Ancient Roman freedmen
Freedmen in ancient Rome existed as a distinct social class (liberti or libertini), with former slaves granted freedom and rights through the legal process of manumission.
Urban and domestic slaves especially could achieve high levels of education, acting as agents and representatives of their masters' affairs and finances.
[4] Freedmen were also viewed as lacking their own social identity, with their reputation, station, and wealth being tied to their patron and the circumstances of their manumission.
[5] The freeborn children of former slaves enjoyed the full privileges of Roman citizenship without restrictions, although laws introduced by Augustus barred the descendants of freedmen from the senatorial class.
Additionally, scholars have been able to identify the presence of wealth freedmen properties through their distinct interest in funerary epitaphs which commemorated their manumission and economic success.
Notable freedmen included the translator and dramatist Livius Andronicus, the comic playwright Terence, the writer of sententiae Publilius Syrus, the father of the poet Horace, the scholar Alexander Polyhistor, the author Gaius Julius Hyginus, Augustus's physician Antonius Musa, the fabulist Phaedrus, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, and the father of the emperor Pertinax.
Following Augustus' rise to prominence in Rome, he enacted a program of laws intended to rectify what he perceived as the moral decay of the late Republic.
The lex Iunia also shored up the freedman's legal protections and more solidly codified the practices of manumission, having the dual purpose of introducing mechanisms of punishment for ungrateful freedmen, but also preventing a patron's abuse of his power over his freepersons.
With most elements of social standing and advancement barred to both past and present slaves, wealthy freedmen made up much of the organization's membership.
Members of the familia Caesaris were particularly prominent under the rule of Claudius, with a triad of freedmen, Pallas, Narcissus, and Callistus being highly influential.
Freedwomen are poorly attested in Roman sources,[citation needed] although their treatment in law demonstrates a different experience from their male counterparts.
The cultural expectation of a free Roman woman was to maintain social respectability and sexual integrity, which conflicted heavily with the master's treatment of enslaved women.
Unwed freedwomen could expect to be bound to their patron for their entire lives, entering into the same pseudo-paternal relationship as freedmen, but with similar restrictions placed on freeborn daughters.
Inscriptions from freedwomen are present at Pompeii and Herculaneum, typically alongside the names of their husbands and children but, more rarely, dedicated solely by them.
