| This dissertation examines how slaves in the ancient Greek world were freed and how this process of status change was understood. In the first section (chapters 1 and 2), I investigate the practice of manumission, collecting and analyzing a number of sources---literary, legal, and inscriptional---that have never been synthesized. The first chapter addresses the procedural aspects of manumission in classical Athens, where we find a multiplicity of practices whose exact interrelation was ill-defined. Chapter 2 then deals with the precariousness of, and modes of protection for, ex-slaves' newfound status. In this chapter, I focus primarily on material from non-Athenian poleis, from which a large body of epigraphic evidence remains (whereas this is largely lacking for Athens).; The second section (chapters 3 and 4) shifts the focus to the Greeks' conceptualization of manumission practices, exploring two different, yet coexistent, notions of manumission in ancient Greece. Thus, chapter 3 looks at the personal transformation of the slave. From an examination of the particular gods involved in "sacral" manumission---among them Apollo, Asklepios, and Sarapis, gods defined significantly by their ability to both heal and revive---I infer a conception of manumission as a process of rebirth, and offer readings of Euripides' "Ion," the "Life of Aesop," and Plato's "Phaedo" in light of this conceptual metaphor. Finally, chapter 4 turns to the Greek (or at least Athenian) conception of the societal transformation of the slave: in what is essentially a process of sociopolitical transition, the polis possessed an agency parallel to that of the "healing gods" discussed in chapter 3, facilitating manumission through a legal recognition of the freedman's new status.; Ultimately, this study not only provides an examination of the material and literary evidence for a particular Greek institution, but also sheds light on the complexity of status in Greece---thereby problematizing the ideological slave/free binary so common in elite literary texts. |
