Javal Coleman (University of Texas)
Studies concerning manumission and freedom in ancient Athens typically focus on the institution of paramone (legal obligations post-manumission) as a process that kept formerly enslaved individuals subordinate to their former enslavers. Scholars such as Rachel-Zelnick Abramovitz have argued that while slaves freed by this procedure are legally free, they are not entirely free from a social perspective (Zelnick-Abramovitz 2005, 2017). On the other hand, others such as Joshua Sosin (2015) and David Lewis (2018) have pointed out that there was no such thing as half-free, half-enslaved people. They note that the Delphic manumission inscriptions make it clear that someone was either enslaved or free in legal terms, even if, in terms of social reality, that freedom was challenged or hindered. What these and other studies have largely failed to incorporate and consider is how freed individuals construct their identity as freed people. This paper takes as its case study the lives of Pasion and Phormion as depicted in the Demosthenic Corpus and Isocrates’ Trapeziticus in order to examine how Pasion and Phormion built freed identities for themselves.
This paper focuses on the ways in which Pasion and Phormion strategically obtained large amounts of wealth, political influence, and powerful friendships as part of constructing their freed identity. It considers how Pasion’s ownership of Phormion contributed to Phormion’s eventual freedom and those other attributes which allowed Phormion to construct a life for himself as a freed person. This life-building included not only the accumulation of material wealth, but also marriage to Pasion’s widow, Archippe, as well as assuming responsibility for Pasion’s sons. My rereading of their construction of freed identity will largely be informed by theoretical frameworks formulated within Atlantic Slave Studies, specifically those of Adriana Chira (2021) and Jessica Marie Johnson (2021).
In a recent article, Chira (2021) examines the custom of manumission in Santiago de Cuba, looking at the process by which formerly enslaved people constructed their freed identity through the enslavement of others in order to build a family and create a stable home life, through which they in turn freed others and supported their goals to do the same. Similarly, Jessica Marie Johnson (2021) engages how formerly enslaved African women built their own definitions of freedom despite the conditions imposed on them upon their receipt of freedom (Johnson 2021). Likewise, Pasion and Phormion manipulate the system that they were brought into in order to build their own freed identities. While it would be foolish to assume that the case of Pasion and Phormion is representative of freed people in 4th century BCE Athens, it would also be foolish to overlook the ways in which they used the different attributes that made up their status to build a free identity for themselves. The aim of this paper is to push scholars to think about enslaved and freed individuals in their own contexts and to consider the different attributes that contributed to their lived experiences, even if that lived experience is difficult to get at.