Freedom in Marriage? Manumission for Marriage in the Roman World

Abstract

Abstract This article examines marriage as a pathway to free status for enslaved women in the early imperial Roman world, arguing that women manumitted for marriage to their former owners experienced a qualified form of freedom. Analysis of a funerary altar from early imperial Rome alongside larger bodies of legal and epigraphic evidence shows that in this transactional mode of manumission, enslaved women paid for their freedom by foregoing certain privileges, including, to varying degrees, the ability to enter and exit the marriage at will and the separation of their property from that of their husbands. Through a close examination of one mode of manumission and the unequal unions that resulted from it, this paper offers further evidence that freedom was not uniform, but varied in its meaning depending on who achieved it and by what means.

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