ROMAN INEQUALITY : affluent slaves, businesswomen, and legal fictions

Roman Inequality explores how in Rome in the first and second centuries CE a number of male and female slaves, and some free women, prospered in business amidst a population of generally impoverished free inhabitants and of impecunious enslaved residents. Edward E. Cohen focuses on two anomalies to which only minimal academic attention has been previously directed: (1) the paradox of a Roman economy dependent on enslaved entrepreneurs who functioned, and often achieved considerable personal affluence, within a legal system that supposedly deprived unfree persons of all legal capacity and human rights; (2) the incongruity of the importance and accomplishments of Roman businesswomen, both free and slave, successfully operating under legal rules that in many aspects discriminated against women, but in commercial matters were in principle gender-blind and in practice generated egalitarian juridical conditions that often trumped gender-discriminatory customs. This book also examines the casuistry through which Roman jurists created "legal fictions" facilitating a commercial reality utterly incompatible with the fundamental precepts--inherently discriminatory against women and slaves---that Roman legal experts ("jurisprudents") continued explicitly to insist upon. Moreover, slaves' acquisition of wealth was actually aided by a surprising preferential orientation of the legal system: Roman law--to modern Western eyes counter-intuitively--in reality privileged servile enterprise, to the detriment of free enterprise. Beyond its anticipated audience of economic historians and students and scholars of classical antiquity, especially of Roman history and law, Roman Inequality will appeal to all persons working on or interested in gender and liberation issues. "This Introduction considers some significant methodological issues. Because the Roman Empire encompassed innumerable local groupings -- municipalities, kingdoms, provinces, villages -- distributed over a vast area and tenaciously preserving separate societal values, institutions and languages, the sense of the very word "Roman" must be examined, a term that "paradoxically is rarely defined or given meaning" (Revell). Despite the dearth of quantitative evidence in and for classical antiquity, this Introduction seeks to show how methodologies other than statistical -- Behavioral Economics, some aspects of Neo-Classical Economics and (most importantly) New Institutional Economics -- can be utilized, in lieu of mathematical approaches, to elucidate Roman Inequality. Because this book makes significant use of evidence from Roman Law, a number of juridical issues must be confronted: the extent to which Roman law reflects actual life; whether surviving "cases" reflect true disputes or fictitious generalizing hypotheses of academic origin; the influence of anachronism and interpolation in Roman law materials; the interplay between Roman law and indigenous law"-- Provided by publisher Cover 1 Roman Inequality 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 List of Abbreviations 12 Introduction 14 Time and Place 17 An “Ignominious Truth”: Ancient Studies’ Lack of Statistics 19 Law and Legal Evidence 23 Textual Matters 38 1. Inequality 39 Financial Inequality: Affluent Slaves, Impoverished Free Persons 40 Legal Inequality: The Privileging of Servile Enterprise 51 2. Fiction: Reconciling Economic Reality and Juridical Principles 62 Generating the Peculium 64 Owning Assets through the Peculium 72 Retaining Peculium Assets after Manumission 78 The Manumission of Skilled Slaves: Facilitating Commerce through Legal Fiction 83 3. Opportunity: From Freedom to Slavery—​From Slavery to Freedom 96 Entrepreneurial Self-​Enslavement 97 Self-​Purchase: Complement to Self-​Sale 113 Manumission Pursuant to Contract 117 4. Businesswomen: In Servitude and in Freedom 140 Women in Commerce 141 Gender Equality and Inequality 149 5. Servile Imperialism: In Power, in Servitude 177 Unfree Masters of Empire 180 Imperial “Freedmen”? 186 Works Cited 194 General Index 260 Index of Passages Cited 266 In the first and second centuries CE a small elite of affluent slaves and wealthy free persons prospered in Rome amidst a mass of impoverished free inhabitants and impecunious enslaved people. Roman Inequality reconstructs the role that slaves and women played in this economy.