Prof Andrea Giardina
Slavery in Ancient Rome

(1)
How could a slave in Rome obtain his freedom?

With the term manumissio, the Romans indicated the action through which the lord granted the freedom to his slave (the lord renounced, through that action, to the authority, called in latin manus, that had on the slave). In Rome, the liberation of a slave involved a quite simple procedure: the decision of the lord was practically unobjectionable and demanded a banal formal approval from a magistrate.
But the lord could free the slave also for testament. The freed slave, or libertus, was a "nearly citizen": could vote in the assemblies, but not be elected; his sons, instead, became roman citizens with plenty of powers and rights: integration of the former slaves in the roman society was much faster than in other societies. The Romans boasted themselves of being the only community that easily integrated therefore the slaves and this characteristic was an important aspect of their "autorepresentation". The only among the ancient cultures, the Roman one quite valued the slavery element of their own origins: they said, as an example, that the mother of the great king Servius Tullius was a slave; they used to say that Romulus received in a sacred fencing called "asylum" individuals of every origin, just to give body to the new city: from this nucleus would have had origins the first peopling of the city.
The roman slavery had therefore two faces: one is that, terrible, of the exploitation, the punishments, the crucifixions (who does not remember the film “Spartacus” of S. Kubrick?). The other is that of the relatively easy liberation and integration. This characteristic of the roman society struck a lot also the strangers. At the times of the second Punic war the Macedonian king Philips V, allied to Hannibal, wrote a letter to the inhabitants of a Greek city in order to urge them to grant more easily the citizenship to the strangers: "Do like Romans, he wrote, that when they free the slaves they put them in the citizenship. In this way they have increased their native land and become much more powerful ". The king of Macedonians picked a fundamental point. The freed slaves, in fact, became suddenly soldiers to serve in the roman armies. Rome widely adopted the practical chance of the manumissio and therefore had more numerous armies.
In the complex existing psychological tie between slave and lord the perspective of the liberation carried out a precious function: it rendered the slaves desirous to acquire merits in front of the lord and pushed them to assume docile and submitted behaviours. But this happened nearly exclusively for the domestic slaves or however for who of them that had more contacts with the lord. For the others - and it was a matter of the great majority - the slavery was a condition for the life. The roman conceptions of slavery did not differ a lot from the Greek ones: also in Rome the slave was considered a property of his lord, and could be beaten or killed to his will.
In Italy the slaves were a multitude: we don’t have any precise information, but it is probable that they represented a third to the half part of the entire population. Therefore this great number of slaves, often held in conditions of extreme suffering, determined a constantly explosive situation. Particularly serious were the revolts exploded in Sicily between the 139 and the 132 b.C. and the revolt of Spartacus, that caused great bloodshed in Italy between the 73 and 71 b.C.