Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-ws8qp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T02:21:10.964Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Macula servitutis

Slavery, freedom, and manumission

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2011

Henrik Mouritsen
Affiliation:
King's College London
Get access

Summary

The crossing of basic boundaries is a source of considerable anxiety in most societies, and in the Roman world few distinctions were more fundamental and sharply drawn than that between free and unfree. The jurists divided the whole of humanity into these two basic categories. As Gaius stated, ‘all people are either free or slaves’, and libertas and servitus were defined as the direct negation of each other. Moreover, freedom was, like servitude, conceptualised as a natural state. Thus, it was in principle, if not quite in practice, impossible to surrender one's freedom, except in very special cases. As one Roman orator declared, ‘What nature gave to the freeborn cannot be snatched away by any injury of fortune.’ Roman law thus considered free status inalienable, as illustrated by the prescriptions concerning self-sale. In principle no one could sell himself or herself into slavery, and formal loss of freedom only happened if the buyer believed the person to be unfree, and the person sold himself in order to gain from the sale. This was clearly a muddled compromise between the principle of inalienability and the reality of Roman society, where self-sale might be an attractive option under certain circumstances. Ordinary people, ignorant of the law, may have tried to gain a better life, but the jurists insisted on the essential difference between slave and free, a distinction which an open recognition of self-enslavement would have undermined.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Macula servitutis
  • Henrik Mouritsen, King's College London
  • Book: The Freedman in the Roman World
  • Online publication: 21 January 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511975639.002
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Macula servitutis
  • Henrik Mouritsen, King's College London
  • Book: The Freedman in the Roman World
  • Online publication: 21 January 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511975639.002
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Macula servitutis
  • Henrik Mouritsen, King's College London
  • Book: The Freedman in the Roman World
  • Online publication: 21 January 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511975639.002
Available formats
×