[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]
This volume publishes nine papers from the 2019 conference of the same name held at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It aims to answer questions about how, and the extent to which, several factors including juridical categories, normative discourses, and shared experiences, shaped the social and cultural landscape that affected the lives of Roman freed persons.
The papers cover evidence from literature, legal codes, and inscriptions to images on commemorative monuments. The editors note other relevant sources which are not covered, such as graffiti. Not considering such sources, especially those as representative of an individual in a moment in time as a graffito could be, seems an oversight when discussing a demographic group so underrepresented in our sources. The volume strives to describe the lives of freed persons and their deeds, thoughts, and words, most often through approaching well-known, and often similar, evidence from different perspectives. This review focuses on three particularly apparent themes: the precarity of freed people’s statuses; the representation of freed people by themselves and others; and innovative approaches to finding the voices and thoughts of freed people.
The papers highlighting the precarity of former slaves’ statuses, in life and after death, by Nicole Giannella, Franco Luciani, and Dorian Borbonus are particularly illuminating. Giannella considers the theme of ingratitude, and discussions surrounding its validity as an excuse for freed people’s re-enslavement, during Nero’s reign. She examines Book 3 of Seneca’s De beneficiis and Book 13 of Tacitus’ Annales, arguing that the lack of statutory regulation for ingratitude reveals the precarity of freed people’s citizenship and freedom. Whilst De beneficiis highlights the common usage of the topic of introducing a law punishing ingratitude in rhetorical training, Seneca also entertains introducing this law into the Roman legal system. Tacitus recounts a debate in the Senate in AD56 on this subject. Whilst the law of ingratitude never came into practice, and freed persons were not subjected to individual rulings of the Senate, which Nero suggested according to Tacitus, Giannella concludes that the consideration of introducing such laws suggests that freed people were set apart from the rest of free Roman society, finding themselves with a defective, precarious, form of freedom.
Luciani explores how manumission did not guarantee integration into society, focusing on the prospects of freed public slaves. By assessing a widely accepted idea that they enjoyed a better social position compared to other freed persons, he considers whether they had greater opportunities to gain freedom and to build relationships with local elites. By examining legal and epigraphic evidence from Italy during the Principate, Luciani concludes that being a freed public slave had no more chance of manumission than private ones. His work counters popular belief, showing that the successes freed public slaves gained post-manumission varied according to the level of social integration that they achieved, as they were dependent upon the approval and support of their patrons. He suggests that dealing with an impersonal patron, rather than an individual who could vouch for them, may have put freed public slaves in a worse position than other freed slaves. A comparative study of freed public and private slaves, and their respective fortunes and careers in later life, would be a natural successor.
Borbonus examines the monumentum Volusiorum, the funerary monument of the gens Volusia, on the Via Appia, where enslaved, manumitted, and freeborn members of the household were buried. The tomb’s epigraphy shows that even within a family tomb, the allocation of burial plots was carefully managed and authorised by the collegium castriense, an association of the household staff. Two processes of burial facilitation and authorisation occur with unusual frequency: the provision of a burial spot and the permission to conduct the burial. Whilst Borbonus offers no explanation for why members of the household needed permission to be buried within the family tomb, he uses this to illustrate the precarious nature of both enslaved and manumitted individuals within, and in relation to other members of, their households. Officially securing a burial place was a priority for freed and enslaved household members, even if the former presumably had greater bodily autonomy than the latter. Borbonus concludes that for individuals and families who found themselves in various degrees of dependence, burial and commemoration in the atmosphere of the organised community were a strategy to address the ambiguities of their social position. Freed persons were embedded in a burial community which had secured a resource that was precarious and relevant to enslaved, manumitted, and freeborn persons.
Katharine Huemoeller, Marc Kleijwegt, and Fábio Duarte Joly’s papers explore the representation of freed people by themselves and others in funerary, honorific, and literary contexts. Huemoeller examines patronal and familial designations on epitaphs, exploring how freed persons were commemorated by those whom they shared relationships which resulted both from slavery and from personal ties (e.g. a man and his wife who had previously been his slave, or two friends who had met whilst slaves). In particular, how words for these relationships are linked by i(s)dem. What is most striking from Huemoeller’s study is that when relationships transitioned from one determined by slavery to one determined by personal ties, this transition is not represented in funerary contexts. Rather, for example, a freed wife was represented as both her husband’s property and his wife after death, despite no longer being the former in life. Huemoeller concludes that these double designations are fundamentally social constructs, applied to one individual but identifying this individual through their connections to another, rather than in isolation. Furthermore, she challenges the meaning of libertus, stating that when used with i(s)dem, it should be considered not only a legal status but also an indication of relationships between people, recognising that a freed person was the centre of a complex web of social ties, shaped equally by relations of property and family. She highlights the need, and advocates, for a shift towards dissociating individuals from the practice of domination and from the status of “being” a libertus/a.
Kleijwegt explores through inscriptions how three freedmen-turned-benefactors were viewed as members of their communities in second century AD Italy. He aims to demonstrate that an alternative avenue to the negative approach to successful freed slaves that dominates modern scholarship can be achieved by accurately assessing the value of a small number of cases: Caius Titius Chresimus from Suessa Aurunca, Lucius Vitrasius Silvester from Cales, and Cnaeus Pompeius Euphrosynus from Puteoli. He uses two understudied aspects of the texts: the number and extent of contacts between the community and the benefactor before and after the project’s completion; and the language used by the authorities to praise the benefactors. The latter is shown to be particularly demonstrative, as the praise for all three men is characterised by original language (some unparalleled in the epigraphic record) and was crafted for the individual moments of praise for these benefactors. Whilst the language of the inscriptions does not constitute outright proof that the freed benefactors were fully integrated into the community, it reveals that some freedmen were viewed as participants in local politics in the cities where they lived. Three former slaves were praised for the affection they showed towards their cities and for contributing to the community. The inscriptions’ inclusive, original language stands out, particularly when conveying the idea that serving the community marked one out as a role model for other citizens and that the benefactor should be viewed as a fellow citizen. These three men seem to have gained a status in life far less precarious than many of their contemporary fellow freed persons.
Joly argues that Neronian literature used manumission as a moral metaphor for qualifying certain forms of aristocratic behaviour. Freed people and their trajectories post-manumission became an important issue in discussions about the moral meanings of freedom and slavery in the context of the Principate and its inherent elite competition for social dominance. Authors such as Seneca, Perseus, and Petronius belittle, even deny, the value of legal freedom achieved by freed people, and Seneca goes as far as saying that legal freedom does not correspond to moral freedom: to obtain the latter, one must adhere to Stoic philosophy. Joly suggests that these authors use this same perspective to criticise aristocrats by depicting them as morally behaving like slaves despite being free, thus becoming examples of indecorous behaviour. He concludes that how the wealth of Roman freed people was depicted by Republican and Imperial authors became part of a wider discussion about what it meant to be a Roman citizen in an unequal society with limited civic freedom. He also acknowledges that further study is required in this area, particularly concerning the impact of empire on Roman slave society at large when the Augustan legislation on manumission made explicit the overlapping notions of libertus and servus. This shift, he suggests, would have further amplified the use of manumission as a moral metaphor to describe the trajectories open to the aristocracy in the Principate.
Kristof Vermote, William Owens, and Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s papers use innovative approaches to finding the voices and thoughts of freed people. These papers raised the most questions and left more unanswered. Vermote aims to answer the question: to what degree can literary texts be rehabilitated when trying to catch a glimpse of the ex-slave’s voice? He almost immediately discounts literary works written by freedmen including Publilius Syrus, Terence, Epictetus and Phaedrus, claiming that their “true” voices are not heard as their work was aimed at the elite slave-owning members of society and had to adhere to the ideology of slavery as a necessary evil. He instead examines evidence for Tiro’s “voice” in Cicero’s correspondence, the voices of freed persons in Tacitus’ historical works and Timarchides’ Letters in Cicero’s Verrines. Whilst these authors quote, or claim to quote, freed people, the quantity, and accuracy, of these citations is low. Vermote concludes, somewhat disappointingly, that there are some echoes of freed people’s voices in the literary record and that paying attention to the context and purpose of the surviving speech is a particularly promising way of “hearing” freed people’s voices but he does not really convince me why these echoes of freed people’s voices offer more to the discussion than literary sources written by freed people.
Owens searches for novel evidence for freed people in Xenophon of Ephesus’ Ephesiaca and Petronius’ Dinner of Trimalchio, though he gives comparatively little consideration to the latter beyond briefly pointing out some similarities in the representation of slavery and freedom shared with the former. A particularly noteworthy element of his argument revolves around his suggestion that the narrative articulation of sympathy for slaves in Xenophon’s Ephesiaca takes the form of traditional “fairy tales”: Potiphar’s wife from the book of Genesis and a version of Snow White. This interpretation is certainly plausible, as the oral tradition associated with these tales would have been accessible to slaves, but further clarification on whether and the extent to which these, or versions of these, tales were circulating at this time, and could provide an inspiration for the Ephesiaca, would aid his argument.
Padilla Peralta attempts to apply affect theory, commonly used in psychoanalysis, to show how Roman manumission interacted on a psychic level with a specific form of structural domination, in this case race, with the dominant emotional register for this interaction being melancholy. Like many of the authors in this volume, he relies on the Dinner of Trimalchio as his case study. Perhaps my ignorance of psychoanalysis, or my scepticism of whether it is possible to decipher the true thoughts and feelings of the living—never mind fictional—representatives of individuals from a long-dead social group, is preventing my engagement with this study, but I struggled to understand precisely what he was hoping to achieve. I wonder if applying this theory to freed people’s writing, such as those discounted by Vermote, would prove more successful.
There are two inconsistencies across the volume. One concerns the translation of ancient languages: some papers provide translations for all key terms and phrases; others only provide some. Whilst such provision will always improve the accessibility of the material, the decision to provide, or not provide, translations in multi-authored volumes must be consistent. The other concerns the terminology used to describe manumitted individuals. In the introduction, the editors explain why the term freed person was chosen: to acknowledge the diversity of the population by using more encompassing vocabulary; and to acknowledge their agency by using an adjective for the condition of being freed, to dissociate the individual from the practice of domination and from the status of “being” a libertus/a. However, the terms freed man and freed woman appear across the volume including when discussing general, rather than specific, cases.
Authors and titles
Sinclair W. Bell, Dorian Borbonus, Rose MacLean: Introduction
Dorian Borbonus: Permissu decurionum Freed Persons and Burial Management in the Collective Tomb of the Volusii
Franco Luciani: Freed Public Slaves in Roman Italy and the Western Provinces Legal Status and Social Integration
Marc Kleijwegt: Fitting in by Decree Freed Slaves, Euergetism, and Local Politics.
Katharine Huemoeller: Doubling Up Patronal and Familial Designations on Epitaphs
Nicole Giannella: The Cost of Ingratitude: Freed Persons, Patrons, and Re-enslavement
Fábio Duarte Joly: Between Moral Slavery and Legal Freedom: Freed People and Aristocratic Behavior in Neronian Literature
Kristof Vermote: Framing the Freed Person: (De)contextualizing the Representation of Freed People’s Voices in the Literary Record
William M. Owens: Novel Evidence for Ancient Freed People Xenophon of Ephesus’ Ephesiaca and the Cena Trimalchionis
Dan-el Padilla Peralta: The Affects of Manumission: Racial Melancholy and Roman Freed Persons