ABSTRACT
An article by Beryl Rawson which appeared in Classical Philology in 1966 in the then unfashionable field of ‘the Roman family’ and its role in the social history of Rome, under the title ‘Family life among the lower classes at Rome in the first two centuries of the Empire’, demanded – and received – careful reading (Rawson 1966). It occasionally ventured into the then also untrodden field of the ‘Familia Caesaris’ and calmly and, some would say, courageously grasped the thorny issues of slave-born Roman society. At what age, for instance, and under what circumstances could manumission (freedom from slavery) be obtained? Why were so many slaves in Rome set free at so early an age? How could you tell from personal names alone whether a particular individual was slave, freed or freeborn? And why in such a status-conscious ‘slave’ society did the vast majority not use any form of status indication, especially those who had their names on tombstones? Then came the question of slave families ‘broken’ by sale or other forms of transfer, and the problem of the ‘marriage’ of male slaves with freeborn women. There was even mention of Junian Latins. All of this involved immense control, in particular of two massive categories of source material, one epigraphic, especially the thousands of funerary inscriptions (sepulcrales), the other legal, especially the Institutes of Gaius and the fifty-book compilation of Justinian’s Digest.
