Alex Cushing (Independent Scholar)
Most documents from the Roman World which record the manumission of an enslaved person give little indication of what motivated the enslaver to free that person. Typically, non-literary accounts of manumission were tersely legalistic, recording only the most necessary information and leaving the historian to piece together relationships and background information. Several papyri from Roman Egypt, however, straightforwardly state the slaveholders’ reasons for freeing the enslaved (Straus 2009: 236). Marsisouchos instructed his daughter to manumit a group of domestic workers “on account of the shared fellowship and care” they showed towards him. (P. Tebt. 2, 407: “... τὰ μ[ὲ]ν σώματα ἐλεύθερα εἶναι… [διὰ] τὴν συνο[ῦ]σάν μοι [πρὸς αὐ]τοὺς [σ]υντροφίαν καὶ κηδεμονίαν…”). In P. Oxy. 3, 494, Akousilaos freed Psenamounis and others “because of their goodwill and personal affection” for him (“ἐλεύθερα ἀφίημι… κατ’ εὔνοιαν καὶφιλοστοργίαν δοῦλα μου σώματα Ψεναμοῦνιν…”). Both allude to the emotional responses that the enslaved could engender in their enslavers but also, importantly, how these might influence the slaveholder’s desire to free them.
Other papyri also demonstrate that personal and even sexualized relationships and emotional connections shaped manumission practices, but we should be circumspect in characterizing these enslavers as motivated exclusively by natural and sincere feelings towards their enslaved workers. It’s notable in both examples that the slaveholders conflated enslaved work product and their own affective state in explaining their reasons for manumitting. Akousilaos and Marsisouchos did not present the value of the work that the enslaved did for them as the reason for manumission, but instead emphasized the less tangible affective qualities of that labour as what made the enslaved deserving of their freedom; εὔνοια, φιλοστοργία, συντροφία, and κηδεμονία are all forms of affective labour provided as part of their duties as enslaved domestic staff (Hardt 1999). In the Antebellum South, enslaved workers frequently employed strategies to generate trust, affection, and a sense of rapport in the slaveholder both as a means of survival and also as a way to obtain their freedom. For their part, slavers considered the affective products of enslaved labour an essential component of the work, contributing to the monitoring and control of obedience and ensuring reliable work product. They viewed signs of affection as proof of compliance and dependability, while unfriendliness was interpreted as a mark of insubordination and unproductiveness (Dwyer 2021).
Similar attitudes appear among affluent, large-scale Ancient slaveholders (Cic. ad Fam. 16, 16, 1; Sen. Ep. Mor. 47, 4; Plin. Ep. 5, 19, 1-5) but this paper will explore how enslavers in Roman Egypt employed the vocabulary and framework of affective labour to assess and justify manumission. Characterizing manumission as a consequence of their affective state reinforced their authority and personal discretion, underlining the benevolence of the act. Though they may have been motivated to some degree by emotional connections to manumit the enslaved, the evidence from Roman Egypt encourages us to recognize that there existed, even for less affluent slaveholders, a complex ideological relationship between affective state, enslaved labour, and manumission.