CHAPTER II THE LAW OF STATUS

The first difficulty for the modem reader wishing to understand the legal lives of people in Rome and her dominions is to think himself back into a world where men’s rights and duties depended on fundamental differences of formal legal status; and a clear conception of these principles is an unavoidable prerequisite to everything else, even what might otherwise have seemed the natural subject to begin with, the machinery of justice and the courts.

It is simple enough to draw up (as Gaius does in the Institutes) a table of the statuses that implied more or less completely different sets of rights and duties in the eyes of Roman law, thus:

1 People (male and female) are either slaves, or they are free.

2 Free people are either free by birth, ingenui, or free by grant of freedom from slavery, �freedmen’, libertini.

3 Free people are also either Roman citizens, or �Latins’ (and if Latins either coloniary Latins or, under the Principate, Junian Latins), or peregrines (and if peregrines either citizens of some particular peregrine community or of none).

4 Roman citizens are either independent—�in their own power’, sui iuris, suae potestatis—or in the power of someone else, alieni iuris.

5 Persons sui iuris are either under guardianship, tutela, or caretakership, cura, curatio, or under neither of these.

This dull catalogue, however, does not, in the first place, exhaust the complexities, for there were numerous other status categories which involved partial differences of rights and duties which could nevertheless be quite important, such as age and sex (the special position of infants and of women), being married with a stated number of children, married without children, or unmarried, being a soldier, being a senator or member of the equestrian order or neither, and in the provinces being a magistrate or councillor of your city or neither (or in Egypt being a citizen of Alexandria, a citizen of another Greek city or just a plain Egyptian).

The origins of the complexities of citizenship and non-citizen- ship lie in the history of archaic Greece, when the Greeks (for reasons, indeed, only dimly understood even today) organized themselves politically not into a nation but into a large number of tiny nations, city-states, whose members had rights and duties within their own state but were without duties or rights—were foreigners—in the state the other side of the mountain. This pattern of life the Greeks themselves exported, both before and after Alexander; Rome, beginning herself simply as one city- state, inherited it, in spite of becoming a world power, and the notion of citizenship of small municipalities and strangership outside remained, notwithstanding some modifications, basic to the structure of Rome’s dominions. �Roman citizen’, therefore, is not just a vague term meaning an inhabitant of the Roman empire, but a precise expression of one particular set of rights and duties.

Thus, if you had visited the market-place of, say, Tarsus in the time of the apostle Paul you would have found there Roman citizens, citizens of Tarsus (some of whom would be Roman citizens as well, like Paul, others not), citizens of other places domiciled but only having the rights of incolae there, and free persons who were not citizens of anywhere.¹ Of all these some would be free-born, others freedmen, some independent, others under the power of fathers or guardians. And the rest of the population would be slaves. Each kind of person would be carry­ing round with him a different bundle of rights and duties in the eyes of Roman law, though it might take little cognizance of some of them.

Citizenship in the ancient world, we are accustomed to say, was based on a principle of personality, not of territoriality; your status depended on birth—the status of your parents—or on grant of one kind or another. However, territoriality was not altogether unimportant.² For one thing, there were many people domiciled in places of which they were not, by the â€?personal’ principle, citizens, and unless the state of their domicile granted them its citizenship they remained incolae (what the classical Athenians called â€?metics’). The Spanish charters, that of Urso (which goes back to Julius Caesar) and that of Malaca (Flavian in date), refer to them. The Urso charter gives places at its city festivals separately to citizens of Urso, incolae, and guests and temporary visitors.³ That of Malaca has a piece of historical tit-for-tat; in the Roman Republican age, Latins domiciled in Rome were allowed to vote in Roman citizen assemblies, in one voting-group picked by lot on the day, and now Malaca repeats the arrange­ment in reverse, allowing incolae who are Roman citizens or Latins to vote in her elections in a group picked by lot.⁴ In the Digest there is a title â€?On the municipal law and on incolae⁹, which makes rules about how far incolae must be bound by the laws and pay the taxes of the community they live in, such as:³

�An incola must obey the magistrates both of the community of his domicile and of that of which he is a citizen.’

It discusses what constitutes domicile as opposed to mere tran­sience, how the domicile of wives is determined, and so on.

The notion of territoriality received a further importance from the extension of Roman citizenship, which came to represent not an exclusive �belongingness’ such as would preclude a man from belonging any more to his own original citizen community but a privileged extra status that a man could have, like Paul, over and above his existing rights.

★

The conditions for acquiring Roman citizenship can be set out as follows:

Birth. To be a Roman citizen by birth you had to be a child of a true Roman law marriage, iustae nuptiae or iustum matrimonium, the condition of which was that both parties must possess conubium —which meant simply the right to contract a true marriage, and was possessed by all Roman citizens but also by some others, as will be seen. Theory held that in iustae nuptiae (which were iure civili) the child followed the status of the father, whereas in any other sort of marriage (which was iure gentium) it followed the status of the mother; but as a result of certain modifications by legislation the effect of the rules in practice, during the whole of our period, was that you could only be a Roman citizen by birth if your father was, and even then only if your mother was either a Roman citizen or otherwise possessed conubium—except that the theoretical rule stayed unmodified in one case (very remark­ably): children of a Roman citizen woman and a slave or an unknown father took her status and were therefore Roman citizens.¹⁴ It must not be forgotten, therefore, that children of Roman citizen fathers might well not themselves be Roman citizens, and might even be slaves.

Manumission. One of the most extraordinary facts of Roman law is that a slave manumitted (that is, given his freedom) in proper form before a magistrate¹⁵ or by will, and not in contra­vention of certain Augustan legislation, by a Roman citizen master, became himself a Roman citizen. We shall see presently that he was in many ways a â€?second-class’ citizen; he was civis Rotnanus libertinus instead of ingenuus. But he had the precious conubium, so that his children, if he married right, could be ingenui. Government grant. The cases are numerous,¹⁶ and it would be tedious to go through them all. The most important were:

1 To whole peregrine communities en bloc. This is the main process whereby Roman citizenship spread during our period, sometimes via the â€?Latin right’ as a half-way stage. Many inscrip­tions record such grants;¹⁷ some emperors were more lavish with them than others, especially Claudius, who was criticized for overdoing it:¹⁸

�He had decided to put all the Greeks, Gauls, Spaniards and Britons into togas.’

2 To the soldiers of the auxiliary regiments and other non­citizen branches of Rome’s forces, including the navy, on com­pletion of their years of engagement or honourable discharge when they left the service. (To be a regular legionary you had to be a Roman citizen, though many men of non-citizen origin were simply given citizenship on enlistment to qualify them if they wished to enter the legions, but the auxiliaries were mostly peregrines during our period.)¹⁹ Of these grants evidence survives in many diplomata, copies on bronze tablets of the official record which were issued to the individuals concerned. They certify²⁰ that the emperor:

â€?has given citizenship to them, their children and descendants, and conubium with such wives as they already had at the date of the grant, or if otherwise with such wives as they should subsequently marry, but only to one wife for each individual’. The interesting feature is retrospective citizenship for children bom during service (when marriage was forbidden). Surprisingly, it seems that the legionaries, who were citizens, were worse off; they did not get such retrospective citizenship for children bom â€?in the camp’.²¹ But the questions of succession to them that arose were partly settled in other ways, as will be seen in Chapter IV. Also since, if a man wanted to enter a regular legion, he could be given citizenship on recruitment, children bom during their father’s service could get citizenship by thus following in his footsteps.

3 To the magistrates (and in some cases, from the second century ad, the town councillors) of â€?Latin’ communities. The right of â€?Latin’ magistrates to get Roman citizenship goes back to Repub­lican times,²² and the charters of Salpensa and Malaca in the Flavian period contain this right—and no more. But by the second century this had become the â€?lesser Latin right’, minus Latium, and there was a maius Latium which gave Roman citizen­ship to all members of the town council. It appears first under Hadrian, and may well have been an innovation of his.²³

4 To Junian Latins (who will be explained presently) marrying a Roman citizen or Latin wife and having a child, by application to the courts when the child reached the age of one. Citizenship was granted to all.

5 In certain cases where the parties to a marriage were under a mistake as to the status of one of them, if there was a child, they could by a senatusconsultum of unknown date apply to the courts, prove mistake, and receive citizenship for all. The complex rules are summed up by Gaius:²⁴

â€?From what we have said it is apparent that if a male Roman citizen marries a peregrine woman, or vice versa, their child is a peregrine; but if the marriage was entered into in error [i.e. error of status] its defect is cured by the senatusconsultum⁹.

6 Grants by the emperor to individuals, either for services rendered or expected, or simply as a favour to themselves or powerful patrons requesting it on their behalf. This was a potential door to traffic in Roman citizenship. The tribune who told the apostle Paul that he had â€?paid a lot of money for his citizenship’ must be referring to bribery to obtain a grant through someone with power at court.²⁵ (He cannot be a freedman who has paid for his manumission and hence citizenship, because a freedman would not be a tribune; and there was no legitimate citizenship by purchase.) He is very insouciant about admitting this, which might imply that it was common, but on the other hand there is astonishingly little reference elsewhere to it as an abuse—except precisely for the principate of Claudius, when Paul’s tribune received his citizenship.²⁶

Of free persons who were not Roman citizens the only category that needs special discussion at this point is the �Latins’. This status had two separate historical origins:

Coloniary Latins, There is no place here to enter into the early history of the status. During the whole of our period the Latin municipalities were communities with a â€?half-way’ position, not Roman citizens but possessed of some of the citizen rights. The status, which ceased to exist in Italy after 49 bc, continued to be granted in the first century ad to hitherto peregrine com­munities²⁷ (not to individuals).

Junian Latins. It seems to have been the emperor Tiberius under whom a law was passed which greatly complicated the Roman law of status. The story begins with the laws inspired by Augustus, lex Fufia Caninia, 2 bc and lex Aelia Sentia, ad 4, designed to limit the numbers of slaves who could be manumitted, by will or by lifetime acts respectively. Now people had in the Republican era sometimes just intimated informally to slaves that they regarded them as free instead of performing a formal manu­mission—by letter or by announcement â€?among friends’; the praetor would protect the personal freedom of the man concerned,²⁸ but he had no status, and in the law’s eyes he was still a slave. The effect of the Augustan laws was to put all those manumitted in contravention of them (if the slave was under thirty, or the master under twenty, or the total number freed by will in excess of the permitted maximum, and so on) in this precarious limbo of the â€?informally free’. By a lex lunia Norbana of ad I9²⁹ a new status was invented for these people; they were to be not citizens but a kind of Latin. They gained a recognized and no longer precarious position at law, though a severely restricted one, as will be seen. Informal manumission â€?among friends’ went on, making Junian Latins, for a long time. Pliny refers to it (showing that they could rise to full citizenship either by a subsequent formal manumission or by a grant of â€?citizen right’ from the emperor),³⁰ and a lady called Helen kept her certificate of such an informal manumission in the year ad 221:³¹

�Marcus Aurelius Ammonion, son of Lupercus, grandson of Sarapion, mother Terheuta, of the ancient and famous borough Hermoupolis Maior, manumitted among friends his slave Helen, bom in the household, aged circa thirty-four years, and ordered her to be free, and received for her liberty from Aurelius Ales son of Inarous... two thousand two hundred drachmas?

The rights of the Latins, both coloniary and Junian, can to some extent be spoken of together. Conubium they did not have, except by special concession (such as to the wife of a discharged soldier) ;³² but the odd consequence of this, that the offspring of a Latin father and a Roman citizen mother (taking her status because there was no iustum matrimonium) would be a Roman citizen, was upheld for coloniary Latins and allowed to Junian Latins by a senatusconsultum of Hadrian’s time,³³ whereas the similar odd consequence for children of a peregrine father and a Roman citizen mother had been rejected by legislation many generations earlier.³* What the Latins did possess was commercium, another part of Roman citizen rights;³⁵ but exactly what that included is by no means clear. Most scholars have tended to assert that it covered practically all the rights of a citizen except conubium: the right to participate in formal conveyance by â€?mancipation’ and so to own property by full â€?citizen right’, to contract, to have access to the urban praetor’s court, to adopt, and to make and inherit under civil law wills—with the agreed exception that will-making rights were not allowed to Junians.³⁶ Ulpian, however, speaks only ofâ€?mancipation’, and some modem authori­ties would give commercium a more limited scope, excluding, for example, full â€?citizenship right’ ownership of property.*? In any case, it may be doubted whether in our period this separate and complex status of Latins was of much real social importance. For Latin males absence of conubium was, as we have seen, unim­portant; as we have also seen, the magistrates—and sometimes councillors—of coloniary Latin cities acquired Roman citizenship ex officio. Moreover, the state needed many services and was prepared to pay for them by granting its citizenship, and to judge by the long list of ways given by Ulpian in which Latins could rise to Roman citizenship,*⁸ they were the prime beneficiaries; â€?any enterprising Latin must have been able to raise himself to the citizenship’.*⁹ As for commercium, whatever its content may have been in archaic times, by our period the old formal rights and actions of the ius civile were so small a proportion of the law compared with the new branches of ius honorarium which pere­grines (and a fortiori Latins) enjoyed as much as Romans that their â€?peregrinity’ in these matters can have been small obstacle. The lack of right to benefit under a Roman will was the most signifi­cant private law disability that remained to peregrines, and that right the coloniary Latins probably had.⁴⁰ The special disabilities of Junians derived not so much from the fact that they were Latins as from the fact that they were freedmen (of a specially restricted sort).

All the rest of the free inhabitants of Rome’s dominions (and of course those outside as well) were simply peregrines, peregrini. The great majority were citizens of some municipal community, with their own local laws with which Roman law concerned itself hardly at all. A slave freed by a peregrine owner was just a pere­grine;⁴¹ what particular rights he had would depend on the law of his owner’s community. But criminous slaves freed by Romans fell, by the lex Aelia Sentia, into that sub-class of peregrines called dediticii. The main point about them is that they could never be promoted to Roman citizenship; even the constitution of Cara­calla that gave all other free persons citizenship continued expressly to exclude them.⁴² But whom the category contained besides these criminous freedmen we do not really know. They had no citizenship of any community; this was the situation of most of the population of Egypt, but the Egyptians were not excluded from Caracalla’s grant. By ad 212 there were still a great many peregrines for Caracalla to promote, especially in the Greek-speaking lands; the â€?upward’ movement to Roman citizen­ship had been going on steadily all the time, but much more massively in the west than in the east, and it was of course the upper classes who had been getting it.^42a

Everybody not so far mentioned was a slave.

*

In a society where status determines all your rights and duties it may be very important to prove your status. Proof that you were a Roman citizen and not a peregrine; that you were free-bom and not a freed slave; most fundamental of all, that you were a free man and not someone’s slave. How difficult or easy was it to establish status? Leaving aside for the moment the last and most crucial case let us consider first the proof of citizen­ship.

The situation in the Republic was that proof of citizenship depended on your name appearing on the census-list, which was normally brought up to date at five-year intervals. Just at the beginning of our period, when the bulk of Italy was being enfranchised after the â€?Social War’, those with a new right to citizenship either had to make a personal appearance in Rome before the praetor or were supposed to be enrolled by the censors under their whole community, now raised en bloc. This was neglected, for numerous political reasons, and people claim­ing to be new citizens by grant were not on the roll. In 65 bc, therefore, when a lex Papia was passed expelling peregrines and requiring prosecution of people falsely claiming to be citizens, many were put in peril. Cicero defended one of them, the poet Archias, which is how we learn about the matter.⁴³

For citizens by birth the lex Aelia Sentia of ad 4 established a system of birth registration.⁴⁴ Why was it established by this particular statute? Perhaps to check age in determining whether masters freeing slaves were aged twenty or under; we know that these registers were used for proof of age.⁴⁵ The lex Papia Poppaea also relied on the registers; to encourage the increase of family size amongst the upper classes it gave certain privileges to those with not less than three children; presumably proof of family size depended on the registers. The parent (it could be the mother)⁴⁶ made a formal statement before the authorities, a professio, and they put the child in the register as stated, without enquiry,⁴⁷ so that the professio was essentially evidence rather than proof. Individuals could obtain a copy of the entry; here is one dated ad 62:⁴⁸

�In the consulship of Publius Marius and Lucius Afinius Gallus, 23 July... at Alexandria beside Egypt. Certified copy from the list of birth attestations open to public inspection in the Atrium Magnum, in which occurs the following item: Lucius Julius Vestinus, prefect of Egypt, published the names of those who had declared the birth of children in their households in accord­ance with the lex Papia Poppaea and Aelia Sentia in the consulship of P. Marius and L. Afinius Gallus. 18 July: Lucius Valerius Crispus, son of Lucius, tribe Pollia, property three hundred and seventy-five thousand sesterces, reported the birth of a son, Lucius Valerius Crispus, son of Lucius, tribe Pollia, to his wife Domitia Paulla, daughter of Lucius, on 29 June prox.; c. r. e. ad k.’ (unintelligible).

From another document we learn the rule that illegitimate children were not allowed on the register; instead of a formal professio parents just made a private declaration of such children under seal:⁴⁹

�... because the lex Aelia Sentia and Papia Poppaea forbids illegitimates to be reported on the register’.

A tablet from Herculaneum also records one of these private declarations, dated ad 60 (though one cannot see why the child was illegitimate):⁵⁰

�In the consulship of Gaius Velleius Paterculus and Marcus Manlius Vopiscus, 24 July, L. Vennidius Ennychus testified that a child was born to him of Livia Acte his wife.’

Apuleius in his defence of himself has a spirited passage that mentions the birth registers:⁵¹

�As to the age of my wife Pudentilla, about which you have confidently (and falsely) asserted that I married her at 60,1 shall make a brief reply; a long one is not needed when the facts are so plain. Her father made a declaration of the birth of a daughter, as everyone does. The entries are preserved both in the public archives and at their home: here they are now, under your nose. Hand Aemilianus the tablets; let him examine the binding, identify the seals, read the year, work out the age...*

As to citizenship by grant, we now have the evidence of the Banasa tablet that there was a register of all new citizens by individual grants and that copies of the entries could be obtained; and there was a register of all grants to discharged veterans, of which the auxiliary diplomata were copies for the individual to keep. The main â€?everyday* sign of being a Roman citizen was possession of the â€?three names’, praenomen, nomen and cognomen, and it was a criminal offence to usurp these, a kind of forgery, sometimes very severely punished.⁵²

An exceedingly interesting new dossier from Herculaneum concerns the efforts of a young woman called Petronia lusta to establish that she was free-born and not a freedwoman.⁵³ It was not, it seems, contested that her mother had been a slave in the household of a couple, Petronius Stephanus and Calatoria Themis, and had been freed by them; the problem for lusta turned on whether her own birth had been subsequent to her mother’s manumission (in which case she was free-born, though admittedly illegitimate—very likely a bastard of Petronius, who seems to have been fond of her) or previous to it, and she herself manumitted by Calatoria Themis after Petronius’ death. lusta apparently could produce no birth declaration (and, incidentally, a lex Viseilia, probably of ad 24, made it a crime for a freed person to pretend to be free-born),⁵⁴ but neither could Calatoria Themis produce any formal record of manumission. The only important Digest text on such cases is 22. 3. 14, which concerns who is to be plaintiff and who defendant; in the present action we do not know, nor what the outcome was. The documents are of two categories: first, a set of records of mutual promises, vaditnonia (bails) by the parties for appearance before the urban praetor in the Augustan Forum at Rome on a given date at the usual unconscionably early hour, on pain of agreed fines, which will be looked at later in a different context; and second, a category of documents consists of a number of testimonia, sworn statements of witnesses on both sides (themselves formally sealed and witnessed):⁵⁵

�1, Gaius Petronius Telesphorus, have written and sworn by the spirit of the emperor Augustus [i.e. Vespasian] and his sons that I know the girl lusta, object of suit, to have been bom free, the child of my fellow-freedwoman Petronia Vitalis; and that it was I who arranged with Petronius Stephanus and Calatoria Themis that he should accept reimbursement for the child’s upbringing and restore her to her mother; from which facts I know that the woman lusta, object of suit, was bom in free­dom as daughter of Petronia Vitalis—which is the question at issue.

T, Quintus Tamudius Optatus, have written and sworn by the spirit of the emperor Vespasian Caesar Augustus and his sons that I was present when Petronia Vitalis discussed the girl her daughter with Calatoria Themis; and that I heard Stephanus the husband of Themis there and then say to Petronia Vitalis “Why are you upset with us about the child, considering that we are treating her as our own daughter?” From which I know that the woman, object of suit, is the daughter of Petronia Vitalis and is free by birth—which is the question at issue.

�1, [name illegible], have written at the request of Marcus Calatorius Marullus and in his presence, because he said he was illiterate, that he has sworn by the spirit of the emperor Vespasian and his sons that: “I know that Calatoria Themis manumitted both the girl and myself; from which I know that the girl is the freedwoman of Calatoria Themis—which is the question at issue.” ’

★

If â€?the woman who calls herself Petronia lusta’ was a freed­woman, the widow Calatoria had over her the rights of a patron. We must look more in detail now at the legal position of persons whose freedom and Roman citizenship were based on manumis­sion, for although the Roman law stated with exemplary firmness that â€?all men are either free or slaves’—that is that it recognized no helots, serfs or villeins—the legal, let alone the economic, reality was a good deal more nuanct. Another reason for taking. the class of freed men and women very seriously is that it supplied the nearest thing Rome ever had to a middle class. To say that they â€?were probably the most intelligent class of the community’⁵⁶ underestimates the range the class covered, for many humble, illiterate menials were manumitted; nevertheless, the freedman class certainly did include many people of high intelligence, literacy, energy and ambition, and what is more, already by the time of Cicero’s death they probably comprised a high propor­tion of all Roman citizens, in the urban communities at least, so that, psychologically and culturally speaking, the status-line of demarcation, free as against slave, was blurred and ultimately annihilated by the fact that so many of the free had once been slaves, and replaced by the simple distinction between â€?haves’ and â€?have-nots’.⁵⁷ The most famous of all Roman freedmen is an imaginary one: Trimalchio. Petronius paints him in detail, mock­ing, en grand seigneur, the characteristics of his class; but behind the satirical picture can be seen many of the traits of a bourgeoisie —emphasis on material values, connection with commerce, urbanism, aping of the â€?gentry’. The scorn and dislike of freed­men amongst the senatorial class springs from the complex attitudes towards slavery which will be spoken of presently. The hatred of imperial freedmen in politics is well known; more general social dislike is trenchantly expressed by Persius, on a slave just freed by formal ceremony:⁵⁷³

�One twist, and Dama is Marcus Dama now. What, Marcus is surety and you refuse to lend? Marcus is judge and you have no confidence? Marcus has spoken it; it must be true. Come, Marcus, be a signatory to my will!’

Even the formally manumitted civis Romanns libertinus had once, says Cicero, been treated almost as a slave.⁵⁸ All through our period he was under a series of legal disabilities compared with the free-born.⁵⁹ Some were disabilities of public law; freedmen could not serve in the regular legions; they could not aspire to the senatorial or equestrian orders (except by extraordinary grant of the emperor); and in most citizen towns they were not eligible for local magistracy. By Augustan legislation a senator could not contract a iustum matrimonium with a freedwoman. These bans affected the whole class; those whose patron or patron’s children were alive were under numerous further limita­tions, based on the ancient notion that they owed â€?dutifulness’ to the family who had conferred on them the benefit of citizenship. This notion may originally have been part of social mores rather than law; but in our period â€?patron’s rights’ were certainly no mere vague general clientship. There are several Digest titles about them, and they were actionable in the courts.

First, the freedman must not act to the harm of his patron. He might bring civil suits against him only by permission of the authorities, and â€?infaming actions’⁶⁰ not at all; and the only criminal proceedings he might initiate against a patron were for treason. And the patron could apply reasonable chastisement to him:⁶¹

�for the praetor is not obliged to put up with a man who was yesterday a slave and today is free, complaining that his master has been rude to him or mildly struck or corrected him.’

Officium involved the freedman in undertaking general services on behalf of his patron, such as accepting the guardianship of his children or supporting him if he fell into poverty. Under this heading a word may also be said about manumission â€?for the purpose of matrimony’. By Augustan legislation it was ruled that a slave woman freed by her patron so that he could marry her (though she was not in terms forced into the marriage)⁶² could not divorce him and go into marriage or concubinage with another without his consent.⁶³ Matrimonial reasons were treated as a valid cause for relaxation of the age minima for formal manumission laid down by the lex Aelia Sentia,⁶⁴ and in this case the woman must actually marry if her manumission was to be good (and her status as a citizen valid). The reverse case is interest­ing (though the relevant text is often suspected of interpolation) :⁶⁵ a woman might free a male slave Tor the purpose of matrimony’, but only if she herself was a freed slave and he her fellow-slave. This is a hint of what must have been a common case, of the slave of either sex, given freedom, buying or begging from the master the partner with whom they had been in sexual relationship (marriage of slaves being impossible) and freeing him or her so that a proper marriage might at last begin.

Again, a slave could be required, as a condition of obtaining freedom, to swear an oath that he would perform so many operae, man-days of work, for his patron, and was then obliged to repeat this oath when free because the law treated the operae as actionable. (It has been pointed out that when a free bread ration was established for the city plebs in the late Republic numerous masters saw their chance to free slaves, put them on the national bread line, and continue to use their operae without having to pay their keep.)⁶⁶ There were some limits:⁶⁷

�Only those operae are taken to have been imposed, which can be performed without indignity or danger to life. Thus if a slave who has worked as a prostitute is manumitted she does not have to provide the same operae to her patron.’

Operae could be either domestic and personal services or skilled craftsman’s work. They were units of value convertible into cash, and sometimes a freedman could offer money in lieu; in any case, the praetor gave an action for them just as if they were a money debt.⁶⁸ Freedmen with two free children, and freedwomen over 50, were exempt. The operae of slaves could be hired out by the master; the lex Aelia Sentia ruled that a patron could not hire out his freedman’s operae for reward, but so many modifications were made to this principle that in the end it did not amount to much.⁶⁹

What, then, of the freedman who failed in general â€?dutiful­ness’? There was no legal mechanism of the praetor for reducing operae; succession to freedmen 53 him to slavery again. Nevertheless, the famous debate staged in Tacitus’ Annals under the year ad 56 shows that many wealthy patrons hankered after such a mechanism,⁷⁰ and that, though they did not get it, Nero (like his predecessor)⁷¹ was quite prepared to re-enslave â€?undutiful’ freedmen in individual cases. By the end of our period, to judge from the Digest, there had come to exist a criminal punishment for freedmen who failed in â€?dutifulness’.⁷² Another category of rights of patron over freedman was automatic; it gave him a hold over his freedman’s property, especially on death. Augustus’ legislation resulted in very compli­cated rules which are not interesting enough to be worth stating in detail. Very roughly put, the basic principle was that if a freed­man had legitimate children they could inherit from him, but if he had any heirs (whether by will or not) outside this narrow range the patron could claim a half share against them. The Augustan rules modified this in numerous details—particularly, that where a freedman’s estate was large the patron would henceforth get a share even as against the freedman’s legitimate children.

Here we must bring in parenthetically the special disability of Junian Latin freedmen. Upon their death everything they had reverted entirely to their patron just as if they had remained slaves, and this reversion could be bequeathed or sold to third parties.⁷³ Justinian’s Institutes get rhetorical and emotional about this:⁷*

�In life they were free, but with their last breath they lost both life and liberty.’

However, the fair point has been made that since, if a Junian Latin had children, he could be promoted to citizenship, only the childless necessarily breathed their last as Latins.⁷³

The rights of succession of patron to freedman sound even more crushing in the light of a Digest title â€?On actions in fraud of patron’ (D. 38. 5), from which it appears that any alienation of property by a freedman before he died, or any legacy, which could be regarded as defrauding the patron of his due share of the estate, was subject to a legal action against the freedman’s heirs:⁷⁶ â€?In life a freedman can make gifts to friends who have deserved well of him; but he cannot make legacies even to deserving friends if by so doing he diminishes the patron’s share.’

Another title in the Digest reveals a sinister practice by which masters would impose on slaves as a condition of freedom some enormous sum of money or total of operae â€?for the sake of burden­ing the liberty’;?⁷

�so that if the freedman offends his patron it can be exacted, and consequently the freedman will be forever under his patron’s thumb through fear of the exaction, and he will agree to do anything if it is demanded by the patron.’

The praetor gave an action to repress this.

The patron’s right to succeed was supplemented by his right to guardianship of all freedmen who were minors and all freed­women of any age (except that Augustan legislation released all women from perpetual guardianship if they had a requisite number of children). Those under guardianship could only alienate property with their guardian’s consent, so this was another element in the control by patrons of their freedmen’s property.

All this sounds very harsh. The Romans liked to think of a freedman’s relationship to his patron as having something filial about it, and this was not wholly â€?doublethink’. It need not be doubted that often there was a â€?faithful retainer’ relationship like that of Tiro to the Cicero family.⁷⁸ And the law was not entirely one-sided. Even the rules about succession must be looked at in the light that the foundation of a freedman’s property was the slave-peoJium, legally belonging to the master, which he had been allowed to keep on manumission; if, as often, the slave had â€?paid’ for his freedom by, in effect, renouncing some or all of his peculiutn, the patron could not then defeat his will and claim part- succession.⁷^ Other limits to the patron’s power were similarly secured by making his right to succession or operae depend on them. Thus he could not, on pain of this, initiate criminal actions against his freedman involving the death penalty (except treason), and he had to support his freedman if impoverished; in fact a common kind of legacy was an annuity, alimenta, to freedmen. And finally, the sense of freedmen as part of the family and a continuance of the family name (which they took upon manu­mission) comes out strongly in the tradition of sepulchral monu­ments, as will be seen.

We hear a certain amount—not only in the Digest—about ways in which a freedman could come to count as free-born. First, by the â€?grant of the gold rings’ by the emperor, which was naturally only for freedmen with special favour at court. They were released from the disabilities of public law and from their patron’s rights to services during their lifetimes, but counted still as freedmen on their death so that their patrons (doubtless usually the emperor himself) preserved rights of succession.⁸⁰ Secondly, just as a man held as a slave might prove in the courts that he was in truth free-born, so might a freedman. This was sometimes abused in collusive actions in which patrons put up no proper defence against the claim (which is no doubt what Encolpius means in the Satyricon when he describes Ascyltus as Treed by lust and free-born by lust’),⁸¹ and the law tried to stop such collu­sions.⁸² The emperors sometimes granted â€?restitution of free birth’ as a fiction.⁸³

★

About slaves there is much literature,⁸⁴ and this is not surprising. The slave is regarded by many historians as the determining factor in the economic, social and intellectual life of antiquity. There can be scarcely a title of the Digest in which he does not figure. Precisely for that reason he will not be treated in a single place in the present book, but will appear where he belongs, which is everywhere. For the moment all that concerns us is his (and, it cannot be too much emphasized, her) place in the law of status.

In many ancient societies everybody was more or less unftee. Greco-Roman society, by polarizing freedom and unfreedom with a sharpness rare in human history,⁸³ provided itself with a sharper version than most societies of the puzzle: what is a slave? Is it a thing or is he a person? In Roman society and law this ambivalence is everywhere. The slave is a res, a tnancipium, thing, chattel; res mortales, â€?mortal objects’, slaves are called at one place in the Digest.*⁶ The slave is an object of buying and selling; damage to a slave is damage to property; you can own part of a slave—that is, the slave can be owned by several people at once, like a field. Few things could read more callously than Digest 21. i, on what constitutes â€?sickness or unsuitability’ of a slave in the market; for instance:⁸⁷

�The slave who does anything to remove himself from mankind is regarded as vicious; as, for example, if he makes a noose or drinks medicine as a poison or throws himself from a height, hoping to achieve death. For one who will do this to himself will have no scruple about what he does to others.’

The slave has no rights or duties. If he commits offences his master can choose between paying damages and handing him over. He cannot sue in the courts (except for one thing) or enter public life or join the army.⁸⁸ There is no such thing as slave marriage. â€?What, you fool! A slave a man?’⁸⁹

Yes, also a man. In the agricultural society of early Roman times the farmer worked the land with his whole family, sons and slaves. And between sons and slaves in the old man’s power there was not all that much difference—except in ultimate expec­tations. To the end of Roman law the rules about Jilius familias and servus are curiously alike; the â€?power of life and death’ applies over both, neither can own anything—they can have only peculium—and so on. The very word for â€?slave’ in old civil law formulas is homo. The law of the Twelve Tables on assault treated slaves just as less privileged adults; the penalty was smaller, that was all. With the great influx of slaves after the Punic Wars, when Roman society and economy were trans­formed, there began Rome’s great heyday of â€?slave economy’, and the chattel status of slaves grew more severe; and then under the Principate (as indeed slaves became rarer and dearer again, but not wholly for that reason) the status was subjected to a long, slow, tentative process of amelioration by legislation on humani­tarian grounds:⁹⁰

�The power of masters over their slaves must indeed be unim­paired, and no man must be deprived of his rights; but it is in the interest of masters that assistance against cruelty or starva­tion or intolerable injury should not be denied to those who have just complaints.’

The labour of the slave was needed at all levels of intelligence and subtlety, and thus he will be found managing estates and businesses and shops and ships, contracting as agent for his master, joining in partnerships with his master or others on the basis of his peailium, nursing, healing, teaching his master’s children. There was one matter on which the slave might (through an intermediary) come into court—namely his liberty.⁹¹ Deliberate killing of him was not only damage to property; it was also murder.⁹² He could on manumission become a Roman citizen, and a Roman citizen could for crime be reduced to slavery; and the children of a Roman citizen might be, and probably often were, slaves. The offices of the public administration were staffed by â€?slaves of Caesar’ and â€?freedmen of Augustus’.

Every sort of treatment by masters, therefore, and every sort of relationship between master and slave can be found in the sources, depending on what part of the labour force the slave belonged to, just as every condition of slave life can be met with from the treadmill to the boudoir—and to the office. And none is more typical than another. Nevertheless, through the pattern there does run a thread of those â€?spiritual stresses and unremitting social tensions’ which make it analogous to the old American South.⁹³ Cases of masters killed by their slaves haunt the literature and the law.⁹⁴ The most celebrated literary reference is Tacitus’ account of the debate that followed the murder of Pedanius Secundus, with a fierce and powerful speech by a famous jurist, Cassius Longinus;⁹* even more significant is the gentle and bien pensant Pliny, writing about the murder of Larcius Macedo:⁹⁶

�and no one can think himself secure merely because he is easy-going and mild; it is not cold calculation that leads to masters being murdered, but simply criminality.’

*

The most important question that could arise about a man or woman was: slave or free? And proof of status could be difficult, for many reasons including the fact that:⁹⁷

�it is difficult to distinguish a free man from a slave.’

In spite of the Roman law’s insistence on sharply distinguishing between slave and free, the evidence suggests that in social, cultural and economic terms there was something much more like a �continuum’ of statuses, quite apart from labour conditions in which the free worker might be worse off than the slave.

To confine ourselves here to formal legal process: causae liberates, suits concerning liberty, might occur both ways round— either the man held as a slave claiming to be free or the man living as a free man claimed by another as his slave. And this question of status might be a necessary preliminary to actions of other sorts. We hear in the Digest of two frauds: one is the suppression of clauses in wills granting freedom to slaves;⁹⁸ the other is a nasty blackmail, the extortion of money under the threat of suppressing evidence of a man’s free status when he is claimed (perhaps by yourself) as a slave.⁹⁹ To plead liberty, if you were held as a slave, you had to have an adsertor libertatis to approach the court for you. There was an action â€?for production’, ad exhibendutn, so as to ensure that you were produced in court. One important case of the suit for liberty resulted from the common practice of exposure of unwanted infants, who might be picked up by people and brought up as their slaves. Roman law insisted that their free status was unimpaired, so that if they could find an adsertor they could recover their freedom. In the Greek­speaking parts of Rome’s dominion¹⁰⁰ it was a condition of such recovery that someone should pay â€?ransom’ representing the costs of the child’s upbringing, but successive emperors refused to allow that any such payment was obligatory.¹⁰¹ However, the practical problem remained: had you any proof, and could you get an adsertor? Many must have failed.

A curious figure appears frequently in the pages of the Digest: the liber homo bona fide serviens, â€?free man in a state of slavery in good faith’. The good faith, is, in our period, that of the person who holds him as a slave—he believes him to be so.¹⁰² How could a free man find himself in this unfortunate situation? We have seen one case, exposure in infancy.¹⁰³ Another was kidnap­ping, suppressio, which the Augustan Peace never succeeded in stamping out—perhaps just because as other sources of slaves dried up the dealers turned to it as a channel of supply; Pliny has some curious tales of disappearances.¹⁰⁴ Again it w^Tas a matter of how you were to prove, against someone who had bought you in the market in good faith, that you had ever been free. Yet another case was that of the slave made free by the provisions of a will of the contents of which he was unaware; such a situation is made the starting point for a discussion about a quite different matter in the Digest:¹⁰³

�A man had a slave Stichus in charge of a loan-bank on his estate in the provinces. In his will, which was opened in Rome, Stichus was down as free and part-heir. Stichus, in ignorance of his status, went on lending and calling in moneys on behalf of the deceased...

What the Digest is mostly taken up with are complex puzzles about acquisition by the bona fide serviens as agent of his supposed master, when it turns out that, having been really a free man all along, he was not capable of acquiring for a third party; but these arc only of technical interest. More important for us is to hear Dio of Prusa in the second of his speeches â€?On Slavery’ :¹⁰⁶

�Enormous numbers of free people sell themselves so as to serve as slaves according to contract, sometimes on terms not light but the most severe imaginable’;

�Are not many people held as slaves actually free men serving unjustly? Some get to a court and prove themselves free, but many for ever fail to do so, being unable to supply clear proof of their free status, or simply because their so-called master is not harsh.’

The last phrase is perhaps the most significant of all. There might be reasons why a man would wish to sell himself into slavery or stay in slavery, and not least because slavery might be less hard than freedom. We hear of other motives; one of Trimalchio’s guests boasts:¹⁰⁷

�Actually, my father was a king. Why am I only a freedman now? Because I handed myself into slavery of my own free will. I wanted to end up a Roman citizen, not a tribute-paying peregrine.’

We hear in the Digest of self-enslavement in order to secure the post of servus actor; the chief accountant of a big private household (and with normal luck to become later their freedman procurator in the same post and finish up a rich citizen with free-born children). And all this is quite apart from the case of which most is heard, which was a plain fraud: you got someone to go through the farce of selling you as a slave to an unsuspecting customer, you and your accomplice divided the price, and then at once you proclaimed your freedom and got an adsertor libertatis.

What, then, was the legal position about self-sale into slavery? Did it make a man irrevocably a slave in the eyes of the law? Dio is of course addressing peregrines, probably about peregrines; Roman law might be otherwise. The truth is that we cannot say what it was, so problematic are the sources; and the reason for this may well be that the law was not altogether in line with the facts of life at this humble level.

Possession in bad faith of a free Roman citizen (that is, knowingly detaining him) was plagium:¹⁰³

�Anyone is liable under the lex Fabia {de plagiariis) who has concealed, sold, imprisoned or acquired a Roman citizen, whether free-born or freed, or another man’s slave.’

It is important to note that the lex Fabia dealt also with detaining slaves. It made the offence, perhaps to the very end of our period, only a civil wrong, actionable for a money penalty:¹⁰⁹ and this rather suggests that it was originally and primarily intended to cover slaves. The praetor gave an interdict for the actual recovery of the free man out of his detention, a kind of habeas corpus¹¹⁰ which could be had as well as the suit under the Fabian law.

But we still ask: could he legitimately sell himself so as to make himself irrevocably a slave? First one might consider whether the contract as such was a valid sale; there seem to have been differences of opinion, settled in favour of the view that if the buyer knew the object offered was a free man there was no valid contract, but if he did not, and was buying in good faith, the sale was good?¹¹ Ulpian tells us that there was an action given to the purchaser for damages, against â€?the cunning of those who, knowing, have allowed themselves to be sold’ and against their vendor¹¹²â€”except, he says, in those cases in which the man who has sold himself is not allowed to assert his liberty. The cases to which Ulpian refers are the frauds already described; the penalty is that you can’t escape from your own trap, and the implication is that apart from fraud you always can escape from slavery. The difficulty remains, that there are texts that seem to imply other cases besides fraud from which you could not escape. Selling yourself to become a servus actor, for example, is not necessarily fraud, nor is being given as gift or dowry or pledge, which Paulus mentions in one text as making a man a slave.¹¹³ One cannot be sure of the answer.¹¹* What one can be sure of is that there were people who did sell themselves into the practical situation of slavery; and if they were content to remain in it no one was ever the wiser. If they did repent there were some circumstances in which the law would not let them escape. But of course a pro­spective buyer who knew their free status might hesitate.

So there were other possibilities. One was self-hire. In the eastern part of the Roman realm there were sometimes transactions looking like contracts for services, which in effect bound the servant even for life, or at least for terms of years; you could hire out yourself or your children on this basis. It might be a way of working off by service an actual debt, or the debt might be a fiction spoken of to ground the contract. Self-hire had a very long Near Eastern history;¹¹⁵ Roman law ignored it, though the awtoramentum, or oath of free men hiring themselves as gladiators, is like it,¹¹⁶ and we shall meet later the judgment debtor who has suffered â€?seizure by hand’ to work off his debt.

The law talks about formal ways of going down in the status scale, capitis deminutio, with its three degrees, minima, media and maxima.¹¹7 The first of these concerns such things as a person sui iuris becoming alieni iuris by adoption, and will occupy us later; the other two are almost entirely penalties of the criminal law, and them too we postpone, except for two cases. One is the famous Roman rule that a man captured by the enemy suffers maxima capitis deminutio in the eyes of the law, losing both citizenship and freedom, but if he returns â€?from beyond the frontier’ he recovers by this postliminium his full status just as it was before; it is a survival of the old â€?city-state’ principle—citizen inside, stranger outside. The second case of an important capitis deminutio not resulting from a criminal conviction concerns the status of free citizen women cohabiting with someone else’s slave, and of the resulting offspring. A senatusconsultum Claudianum of ad 52 laid down (to state a controversial position in outline) that if such a cohabitation was with the consent of the slave’s owner the free-born citizen woman was reduced to the status of a liberta; if it was without such consent the citizen woman, whether free-born or freed, suffered capitis deminutio maxima and became the slave of the slave’s owner (except if—and for so long as—she was in patria potestas). The senatusconsultum also, perhaps by inadvertence of wording, permitted private agreements whereby, although the woman remained free (even though a liberta) her children became slaves—which might well be the only terms on which her partner’s master would give his consent; but this anomaly was abolished by Hadrian. The purpose of these rules cannot have been to prevent the contamination of free with slave genes. For one thing, they applied to freed as well as free women; and for another, there was nothing to prevent a free citizen woman cohabiting with her own slave and producing free children thereby, so if her partner’s master was willing to sell him, and she to pay the price (or to pay the master the price of his manumission), no penalty at all resulted. What else may the purpose have been?¹¹⁸

There was one field of society in which free women often married slaves and freedmen—namely, when the latter were servi Caesaris and liberti Augusti, imperial slaves and freedmen. This class has been the object of important recent studies, winch show how seriously we must take it.¹¹⁹ These were the real â€?civil servants’ of the Empire, the men who ran the administration from the executive side. They were a â€?white-collar’ class, proud of their nomenclature and conscious of their hierarchy, and they could attract wives â€?above them’. The emperor was their master or patron respectively, and he wanted a hereditary service—sons bom as slaves of the imperial household, vernae Caesaris. Now the inventor of the rules of the senatusconsultum Claudianum was the most famous of all imperial freedmen, Pallas, the powerful financial secretary of Claudius, and he was â€?decorated’ for his invention.¹²⁰ Part of its purpose, at least, may therefore have been to give the emperor control over the children of his civil servants without wholly withdrawing the chance of servi Caesaris to marry free women. However, it must not be forgotten that many freed slave women left a beloved partner behind in slavery. If they continued to cohabit with the slave partner any subsequent children were free; but this was a financial loss to masters. The Claudian legislation produced the effect that a master could not lose the offspring of his male slaves without a pecuniary quid pro quo.

The imperial slave, if of ability to rise high in the service, would normally expect manumission at about the minimum statutory age of thirty, and it appears that he would normally pay for his freedom. The one special status rule of which we hear refers to â€?public slaves’, but it probably applied to the servi Caesaris: they had the right to make a will on the basis of half their peculium.¹²¹ Whether they retained this half on manumission is not known. The libertus Augusti, as our ambitious civil servant has now become, has the emperor as his patron, with those rights over his property at death which we have seen, and which are worth remembering in reading of the great fortunes accumulated by Pallas and Narcissus. He may have remained single hitherto; otherwise he may divorce the wife he now has and make a yet grander marriage. It is for such as him, when he reaches the senior posts, that the â€?gold rings’ or fictitious â€?restitution of free birth’, and thus even the equestrian order, are not beyond the bounds of dreaming. He is the most socially mobile figure in the picture, a â€?symptom of the interpenetration of classes in Roman Imperial society’,¹²² a projection of the â€?spectrum of statuses’ upwards as well as downwards.

*

At the highest end of the �spectrum’ were the two formal �orders’, the senate and the equites. They are so frequently described in books on Roman history that little need be said about them here.

Entry to the senate depended on being free-born and possessing property worth not less than a million sesterces (a modest barrier, really; many were many times wealthier than that—Seneca was worth three hundred million, the younger Pliny perhaps about sixteen million).¹²³ It was also necessary in the ordinary way to begin with certain military posts and then, as in Republican times, be elected to the first post that actually qualified a man to sit in the senate, the quaestorship. The senate was to this extent a hereditary body, that sons of senators were entitled to the â€?broad stripe’ of purple on their tunic which enabled them automatically to set foot on the ladder; but others could be granted the â€?broad stripe’,¹²⁴ and the emperors, as censors, increasingly made use of the right to â€?adlect’ comparatively senior men of proved ability to an appropriate standing within the senate. As is well known, many posts in the government of the empire were throughout our period open only to senators.

Entry to the equestrian order depended on being free-born and possessing property worth not less than four hundred thousand sesterces. Beyond this there is something of a puzzle. There was a â€?grant of the public horse’, and those with the â€?public horse’ took part in an annual parade and â€?choosing of the equites⁹ in Rome. But it is inconceivable that all the people who call themselves equites in the inscriptions of the empire had the â€?public horse’ and indeed clear that the â€?public horse’ was an additional distinction. On the other hand, in that case, what is the definition of an eques Romanus?¹²* The impression, at least, is that many people all over the Roman world, conscious of possessing the necessary birth and wealth, called themselves equites Romani. To take a post in the administrative part of the civil service, which began originally, like the senatorial career, with military tribuneships, you would have to have imperial permission, and that would confirm your status. What seems certain is that the class of equites in economic terms was enormously wider than the quite small number of men who took up salaried careers in government service, and was not much less landowning and rentier than the senators.

In the municipalities of Rome’s dominions, both citizen towns and others, entry to the or do, the local senate or town council, was subject to severe rules. Roman policy in this matter was consistent, and only weakened in the latter part of our period when it began to be difficult to find men to offer themselves; it was the one thing that Rome minded about the internal arrangements of even the peregrine cities, that they should be governed by the best people—that is, the wealthy. One of Cicero’s attacks on Verres shows the principle as expressed in the late Republic:¹²⁶

�For three years no one in any town in all Sicily has been made a senator without payment, no one by suffrage, which is what their laws require—all by Verres’ instructions or letters. And in the cooptation of all these senators not only was there no suffrage, but neither were the categories respected from which senators are supposed to be picked—no property qualification, no age qualification, none of the rules for Sicily. -. nor the rules laid down by the senate and people of Rome.

�Halaesus had rules laid down by C. Claudius in accordance with a senatusconsultum; there were many provisions: no one under 30, professions the exercise of which disbarred, property rating and so on;... from Verres even an auctioneer bought a place on the ordo.’

Nearly two hundred years later rules of the same kind were in force in Bithynia

�My lord, the lex Potnpeia, the charter of Bithynia, has a rule

B

that no one may be a magistrate or sit in a senate if under 30 years of age.. /

For towns of cives Romani the famous and formidable list of disqualifications is given in the â€?Table of Hcraclea’—arrangements probably made standard by Julius Caesar. The following are not allowed to sit in the senate:¹²⁸

�he who has been convicted of theft committed by himself or has settled out of court for theft; he who has been convicted in actions of pledge, partnership, guardianship, mandate, assault or fraud; he who has been convicted of offences under the lex Laetoria [protecting minors against confidence tricks]; he who has taken an oath as a gladiator; he who has [?] taken an oath of insolvency in court or an oath of solvency, or has informed his sureties or creditors that he is insolvent or settled out of court on a basis of insolvency, or whose sureties have paid out on his behalf; he whose property has been sold up by edict of the magistrate [with certain exceptions]; he who has been condemned in a criminal trial at Rome so as to be exiled from Italy, and has not been restored; he who has been con­demned in a criminal trial in the city of his origin; he who has been convicted of bringing suit or otherwise acting either calumniously or collusively; he who has been reduced to the ranks in the army for ignominy or dismissed from the army ignominiously; he who has taken money or other reward for accusing a Roman citizen on a capital charge; he who has been a professional prostitute; he who has been a master of gladiators or a brothel-keeper?

And we have already been told a little earlier in the same docu­ment that persons actually engaged in the occupation of auctioneer and undertaker cannot enter. The charter of Urso adds a domicile qualification, and also a clause providing for proceedings against councillors alleged to be â€?unworthy of their place*—which at Urso did not include being a freedman; the implication is that elsewhere being a freedman did disqualify.¹²**

This matter of â€?unworthiness’ is given additional piquancy by the discovery that at Herculaneum L. Vennidius Ennychus (whom we have met already making a birth attestation) had been judged unworthy, and probably refused permission to stand, and made an attempt to get this stigma removed.¹³⁰ The documents are very fragmentary; it is a marvel that the editors could wring anything out of them. The first begins:

�Lucius Vennidius Ennychus announces to Lucius Annius Rufus, by way of testification, that he is eligible for the right of office; and if Rufus is willing [? to name] as arbiter one of the ten members of the senate and Augustales nominated by him, Vennidius.. ?

Of the second the editors could only read:

. whom you have named above’. \. I am ready to go to Festinius Proculus as arbiter, otherwise I shall be necessarily obliged to proceed with you by judicial wager.’

We do not know on what grounds the unhappy Ennychus had been blackballed, nor the outcome of his suit; but the tablets waft a faint scent from the past of passions and indignities arising out of small-town status that adds a little to the famous election posters of Pompeii:

�Gaius lulius Polybius for magistrate: called for by the Mule­drivers’ Union.’