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Public Slaves in Rome: 'Privileged' Or Not? *

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Public Slaves in Rome: 'Privileged' Or Not? * The Classical Quarterly 70.1 368–384 © The Classical Association (2020) 368 doi:10.1017/S0009838820000506 PUBLIC SLAVES IN ROME: ‘PRIVILEGED’ OR NOT?* INTRODUCTION In the Roman world, slavery played a crucial role. Besides private slaves, owned by individual masters, and—from the beginning of the Principate—imperial slaves, who were the property of the emperors, there were also the so-called public slaves: non-free individuals who were owned by a community, such as the Roman people as a whole in Rome (serui publici populi Romani), or the citizen body of a colony or a municipium in Italy or in the provinces (serui ciuitatum). Public slaves in Rome were employed for numerous public services and acted under the authority of the Senate as assistants to public magistrates, officers or priests. Similarly, in Italian and in provincial cities, they juridically depended on the decisions of local councils and performed various activities within the civic administration, beholden to the magistrates.1 In historical and legal texts, the most frequent references are to a seruus publicus or to a seruus ciuitatis, whereas in Latin inscriptions we generally find a single personal name for the slave, which was the only name that slaves typically possessed, followed by the expression seruus publicus or by the ethnonym of the community—in the genitive case—to which they belonged. In some of these inscriptional instances, mostly from the city of Rome, public slaves are referred to with a second name (agnomen), derived from the nomen or the cognomen of their former masters. Modern scholarship has tended to distinguish serui publici from the general slave population, whether in Rome or in the municipalities, and regardless of chronology. This was due not only to their legal status (that is, as property of a collective entity) but also to the common opinion that they enjoyed an exceptionally high status and social mobility, which would have set them apart from other slaves. This paper aims to reassess this specific matter by relativizing the above-mentioned assumption. The focus of the investigation is indeed the social position of public slaves in the city of Rome, particularly in the Imperial period. The opening section will provide a review of the scholarly views on the social status of public slaves in the Roman world. This study will then discuss the various indicators of privileged status for public slaves, which have been adduced by modern scholarship, * This paper is part of the ‘Serui Publici: Everybody’s Slaves (SPES)’ project, which was based at Newcastle University, and received funding under a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (H2020–MSCA–IF–2015) under grant agreement no. 704716. I am very grateful to A. Russell, F. Santangelo, A. Wallace-Hadrill and G. Woolf for their useful comments on previous oral or written versions of this paper. Remarks and criticism from the anonymous reviewer and from B. Gibson proved invaluable. 1 The main studies of public slavery in the Roman world are L. Halkin, Les esclaves publics chez les Romains (Brussels, 1897; repr. 1965); W. Eder, Servitus publica. Untersuchungen zur Entstehung, Entwicklung und Funktion der öffentlichen Sklaverei in Rom (Wiesbaden, 1980); A. Weiss, Sklave der Stadt. Untersuchungen zur öffentlichen Sklaverei in den Städten des römischen Reiches (Stuttgart, 2004). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 28 Sep 2021 at 15:25:40, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009838820000506 PUBLIC SLAVES IN ROME 369 with particular focus on the city of Rome. The third part will examine epigraphic evidence that can shed light on the manumission of serui publici populi Romani. There will follow a discussion of the possible existence of a hierarchy among members of the familia publica in Rome. The final section will examine how public slaves were viewed in ancient times, through analysis of a selection of passages from literary and legal texts. 1. PUBLIC SLAVES AS PRIVILEGED: THE COMMON VIEW It is generally accepted that public slaves in the Roman world enjoyed a higher status within the servile population, benefitting to some extent from a privileged life and good social conditions. This interpretation stems from the fact that various legal measures provided for public slaves to receive certain ‘benefits’ (lodging, board and clothing, a possible remuneration, the right to dispose of half of their peculium testamentarily). In respect of all these formal ‘advantages’, Theodor Mommsen was among the first scholars to admit the existence of ‘theils factische, theils rechtliche Unterschiede’ between public and private slaves.2 The same arguments were advanced in 1897 by Léon Halkin.3 From then on, this view pervaded subsequent scholarship. In 1908, for example, William W. Buckland outlined that public slaves ‘took a social rank very different from that of ordinary slaves’,4 while, two decades later, Reginald H. Barrow stated that ‘the social and legal status of these [that is, public] slaves was superior to that of private slaves’.5 This perspective basically prevailed until the second half of the twentieth century and thereafter. For instance, when Gerard Boulvert and Paul Weaver embarked on their studies of imperial slavery, a topic somehow related to seruitus publica, they both shared the view that serui publici were privileged slaves.6 In 1977, in an article commenting (at times sternly) on Halkin’s book, Nourbert Rouland also ended up confirming the idea that public slaves enjoyed better conditions than private slaves.7 A few years later, Walter Eder reaffirmed ‘der privilegierte Stellung’ of the serui publici populi Romani: in addition to the formal ‘benefits’ already noted by previous scholars, he regarded the fact that public slaves in Rome generally partnered with freeborn or manumitted women as proof of a privileged condition; moreover, he supposed (though without evidence) that they were not required to perform operae for the state after their manumission, and interpreted this as a marker of status.8 While the lack of evidence makes this assumption simply impossible to prove for public slaves in Rome, the subsequent finding of the Lex Irnitana demonstrated that Eder’s hypothesis is most likely wrong for serui ciuitatum.9 In the decades that followed, other scholars agreed 2 T. Mommsen, Römisches Staatsrecht (Leipzig, 18873), 1.323; cf. 2.836. 3 Halkin (n. 1), 112, 120, 135. 4 W.W. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery. The Condition of the Slave in Private Law from Augustus to Justinian (Cambridge, 1908), 321. 5 R.H. Barrow, Slavery in the Roman Empire (London, 1928), 130–2. 6 G. Boulvert, Esclaves et affranchis imperiaux sous le Haut-Empire romain. Rôle politique et administratif (Naples, 1970), 11; P.R.C. Weaver, Familia Caesaris. A Social Study of the Emperor’s Freedmen and Slaves (Cambridge, 1972), 215. 7 N. Rouland, ‘A propos des serui publici populi Romani’, Chiron 7 (1977), 261–79, at 276. 8 Eder (n. 1), 122. Analogously, Rouland (n. 7) was sceptical about the possibility that public slaves were subject to the obligation of operae. 9 See n. 76 below. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 28 Sep 2021 at 15:25:40, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009838820000506 370 FRANCO LUCIANI with the commonly held idea of an overall better social condition of public slaves in comparison with the social condition of private slaves.10 In his 2004 book on public slaves in the cities of the Empire, Alexander Weiss devoted a whole chapter to ‘Die Stellung der öffentlichen Sklaven in der römischen Gesellschaft’.11 After an accurate analysis of the overall matter, Weiss concluded that the tendency to place municipal and colonial slaves on a high level within the whole slave society is legitimate. Indeed, besides their frequent unions with free or freed women, the possibility of some of these slaves receiving a sort of remuneration (as well as the fact that they performed euergetic acts) led him to infer that they had considerable liquid assets. As a result, Weiss suggested that municipal slaves be ranked immediately below those in the imperial household. This has remained as the prevailing opinion among scholars working on public slavery. For instance, in 2006, when studying the legal aspects of public slavery, János Zlinszky came to the conclusion that a public slave was entirely different from a private slave because of ‘eine gewisse Selbständigkeit’.12 Analogously, in 2007, when referring specifically to the familia publica of Ostia, Françoise Sudi-Guiral assumed that this group of slaves enjoyed ‘une position de supériorité’.13 Most recently, in 2011, Leonard Schumacher stated that public slaves were characterized by ‘a, relatively speaking, higher social position’.14 Finally, Richard Gamauf counted the ‘[s]erui publici owned by the state or a municipality’ among the ‘privileged […] groups of slaves’, as they ‘had a better legal position’.15 Only a few scholars—such as Paul Louis in 1912 or, more recently, José Miguel Serrano Delgado in 1996 and Christer Bruun in 2008—have openly questioned the assumption that public slaves occupied a ‘privileged’ position.16 Both Louis and Serrano Delgado argued that the majority of public slaves in Rome and in the municipalities performed menial jobs, which made their fate uncertain and debarred them from any career. Analysing the case study of Ostia, then, Bruun convincingly demonstrated that the former public slaves hardly reached a good social position, expressing an opposing opinion to that previously proposed by Sudi-Guiral.17 10 Cf. M. Morabito, Les réalités de l’esclavage d’après le Digeste (Paris, 1981), 177; A.T.
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