What can there be new to say about any of the topics, all much discussed in recent decades, mentioned in the title? The answer is in the final word ‘freedwoman’. Converting a slave into an acceptable, respectable citizen was, P. argues, more problematic for female slaves than male. This is essentially a book about that most tricky of subjects, stereotyped attitudes and prejudices, and P. on the whole handles it well, using literary, legal and epigraphic sources.
Chapter 1 explores gendered assumptions about the relationship between sexual conduct and social status. The ideal Roman matron had sexual integrity and honour; the female slave was allowed to have neither, being obliged to be sexually available, and was accordingly stigmatised by her slave experience. This distinction, however, P. then proceeds to refine. Some behaviour, unacceptable in freeborn women, would in a slave be regarded as acceptable, because under compulsion, as would also quasi-matrimonial faithful sexual relationships within the familia, whereas promiscuity and affairs outside the household would not, and reinforced the stereotypical negative view of the slave. This P. argues at some length, and with some repetition, before settling down to examine the evidence for freeborn (especially elite) Romans' conventional view of female slaves, as generally given to promiscuity and disregard of morality.
Chapter 2, ‘Gender, Labor and the Manumission of Female Slaves’, is the least satisfactory. P. is inclined to push existing evidence beyond what it will bear, while his argument (pp. 44–53) that female labour was generally devalued, in comparison with that of men, is at times almost an argumentum ex silentio. He is perhaps too ready to dismiss the evidence for women on rural estates. For urban households, epigraphic studies ‘have found an approximate ratio of one female slave for every two males’. This, he claims, ‘most likely reflects the importance and prestige of their respective duties’. However, the representativeness of surviving funerary inscriptions is open to challenge. Not only are a large proportion of those commemorated of undeclared status (incerti) but, in the sample of one in five epitaphs in CIL 6 in P. Huttunen, The Social Strata in the Imperial City of Rome (1974), only 10% in all (of whatever rank or status) had a stated job title. These are shaky grounds for generalisation. Elsewhere, in Chapter 4, on the significance of the wording of inscriptions commemorating patrons and husbands, he shows more caution in interpreting a small sample as evidence of attitudes (p. 115).
P. asserts (p. 189 n. 24) ‘Roman literary authors and jurists generally considered slaves trained in a skill (articifium) to be more valuable than those occupying a general position’, quoting in support only Dig. 32.65.1, Marcian, which contains no such comparative value judgement, and he then goes on to speculate that females were less likely to be given training. However, the aedile's edict, for the protection of buyers against dishonest dealers, drew a distinction between new slaves (novicia), and ‘veterans’, those who had been slaves for at least a year; at market, slaves sold as ‘new’ could fetch a better price (Dig. 21.1.37, Ulpian), since it was considered more difficult to retrain a ‘veteran’ to learn new skills and unlearn old habits.
On the vexed question why slaves' offspring were not classed as fructus (p. 50), P., showing thorough knowledge of the secondary literature, defends the innovative interpretation of Ulpian's enigmatic statement (Dig. 5.3.27pr.) by A. Rodger, Law Quarterly Review 123 (2007), 446–54, which he uses as evidence that ‘slave owners, with good reason, purchased female slaves with the intention of having them produce children (my italics)’. However, this is far from establishing that it was frequently the only, or even the main, consideration in making a purchase, nor does it explain the view that the offspring were not to be regarded as fructus. Like many modern scholars before him (present reviewer included), P. has assumed that Ulpian is talking about purchase. However, comparare, ‘acquire’ has much wider application than emere, and most legal discussions of fructus are in the context of leasing (Buckland, Text-Book of Roman Law [1963], pp. 221–6). This puts matters in a rather different perspective. Someone might lease, taking on the costs of tending and rearing, for example, a flock of sheep, for the sake of what they produce – meat, skin, wool and more sheep. But who would lease female slaves (let alone their ‘stud’ males) solely as breeding stock? Are they expected to spend the rest of the time just waiting to be fed? Slaves are hired for their labour and services.
Chapters 3 and 4 discuss patron–freedwoman relationships as treated in legal and in epigraphic sources. The material in Chapter 3 will be already familiar to anyone who has studied Roman law relating to freed slaves in general, on matters such as inheritance, obsequium, operae, marriage, ius liberorum, etc. All of these P. discusses, concentrating on the particular requirements and restrictions applicable to freedwomen, and how these affected their lives, and distinguished them from the freeborn. As with freed men, the law both guarded the freedwoman's independence and her claim to citizenship, while also protecting the interests of patrons. He has read the texts closely and carefully, and clearly explains their significance, not only for the freed slaves, but for Roman social cohesion generally.
Chapter 4 concerns a more nebulous, and less well-documented, topic, the evidence of funerary inscriptions (using those from Rome itself, in CIL 6) for the nature of the relationships between freedwomen and their patrons, who were sometimes also their husbands. Here he has to ignore the incerti and consider only those inscriptions with explicit status indications. Quoting a number of commemorative inscriptions, he explores nuances of expression and their possible significance. His interpretations, necessarily somewhat subjective, are on the whole plausible and convincing. I commend particularly to readers the final paragraph of the chapter (p. 128), on the importance of the patron–freedwoman relationship, both as ‘about family’ and as validating the freedwoman's achieved place in the citizen community.
Chapter 5 draws the threads of argument together. In legal writings, the freedwoman is idealised as, though socially inferior, potentially as moral and respectable as the freeborn. Literature, however, perpetuates the stereotype of the ‘slavish’ woman, i.e. one characterised by promiscuity and disregard for morality, and also perpetuates the stigma of slave origins for any freed slave woman who continues to behave in this way. However, this can also throw into sharper contrast the merit of the freedwoman who does not behave in this manner, but has openly chosen to embrace the values and mores of free Roman society by entering into marriage. It also benefits one in respectable concubinage – a status whose acceptance was made possible, P. argues, by political and social developments in the early Principate, which had changed the nature of citizenship, and blurred the divisions, not only horizontally, between freeborn and freed, but also, as he signals less directly (pp. 2–3, 93, 149 – ‘social norms’, and in Ulpian, dignitas), vertically, the legally defined senatorial elite blurring at the lower end into the honestiores, and lower-class freeborn grouped together with freed as humiliores. All this eases the freedwoman's transition from slave woman to Roman citizen matrona, and justifies her citizenship.
Despite the reservations noted above, particularly in regard to Chapter 2, this book is a thoughtful and innovative study of an important topic. It throws light on the Roman ideology regarding citizenship, gender and slavery, and is a useful addition to the literature on all three areas.
