I’ve been doing some thinking on the big picture of my dissertation and, after some important conversations with my adviser, now have a sense of the direction of this future research. I have no doubt that over the next couple of weeks as I prepare my official proposal that I’ll come back to these categories again.
You may remember in some earlier posts how I explained that it now seems necessary to have a diachronic account of manumission. This diachronicity is definitely going to be an important theme of my dissertation, as is the question of how the Greeks and Romans understood how their forms of manumission to be different from each other. An important aspect of this question that I haven’t mentioned yet is why the Greek conception of freedmen is so blurry in contrast to the Roman conception of freedmen. What I mean by this is how Roman freedmen are very visible in Roman literature and art, especially funerary art. In contrast, Greek freedmen are practically invisible: they blend in with Greek citizens and metics and never acquire a coherent social identity in the same way. One of the questions my dissertation will have to grapple with is how the different manumission practices of the Greeks and Romans reflects this profound difference in their societies.
I also now have a sense of the different types of evidence that I’ll be investigating. The evidence primarily falls into four different categories, although the last one may be split in two:
1) Greek Inscriptions
2) Historians, Greek and Roman
3) Comedies, Greek and Roman
4) Miscellaneous Prose, Primarily Roman but some Greek
You may remember in some earlier posts how I explained that it now seems necessary to have a diachronic account of manumission. This diachronicity is definitely going to be an important theme of my dissertation, as is the question of how the Greeks and Romans understood how their forms of manumission to be different from each other. An important aspect of this question that I haven’t mentioned yet is why the Greek conception of freedmen is so blurry in contrast to the Roman conception of freedmen. What I mean by this is how Roman freedmen are very visible in Roman literature and art, especially funerary art. In contrast, Greek freedmen are practically invisible: they blend in with Greek citizens and metics and never acquire a coherent social identity in the same way. One of the questions my dissertation will have to grapple with is how the different manumission practices of the Greeks and Romans reflects this profound difference in their societies.
I also now have a sense of the different types of evidence that I’ll be investigating. The evidence primarily falls into four different categories, although the last one may be split in two:
1) Greek Inscriptions
2) Historians, Greek and Roman
3) Comedies, Greek and Roman
4) Miscellaneous Prose, Primarily Roman but some Greek