Deborah Kamen (University of Washington)
Of the inscriptions from Hellenistic Delphi that record enslaved people sold to Apollo “on the condition of freedom,” about a quarter include an obligation to remain by (paramenein) their former owner, usually until the latter’s death. For many years, there has been discussion of the status of those individuals who “remain,” with them being classified most recently as slaves (Sosin 2015); as free, albeit with continuing obligations (Zanovello 2017: 66-82; see also Canevaro and Lewis 2014); or as slaves vis-à-vis their manumittors and free vis-à-vis other people (Zelnick-Abramovitz 2018). In this paper, I argue that we should understand them as occupying a non-binary status somewhere between slave and free: namely as “conditionally freed slaves” bearing some resemblance to statuliberi in Rome.
First, I challenge the argument that the use of an aorist participle of paramenein in many of the inscriptions necessarily implies that the individual under paramonē was still enslaved: that is, that paramonē must be prior to their freedom (Sosin 2015). Although some inscriptions do use an aorist participle, in other instances we find a future indicative or (quite often) an aorist imperative, neither of which indicate anterior time. The tense of paramenein in these inscriptions therefore cannot in itself be an indication that paramonē precedes freedom.
Second, I demonstrate some of the ways in which an individual under paramonē does not neatly fit into the categories of “slave” or “free.” Some inscriptions stipulate, e.g., that such individuals can pay for their release from paramonē or that they can enter into arbitration, both of which presuppose free status (Zanovello 2017: 66-82), while other inscriptions stipulate, e.g., that they can be physically punished by their manumittors or that any children they bear are to be slaves, which implies servile status (Sosin 2015).
Finally, I compare the standing of those under paramonē to similar statuses in other slave societies, including under Roman (Digest 40.7; Buckland 1908: 286-291) and Islamic law (Crone 1987: 64-76), in colonial Brazil (Higgins 1999: 154-156), and in antebellum Louisiana (Owens 2017). In all of these instances, individuals occupy some kind of recognized limbo status until they fulfill the specified terms of their manumission. There is no a priori reason that conditional freedom could not have existed in Hellenistic Delphi as well.
Thus, even if the status of those under paramonē was not defined de iure (as it was, e.g., in Rome), the in-between de facto standing of these individuals is apparent, especially when viewed through the lens of recent scholarship on the complexity of Greek status (Kamen 2013, Davies 2017). In short, then, this paper challenges that the idea that individuals in the Greek world could only be enslaved or free. While law and ideology generally operate in binaries, reality is far more complicated.