Research on Roman freed persons has long revolved around juridical status, the asymmetrical relationships that conditioned social and economic interactions, and adherence to a koine in artistic and epigraphic commemoration (cf. H. Mouritsen, The Freedman in the Roman World [2011]). Freed persons are often treated as a monolithic group whose single motivation was the accumulation of wealth and pushing their children up the escalator of social mobility. A more recent turn in scholarship aims to write their history ‘from below’, seeking to understand the diversity of experience and agency within their ranks and the avenues they pursued to carve out a civic space. The editors of this new entry into the field set for themselves the challenging task of opening new venues for this line of research (Bell, Borbonus and MacLean, pp. 1–23).
Fortunately, the contributions succeed in centring the heterogeneous socioeconomic interactions, identity formation and psychological responses of freed Romans within the analysis of well-trodden textual and epigraphic evidence. The outcome is a more nuanced picture of the freed experience. The volume is as timely today as when it originated at a 2019 conference. It consists of an introduction, nine chapters, a general bibliography and an index.
Borbonus analyses 191 inscribed funerary objects (tituli, podiums, urns) from the now-lost tomb of the senatorial household of the Volusii Saturnini that document burials across four generations of enslaved and freed members of the gens from the Augustan to the Flavian period. Borbonus bypasses questions of juridical status and layers of ownership within the household in favour of the organisation of burial space and the stakeholders regulating its use through two formulas that correspond to different domestic authorities granting access. The recording of these transactions was unnecessary in epitaphs. So why did so many members include them? Freed family members seem to be memorialising success in securing a legitimate burial spot and expressing their place within the household collegium castriense. It is worth adding that this practice also signals a desire to elevate the activities of this collegium, which was the nexus of social interaction for household members, by imitating the collegial behaviours observed in the wider community.
F. Luciani explores an impersonal form of slavery which saw Roman cities enslaving a range of officials and workers to perform day-to-day services for the municipal administration. Manumission and the community’s highest civic status (Roman versus Latin citizenship) were possible for the fortunate few. The traditional argument is that higher-ranking servi publici had an inside track towards post-manumission prosperity, constituting more ‘acceptable’ freedmen in the eyes of the local freeborn elite through their substantial stipend and privileges, and the social capital accumulated through contact with the decurions who occupied municipal offices and the council. But Luciani’s evidence agrees with recent research showing that most municipal freedmen fell well short of their private peers and encountered poorer access to the wider urban labour market and associative landscape. Their collective manumission by their town deprived them of a personal patron and accompanying socioeconomic benefits, and they nonetheless had to shoulder the burdens of ongoing obligations to the town.
Whereas most studies measure the trajectory of freed families through their freeborn descendants’ activities, M. Kleijwegt explores three freedmen in Italian towns who secured civic prominence through their own public benefaction. The distinctive language of their honorific inscriptions frames them as models of civic engagement. One even saw his son elevated to the municipal council ob merita patris (CIL X 4760). While the curated information ultimately inscribed cannot fully capture the attitudes of all elite circles, these men’s generosity seems to have situated them as fully engaged citizens standing alongside their freeborn counterparts. Roman towns always tapped into the wealth of sub-elite citizens in exchange for honours, and a useful follow-up would be to observe how the criteria of acceptance observed in these three smaller towns apply in larger communities, where more sources of wealth produced a much larger pool of potential (freeborn) benefactors. Apart from those operating through the *Augustales, how were other freed benefactors received?
K. Huemoeller arguably provides the best example of how to unlock new perspectives on freed identity and agency in the context of formulaic epitaphs. She analyses the occurrence of multiple designations (i.e. juridical status, occupation, relationships) for the same person joined by i(s)dem, the demonstrative pronoun that became a fossilised connector in epigraphic formulas. Through these ‘double designations’ subaltern people could map out the nuances that sustained their socioeconomic networks. Huemoeller’s reading of an epitaph erected by a freedwoman named Rasinia seems to bring us tantalisingly close to the identity that this woman would have claimed for herself in any given situation (CIL VI 25377). She commemorated herself, her patron, son, verna and freedman; and the several designations she ascribes to herself map her identity from serva to liberta to mother to enslaver and patron (pp. 137–8). The complexity of her experience risks being overlooked if the historian focuses solely on vertical and horizontal juridical status markers such as servus/-a or libertus/-a.
The sporadic ancient legal debates over whether to allow the re-enslavement of so-called liberti ingrati, who acted contrary to expected obligations and deference, form the basis of N. Giannella’s chapter. Outside the context of academic declamations, one proposal under Nero was hotly debated in the senate between angry patrons and anti-re-enslavement advocates. Asked to settle the matter, the emperor was reluctant to establish a blanket precedent for all cases of this kind and decreed that any punishments involving ingrati should be taken up on a case-by-case basis. Giannella points out that this indecision would shift the accused from a hearing before a iudex following a formula to an arbiter adjudicating subjectively. Nero’s failure to strike down the possibility of re-enslavement must have placed a serious psychological burden on freed people. The new status quo would be two categories of freedom: one inalienable enjoyed by freeborn Romans and the other subject to revocation at any moment.
F. Joly examines a tendency by Neronian satirists to diminish the value of manumission for freed people and to reduce it to a metaphor employed in invective against members of the imperial elite who transgressed acceptable norms. This ideology insisted that a libertus was always defined by an enslaved past, a condition that indelibly tainted his character and impeded his chances of ever fitting into ‘proper’ society. Joly’s study adds to a growing understanding of how the frequent literary refashioning of enslaved and freed ‘traits’ to fit narratives of invective or praise reflected elite anxiety over manumission and imperial legislation taking a heavier hand in regulating it. This calls to mind Seneca’s assertion that ‘even’ enslaved gladiators possessed enough dignity to end their lives on their own terms rather than die for the amusement of tyrants (Ep. 70). One should also note that the invective found in satire may not reflect the wider views of freeborn sub-elite Romans who worked and socialised with freed people.
It is almost axiomatic that literary texts, which adopt elite perspectives, hold little value for accessing enslaved and freed voices. These can only be reached through personal inscriptions. But K. Vermote’s research has us rethink the role literature can play in glimpsing the genuine freed experience, the elusive ‘backstage view’ of how they navigated their status and relationships. This is illustrated in a close reading of two texts written by freedmen, Tiro in his correspondence with his patron Cicero, and Timarchides cited in the Second Verrine Oration. Vermote walks readers through the ways in which each freedman plays the public–private epistolary game, taking cues from their elite correspondents and observing status-related protocols to maintain trust, but all the while advancing their own ‘discursive’ agency.
The final two chapters follow a similar thread in trying to locate elements of freed psychology in the world of the novel. W. Owens’s analysis of Xenophon of Ephesus’ Ephesiaca seeks traces of freed persons’ commentary on their experience (‘hidden transcripts’, p. 226). Written in Greek and set in the Aegean but grounded in an imperial Roman cultural context, the novel follows an elite couple from Ephesus who were enslaved by pirates, endured sale through various households, were eventually manumitted and reunited, and lived the rest of their lives in civic obscurity. Owens discusses several features of oral folktale traditions, which was the primary storytelling vehicle by which enslaved (and freed) people could preserve their histories. Xenophon’s sympathetic portrayal of the protagonists may therefore reflect real anxieties and despair many freed Romans lived with. Each character frames the tale of their misfortune to accommodate different status-power contexts, and, although they began life among the freeborn elite, the experience of slavery and manumission was forever imprinted on their mentality.
D. Padilla Peralta uses the psychoanalytical approach of racial affect theory to glimpse into the ‘thought-world’ of freed Romans. He regards the asymmetrical structures of ancient slavery and manumission fundamentally as a racialising practice, and the outcome of its widespread occurrence in ancient Rome was trauma and melancholy among formerly enslaved groups. Padilla Peralta finds this emotional response operating in a speech by the freedman Hermeros in Petronius’ Satyrica 57. Hermeros exhibits a posture of paranoia at his Otherness, the fact that he will never enjoy full acceptance in the wider social landscape, and a defensive reframing of his rise from slavery, victory in his vera athla and his own agency in these struggles. This chapter shows an impressive control of how sociological theory and comparative historical material can bear on the interpretation of ancient literary (and epigraphic) texts, and it succeeds in centring possible freed perspectives in this ancient novel. But readers may wonder where precisely Petronius’ characterisations fit into the speech. The argument would be strengthened by a more vigorous discussion of the likelihood that the ‘freedman’ cultural framework portrayed in the novel took inspiration from real-world attitudes (cf. p. 252).
The contributors offer insightful new ways to research the freed communities in the Roman empire. The volume is well organised and almost entirely free of typographical errors, and the collective bibliography is expansive. The coherent nature of the collection is also impressive: each chapter’s themes build on the last. Each author raises new questions about the assumptions that historians often make about the lives of subaltern Romans, responding to the editors’ call to ‘distinguish between two competing registers of our sources: those that engage in a discourse about freed people and those that document, however imprecisely, their lived realities’ (p. 11).
My only overarching point of criticism comes in the form of a question. How widely applicable is each approach to larger bodies of textual and epigraphic evidence outside the relatively narrow confines of the case studies presented here? Each author notes this obstacle in their own way (e.g. Padilla Peralta, p. 267). At any rate, I suspect that scholars with initial objections grounded in traditional models will be intrigued by the new perspectives that the methods presented here can unlock within a range of source material. This book should be included on the reading list of anyone undertaking the study of the socioeconomic experience of enslaved and freed Romans.
