ABSTRACT
Manumission appears to have been so much more frequent in the Roman world than in Greece that there is some justification for seeing it as a temporary phase through which an outsider, if he had proved reliable, would pass to Roman citizenship. At Athens, however, slavery was a ‘closed’ rather than an ‘open’ system; citizen status was not conferred by manumission—on the rare occasions when freed slaves were granted citizenship, this was a separate political act. Liberating a slave did not entail that he was immediately free to do as he pleased. When a Greek slave paid his master to become free, a contract was often drawn up which was guaranteed by a god; and many of these contracts survive, inscribed on the walls of public buildings at Delphi and similar religious centres.
