Alex Cushing, Loyola University Maryland
Some few hundred wax tablets were preserved in various locations around the Bay of Naples by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius of 79 CE. These included the larger archives of the auctioneer and businessman L. Caecilius Iucundus of Pompeii and the Sulpicii, formerly-enslaved members of a creditary and banking firm based at Puteoli, as well as various smaller personal archives from Herculaneum. These tablets recorded different legal and financial procedures and transactions. Andrew Lintott has referred to the archives as “perhaps our most intimate contact with Roman private law” (Lintott 2002: 555) and, indeed, many of the documents provide us an incredibly detailed picture of Roman law and legal procedure in practice, giving us a sense of how both routine and more complex juridical processes were navigated by everyday Romans.
These tabulae are also remarkable as documentation of the legal capabilities of formerly enslaved people, who are found throughout the archives engaging in a range of legal transactions with some degree of ease and knowledge. In some cases, as in the affairs of the Sulpicii, this legal procedural knowledge was a component of the work that they did while enslaved and their familiarity with legal formulae and courses of action was developed over years of specialization before manumission. Among the Sulpicii, legal procedural cooperation and mutual support between freedmen were common aspects of their business relationships. In other examples from the archives, however, the legal mechanisms recorded were of a sort that an enslaver would not have wanted an enslaved worker to know. A series of tablets from 76 CE found in the Casa del Bicentenario at Herculaneum recorded the efforts of Petronia Iusta to prove that she was in fact free-born and not a freedwoman as her nominal patron, Calatoria Themis, contended. How precisely Petronia gained the practical knowledge necessary to initiate this legal procedure is unclear, though she did benefit from the support in court of her fellow freedperson C. Petronius Telesphorus, who in fact had previously been acting as Calatoria’s legal guardian. It is possible that he used his own legal expertise, in addition to his corroborating testimony, to help his colliberta negotiate the juridical process of establishing her legal status.
These are not the only examples from the tabulae of groups of freedpersons, often colliberti who had been manumitted by the same enslaver, acting as important supports for each other in legal procedures. The wax tablet archives demonstrate that fellow freed slaves provided reliable assistance in completing juridical procedures as legal representatives but also acted as important sources of legal knowledge and guidance for each other. This capacity for various forms of legal collaboration between colliberti helped formerly enslaved people to circumvent barriers to legal access and also to gain procedural knowledge that might otherwise have been difficult to acquire.