This chapter focuses on the legal status and social position of public freed persons in the Roman world, with a particular focus on Italy and the western provinces. It primarily aims to test the idea that public slaves enjoyed a better social condition in comparison to other groups of enslaved persons, by investigating their prospects to gain freedom and build social relationships. The first section considers the legal status of public freed persons, by describing the process of their manumission in self-governing towns in the light of chapter 72 of the Lex Irnitana and discussing the related modern debate about the possible condition that was granted to public freed persons in the municipium of Irni, Baetica (cives Latini or Latini Iuniani?). The second section examines whether, how and why public freed persons could integrate into urban society, based on the extant inscriptional evidence in Italy and the western provinces.

In this chapter, I unpack the rationalization for instrumental citizenship by distinguishing between Greek and Roman ways of approaching the concept. Explaining the rise of investment migration around the world is best handled using the Roman ideal, focusing on the status of citizenship as a creature of legal individualism, rather than the participatory dimension of the Greek conception.

This chapter tackles two principal problems with connecting the formulas to a real world: their often difficult or incorrect (by classical standards) Latin, and the late Roman and early Merovingian legal language that has led to them being labeled as antiquarian fossils. The chapter argues that the idiosyncratic Latin of the formulas in fact communicated essential content in regions where the spoken languages were evolving into Romance, as well as (with the help of glosses and occasional vernacular words) where they were Germanic. The obsolete (or obsolescent) legal language reflects a legal culture in the eighth and ninth centuries in which – especially in western areas with strong Roman roots – references to Roman law and procedure still meant something. Roman legal language gave some documents an imprimatur of authority. Descriptions of antique procedures bore a recognizable relationship (though not necessarily an exact correspondence) to how those transactions were actually carried out. In short, the legal and formulaic inheritance of Rome in the western regions of the Carolingian world contributed to a normative framework that lent authority and legitimacy both to documents and to the legal procedures that they recorded.

The reasons for the long stability and the centuries-long, uncontested Roman rule over the entire Mediterranean basin and bordering territories are a perennial topic of discussion. In that respect, the willingness of Rome to grant citizenship to former subjects is an essential chapter to be written in this history. Yet it is less often asked to what extent the induction of individuals from the subject states and peoples into the Roman Senate contributed to that stability. The positive and negative consequences of this phenomenon are discussed in this chapter.

The reasons for the long stability and the centuries-long, uncontested Roman rule over the entire Mediterranean basin and bordering territories are a perennial topic of discussion. In that respect, the willingness of Rome to grant citizenship to former subjects is an essential chapter to be written in this history. Yet it is less often asked to what extent the induction of individuals from the subject states and peoples into the Roman Senate contributed to that stability. The positive and negative consequences of this phenomenon are discussed in this chapter.

This paper re-evaluates Dio’s famous passing reference to Caracalla’s universal grant of citizenship by recontextualizing it within Dio’s larger narrative. Dio was the first historian to see the spread of Roman citizenship as we do – as a progressive expansion culminating in universal citizenship. Dio’s treatment of the topic of enfranchisement repeatedly returns to the question of whether an exclusive citizenship distorts or affirms the natural hierarchy of honour in the empire. The question is explored almost exclusively through the medium of embedded speech, with various voices within the text contributing to an emerging opposition between two competing visions of the proper relationship between citizenship and honour. This emerges in the tension between two important texts in Dio’s Augustan narrative: the speech of Maecenas, which recommends the enfranchisement of all the emperor’s subjects in order to erase the distinction between Romans and subjects (52.19.6), and the political testament of Augustus, which urges against mass enfranchisement and insists on the importance of the very same distinction (56.33.3). The narrative voice offers no explicit guidance on how to resolve these contradictory visions, leaving individual readers to confront the questions that they raise, with significant implications for their evaluation of Caracalla’s grant.