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The lex Fufia Caninia of 2 BC was a law passed under Augustus, the first Roman emperor, concerning the manumission of slaves. The law placed limits on the number of slaves that could be formally released from slavery by means of a will. Testamentary manumission had been established in early Rome as one of three procedures recognized in Roman law as not only granting libertas (liberty) to the formerly enslaved person but also full citizenship.

Provisions

According to the jurist Gaius, the law prescribed the number of slaves who could be freed by a will in proportion to the size of the estate.

An estate holding only one or two slaves was excluded from the law, and the testator had free discretion in manumission.
For an estate holding three and up to ten slaves, no more than half could be manumitted;

over ten and up to thirty, a third;
over thirty and up to hundred, a fourth;
over one hundred and up to five hundred, a fifth, with a cap of one hundred regardless of the size of the estate.^[1]

Any fugitive slaves belonging to the decedent were counted as part of the total number of slaves in the estate.^[2] Each slave to be manumitted had to be listed by name in the will,^[3] though a description or job title might be accepted if unique, such as allowing for the child of a named female slave to be freed if not yet born at the time the will was made.^[4]

Purpose and effect

Along with the lex Iunia Norbana, most often dated to 17 BC, and the lex Aelia Sentia of AD 4, the lex Fufia Caninia was part of a program of Augustan social legislation that, among other objectives, regulated the status nexus of slave and free.^[5] The ancient right of masters to dispose of their slaves at their discretion – a matter of private law during the Republic, and an aspect of Roman patriarchy (patria potestas) – was reframed by these laws as an interest of the state.^[6]

Preserving the value of the estate for the heirs against end-of-life exuberance and protecting the claims of creditors are two perceived purposes of the law.^[8] A few ancient sources claim that masters had been freeing slaves "indiscriminately" with the stipulation that they participate in funeral rites, bolstering the deceased's social profile through the large number of mourners, but to the material detriment of the living successors.^[9] Economic historian Peter Temin saw the law from a labor market perspective as a way to incentivize slaves to prove their value and gain one of the limited opportunities for manumission.^[10] Others, such as P. A. Brunt, have viewed the law as more generally encouraging owners to filter candidates for manumission based on their readiness for participating as citizens.^[11]

The lex Fufia Caninia may or may not have limited the demographic impact of former slaves on Roman society,^[12] and the law is not seen by most scholars in the 21st century as primarily aimed at reducing the total number of manumissions.^[13] But since testamentary manumission is thought to have been the most common of the three forms creating a new citizen through manumission,^[14] the numerical limits may have led to more informal manumissions, which did not come with full rights of citizenship.^[15]

The lex Fufia Caninia was abolished in AD 528 under the emperor Justinian, during reforms that dismantled most of the Augustan legislation on manumission.^[16]

References

^ Gaius, Institutiones 1.43, as cited by Pedro López Barja, Carla Masi Doria, and Ulrike Roth, introduction to Junian Latinity in the Roman Empire. Vol. 1: History, Law, Literature, Edinburgh Studies in Ancient Slavery (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), pp. 7–8.
^ Pedro López Barja, "The Republican Background and the Augustan Setting for the Creation of Junian Latinity," in Junian Latinity in the Roman Empire, p. 102.
^ Richard Gamauf, "Dispensator: The Social Profile of a Servile Profession in the Satyrica and in Roman Jurists' Texts," in The Position of Roman Slaves: Social Realities and Legal Differences, Dependency and Slavery Studies 6 (De Gruyter, 2023), p. 151.
^ W. W. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery: The Condition of the Slave in Private Law from Augustus to Justinian (Cambridge University Press, 1908), p. 547.
^ Barja et al., introduction to Junian Latinity, p. 8.
^ Barja, "The Republican Background," pp. 83, 97.
^ J. M. C. Toynbee, Death and Burial in the Roman World (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971, 1996), p. 45.
^ Kathleen M. T. Atkinson, "The Purpose of the Manumission Laws of Augustus," Irish Jurist 1:2 (1966), pp. 368–370.
^ Barja, "The Republican Background," p. 99.
^ Peter Temin, "The Labor Market of the Early Roman Empire," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34:4 (2004), p. 531.
^ P. A. Brunt, "Marcus Aurelius and Slavery," Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 71 (1998), p. 143.
^ Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, "Augustus and the Transmission of Roman Citizenship," in Augustan Papers: New Approaches to the Age of Augustus on the Bimillennium of his Death (George Olms, 2020), pp. 68–69.
^ Barja, "The Republican Background," p. 81.
^ Peter Garnsey, Cities, Peasants, and Food in Classical Antiquity: Essays in Social and Economic History (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 3, cautioning that relative frequency eludes definitive proof.
^ Barja et al., introduction to Junian Latinity, p. 8.
^ Simon Corcoran, "Junian Latinity in Late Roman and Early Medieval Texts," in Junian Latinity in the Roman Empire, p. 141.