Freedom, Manumission and Freed Persons
Freedom: How Enslaved People Became Free
When an enslaved person was set free by their owner, this process was called manumission. Freedom did not erase status differences overnight — a freed person carried duties towards their former owner for the rest of their life. Roman law recognised several different routes into manumission, and the exact method used could affect the rights a newly freed person received afterwards.
There were several recognised routes into manumission: being included in the census as a free person, being freed by a magistrate in a formal ceremony known as manumissio iusta — formal manumission, being named as free in an owner’s will, or simply being declared free in front of the owner’s friends. Each method gave the same basic legal freedom, but only some counted as full, formal manumission recognised by the state.
Peculium: Saving Towards Freedom
Some enslaved people held a peculium — savings or property that, in strict law, still belonged to the owner, but which the enslaved person was treated as controlling day to day. An enslaved person could build up a peculium through skilled work, trade or careful saving, and eventually use it to buy their own freedom outright. In practice, few enslaved people had the resources to do this quickly, so most who gained freedom this way had built up their savings over many years of trusted service.
The historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus explains that manumission could come about in two very different ways. He writes that most enslaved people who were freed “received their freedom as a gift because of their hard work and fine service,” and that this type of manumission was considered the most desirable, since it showed that an owner valued the enslaved person’s loyalty.
A smaller number of enslaved people instead paid a ransom fee, saved up from years of “just and honest labour,” to buy their own freedom outright. Both routes ended in the same basic legal status, but being given freedom as a gift carried an extra suggestion of the owner’s trust and approval.
Public Slaves and Freedom
Enslaved people who served the community as servi publici — public slaves — sometimes had a better chance of freedom than those owned by a private household. When the general Scipio captured New Carthage, the historian Livy records that around two thousand skilled workers were declared public slaves of the Roman people, “with the not distant hope of freedom if they should actively exert themselves in providing the equipment for war.” Service to the Roman state, rather than to a single owner, could therefore also lead towards manumission.
Symbols and Ceremony
Manumission could also be marked visually. A relief carving from the first century BC shows two freed men wearing the pileus — the felt cap that marked their new status as free men. Wearing the pileus in public was a visible sign that a person had passed from slavery into freedom.
Marriage as a Path to Freedom
Some enslaved women were freed specifically so that their owner could marry them. A tombstone from Roman Britain records that Barates of Palmyra freed his enslaved woman, Regina, in order to marry her: “To the spirits of the dead, and to Regina, his freedwoman and wife, of the Catuvellauni, aged 30 years, Barates of Palmyra erected this.”
Roman law set clear rules about this kind of manumission. The jurist Marcianus stated that a patron could not force a freed woman to marry him against her will, but Ulpian ruled that if a patron had freed a woman specifically so that she would marry him, she was obliged to go through with the marriage. The two rulings show how carefully Roman law tried to balance a freedwoman’s consent against a patron’s expectations.
A freed man or woman (libertus or liberta — freedman or freedwoman) became a Roman citizen, but with limits. They usually took their former owner’s family name, remained a client of their former owner for life, and could not stand as a candidate in an election. In return, the former owner continued to benefit economically from their former slave’s work and connections.
Freed status was not always a dead end. Lucius Voltacilius Pilutus is said to have been chained to the door post as a doorman before he was manumitted because of his intelligence and interest in education; he went on to become a teacher of rhetoric.
A cremation chest for a woman named Vernasia Cyclas shows how far a freedman could rise. Its inscription names her husband as “Vitalis, freedman and Private Secretary of the Emperor,” showing that some freed men reached positions of real trust within the emperor’s own household.
King Philip of Macedon once praised the Romans in a letter to another Greek city, saying that “the Romans make even slaves into citizens when they have freed them, and allow them to hold important positions in the state.” This was not fully accurate — a freedman could become a citizen, but could not hold public office. Philip’s comment shows that other ancient rulers saw Roman manumission as an unusually generous system, even though he overstated exactly what freedom allowed.