ABSTRACT
Persona is a chameleon term and practice. Its bizarre political and institutional history helped both individuate and homogenize people. The fascinating story of the persona starts with the Greek prosopon or prosopeion, the theatrical mask used to disguise the face of an actor. The person is a representative not a moral universal. The ‘representer’ acts; his decisions are attributed to the represented. Law’s fiction enables someone to stand in for the Church or a corporation and assigns his acts and liabilities to the institution. Roman law distinguished between persons and things; only things could be owned, bought and sold. Legal personality became again a mechanism for hierarchizing and grading moral dignity. The Roman distinction between persona and homo and the Christian between body and soul allegedly collapsed after the eighteenth-century revolutions and the positivization of natural rights. The secularists insist on the person’s unity, continuity over time and permanence over space and explore the contents of consciousness and conscience.
