Dediticii

[8] Under Augustus, in AD 4 the lex Aelia Sentia created a new class of freedmen who, while technically free, held no rights of citizenship, a status they shared with peregrini dediticii.

Gaius describes these slaves as those "who have been chained by their masters as a punishment, or those who have been branded, or interrogated under torture concerning some wrongdoing and convicted of that offence, or handed over to fight in gladiatorial combat with swords or with wild beasts, or sent to the games (ludi), or thrown into custody" and then later manumitted.

[15] Unlike the peregrini dedicitii, who could make a will under the local law of their community,[16] these dediticii were like slaves in holding no rights to succession and therefore could not create a stable family line through passing down property.

[18] Their assimilation to the status of foreigners under surrender has been somewhat perplexing to scholars; W. W. Buckland considered this one of the instances in Roman law of "rules... made to apply to cases quite different from that for which they were invented.

[25] Augustus imposed a term of twenty to thirty years on war captives who had shown resistance;[26] age and the physical toll of slavery well past the average life expectancy of slaves might have been thought to reduce the threat.

[27] However, this constitution does not survive in a single, unified, intact text; the wording pertaining to the excluded dediticii is vexed; and Ulpian and Dio Cassius both clearly state that the grant was universal.

[32] "Potentially disloyal" would be a nebulous category not readily defined as a matter of law, and a likely solution is that only a subgroup of dediticii were excluded, the former slaves treated as criminals and barred from citizenship by the lex Aelia Sentia.