Posthumous freeing of slaves

[Phaichtos]

I've recently done a fair bit of research on Roman slavery. As the post above mine mentions, posthumous manumission was occasionally practiced; sometimes it was out of genuine feeling of good will towards ones slave(s), rewarding them for a life of faithful service. Other times though, it was simply at the whim of their owner and can oftentimes be inferred that like the modern wealthy, well-off Romans would (even posthumously!) find ways to avoid taxes.... in this case, by "freeing" some of their slaves, making them no longer technically their "property", but still holding them in a patron-client relationship where the (now former) slave was entirely beholden to the former master (if still alive) or master's family (if he wasn't).

A good book to get you started (if you're curious) is Keith Bradley's Slavery and Society at Rome. With this topic in particular (see: Ch 8: Slavery and Progress), he depressingly notes that "it is difficult to imagine that most slaves ever had the chance to win freedom...or were prepared to that the chance [to take other measures to become free] when and if it arose." Likewise Milton Meltzer notes in his Slavery: A World History that while a few lucky Roman slaves were granted their freedom (whatever the motives of their masters), the vast majority of people who were enslaved would die enslaved. A sort of counterpoint to all this is Peter Temin who made the claim in his article "The Labor Market of the Early Roman Empire" that "frequent manumission was a distinguishing feature of Roman slavery." I could not disagree with the man more, but in all fairness he is an economist and not a historian, so I suppose he sees the world a little bit differently than I (or Meltzer or Bradley) do.

Anyway, hope some of that helped