Tra schiavi e liberi: aspetti della mobilità sociale tardoantica

The article aims to analyze some aspects of the transition in the late antiquity of free persons belonging to the lower classes of the Roman society to the condition of slaves and vice versa, particularly in ways overtly illegal or at least not completely legal, as the flight of slaves to build up for themselves a false free identity or the sale into slavery of sons and other members of the family by the paterfamilias. The relative ease of these movements is linked to a lowering of the legal and social position of the humiliores, particularly in some professional situations, and their increased closeness to the social and economic conditions of the slaves. From this point of view is analyzed CTh. 4, 6, 3=CJ 5, 27, 1 and the problem of its interpretation in Nov. Marc. 4, 2-.4, which raises the question whether the expression vel humili vel abiecta can be read as an allusion to pauperes as a whole or only to the specific professions mentioned in the constitution. The article takes then into account the laws about the flight of slaves who, pretending to be free, get jobs and even contracts of colonate in the countryside. To counter this phenomenon the state requires, starting from a constitution of Arcadius and Honorius (CJ 11, 48, 12, 1), from the owners and their administrators a responsible attention in accepting strangers in their landholdings. Finally, this study is concerned with the legislative evolution in the fourth and fifth centuries on the sale of children as slaves, focusing in particular on the situation witnessed in Aug., ep. 10*. It proposes the hypothesis that the twenty-five years contract of locatio-conductio operarum to which Augustine makes hint was thought as a compromise between the intangibility of the free status and the social and economic reality in which the needs that drove the poors to the sale of their children were linked to the interests of the rich to buy up cheap labour force under conditions of relative safety..