ABSTRACT
Roman Imperial society, both of the early and late empire, exhibits a highly developed system of formal stratification. It was made up of a rigid hierarchy of orders or ‘estates’ with legal distinctions of status between them. In the early empire these estates were the senatorial and equestrian orders, the free-born plebs and rural peasantry, the slave-born freedmen (liberti) and those still of slave status (servi). However, juridical status is far from being a reliable indication of social status. A considerable degree of flexibility in the working of the system of stratification was permitted, and was indeed inescapable, if the basic structure was not to be strained and break down in social discontent and revolution. Social mobility, or social movement in the restricted sense of changes in class or status, the process by which discrepancies arose between the legal system of stratification and actual social status, and were tolerated, is important enough in the history of the Roman empire to demand more attention than it has hitherto received. 1 It cannot be measured statistically. In the absence of anything approaching complete data or statistically significant samples, or devices such as indices of association, or even an agreed list of power and occupational rankings, a different, non numerical approach has to be adopted for the problem of social mobility in the Roman empire. M. K. Hopkins has recently suggested such an approach. 2 It involves tracing what he calls patterns of mobility, that is the order in which highly valued status symbols are acquired by members of a group or class to which they were not appropriate in the hierarchical society of the empire. Social mobility in Rome is thus seen as a process of status dissonance by which persons rate highly on some criteria of status, such as ability, achievement, wealth, but low on others, such as birth or legal condition.
