In the previous chapter we have seen that the polar opposition between slave and free coexisted with a spectrum of relations haunted, to varying degrees, with the specter of servility. Another factor that troubled the theoretically absolute separation beween slave and free was the traffic between the two states, apparently so separate: slaves were continually being freed and a number of circumstances could reduce a freeborn person to slavery. In this chapter, then, we will look at enslavement and (briefly) emancipation, the crossings of the great divide beween slave and free.

From slave to free

The impression given by the surviving records is that manumission was common among domestic slaves, but this impression may be misleading; for one thing, the epigraphic record is probably unrepresentative and, for another, the ideal represented by Roman authors that manumission was the expected reward of faithful service may be just that, an ideal. Nevertheless, freedmen are ubiquitous in the surviving literary and epigraphic corpus and the Greeks at least regarded Roman practices as remarkable. The formally manumitted slave at Rome took on the status of his master, which meant that, unlike Athens (where the freed slave became a metic), Rome accepted freed slaves into the citizen body. The freed slave retained obligations toward his or her original owner as well as certain legal disabilities, and inhabited legally, socially and morally, an inbetween world. For the freedman or freedwoman, freed status might be a source of pride: Petronius' Trimalchio and his freedman friends insist on their self-made, independent status (Satyricon 57, 75–6), and in this they recall the freedmen advocati of Plautus' Poenulus (515–28 and 533–40), determined to assert their respectability and self-sufficiency.