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Roman Elite Education

The Classical Review vol. 62 no. 2 © The Classical Association 2012; all rights reserved certain key assumptions are not fully articulated: the nature of the relationship between ‘ideology’ (used apparently just to mean ideas, rather than in any more technical sense) and reality, and the question of change and development. The account moves backwards and forwards unpredictably; that is often justifi ed, building up a synchronic picture of the institution, but at times it begs questions about developmental sequence. M. appears to emphasise the material in arguing that the Romans freed lots of slaves – above all as a means of managing them – and gave them citizenship to help integrate them into society, and then had to conceive of ways of accommodating this practice within their value system. The implied counterfactual – why could they not have freed slaves without granting them citizenship, as the Greeks did? – suggests that we need to start from the other end, exploring how Roman ideology promoted the expectation that even slaves could be integrated into society (which must relate to their willingness to extend citizenship to conquered provincials – a point which M. offers as an explanation of Augustan anxiety about freedman, but does not extend), and then the practical mechanisms and institutions were developed in order to make their ideas into reality. This work scarcely marks the end of the debate on the place of the freedman in the Roman world. Specialists will doubtless question M.’s detailed arguments on such topics as the frequency and scale of manumission or its demographic implications. More importantly, we may hope for further research into the implications of his ideas for our understanding of Roman society as a whole (dominated by established social groups, rather than fl uid and open) and of the operations of the Roman economy (organised around extended family enterprises rather than intrepid entrepreneurs). We might also hope for a less densely written, more accessible version at some point; this analysis is too important to be confi ned to specialists, leaving students to persist with old-fashioned assumptions about the typicality of Trimalchio, the purpose of the peculium and the dilution of Roman stock as a result of their peculiar habit of manumission. However, for those specialists the book is essential reading, for its lucid compilation and discussion of the evidence and also for its careful but radical thesis about the role and signifi cance of Roman freedmen.