dediticii

Under Augustus, in AD 4 the lex Aelia Sentia created a new class of freedmen who, while technically free, held no rights of citizenship, a status they shared with peregrini dediticii. The jurist Gaius called the status of dedicitius "the worst kind of freedom."Pessima … libertas: Gaius, Institutiones 1.26, as cited by Deborah Kamen, "A Corpus of Inscriptions: Representing Slave Marks in Antiquity," Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 55 (2010), p. 104. In modern scholarship, these former slaves are sometimes referred to as dediticii Aeliani to distinguish them from the original dediticii, free people who surrendered and were brought under treaty.Pedro López Barja, "The Republican Background and the Augustan Setting for the Creation of Junian Latinity," in Junian Latinity in the Roman Empire, p. 97.{{efn|The term Latini Aeliani is also found in modern scholarship, but the lex Aelia did not in fact permit slaves so criminalized to obtain Latin rights, as could free people brought under deditio.Pedro López Barja and Jacobo Rodríguez Garrido, "Of Mice and Junians: On the Latin Condition," in Junian Latinity in the Roman Empire,

pp. 124–126.}}

If a slave during his servitude had been subjected to certain punishments but later freed (either by the master who punished him or by a subsequent owner), he was excluded from the political liberty that had customarily followed formal manumission in Republican Rome. Gaius describes these slaves as those "who have been chained by their masters as a punishment, or those who have been branded, or interrogated under torture concerning some wrongdoing and convicted of that offence, or handed over to fight in gladiatorial combat with swords or with wild beasts, or sent to the games (ludi), or thrown into custody" and then later manumitted.Ulrike Roth, "Men Without Hope," Papers of the British School at Rome 79 (2011), p. 90, citing Gaius, Institutiones 1.13 and pointing also to Suetonius, Divus Augustus 40.4 They existed in a state of permanent delinquency (turpitudo).Luigi Pellecchi, "The Legal Foundation: The leges Iunia et Aelia Sentia", in Junian Latinity in the Roman Empire vol. 1: History, Law, Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), p. 62 and n. 34, citing Gaius, Institutiones 1.15. A dediticius caught in adultery could be killed with impunity.Simon Corcoran, "Junian Latinity in Late Roman and Early Medieval Texts: A Survey from the Third to the Eleventh Centuries AD," in Junian Latinity in the Roman Empire, p. 136. A manumitted slave would not become dediticius, however, if he had been bound while used as surety for a loan, or if the chaining was carried out by a mentally ill person (furiosus) or ward.Corcoran, "Junian Latinity in Late Roman and Early Medieval Texts," p. 135, n. 26.

Unlike the peregrini dedicitii, who could make a will under the local law of their community,Egbert Koops, "Masters and Freedmen: Junian Latins and the Struggle for Citizenship," Integration in Rome and in the Roman World: Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop of the International Network Impact of Empire (Lille, June 23-25, 2011) (Brill, 2014), pp. 115–116, n.69. these dediticii were like slaves in holding no rights to succession and therefore could not create a stable family line through passing down property.Roth, "Men Without Hope," p. 91. When they died, any property they had went to the person who had manumitted them.Pellecchi, "The Legal Foundation," p. 63. Their assimilation to the status of foreigners under surrender has been somewhat perplexing to scholars; W. W. Buckland considered this one of the instances in Roman law of "rules... made to apply to cases quite different from that for which they were invented."W. W. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery: The Condition of the Slave in Private Law from Augustus to Justinian (Cambridge University Press, 1908), p. 534.

The law also created a dilemma for owners particularly of agricultural slave crews. Chaining was a routine means of controlling and disciplining slaves that might be preferred to harsher punishments such as whipping, torture, or disfigurement. Employing it now meant that masters were automatically denying their slaves any hope of ever becoming citizens, a hope that had been used as a way to encourage them to work hard and willingly. The lex Aelia Sentia was thus one more way in which Augustus appropriated the traditional power of a paterfamilias to govern his own household.Roth, "Men Without Hope," pp. 92–93. Even if an owner acquired a slave who had been subjected to one of these forms of punishment, but did not himself chain or punish a slave and then manumitted him, the former slave still could not enjoy the rights of citizenship.Roth, "Men Without Hope," pp. 93–94.

These criminalized former slaves were characterized as a threat to society, and if they came within a hundred miles of Rome, they and their property could be seized.Jane F. Gardner, "Slavery and Roman Law," in The Cambridge World History of Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2011), vol. 1, p. 429. The dediticius was then sold into perpetual slavery outside the hundred-mile radius. If released by his master, he became a slave of the Roman people, at the disposal of the state but with none of the privileges of the public slaves (servi publici) in civil service.Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, p. 596.

Why the lex Aelia Sentia permitted the manumission of a slave perceived as a danger is not entirely clear.Barja, "The Republican Background," p. 82. Sales contracts sometimes stipulated a term of servitude, typically ranging from one to five years, after which time the slave was to be manumitted.Thomas E. J. Wiedemann, "The Regularity of Manumission at Rome," Classical Quarterly 35:1 (1985), pp. 169–173. Augustus imposed a term of twenty to thirty years on war captives who had shown resistance;Wiedemann, "The Regularity of Manumission," p. 170, n. 21, citing Suetonius, Augustus 21; Cassius Dio 53.25.4. age and the physical toll of slavery well past the average life expectancy of slaves might have been thought to reduce the threat.{{cn|date=January 2024}}

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The Constitutio Antoniniana of AD 212, with which Caracalla granted universal citizenship to all free persons within the empire, has sometimes been interpreted as excluding those who had become subjects through a deditio (that is, a person who was a dediticius).Olivier Hekster, Rome and Its Empire, AD 193–284 (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), p. 47. However, this constitution does not survive in a single, unified, intact text; the wording pertaining to the excluded dediticii is vexed; and Ulpian and Dio Cassius both clearly state that the grant was universal.Herbert W. Benario, "The Dediticii of the Constitutio Antoniniana," pp. 188–189, 191.

On the basis of the Tabula Banasitana, it has been argued that the intention was to exclude recent dediticii whose loyalty was not assured.A. N. Sherwin-White, "The Tabula of Banasa and the Constitutio Antoniniana," Journal of Roman Studies 63 (1973), pp. 97–98. But before the constitutio, there had been no bar to peregrini dediticii being granted citizenship, and those who served in the Roman military—as the "barbarian" troops of the numeri did—regularly became citizens as a reward at the end of their service.Benario, "The Dediticii of the Constitutio Antoniniana," p. 194. If all foreign provincials under treaty were excluded, it becomes harder to discern how the constitutio would achieve its aims of broadening the tax base and enlarging the cultivation of Roman religion.Benario, "The Dediticii of the Constitutio Antoniniana," pp. 188, 191. The granting of citizenship could not be meaningfully "universal" if it excluded so many people, and though no similar large-scale expansions of citizenship are known, by the 5th century the free inhabitants of the empire are clearly represented in the sources as all citizens.A. H. M. Jones, "Another Interpretation of the Constitutio Antoniniana," Journal of Roman Studies 26:2 (1936), pp. 224, 227. "Potentially disloyal" would be a nebulous category not readily defined as a matter of law, and a likely solution is that only a subgroup of dediticii were excluded, the former slaves treated as criminals and barred from citizenship by the lex Aelia Sentia.Benario, "The Dediticii of the Constitutio Antoniniana," p. 196. In this view,Accepted also by t Koops, "Masters and Freedmen: Junian Latins and the Struggle for Citizenship," pp. 124–125. the dediticii exception in Caracalla's constitutio was thus carefully limited and framed so as not to contravene the 200-year precedent of the Augustan lex.Benario, "The Dediticii of the Constitutio Antoniniana," p. 196.

Dediticii are absent from later Imperial law, and Justinian (reigned AD 527–565) abolished the status as already obsoleteBuckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, p. 402. in the year 530.Corcoran, "Junian Latinity in Late Roman and Early Medieval Texts," p. 141. However, an early medieval legal text correlates wergilds, the compensation paid for the taking of a life according to the victim's social status, with Roman statuses including that of dediticius, though wergilds were not a feature of Roman law.Corcoran, "Junian Latinity in Late Roman and Early Medieval Texts," p. citing the 9th-century Aegidian Epitome (Par. Lat. 4416 f. 50v).

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