Manumission with "Paramone": Conditional Freedom?
A common view holds that slaves freed on condition of paramone were juridical chimeras, legally half-free, half-slave. This paper argues that this view is based on a misunderstanding of the Greek sources, mainly epigraphic; that the intermediate or hybrid juridical state of conditional freedom is a...
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| Published in | TAPA (Society for Classical Studies) Vol. 145; no. 2; pp. 325 - 381 |
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| Main Author | |
| Format | Journal Article |
| Language | English |
| Published |
Johns Hopkins University Press
01.10.2015
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| Online Access | Get full text |
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| Summary: | A common view holds that slaves freed on condition of paramone were juridical chimeras, legally half-free, half-slave. This paper argues that this view is based on a misunderstanding of the Greek sources, mainly epigraphic; that the intermediate or hybrid juridical state of conditional freedom is a modern invention; that the evidence for manumission in the Greek world suggests overwhelmingly that polities constructed liberty and slavery as a binary pair, rather than poles on a spectrum. |
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| ISSN: | 2575-7180 2575-7199 2575-7199 |
| DOI: | 10.1353/apa.2015.a596191 |