Also during the Late Empire, manumission began to be practiced in churches and church leaders got special permission from the government in order to be able to officially oversee manumission, similar, (I assume, though this would be an interesting comparison to research) how they had official permission to oversee weddings.
One of the reasons why I’m interested in looking at how the Greeks and Romans practiced manumission differently in the Hellenistic and Republican Periods is because eventually manumission becomes homogenized. Obviously when Rome is the central power across the Mediterranean, the legal and political aspects of manumission are going to be quite similar anywhere in the Empire. However, as Kyle Harper points out, around 300 CE, both Latin and Greek texts describe a similar kind of ritual as part of manumission. This ritual is called the alapa, which is simply the Latin word a blow or strike. This ritual takes its name from how a slave was hit by his or her master during manumission.
Also during the Late Empire, manumission began to be practiced in churches and church leaders got special permission from the government in order to be able to officially oversee manumission, similar, (I assume, though this would be an interesting comparison to research) how they had official permission to oversee weddings.
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Sometimes I get asked how I got interested in Greek and Roman slavery. The answer is that I was initially more interested in the philosophy and theory of Greek and Roman literature, particularly political theory. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on justice and war in Greek thought and when I was done I realized that I needed to understand Greek and Roman slavery before I understand why these people were willing to go to war. Unfortunately, I still don’t understand Greek and Roman slavery.
I bring this up because scholars will sometimes get flashbacks to previous work when conducting research. Today I was reading the historian Polybius, a Greek historian who tries to explain the rise of the Romans from 220-167 BCE. One of the important people that he examines during this period is the Macedonian king Philip V. Polybius thinks that Philip V started off alright but then began behaving badly, at least in comparison to his Macedonian ancestors. Polybius gets quite upset at Philip V for desecrating the holy site of Dodona during the Social War. To show us how Philip V’s ancestors were capable of restraining themselves, Polybius cites a number of examples, including this description of Alexander the Great and the Greek city of Thebes: “He was so furious with the Thebans that he sold the inhabitants into slavery and razed the cit to the ground, yet in capturing the city he never forgot the respect and reverence due to the gods.” (5.10) This comment is particularly interesting as Polybius then goes on a digression about “rules and rights of war” (5.11). Just to be clear, Polybius doesn’t really have any conception of human rights, but he does feel very strongly that there is a right way to fight a war and a wrong way. For his justification on the right way to fight a war, he has this argument: “After all, a good man does not make war on wrongdoers to destroy and annihilate them, but to improve them and correct the error of their ways.” (5.11) I haven’t done any research into the philosophical influences on Polybius, but this smacks of Platonism to me, in particular Republic 1 and Plato’s Apology. What does this have to do with slavery? Well apparently for Polybius while it’s pointlessly evil to desecrate a sanctuary, enslaving a whole city is justifiable if you think that is what will make those people better. In the blog I’ve mentioned how Cicero’s letters offer an unparalleled look into the personal life of an elite Roman man at the end of the Republic. Indeed, there is no equivalent collection of letters any where in Greek literature. In fact, most of the collections of Greek letters are either forgeries, such as letters attributed to Plato, Socrates or Diogenes. Others, such as the letters of Chion of Heraclea, are works of fiction similar to Bram Stroker’s epistolary novel Dracula.
Back to Cicero. Cicero’s most famous slave and later freedman is Tiro. Tiro was a trusted companion of a high literary caliber and ambitions that paid no mind to his status as a slave. For example, he had no compunction in criticizing Cato the Elder’s rhetoric, a stance that the later Roman writer Aulus Gellius found to be out of line for either a slave or a freedman. Cicero apparently didn’t mind this chutzpah. Tiro’s interest in literature went beyond rhetoric: he is credited with inventing a form of shorthand that was used from antiquity and into the Medieval Period. Furthermore, it is likely that Tiro is the one who edited and collated the collection of Cicero’s letters. However Cicero didn’t have a thriving relationship with all his freedmen and slaves. Given how many slaves and freedmen he interacted with, that is not surprising. When reading his letters, you can get a sense of how invisible, but vital, these workers are: who delivers the letters, who cooks, cleans and educates etc. One of his freedmen that Cicero did not like at all was named Chyrsippus. In one of his letters to his dear friend Atticus, Cicero explains that he is going to try and get Chrysippus re-enslaved on the grounds that his hasn’t fulfilled some of his obligations (2.7.8). The kind of duties that Cicero is referring to are similar to the paramone duties that I’ve mentioned when talking about the manumission of Greek slaves. So last time I got you all deep and dirty into the kinds of problems and questions that epigraphy poses. However by the end of that post you may have wondered why it’s such a big deal if Philip V wrote that letter in 220 or 217 BCE? Well the main difference that it makes is that of the war that he refers to in the letter. This war is important to Philip V’s request about the expansion of Larisaean citizenship because there are fewer people because of the recent war. Since Philip V doesn’t specify which war, we can only figure out which one he is likely referring to by the date. Importantly for us, if the inscription is from 217 BCE, the war that he is referring to is the Social War, which is an important event in Greece’s relationship with Rome.
The Social War (named so because it was fought by symmachoi, alliances of Greek cities, rather than by single cities) marks an ipmortant turning point in Greece’s relationship with Rome because the ancient historian Polybius suggests that after the peace of Naupactis in 217 BCE, the Greeks began to look westward to Rome and to take Rome seriously as a threat (5.104). If the inscription is from 220 BCE, that would be evidence against Polybius’ account, as Philip V’s comments about the Romans would suggest that he was worried about them prior to the Social War. However, with the inscription in 217 BCE, we have some nice confirmation of Polybius’ idea of 217 BCE as a watershed year in Greco-Roman relations. Epigraphy is the study of inscriptions. At least one chapter of my dissertation will be entirely about inscriptions, as they provide the most information about Greek manumission during this time period. I’ve also mentioned how one of the inscriptions that I’ll be looking at is an inscription that contains a letter from Philip V, then king of Macedon, to a small town in Thessaly. In this letter Philip V makes some flippant remarks about Roman manumission practices, which primarily demonstrate that he doesn’t really have solid information on Roman society.
Since one of the goals of my dissertation is to emphasize the diachronic nature of Greek and Roman manumission, that is, that this cultural practice occurred within history and could change over time, dates are rather important. Today I figured I would introduce you to the kind of scholarly debate over how to properly date an inscription. You may or may not be surprised that the best way to date an inscription is by the dates that the inscription itself mentions. Since stone can’t be tested for age like any sort of carbon based material, the stone itself isn’t a reliable guide for how long it’s been around. Sometimes you can attempt to place an inscription within a particular time period passed on the style of the inscription. Although this approach can get you into trouble since both the Greeks and Romans loved their ancestors and therefore loved imitating them, including the style of their inscriptions. So the best method is to use the dates that inscription itself presents. This may sound straightforward until one realizes how damaged some of these inscriptions are. It can sometimes take a good long while to decide simply whether or not a particular mark is intentional or a crack in the stone. Back to Philip V. Since Philip is the king of Macedon, and Larisa is under Macedon control, the Larisa counted years the way most people do under monarchies: since the time that the current king ascended to the throne. Therefore when the scholars Lolling and Kern say that the inscription has the following line: ἔτους Β, Ὑπερβερεταίου κα (IG 9 2, 517) we can understand that to mean “during the second year, in the month of Hyperberetaion.” Etos, genitive form etous, means year, and that Β stands in for the number 2. The Greeks, while being very smart, never settled on standardized numerical signs like the Romans, so they frequently use letters, and their place in the Greek alphabet, to represent numbers. So the Β in this case means second, since Beta is the second letter in the Greek alphabet. When Philip V means second year, he means the second year of his reign, which corresponds to 220 BCE. This is all well and good until another scholar comes along and takes another look at the inscription itself. The scholar in this case is one Christian Habicht and he takes a closer look at the inscription and says that this particular line looks like the following: ἔτους Ε, Ὑπερβερεταίου κα (Habicht 1970) Habicht sees an Epsilon rather than a Beta and since Epsilon is the fifth letter in the Greek alphabet that means that Philip is referring to the fifth year of his reign, which corresponds to 216 BCE. Why should we believe Habicht? Well, he provides a photograph that backs up his reading and he also cites another scholar, G. Klaffenbach, as having seen this Epsilon as well. Habicht also appeals to the similarity of the style of the Epsilon in the word etos in the same line. Most of what I have posted on Roman comedy has been focused on Plautus. Plautus does get most of the attention, both scholarly and critical, when it comes to Roman comedy. The general consensus seems to be that his work is funnier, in part because it gets more raucous and ribald. Also there is more of it: 21 plays of Plautus survive while there are only six by Terence.
Terence is also particularly interesting for my work because he himself used to be a slave. That his plays don’t show any particular sympathy for slaves has upset some historians, like MI Finley, who are disappointed that texts that could provide valuable insight into the perspectives of Roman freedmen don’t directly talk about issues of slavery and freedom. More on those problems later I’m sure, but for now ethnicity. Sometimes ethnicity gets addressed in these plays quite directly, such as when in the Eunuch Thais, a madam in charge of a brothel, asks her lover for both a eunuch and an African maid (Act 1 Scene 2). While a eunuch has some utilitarian purposes in a brothel, Thais’ fixation on having an African maid appear to be because of how this particular slave gets categorized as exotic and therefore a luxury item. The maid’s skin color, which is explicitly commented on in Act 2 scene 2, is the primary reason for her presentation as exotic, although the connections with very black skin with Ethiopia specifically points to how for the Romans, ethnology was always a very literary project (Ethiopia being a place connected with isolation beginning in Homer and continued in Herodotus). Ethnicity also appears in slaves in Terence in more oblique ways. Sometimes it is simply the slave’s name. In the Self Tormentor, one of the main characters is a slave named Syrus. In Latin, Syrus is simply an adjective meaning from Syria. Such an ethnicity in the Greco-Roman world did not come without prejudicial associations. Indeed, in Plautus’ Trinommus there is a comment on how Syrians are naturally better at surviving heat (Act 2 Scene 4). Other times ethnicity comes up in Terence’s plays through the description of a slave. For example in Terence’s Phormio, the slave Davus is explicitly described as having red hair (Act 1 Scene 1). While this may be a reference to the type of costume worn by the actor, it could also be Terence writing this slave as being of a particular ethnicity. The Romans’ enthusiasm for Greek culture and literature is well attested. Equally well attested is how this enthusiasm did not translate into to kind treatment of actual Greeks. This early disconnect feeds into Wallace Hadrill’s theory of how in this period Romanization and Hellenization are the two effects of the same process. Even at this period, Romanization is marked by the particular politicization of certain spaces, while Hellenization refers to the cultural practice of people in those places. That these two movements are part of the same process is perhaps best seen in Roman education: for the Romans, it was perfectly obvious that a thoroughly Roman education was grounded in Greek literature and philosophy, in the original Greek.
How did these Roman aristocrats learn Greek? From Greek slaves. Unfortunately, we primarily know about this because of a description of an exception: Plutarch reports how Cato dismissed his son’s Greek tutor so that he could oversee his son’s education personally. This tutor was a Greek slave named Chilon, who had a good reputation as a teacher: “After the birth of his son, no business could be so urgent, unless it had a public character, as to prevent him from being present when his wife bathed and swaddled the babe. For the mother nursed it herself, and often gave suck also to the infants of her slaves, that so they might come to cherish a brotherly affection for her son. As soon as the boy showed signs of understanding, his father took him under his own charge and taught him to read, although he had an accomplished slave, Chilo by name, who was a schoolteacher, and taught many boys. Still, Cato thought it not right, as he tells us himself, that his son should be scolded by a slave, or have his ears tweaked when he was slow to learn, still less that he should be indebted to his slave for such a priceless thing as education.” (Plutarch, Life of Cato 20.2-4, trans. B. Perrin) Here its quite clear that for Cato the problem with his son’s education was a tangled combination of how the tutor was both a slave and a Greek. Cicero, who lived at the end of the Republic, provides some evidence for this attitude from earlier periods. In Pro Balbo 28, he notes how a Greek freedman Gnaeus Publicius Menander was taken to Greece as an interpreter. Although he doesn’t specify when he did given how there are many accounts of Romans being fluent in Greek in the 3rd century, that this use of a freedman’s translating abilities was more for the Romans to force the Greeks to speak to use this translator and thereby note his inferior status to the Romans. Today I’m going to continue looking at the Greeks’ practice of sacral manumission. Again, most of information about this practice comes from Delphi, but it was done elsewhere in the Greek mainland, including the small town of Chaironeia in Boiotia. Here’s an inscription from Chaironeia that is indicative of the kind of formula (standard way of writing) that was used:
Ἀρχεδάμω ἀρχῶ, μεινὸς Ὁμολωΐω πεντεκαιδεκάτη, Ἄλ<υ>πος Ἱππίαο ἀντίθειτι τὰν ϝιδίαν δούλαν Εὐρώ- παν ἱαρὰν τεῖ Σεράπει, τὰν ἀνάθε- σιν ποιιούμενος διὰ τῶ σουνε- δρίω κατὰ τὸν νόμον. (IG VII 3356) With Archedamos as archon, on the 15th on the month of Homoloios, Alypos, son of Hippias, dedicated his personal slave, the hallowed woman Europa, to Serapis; the dedication having been done through the council and according to the law. (translation my own) Note how in this inscription the slave is not directly described as being manumitted, but rather as being dedicated to the god Sarapis. Also, that the slave is already described as being hollowed or made holy. We should also remember Zelnick-Abramowitz’s critique of the complicated groupings of manumission: really the most important factor is whether or not the manumission is public or private. Here it’s clear that Alypos and Europa want to stress that this manumission has the backing of both the god Sarapis as well as the local government. In this way the text is attempting to use many different strategies to gain authority over the manumission of Europa. Such a struggle for authority is quite different from the representation of manumission in the Roman world, in which is frequently presented as quite simple. For example, at the end of the play Epidicus, the slave Epidicus is freed simply by the words of his master. Yesterday I gave you Calderini’s categories of Greek manumission. Today I’m going to look at Orlando Patterson’s.
Patterson is a sociologist whose 1975 work Slavery and Social Death remains a foundational text in comparative slave studies. In the sections on manumission, Patterson argues that there are seven main categories of manumission: 1. Postmortem (i.e. after the master’s death) 2. Cohabitation 3. Adoption 4. Political (i.e. a decision that effects a large group of slaves) 5. Collusive litigation (i.e. the slave and master agree on a legal fiction) 6. Sacral 7. Purely contractual What is particularly interesting about Patterson’s list is that for two of the more unusual methods, Collusive Litigation and Sacral, he cites almost entirely Greek and Roman examples (236-9). I’ll talk about Collusive Litigation some other time, as most of most of the evidence around this practice comes up during the Classical Greek period. Sacral manumission, on the other hand, is an important question for the Hellenistic Period. For it is in this time period that the Greeks developed a new method for describing manumission: the master pretends to sell the slave to a god. We actually know a lot about this method of manumission, because there are some many inscriptions that use this particular wording, such as the hundreds of inscriptions at Delphi. There the slaves are sold to Apollo, the god closely associated with Delphi. However Apollo is not the only god into whose trust slaves were sold. In nearby Chaironeia, there are a number of inscriptions in which slaves are sold to the god Sarapis. Sarapis was the god most closely associated with the reign of the Ptolemies, the Greek line of kings who ruled Egypt after Alexander. The cult of Sarapis was successful both within Egypt and in the larger Greek world. There are three temples to Sarapis on the island of Delos. Chaironeia is on the Greek mainland, area that the Ptolemies never controlled. |
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June 2022
Dissertation Blog
These are my notes as I research and write my dissertation. The thoughts are intended to be rough and hopefully spark more detailed writing later on. Categories |