The ‘municipal freedmen’ of the title are freed public slaves of the self-governing towns of Italy. The book thus takes its place alongside two other recent studies of public slavery: A. Weiss, Sklave der Stadt. Untersuchungen zur öffentlichen Sklaverei in den Städten des römischen Reiches (2004) and F. Luciani, Slaves of the People. A Political and Social History of Roman Public Slavery (2022). E.'s study is distinguished by its focus on the freed as opposed to those still enslaved and by the extension of the analysis to ‘descendants’ of those freed men and women. Its aim is to challenge a notion that municipal freedmen were a privileged group and, more broadly, to contribute to debunking a ‘Trimalchio narrative’ that assumes that ‘manumitted slaves entered a vibrant freedman economic class that routinely placed them on the path of financial success and gave their sons and grandsons a push up the social ladder’ (p. 106).
Chapter 1 introduces the central concept of ‘municipal gentilicia’, i.e. the gentilicia taken by municipal freedmen of particular towns. We know that these included the generic Publicius, many names based on toponyms (e.g. the Ostienses and Ostiensii of Ostia), and some names with other associative links (e.g. the Campanii of Capua and the Primigenii of Praeneste). E. extends the category to all names that have a toponymic association with an Italian city that has produced evidence of public slavery (e.g. Coranius and Urvinius are hypothesised to be the municipal gentilicia of Cora and Urvinium Mataurense respectively). E. assumes that all people with a municipal gentilicium (excluding some Publicii, pp. 50–2), wherever they are found, were either municipal freedmen or were their ‘descendants’ – the latter term used loosely to include cases where the name was transmitted by manumission (hence my use of quotes). These assumptions underpin the catalogues of 257 municipal freedmen and 613 ‘descendants’ that provide the basis for the empirical analyses in Chapters 3 and 4 and make up a third of the book.
Chapter 2 provides some general context about public slavery and manumission. It covers the size of familiae publicae (guessing they ranged from around 40 in smaller cities to 100 in larger cities, excluding women and children), their demographics (following Weiss in concluding that females are underrepresented in the epigraphic record), marriage patterns (with a useful discussion of the inconsistent application of the SC Claudianum to the children of municipal slaves and free women), procedures of manumission and the likely scale of manumission (‘low’).
Chapter 3 draws on the catalogue of municipal freedmen to explore prospects after manumission. It finds that they mostly remained in the same town (as E. emphasises, municipal freedmen constitute important untapped evidence for the study of mobility), married freeborn women significantly less often than did imperial slaves, were not a major presence in the colleges of Augustales, and are rarely attested among the members of professional collegia. Instead, he argues, they mostly continued to work in the same occupations, and their social and civic life generally continued to centre on the familia publica. E. concludes that most municipal freedmen ‘struggled to gain traction in the local economy and social scene’ (p. 152) and suggests that the key explanation was the lack of a personal relationship with a wealthy and influential patron.
Chapter 4 turns to the ‘descendants’. It finds that just 12% remained in the town in which their ancestral line is assumed to have originated (which is taken to illustrate their progenitors’ shallow roots). An extensive discussion explores the social profile of the group as a whole: 1.5% were senators, 3% were equestrians, 7% were decurions, 8% were soldiers, 5% had occupations or were members of professional associations and 6% were members of voluntary associations; the remaining 68% display ‘no sign of social/economic mobility’ (p. 213). E. suggests that these results demonstrate that the descendants too ‘struggled to gain traction in imperial society and the economy’ (p. 212).
This is an innovative empirical analysis of an important topic; so its results deserve careful review. E. certainly succeeds in showing that the municipal freedmen were not uniformly prosperous or ‘successful’ in launching their offspring into the curial class. But his results do not necessarily mean that they were disadvantaged relative to private freedmen. Neither the data nor the analyses of them are straightforward.
The catalogue of 115 ‘secure’ and 142 ‘probable’ municipal freedmen is a very large increase on the 55 certain cases compiled by Weiss in 2002 (pp. 236–41). The expansion is achieved mainly by adding people who seem likely to be municipal freedmen. Even the ‘secure’ category involves some judgement calls: one might doubt, for example, whether every man with a municipal gentilicium who was a member of the local college of Augustales was a municipal freedman (p. 60). The ‘probable’ group relies on even less secure indices (pp. 60–3), including, for example, anyone with a municipal gentilicium who worked as a plumbarius or officinator in the corresponding town. The risk of including people who were not municipal freedmen complicates the attempt to make strong claims about the social and economic status of municipal freedmen.
Nor is it easy to interpret the patterns E. reveals without better benchmarks. For example, the fact that the local municipal gentilicium is rarely one of the most common gentilicia in the local college of Augustales (pp. 125–7) does not necessarily mean that municipal freedmen were less likely to become Augustales than were private freedmen. That would depend on the relative numbers of the two groups in the total population.
The ‘descendants’ are even more complicated. As Chapter 1 makes clear, many toponymic names (and indeed Publicius and its variants) entered the Roman onomasticon very early, and some were demonstrably used by aristocratic families. E.'s learned and judicious discussion of the problem left me unconvinced that these names can be regarded as reliable indices of ‘descent’ from a municipal freedman. While I am convinced that the many Ostienses in Ostia were municipal freedmen or their descendants, I doubt whether the 45 Urvinii, scattered across Italy and the provinces (Fig. 4.1), were all ‘descendants’ of municipal freedmen from the small town of Urvinium Mataurense – especially when there is not a single certain or even ‘probable’ case of a municipal freedman from that town.
Again, the patterns are hard to interpret without benchmarks. Does the fact that only 5% of the ‘descendants’ are attested as having an occupation or being members of professional associations show that the ‘descendants’ were missing from the middling strata of urban society (so p. 213)? Or is it just what we would expect given how rarely occupations or collegium membership are mentioned in inscriptions? And what can we conclude from, for example, the fact that the known decurions of Ostia include seven Auli Egrilii as opposed to just one Ostiensis (pp. 195–7)? All the Ostienses are probably ‘descended’ from former municipal freedmen; but the Auli Egrilii include aristocratic lineages as well as the ‘descendants’ of their freedmen. To really address the questions raised by the book, one would need to be able to compare the ‘descendants’ of municipal freedmen to the ‘descendants’ of private freedmen.
The construction of ‘success’ also deserves some thought. It is debatable whether all families ‘sought to rise from humble beginnings to the upper echelons of imperial society’ (p. 65). There is a risk of importing an elite conception of success that would have been alien to most of the people involved. Among other things, it leaves the analysis with nothing to say about the experience of the women in the catalogue, since almost all of the indices of success are exclusive to men.
E.'s meticulous study succeeds admirably in debunking simplistic notions of municipal freedmen as a uniformly privileged group. But the question of whether they were advantaged or disadvantaged relative to private freedmen remains open.
