Abstract
The municipal slaves and ex-slaves of Roman towns occupied a liminal socioeconomic status. Although scholarship has emphasized how this group’s links to municipal authority could confer social capital and foster access to lucrative civic institutions, a comprehensive analysis of the evidence indicates that few members ever advanced in existing social and economic structures. This article on the associative behaviors of current and former municipal slaves suggests that they instead relied on their official organization, the familia publica, for their civic identity and as an outlet for the meaningful engagement in local socioeconomic life that was so important for subaltern Romans.
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