Freedman

Abstract: What we know of Roman political life under the early Empire we owe mostly to senatorial writers, and to an eques, Suetonius; a single Imperial freedman, Phlegon of Tralles, has left some scraps of information about the Court in his own time and before. It is therefore worth paying some attention when we have a lengthy text which reproduces the observations on human life and fortune of a man who was himself the slave of an Imperial freedman. Epictetus has been little used as a historical source; it is the aim of this paper to bring out both the extent and the value of his references to Roman society and politics in his own time.Before we can assess the value of these references, we must examine both the experience on which they are based and the authenticity of the text in which they occur. Epictetus originated from Hierapolis in Phrygia; according to an inscription he was born a slave. Either by birth or sale, he belonged to Epaphroditus, the freedman and a libellis of Nero, who after Nero's death survived unharmed until relegated, and then (in 95) executed, by Domitian. Whether Epaphroditus remained a libellis under the Flavians is not clear, though the likelihood is that he did not. This view would be supported if we could be sure that it was the same Epaphroditus who encouraged Josephus in the writing of his Antiquitates, completed in 93–4.

Abstract: The first and indeed the only Roman clerical officer to achieve historic fame was Gnaeus Flavius, a scriba of the aediles, who published the secrets of the ius civile and of the calendar and was himself elected aedile in 304 B.C. From this incident some interesting facts emerge on the status and organization of the early Roman civil service. Scribae, if one may generalize from Gnaeus Flavius' case, were, unlike the public γραμματeĩς of the Greek cities, professional clerks who normally made the civil service their life's career, and were therefore experts at their job—sometimes considerably more expert than their annually changing masters. On the other hand, they were not, like the δημoσιοι who often performed similar work in Greek cities, public slaves, but citizens, though of rather humble standing. Flavius was the son of a freedman and, when he stood as aedile, the returning officer refused to accept his name until he formally renounced his profession. Servi publici were not unknown at Rome, particularly in the service of the priestly colleges, but the greater and more important part of the civil service consisted of salaried citizens.

Abstract: Freedmen in Rome and Italy were heavily involved in industrial and commercial activities and were also owners of property, both rural and urban, on a considerable scale. These facts are relatively well-known, although the evidence has not been systematically collected and analysed. The surveys of Kuhn and Gummerus were concerned basically with artisans and drew only on the inscriptions of Rome and other Italian centres; they need to be broadened, corrected and brought up to date. Meanwhile one must bear in mind that such surveys have serious limitations, which prevent us from arriving at an accurate assessment of how the work-force was divided according to status. These limitations include the frequent absence of explicit status-indications, and the unrepresentativeness of the surviving sample of inscriptions, which is biassed towards those with a special reason for having themselves commemorated, namely freedmen, and in general towards better-off artisans and traders. My present purpose is not to establish the active involvement or numerical dominance of freedmen in this or that sector of the economy, but to try to understand the phenomenon of the successful freedman, the possessor of moderate or substantial means, in the context of the economy and society of Italy in the period of the Principate. Examples of wealthy freedmen abound in the sources. For example, a metric inscription from the age of Augustus records how the noble Aurelius Cotta gave his II freedman Zosimus an equestrian fortune several times over, while a contemporary of his, the freedman Isidorus, left according to the elder Pliny 4,116 slaves, 3,600 teams of oxen, 257,000 other animals and sixty million sesterces in cash.

Abstract: Introduction Teresa Ramsby, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA Locating the Grapevine in the Late Republic: Freedom and Communication Pauline Ripat, University of Winnipeg, Canada The Face of the Social Climber: Roman Freedmen and Elite Ideology Babara Borg, University of Exeter, UK The Freedman Economy of Roman Italy Koenraad Verboven, University of Ghent, Belgium ? Deciphering Freedwomen in the Roman Empire Marc Kleijwegt, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA Feasting the Dead Together: Household Burials and the Social Strategies of Slaves and Freed Persons in the Early Principate Carlos R. Galvao-Sobrinho, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA 'Reading' the Freed Slave in the Cena Trimalchionis Teresa Ramsby, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA Between Fame and Infamia: The Image and Influence of Roman Charioteers Sinclair Bell, Northern Illinois University, USA 'Saintly Souls:' White Teachers' Instruction of Greek and Latin to African American Freedmen Michele Ronnick, Wayne State University, USA Response Eleanor W. Leach, Indiana University, USA Index