Invisible Romans (27 page)

13. Free at last. A public manumission ceremony declares a slave free. Note the freedman’s cap.

Dedicated to the Spirit of the Annii Macer and Licinianus. I, Alphios their slave, set this up to fulfill my vow – I am now free! (
CIL
12.619, Auriol, France)

Manumission was the route to freedom. Masters controlled this almost completely – the only exception was being able somehow to prove your improper enslavement and so free status before a magistrate. The masters often held out the promise of freedom as an incentive to get slaves to do what they wanted them to do – although it is interesting to note that the agricultural writers do not include this promise among the rewards they suggest to encourage slaves. Slaves could be freed through the declaration of the master before friends or
before a magistrate, through self-purchase, or by testament. If officially manumitted before a magistrate they received a document proving this (
Digest
3.2.8.1). Although contracts for manumission are known from Egypt, the actual document proving freedom has rarely been found. There are a few examples in Greek; here is a Latin one:

Marcus Aurelius Ammonion, son of Lupergos, son of Sarapion, from Hermupolis the Greater, ancient and splendid, declares in the presence of his friends that Helen, his house-raised slave, age about 34 years, is no longer to be a slave and to now be free. He received as the price of her freedom 2,200 Augustan drachmas from Aurelius Ales, son of Inarous, from the Tisicheos district of the Hermupolite nome. Ales, son of Inarous, gave the money to Helen the aforementioned freedwoman and will make no claim for it against her. Done at Hermupolis the Greater, ancient and splendid, on the seventh day before the Kalens of August, when Gratus and Seleucus were consuls, in the third regnal year of Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Pius Fortunate Revered. (
M.Chr.
372)

In theory a freed slave could produce a document like this, but it was written on perishable material – an incised waxed tablet enclosed by wooden plates inscribed in pen and ink – so it was unlike another type of ‘manumission,’ the discharge of a solder from service, which was written in bronze. There does not seem to be any reference in fiction or elsewhere to a manumitted slave producing a document as proof of his freedom. When a master does try to reclaim a runaway, the man is identified by physical features, and the statement that he could not produce a liberation document is never mentioned. Thus although in theory this sort of identification could have made it harder for a runaway to escape successfully – or easily forged to prove freedom – it does not seem to figure importantly. Freedom itself, however, was celebrated happily when it occurred. In one club that had both free and slave members, the newly freed slave was to bring an amphora of wine to the next meeting – the equivalent of three cases of the stuff – to lubricate a fine celebration of a great event (
ILS
7212, Lanuvio, Italy).

Certainly not all slaves were eventually freed; many died in harness. Probably few males were freed before the age of thirty (although the
Egyptian evidence may contradict this), and few females before the end of their childbearing years (early forties). And to judge by comparative material, slaves in urban households were much more likely to be freed than those in the countryside. Still, slaves could see freedmen around them; the possibility of manumission could be real or remote, but at the very least, to judge from fiction and nonfiction sources and, most of all, from the slaves’ voices reflected in the fortune-telling material, it figured prominently in a slave’s mind as he contemplated his life and options.

Conclusion

A slave’s outlook was bounded by his possibilities. He focused on managing in his current condition vis-à-vis the master, up to and including escaping in flight; he developed strong ties with other slaves, even to the point of forming a family, and feared the disruption of being sold; he longed for a freedom that might eventually come. Slavery deprived the slave of self-determination, but it did not deprive him of self-identity. He remained a thinking, feeling, acting human being, and lived within slavery coping as best he could.

5
AFTER SLAVERY: FREEDMEN

THE FREEDMAN, THE EX-SLAVE
, is an ordinary Roman very difficult to imagine because there is not even a remotely similar category in Western societies. Freedmen have attracted a good deal of attention in Roman social history because the elite interacted with them in significant and often negative ways. Ironically, their visibility in prejudiced elites’ sources has made their actual lives quite invisible. Freedmen or freedwomen are much like other free ordinary folk, but their situation and possibilities are different enough, and the animus and misunderstandings regarding them misleading enough, to call for a separate treatment.

The animus comes out in the elite’s literary portrayal of the freedmen, a portrayal that has often been taken as a true description of freedmen in general. The treatment of such authors as Juvenal, Martial, Tacitus, and Suetonius depicts freedmen who were insulting at least and anathema at most to the ruling men of the empire, and to their literary mouthpieces. The origin of this attitude is in the dynamics of slavery and freed slaves within the elite household. I will describe in detail below the circumstances and life of freedmen; in summary here I just note that ex-slaves, like slaves, were absolutely essential to the ‘leisure class’ life of the aristocracy. And more than just a source of labor, ex-slaves in particular represented the most successful of an elite’s slaves. These were the slaves who had been put in charge of affairs in the household and on
rural estates. These were the slaves who had been financed in business ventures on behalf of the master. It was only through such dependent men (and at times women) that a master could manage and control the resources to produce the wealth that produced the leisure. In return for the ‘privilege’ of being a slave or ex-slave in the master’s household, the slave or freedman owed obedience and duty to the master and his interests. As far as the master was concerned, the position was one of perpetual dominance (for a slave) and subalternship (if a freedman). If they accepted this position, then all was well. But, in fact, a man was often employed in a responsible task because he was exceptionally talented; with freedom could come an assertion of that talent for his own purposes, leading to significant or even vast wealth. With the talent and wealth came the challenge to and extreme tension for the aristocracy that always arose when ‘outsiders’ qualified by ability and money challenged the existing elite for influence and power. But with freedmen it was much worse than had the challenge come from mere nouveaux riches – these were men who had once been
slaves,
a condition inherently and inextinguishably degrading in the eyes of the leaders of society. It is this revulsion at status-crashing that turned what might have been mere disdain into active loathing.

And worst of all were the ex-slaves of the imperial family. I do not include these freedmen in general here as they are set apart from other ordinary freedmen by their special relationship to the imperial household, but their role in creating the perception of the elites must be noted. The imperial freedmen derived prestige from association with the ruler of the rulers. They were relied upon to run the machinery of the empire (for the empire was thought of as a great household by the emperor, to be managed like any other ‘estate’). They could take advantage of their position to assert themselves (as agents of the emperor) blatantly at the expense of the elite, who had to do as the emperor wished or suffer the consequences. So the irksomeness was doubled: the elite had to bow to the emperor, and also to his agents, who once had been
slaves.

The hatred of imperial freedmen especially, but uppity freedmen in general, brought scathing opprobrium to focus on this societal group. To keep them at bay, they were disparaged as forever despised, inferior; they were marked by law and custom as unworthy of mixing with the elite in politics or marriage or anything. All this is understandable given
the mentality of the elite. But what all too often happens is that this assessment of freedmen is generalized to provide the context and even details of lives of freedmen in general. I seek to retrieve the outlook of ordinary freedmen and to show how large the gulf was between their lives and negative descriptions of freedmen provided by the elite.

Alongside the alleged ancient hostility toward ordinary freedmen lies the modern misunderstanding that sees the freedmen as the bourgeoisie. Just as the ancient aristocracy limned freedmen according to their prejudices, over the past two centuries many have tried to find a ‘middle class’ in the freedmen because they were often engaged in commerce and industry. But they are no such ‘class’ in any sense that fits the actual conception of a ‘middle,’ nor do they fit the sociopolitical implications of a bourgeoisie. Fortunately, many scholars now avoid such descriptions, but they are found in older works, and in careless popular accounts.

A more pernicious nuance to the discussion of freedmen comes with racist overtones. Moderns have taken their cue from the vehement accusation of Tacitus and Juvenal about ‘Orontes flowing into Tiber.’ Starting with a conviction that peoples of the Eastern Empire (the Orontes is a river in Syria) were effeminate, intriguing, loathsome folks in general, the elite was convinced that slaves mostly came from there (or, at least, the ones who became uppity freedmen) and were displacing native-born, virile, moral Italians in Rome. This was leading to a definite decline in the quality of Romans as a whole, they thought. Early in the twentieth century the great ancient historian Tenney Frank wrote an extremely influential article in which he used epigraphic evidence from Rome to ‘prove’ the ancients right; he concluded that during the empire only 10 percent of Romans had ‘pure’ Italian blood and that fully 80 percent of the city of Rome were freedmen and their descendants from the eastern, ‘oriental’ part of the empire. Read today, his analysis is blatantly Eurocentric, racist, and a paradigm of orientalism. But his statistics and conclusions so fit the ancient elite’s own prejudiced views that they were not seriously questioned by A. M. Duff in his fundamental 1928 treatment of freedmen (‘It seems, then, that freedman and their descendants in a great measure ruined Rome … Manumission, if it has been directed aright, need not have worked with such deplorable effects upon the population … The influx of Oriental blood would not have
been so overwhelming’); Frank’s premises and ‘evidence’ were influential even as late as the 1960s. It is time once and for all to eliminate such thinking from any discussion of freedmen.

Freedom

When I talk about freedmen I actually restrict myself to a specific group: slaves that have been freed by masters who were Roman citizens. Manumitted properly, these slaves became Roman citizens, although citizens with some disabilities, which I will discuss. Freed slaves of any other citizenship (and remember that there was no universal Roman citizenship until early in the third century
AD
) did not gain citizenship in either their local towns or in the Roman body politic upon gaining freedom; rather, they became just like any other noncitizens in their communities – Athens, Alexandria, Antioch – and in the empire. Of demographic necessity, therefore, freedmen were concentrated in Italy, where citizens were concentrated, and to a lesser extent in the western areas of the empire; Roman citizens and therefore Roman freedmen were rarer in the eastern regions. Moreover, it seems that most freedmen lived in urban rather than rural areas since the opportunities to gain one’s freedom were apparently more abundant in the urban household setting.

Manumission was what made a person a freedman. As I discuss in
Chapter 4
, manumission was always a possibility. Probably most emancipation took place for men by around age thirty and for women toward the end of their childbearing years, say their mid forties. Exceptions were always possible, of course, but relatively young men of talent would be most useful to their ex-masters and now patrons; older women might be of little economic use to the master, and could well be gotten out of the household. But there are no statistics, and clearly many slaves were never freed at any time in their lives. A master’s calculus might include personal as well as economic considerations; the matrix of decision-making is unknowable in detail.

The legal aspects of manumission can be briefly summarized. There were a number of ways to perform the act. These ranged from public and formal procedures before a magistrate to a very informal declaration of freedom in front of friends, to testamentary grants of freedom. It might have made a difference if a person were freed formally or informally, for
informal manumissions did not technically carry Roman citizenship; only an inferior species of citizenship called Junian Latin status was granted. Although it might seem logical that many more slaves would be freed informally, and so with disabilities, than formally, the relative numbers are unknown; estimates have ranged as high as 40 percent or more being Latins, but it is impossible to know. Freedmen themselves do not make any distinction either in epigraphy or in fiction. No one identifies himself as a ‘Latin freedman’; Latins are almost completely absent from Roman legal documents. The absence in the evidence probably reflects a lack of concern in people’s minds to distinguish between freedmen with full citizenship and those with Latin citizenship. After all, they both had mostly the same economic, social, and legal rights. The main Latin disability was the inability to leave children an inheritance in Roman law. The only other ‘problem’ with being a Latin citizen within the Roman citizenship world was that you could not hold political office in Rome, or other place that was composed of Roman citizens. As I have repeatedly stressed, the inability to hold political office was not a worry in the minds of ordinary people, and certainly would not be in the minds of most freedmen. They had no hope, and no ambition, no thought to break into the ranks of the local, much less the imperial, elite. While occasionally the Latin status was important in an elite context, it was never so in the lives of most ordinary Romans. It is fully justifiable to treat freedmen who gained freedom formally in the same discussion as those who were informally manumitted, and the groups are conflated in the discussion below.