FREEDMEN

When a slave was manumitted by his master, he became known as a freedman, and due to the large number of urban slaves who received their freedom, they formed a significant portion of the population of Rome. If a slave was freed in a will, the public reading of the will was the official.

Legal way that the slave was freed. If a man wanted to free his slave while still alive, the master and the slave had to appear before the praetor and the master declare his intention to set his slave free. At this point, the praetor touched the slave with a rod, and this action was what legally freed the slave.

All free citizens were divided into two groups. The ingenuus group consisted of people who were born free and therefore had higher status. The other group, the Ubertinus, had formerly been slaves but had gained their freedom. A freedman received a liberty cap, which was the most obvious symbol of his new status.

Even though a freedman was technically a citizen, there were a number of restrictions and obligations placed upon him that in reality made him inferior to free-born citizens. A freedman was excluded from holding high office or becoming a senator. A freedwoman was not allowed to marry a senator. A freedman could never bring any legal charges against his former master. The main obligation placed upon him was that a freedman became the client of his former master. All clients were expected to honor, respect, and help their patrons, but the expectations were the greatest by far if your patron had been your former master. A freedman client was expected to treat his ex-master with obsequium, the respect that a child should show his or her father. Considering the power of the paterfamilias in Roman society, this was a heavy burden. Freedmen also owed their ex-master something called operae—literally, "days." A freedman was expected to donate a certain number of days' labor to his master every year for the rest of his life. The number of days varied, but it could be as much as a couple of weeks.

Freedmen who had gained special skills or training under their former master had to ensure that they did not compete for business with him. Thus, for example, if a doctor had freed one of his slaves and the slave desired to put the knowledge he had gained to use by setting up a medical practice himself, he was required either to move to a different city from that of his master or, if he stayed in the same city, to pay his master a portion of his income as compensation for any patients he might take away.

On the other side of the relationship, the ex-master in his role as patron was expected to help and assist his protege. In addition, a master was not allowed to revoke his manumission unless the freedman acted ungratefully toward his former master. If a master could prove that a freedman had not treated him with the respect or gratitude that society deemed appropriate, the praetor could (and would) take away his freedom and make him a slave once again to his former master.

Freedmen had an interesting and awkward status in Roman society. People who were ingenuus looked down on freedmen and despised them as social inferiors. Since most slaves were captives of war and thus foreigners by birth, people who had been born citizens, and particularly those who were Italian, were extremely resentful that so many foreigners were being granted citizenship. This resentment could turn to hatred because freed-men sometimes became very wealthy. Since those slaves who were freed were those most likely to have acquired a professional talent or skill, once freed often they were able to amass considerable wealth. Many professionals in Rome were freedmen, as were most merchants and small-business owners. However, while they were often better off than the free-born poor, the majority of freedmen probably only attained modest means.

There were nevertheless a few rare cases of freedmen who became fantastically wealthy, and these few tended to capture the public's imagination, creating the misconception that these foreign-born ex-slaves were getting rich at the expense of "real" citizens. Such freedmen are an example of "status dissonance." Status dissonance occurs when an individual becomes powerful in some way that does not seem to correspond to his formal place in the social hierarchy. Thus with freedmen, the dissonance occurred because, although they were denied the right to hold office and belonged to a despised social class, they were able to acquire as much wealth as an equestrian or senator.

One of the most famous rags-to-riches stories of a freedman involved a man named Ctesippus. He was a slave who worked in a laundry as a fuller. This was a particularly demeaning job since the way Romans bleached clothes was to immerse them in human urine and then have slaves stomp on them. Ctesippus thus spent his days stomping around waist-deep in vats of urine. Eventually the laundry went out of business and all of its property was auctioned off. An old, rich widow who had attained independent status bought a candelabrum at the auction, and as a sort of bonus, the auctioneer threw in Ctesippus for free. He charmed his new mistress and became her lover. She freed him, and when she died a little bit later, she left him her entire fortune, which instantly made the exfuller one of the richest men in Rome.

Because of instances like this, a common way to refer to freedmen was to call them "the sons of fortune," a title implying both the degree to which their lives were ruled by chance and the wealth with which some of them unexpectedly ended up. This led to a popular stereotype of the freedman as a vulgar, boorish person lacking social graces but addicted to luxury and to ostentatious displays of his wealth. The most famous portrait of such a freedman is the character of Trimalchio in Petronius's novel. The Satyricon. Banned from both political and social life, many freedmen got their revenge after death by having enormous, elaborate tombs made to draw attention to themselves posthumously.

Another famous freedman was Cicero's personal slave. Tiro. Tiro had been Cicero's faithful companion throughout his life and had received an education equal to his master's. His official duty as a slave had been to be Cicero's personal secretary, and to keep up with his master's verbosity. Tiro invented a system of shorthand note taking, which others imitated. Even after he was freed. Tiro devoted himself to cataloging and publishing Cicero's writings. After Cicero's death. Tiro wrote a biography of his former master, which, interestingly, was not completely positive.

The Romans were famous for having a minimalist bureaucracy, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the fact that emperors were not provided with any official staff to assist them. Thus, despite having to personally rule over a gigantic empire and to make important political and economic decisions, emperors had to rely on their own servants to run the state. Therefore, the slaves and freedmen of the emperor became the most important officials in the government. The emperors' freedmen, in particular, became notorious for the powers they wielded, not the least of which was controlling who got access to the emperor. If someone wanted to petition the emperor or get an audience with him, the best strategy was to bribe one of the freedmen who acted as his secretaries. Because of this, some imperial freedmen amassed gigantic fortunes.

The most famous of these was a freedman named Narcissus, who was the personal secretary to the emperor Claudius. Taking full advantage of the opportunities presented by his position. Narcissus acquired a fortune of 400 million sesterces. This is the single largest fortune known from antiquity to have been possessed by someone other than a king or head of state. It is easy to see how individuals such as Narcissus and Ctesippus aroused the jealousy and hatred of free-born citizens, and despite their influence, freedmen were always regarded with suspicion and often hostility. Over time, however, many senators were the grandsons or great-grandsons of freedmen. Rome was unusual in the upward mobility that an admittedly small, yet influential, number of people was able to attain.