Patronae of the Western Roman Empire Disclosed

Objective

The relationship between freed individuals and their former owners is central to modern understanding of the role of slavery in Roman society. While both men and women owned and manumitted slaves, scholarship has focused on male patrons in analysing this relationship. This androcentric focus extends also to the freed, with scholars focusing on how freed men were supported by their patrons in the former’s quest for social advancement following manumission. The result is a patronage model that sees Roman freedpersons as dependent on their former masters in their social mobility, seemingly reflective of inflexible status hierarchies. Despite recent studies of women slave owners, freedwomen and female slaves, the study of Roman patronage remains shaped by male patterns and, thus, by a single-gender-model. What is missing, as a corrective to this approach, is a dedicated study of female patrons: PoWeRED (Patronae of the Western Roman Empire Disclosed) offers just this through a full-scale analysis of the epigraphic evidence for patronae from the Latin West of the Roman Empire. Assembling and interpreting a corpus of c. 1200 inscriptions, and exploring the identities, relationships and network patterns of patronae, PoWeRED builds a new patronage model. This diversified model highlights also patronal dependence on the freed for both familial and social purposes: in the family, patronal ancestry building is shown via the freedpersons’ use as substitute descendants of childless patronae; in the community, patronal dependence on freedpersons as civic tools and instruments in public life is stressed. Through a diversity of patron-freedperson-relations, PoWeRED illustrates notable status malleability in Roman society. Besides building a corrective to the male patronage model, championing the female as the determining historical agent promotes a bottom-up approach via the ‘lesser’ gender, emphasizing the importance of gender in researching societal structures in the Roman world.