3 known locations can be tried.
3 known locations can be tried.
A common view holds that slaves freed on condition of paramone were juridical halfings, legally half-free, half-slave.This paper argues that this view is based on a misunderstanding of the Greek sources, mainly epigraphic; that the intermediate or hybrid juridical state of conditional freedom is a modern invention; that the evidence for manumission in the Greek world suggests overwhelmingly that polities constructed liberty and slavery as a binary pair, rather than poles on a spectrum."Next to paganism, the institution of slavery is probably the most difficult feature of ancient life for a modern student to understand." 1 Manumission with it.From Delphi alone, some 1000 inscriptions attest to over 1200 manumissions (ca.200BC-ca.100AD). 2 Inscriptions from Boiotia, Phokis, Thessaly, Macedonia, Bouthrotos, Kalymna, Lemnos, and elsewhere offer hundreds more.Scholarly attention has fallen heavily on Delphi, where manumission is held to have worked roughly as follows.A slave somehow acquired enough money to purchase freedom.But since the slave was legally incapable of contracting the purchase, it, its owner, and the god engaged in a sham sale wherein the slave entrusted the sale (and funds) to Apollo, who bought the slave.This 'sale' in effect freed the slave.In roughly a third of known cases, the former slave was subject to paramone.This obliged her to 'remain' in service to her manumittor, in semi-slavery, free to go and yet required to remain in a state of conditional or partial freedom.Service was usually to conclude upon the former master's death, at which point the freedperson left this state of semi-slavery and became properly free.Westermann and Finley "used this intermediate stage of conditional release to create the concept of a spectrum of statuses between slave and free.This idea seems now," Hopkins could write in 1981, "to have won general acceptance among ancient historians and has undermined the old, strict dichotomy, slave-free." 3 A generation later, acceptance is widespread.A valuable monograph articulates a graded spectrum of statuses in Classical Athens.4 A rich, comprehensive study of Greek manumission concludes uncontroversially that: Manumission inscriptions that include paramone clauses and other conditions reflect the ambiguous status of manumitted slaves.The freed persons remained with their manumittors, served them as slaves, and were liable to corporal punishment and to revocation of their manumission should they fail to do as ordered.On the other hand, they 1 Welles 1956: 316.
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