A Roman institution, unique in antiquity, affirms this attitude quite decisively: the admission of freed slaves to the citizenship. The Greeks observed the practice with some astonishment. We learn of it first through the eyes of a Hellenistic monarch. Philip V, ruler of Macedon, in a letter to the Greek city of Larissa in Thessaly, noted the Roman custom of according citizenship to freedmen and commended it to the Larissans (Syll. 3, 543: 29-34). The Greeks may have been surprised. For the Romans this was routine. Liberality with the franchise speaks volumes. Extension of citizen privileges to communities and peoples within Italy was generous but not startling. A similar generosity toward slaves stood in a different category. The large majority of slaves acquired in this period came from abroad, prisoners of war reduced to servitude or captives purchased on the slave mart. Homegrown slaves existed too, but they will have been the children or descendants of those brought to Italy in servile status.8 Manumission came more readily in the city than in the countryside, a reward for loyalty and industry, an incentive for obedience, a means of perpetuating the system while liberating the individual. And masters had motives that were not always altruistic. Slaves might purchase freedom with their savings; they would still owe informal allegiance to an ex-master and form part of his clientage, a source of social prestige and political authority (see also Chapter 14).9
Whatever the motives, however, the fact of frequent manumission is notable and meaningful. The ready entrance of freedmen into the citizen body signified a level of comfort with foreigners that was unmatched elsewhere in the classical world. What counts here is not liberality or generosity, but the presumption that citizenship could be shared by those of alien birth. Assimilation to Roman ways sufficed to authorize the award of full civic privileges. Romans evidently did not worry about diluting the purity of the stock. Nor did they balk at the exercise of political rights by those whose roots lay in Spain, Cilicia, or Syria. Numbers cannot be ascertained. But the citizenry plainly swelled substantially through the absorption of former slaves. Augustus eventually put on the brake - but not on racial grounds.10 The attitude of the Roman Republic is clear enough: its populace could only benefit from the admixture of people from everywhere in the Mediterranean.
World History
