Download or read book Municipal Freedmen and Intergenerational Social Mobility in Roman Italy written by Jeffrey A. Easton and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-12-11 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges prevailing models of the ways formerly enslaved individuals in Ancient Rome navigated their social and economic landscape. Drawing on the rich epigraphic evidence left behind by municipal freedmen and freedwomen, who had been owned and manumitted by the communities of Roman Italy, it pushes back against ameliorating views of slavery as a temporary condition and positive notions of a prosperous and consciously proud Roman freedman class. Manumission was a far more complex process, and it did not always put former slaves and their descendants on the straight and narrow path of upward mobility.