The act of manumission did not transform the slave as a human being. In the eyes of society he still carried many of the moral and mental deficiencies associated with servitude. For example, even if he was adopted by a freeborn, the jurists insisted that legally he remained a freedman, a condition regarded as innate to his person; despite the change to his formal status he was in essence still a former slave. Naturally therefore a freedman could never become entirely equal to an ingenuus, and when he entered society as a free man he needed help and supervision. Logically this guidance would be provided by the former master, whose support – at least in theory – had enabled him to reach a level of personal development that qualified him for freedom. Manumission was therefore not supposed to terminate the relationship between the freedman and his former owner. Also after freedom had been granted the two were expected to be closely involved, and in many respects manumission merely redefined their relationship rather than bringing an end to it. The previous ownership was replaced by a new bond based on debt and gratitude for the ‘beneficium’ of freedom.

The new relationship between the freedman and his former master was constructed socially and legally through a combination of elements derived from different spheres of Roman life.

In previous chapters dealing with the ideology and practice of manumission the freedman was – inevitably – approached as an object of ridicule, concern, trust, or promotion, which naturally brings us to the question of the freedman's own subjective experience, his views and outlook. However, any attempt to approach what might tentatively be called the ‘identity’ of freedmen faces a number of obstacles, the most obvious being the fact that the literary sources at our disposal operate with a set of simple but evocative stereotypes, which have had a strong impact on the image of the freedman right up until the present day. The ancient stereotypes came in a positive as well as a negative version, but the latter – more colourful and engaging – has been the more influential. Thus, most scholars addressing the issue of the ‘freedman identity’ have relied heavily on ancient complaints about ‘bad’ freedmen, which is ironic, since the ‘good’ ones in reality must have been the more common; otherwise the practice of manumission would presumably have declined.

The end result has been a Roman libertus barely distinguishable from the literary caricature, whose vulgarity and obsession with status have been readily accepted as typically freed characteristics. The image has been further entrenched by the common identification of the freedman with the archetypal figure of the social climber, which has been important in familiarising the ancient concept of the ex-slave to a modern audience.

The previous chapters explored what might broadly be called the ‘construction’ of the freedman at Rome, i.e. the concepts used to define the process of manumission and the anxieties it gave rise to. These concerns formed part of the ideological backdrop against which we have to assess the practice of manumission, but they remain distinct and should ideally be kept separate analytically. The aim of this chapter is to establish how manumission actually worked and that means asking who was freed, how it happened, and what the underlying motivation was. The logical starting point for this inquiry is the question of scale, since a basic quantitative framework is crucial if we want to understand the practice of manumission.

THE SCALE OF MANUMISSION

Ancient history is notoriously short of reliable statistics and the study of slavery and manumission is little different in that respect. No extant source tells us how many freedmen were attached to any single patron, nor are there any figures for the number of freedmen at a given point in time in any Roman community. To complicate matters even further, there is little evidence on which even a vague estimate of the number of slaves might be based. As Scheidel pointed out, the most common estimate of the number of slaves in Italy, Brunt's suggestion of 3 million slaves under the empire, is not based on any specific evidence.

After the section on the practice of manumission, its frequency, modalities, and patterns, we will now turn to the place of the freedman in the Roman economy and society. The first of these chapters is devoted to their role in the economy, which has attracted much scholarly attention. The reason is partly the sheer abundance of evidence for their participation in the economy, especially the urban commercial sector, which they seem to dominate completely, and partly the phenomenon of the rich freedman. This issue will be dealt with separately in the second part of the chapter, but a brief survey of some of the evidence for freedmen in urban trade and manufacture may be useful.

Not all the evidence that has been adduced in this context is equally compelling; for example, the many funerary inscriptions with job titles may not be representative, since this medium was used only sporadically outside the freedman community. But many other types of sources were not the result of the freedmen's epigraphic ‘habit’. Thus, amphorae and other types of containers carry inscriptions indicating the producers and recipients of the contents, and here the majority of the names appear to be those of freedmen and slaves. Similarly, pottery was stamped with the names of the producers, who often seem to be ‘servile’. At Pompeii a number of seal stamps have been found which were used to mark a variety of products, and at least two thirds of them may feature freedmen.

Roman public life was – as a matter of course – dominated by men of means. The rich monopolised all positions of status and influence, and, as we have seen, some freedmen (a very small minority, no doubt) became not just comfortable but conspicuously well off. Their blanket exclusion from positions of authority therefore produced a glaring case of ‘status dissonance’, that is, a clash between different parameters of social standing, in this case wealth and personal background. The taboo against former slaves exercising public authority was absolute and non-negotiable, justified as it was by the natural order that dictated that higher beings govern the lower. As a result, freedmen were excluded from the entire honours system, including magistracies, priesthoods, the senate, the equestrian order, the law courts, and the local town councils. The fact that the bar on freedmen in the ordo decurionum apparently was enshrined in law only in 24 ce is of little import in this context since the lex Visellia merely formalised an existing de facto exclusion. Although the ban on rich freedmen pursuing careers severed the normal association between wealth, rank, and power, certain aspects of the public honours system remained open to them. Thus, the ornamenta, i.e. the outer symbols of rank and office, were occasionally bestowed on particularly deserving freedmen as a means of negotiating the paradox of rich citizens without a matching status.

The crossing of basic boundaries is a source of considerable anxiety in most societies, and in the Roman world few distinctions were more fundamental and sharply drawn than that between free and unfree. The jurists divided the whole of humanity into these two basic categories. As Gaius stated, ‘all people are either free or slaves’, and libertas and servitus were defined as the direct negation of each other. Moreover, freedom was, like servitude, conceptualised as a natural state. Thus, it was in principle, if not quite in practice, impossible to surrender one's freedom, except in very special cases. As one Roman orator declared, ‘What nature gave to the freeborn cannot be snatched away by any injury of fortune.’ Roman law thus considered free status inalienable, as illustrated by the prescriptions concerning self-sale. In principle no one could sell himself or herself into slavery, and formal loss of freedom only happened if the buyer believed the person to be unfree, and the person sold himself in order to gain from the sale. This was clearly a muddled compromise between the principle of inalienability and the reality of Roman society, where self-sale might be an attractive option under certain circumstances. Ordinary people, ignorant of the law, may have tried to gain a better life, but the jurists insisted on the essential difference between slave and free, a distinction which an open recognition of self-enslavement would have undermined.

Adding another volume to the ever-expanding mass of scholarly literature on the ancient world requires some justification. But in the case of the Roman freedman there does seem to be a surprising gap; for although most works on Roman history or culture make passing references to freedmen in some context or other, few of them have tried to grasp the nature of Roman manumission and its wider function within Roman society. Attempts to deal comprehensively with the question of Roman manumission are relatively rare, a notable exception being Keith Hopkins' chapter in Conquerors and Slaves. Moreover a general synthesis of the Roman freedman, covering both republic and empire, has never been ventured, and the last book-length treatment of the imperial period was Duff's problematic work of 1928. By contrast, the republic is much better served with Treggiari's fundamental monograph (1969) and Fabre's detailed study of the patron–freedman relationship (1981). Most dedicated studies have dealt with specific, often highly technical aspects of manumission, particularly the legal ones, or with individual groups of freedmen, above all those of the emperor.

The apparent reluctance to tackle the phenomenon as a whole merits closer consideration. For once the reason cannot be lack of evidence, since few groups in Roman society are more fully documented or covered by such a diverse range of sources, legal, literary, epigraphic, and documentary. In fact, the sheer scale of the evidence may have militated against a synthetic approach, not least in the current age of increasing academic specialisation.

INTRODUCTION

The amount of price information which has survived from the ancient world is substantial. Although spreading over a great number of commodities and services, and scattered over a number of centuries and locations, in total it forms a considerable lot. In recent years it has been compiled into electronic databases too large to print out or make sense of by cursory reading. Yet what kind of economic information do prices render? The information, for example, that trumpets cost 60 drachmas in Athens at the end of the fifth century bc is as useless in itself as the question of how far a flea can jump.

Several approaches have been adopted in recent decades. On the one hand, scholars have used prices as an index of standards of living. Comparing per capita income and subsistence costs with estimated nutritional needs and the work-capacity of individuals or families has provided some idea of the financial balance-sheet of ancient households. Another project has been to understand the nature of price formation. According to the neo-classical market model, prices settle at ‘market’ price (i.e. the intersection of supply and demand) and the market for a good is cleared. Were prices in antiquity, too, formed mostly by the market mechanism, or were they more strongly influenced by other factors, such as state intervention, custom or vague notions of normal or ‘just’ price? What exogenous factors affected prices, such as wars, conquest, army movements, political alliances, questions of upper-class power, or the formation of empires?