142 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
who ran workshops or commercial operations for the profi t of their masters
were permitted considerable freedom of action. The disabilities imposed by
their legal position as chattel were circumvented by the device of peculium ,
a fund allotted to slaves against which they could contract obligations. The
peculium might comprise not only working capital, but also property – and
slaves.^41 Even within the category of slaves, wealth could confer power over
others. Responsibility within the master’s household also conferred power,
which varied with the size and status of the household. The top slaves of
the imperial household were able to exercise considerable infl uence and
accumulate impressive wealth, as is attested not only by literary anecdotes,
but also by inscriptions. Musicus Scurranus, Tiberius’ slave cashier for the
imperial treasury in a Gallic province, received a dedication from his own
household slaves, sixteen in number ( ILS 1514). One other important
element in the relatively high status of domestic and urban slaves was the
likely prospect of manumission, a possibility denied their counterparts in
the countryside and mines.
For all these status differences, the ultimate legal dependence of all slaves
made them less diffi cult to accommodate in the Roman hierarchy than
freedmen. Freedmen – as free, Roman citizens, able to accumulate great
wealth in theory, and sometimes in practice, and yet tainted by their servile
background – encapsulate the contradictions between rank and status that
Roman society had to accommodate.
Most freedmen were humble men, married women of the same rank, often
remained dependent on their former masters, and consequently presented no
awkward contradiction between rank and status.^42 Some, however, rose to a
status not commensurate with their inferior rank. The conservative aristocrats
who urged the Roman senate in AD 56 to decree that disrespectful freedmen
should be re- enslaved, were reacting against the phenomenon of successful
freedmen, not simply against the way they humiliated their former masters
(Tacitus, Ann. 13.26–7).
Imperial freedmen were capable of reaching the summit of the propertied
class – they contribute four of the ten richest men known from the
Principate – and were courted for their immense infl uence even by members
of the elite orders. Unlike other freedmen, they generally married freeborn
women.^43 Nevertheless, their servile origins were not forgotten, and generally
prevented their rising into the aristocratic orders. Even the ‘right of freebirth’,
a legal fi ction by which an emperor certifi ed a freedman as being of free birth
and eligible for equestrian rank, could not wipe away the stain of servility in
the eyes of the elite.^44 The intensity of the hostility directed against these
men, whose position rested entirely on their proximity to and infl uence over
emperors, can be sensed in the abusive language employed by the normally
mild- mannered Pliny, as he described his reaction to an inscription honouring
Claudius’ freedman Pallas with free birth and the insignia of the second most
senior magistrate, the praetor: ‘Personally I have never thought much of
these honours whose distribution depends on chance rather than on a