The Purpose of the Lex Fufia Caninia

Echos du Monde Classique/Classical Views XXXV, n.s. 10, 1991, 21-39 THE PURPOSE OF THE LEX FUFIA CANINIA* JANE F. GARDNER The lex Fufia Caninia tends to be relatively neglected in discussion of the various measures affecting manumission, and the legal and social position of freedmen, which were introduced during or soon after the principate of Augustus. Because this law is concerned solely with numbers, and because literary sources conveniently provide some ready-made superficial explanations of motive, there is a tendency for discussion to be limited to considerations suggested by these latter. There is also, one suspects, a tendency implicitly to ascribe to the lex Fufia Caninia motivation suggested by the more immediately obvious social and moral bases of the later lex Aelia Sentia, and of the lex Junia,' The lex Fufia Caninia of 2 Be applied only to testamentary manumissions. It laid down a sliding scale to restrict the number of slaves in a household that could be set free in this way. The larger the slave household, the smaller the proportion of slaves who could be freed, from half in households below ten, to one-fifth in households between one hundred and five hundred. The lex Aelia Sentia of AD 4 specified minimum age limits for both owners (20) and slaves (30) before formal manumission could occur. Unless "good cause" (consisting essentially in close personal service or actual blood relationship to the owner or intention to marry) was shown to an official committee, the slave received freedom but not full citizenship. Manumission by will was excluded for owners under the age of twenty. Slaves who had been chained, branded, imprisoned, found guilty, after interrogation under torture, of crime, or used as gladiators or beast-fighters, were assigned the status of peregrini dediticii, "surrendered foreigners," with no prospect of ever achieving Roman citizenship or even Latin status, and banned from an area within one hundred miles of Rome (Gaius, l nst, 1.13-14, 25-27). • I am grateful to Professors John A. Crook and Keith R. Bradley, and to the journal's referees, for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. They are not responsible for the views put forward. ! Sources for the lex Fufia Caninia in RE 12. 2355-56. The main ancient source for all three laws is Gaius' Institutes. Lex Fufia Caninia: Gaius 1.42-46. Lex Aelia Sentia: Gaius I.13-21, 25-6, 36-41. Lex Junia: Gaius 1.22-4, 28-35; III.56. See also W. W. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery (Cambridge 1908), Ch. 23; Alan Watson, Roman Slave Law (Baltimore and London 1987), Ch. 2. On manumission generally, see also T. E. J. Wiedemann, Slavery : Greece and Rome New Surveys 19 (Oxford 1987), chap. III and refs. there; idem, "The Regularity of Manumission at Rome," CQ 35 (1985) 162-75. 21 22 JANE F. GARDNER The purpose of these limitations is evident, namely to preclude the admission to citizen rights of undeserving or undesirable types. Owners were to have reached years of reasonable discretion, slaves were to have reached an age by which they might be expected to have deserved manumission by a decently long period of service, and to have no stains on their records. The lex Junia is in similar vein. It provided an incentive, in the prospect of achieving full citizenship, for those ex-slaves who on manumission had attained only Latin status to settle down in a matrimonial relationship and found a family. By taking Latin spouses (or Roman wives) and having a child who survived to one year they could qualify for Roman citizenship. These laws do not bear the name of the emperor, and were promulgated by other members of the governing class. They could scarcely have been enacted without his acquiescence, at least, although whether they were conceived by their nominal authors, rather than the emperor himself, is open to doubt. Of the literary sources for the lex Fufia Caninia and lex Aelia Sentia (see below), Dionysius of Halicamassus gives no assistance, and Suetonius and Dio simply assume that the policy was Augustus' own. In a very broad sense, the laws may be said to have a...