Authorship

This is an extract from a letter by Jehan Lefèvre de Saint-Remy – otherwise known as ‘Golden-Fleece’, King of Arms of the Burgundian order of chivalry, the Order of the Toison d’Or – written to Jacques's father following the young knight's dramatic death, of which more anon. It is a letter of surprising length, full of heartfelt admiration – and, one senses, affection – for Jacques, and contains detailed, eyewitness accounts of many of his most memorable exploits. Given Lefèvre's status and reputation for integrity, it leaves little reason to doubt that Jacques de Lalaing was a genuinely exceptional knight, fit to be memorialised as an object of outstanding pride for Burgundy, and indeed a model of ideal knighthood. Moreover, the letter gives such clear indications of how The Book of the Deeds of Jacques de Lalaing came to be written that it is more than a little strange that there should have been for a long while doubts and confusion about its authorship.

In short, the first (17th-century) edition attributed The Book of the Deeds to the Burgundian chronicler Georges Chastellain, on the flimsiest of bases that the writer's name which appears at the very end – in the last line of the verse epitaph for Jacques – is ‘Jorge’.

The Book of the Deeds of Jacques de Lalaing has survived in thirteen manuscripts. This is a translation of the text as it appears in the earliest complete copy, dating from the late 1470s or early 1480s: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS fr. 16830. Beautifully illuminated – though less sophisticated in style than the magnificent manuscript of c. 1530, now in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles – and copied with great care, it has few obvious errors or accidental omissions; on the rare occasions when these occur (all indicated in footnotes), I have referred to the text of Lettenhove's edition (Volume VIII of his Oeuvres de Chastellain, Brussels, 1866), which was based on a late 15th century manuscript belonging to the comte de Lalaing and another from the late 15th or early 16th century: Valenciennes, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 665. The Paris MS 16830 is accessible on line: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10537591f/f11.item. Chastellain's edition is also accessible on line: https://archive.org/details/oeuvrespubparleb08chasuoft/page/n5/mode/2up.

This contribution brings racial affect theory to bear on the literary representation of Roman manumission, in the process developing new critical tools for the history of Roman slavery as a mechanism for racialization. Through a close reading of the freed man Hermeros’ diatribe in the Cena Trimalchionis, I argue for the centrality of racial melancholy to the discursive and social forms by which manumission came to be experienced and figured. The operation of this racial melancholy in Petronius’ text is decomposable into two distinct, but complementary, sentimental performances: paranoia on the one hand, and compulsion into (evasive) autobiographical confession on the other. The interlinking of these performances within Hermeros’ speech generates a melancholic affect, which I conceptualize as a disposition for managing and negotiating the grief of enslavement and manumission. In formulating and grounding this claim, I hope to clear a space for mutually enriching exchange among historians of Roman slavery, historians of premodern race, and those literary critics and cultural theorists who have been influential in setting the terms for the “affective turn.”

On a well-known epitaph from first-century CE Rome, one man commemorates another as his “fellow freedman and, at the same time, dearest companion” (conlibertus idem consors carissimus) (CIL 6, 22355a). The phrase reveals that the men are connected in two ways: by their involuntary legal subjection to the same patron and by their mutual camaraderie. It is the relationship between these two ties, expressed by the Latin idem, that I investigate in this chapter. Over 100 epitaphs employ a form of idem to communicate two distinct but simultaneous bonds, the majority of which were formed through the processes of enslavement and liberation. Employing this corpus of inscriptions, I explore the entanglement of interpersonal ties experienced by freed persons in Roman households. I show that the word libertus/a (freed person), which we often read as a marker of status, is employed on these epitaphs as a relational term, interchangeable and sometimes overlapping with interpersonal ties generated by very different social and legal phenomena, including affection, birth, marriage, and testation.

In book 3 of De beneficiis, Seneca the Younger notes the common use of a law punishing ingratitude in rhetorical training and debates the merits of introducing a comparable law into Roman civil law. Ultimately, he dismisses the need for such a law outside of the school setting (Ben. 3.6–17.3). Scholars have been quick to point out that Seneca is not exactly correct: legal cases were brought for certain instances of ingratitude. I would like to consider one such instance, the fate of the liberti legally rendered ingrati. The penalties for ingratitude varied as the forms of ingratitude did, but I will focus on the extreme penalty of re-enslavement. This chapter takes as its premise the debate in Tacitus’ Annales (13.26–27) on allowing re-enslavement to become a standard penalty for a freed person’s ingratitude. The re-enslavement supporters fail to win over Nero, but the emperor allows that individual cases for re-enslavement could be heard. I will argue that this lack of statutory regulation for this penalty paradoxically reveals the precarity of the freed person, their citizenship, and their freedom. This precarity is emphasized using the language of social relations rather than the law to describe the situation of the freed person and their former owner. This chapter will contribute to the study of the nature of Roman freedom by considering the following questions: did freed persons share in the same liberty as freeborn citizens? And if that liberty is different, to what extent can a freed person be integrated into the “free” population?

This chapter discusses a group of inscriptions that include formulas granting permission for burial in a collective tomb on the Via Appia. These epigraphic formulas speak to the careful management of a resource that was of importance in a community in which enslaved and freed persons constituted the majority: the successful acquisition of a respectable burial. Curiously, these permissions are sometimes given out by the decurions of an association and in other cases by the aristocratic patriarchs. This suggests that the agency to grant these permissions did not rest exclusively with either enslavers or dependents, but more importantly the epigraphic commemoration of these arrangements may pay deference to the authority of the association and the aristocratic patrons. Taken as a group, the inscriptions thus appear to reflect a carefully choreographed interaction between enslaved, manumitted, freeborn, and aristocratic members of the gens Volusia. This reading complements interpretations of freed persons’ funerary culture as self-representations by positing that these funerary monuments are also concerned with securing burial privileges in the collective tomb.

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.

This contribution attempts to reconstruct the lost voices of Roman freed persons by focusing on the performative function of literary texts, rather than on their authorship. A study of the performative function of texts considers the contextual motivations of an author’s decision to cite, (re)phrase, and frame freed person’s words, and allows for a nuanced deconstruction of certain passages that might otherwise be labeled merely “elite discourse.” The texts chosen for this analysis are Cicero’s correspondence with Tiro, Tacitus’ historical works, and a letter written by the freed man Timarchides as quoted by Cicero in his oratio against Verres. Ultimately, the contribution’s goal is to suggest a methodological approach that – to some extent – rehabilitates literary texts as evidence for the freed person’s voice, and to argue that the value of literary sources when trying to recover this voice lies specifically in the tension between the public limits of freed persons’ (discursive) agency on the one hand, and the range and inventiveness of their self-representation in the context of their own or their patron’s trust network on the other.

The Principate of Nero is a well-documented period for a study about the literary evidence on Roman enslaved and freed people. In Neronian literature – as exemplified by Seneca, Persius, and Petronius – manumission is recurrently mentioned as a metaphor for describing forms of aristocratic behavior in imperial times, so that freed people became an important issue in discussions about the moral meanings of freedom and slavery under the Principate and its inherent elite competition for social dominance. Neronian authors criticized certain aristocrats by depicting them as morally acting like enslaved or freed persons, thus becoming examples of an indecorous behavior. The chapter argues that the representations of freed people in this context were related to the legal changes in slavery since Augustus, which involved a kind of surveillance of the practice of manumission and the creation of a new category of freed people, the Junian Latins, that did not automatically entail Roman citizenship. Both aspects had an impact not only on the more immediate relations between enslavers and enslaved persons, and on the social life of enslaved and freed people, but also reconfigured the ideas of slavery shared by the Roman elite.