freedmen

freedmen (Lat. liberti, libertini), slaves who had been freed (‘manumitted’) by their masters, and a class of people who figured much more prominently in Roman society than in Greek. Freedmen in Rome have been regarded as almost comprising a middle class in the society of the late republic and early empire, and they included many people of intelligence, energy, and ambition. In Athens manumission required no formal procedure; a manumitted slave was registered as a metic (resident alien) with his former owner as sponsor. This meant that he was not a citizen and could not normally become one.

It was an extraordinary feature of Roman law that a slave manumitted in proper legal form by a Roman citizen owner became himself a Roman citizen, though ineligible for high rank because he was not himself free-born (which his children would be). A freedman whose former owner or his children still lived owed obligations to the family which were enforceable at law (see CLIENT). Romans liked to think of the relationship between freedmen and patron as filial, and certainly bonds of affection existed, as for example between Cicero and his family and their freedman Tiro.

By the end of the republic freedmen constituted a large proportion of the Roman citizen body; the distinction between citizens of servile birth and those of free birth became blurred, and was replaced by the distinction between the rich and the poor. Petronius' imaginary freedman Trimalchio is an extravagant satire on the characteristics of the class. Many of the higher posts in the bureaucracy during the first century AD were held by freedmen, who were ineligible for the curule magistracies. These men often came to exercise great power, and incurred widespread hatred.