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.
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.