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Manumission with Paramone: Conditional Freedom?
- TAPA
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 145, Number 2, Autumn 2015
- pp. 325-381
- 10.1353/apa.2015.a596191
- Article
- Additional Information
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summary:
A common view holds that slaves freed on condition of paramone were juridical chimeras, legally half-free, half-slave. This paper argues that this view is based on a misunderstanding of the Greek sources, mainly epigraphic; that the intermediate or hybrid juridical state of conditional freedom is a modern invention; that the evidence for manumission in the Greek world suggests overwhelmingly that polities constructed liberty and slavery as a binary pair, rather than poles on a spectrum.