ABSTRACT
The involvement in dye-shops of individuals bearing the gentile name ‘Veturius/a’ was noted by Helen Loane in her 1938 study of commerce in the city of Rome and by Susan Treggiari in her 1979 study of women’s occupations (Loane 1938: 6-7; Treggiari 1979: 71-2). The gentile name of the manumitting owner was taken by male and female freed slaves who could in turn pass it on to their own legitimate freeborn children (in the case of fathers) and to their freed slaves (in the case of men and women). The recurrence of the ‘Vetur-’ gentile stem in inscriptions from Rome and its surrounds therefore raised the possibility that some unknown Veturius or Veturia had regularly trained slaves in a trade which these slaves maintained following manumission.
