Manumission with Paramone: Conditional Freedom?

Abstract

A common view holds that slaves freed on condition of paramone were juridical halfings, legally half-free, half-slave. This paper argues that this view is based on a misunderstanding of the Greek sources, mainly epigraphic; that the intermediate or hybrid juridical state of conditional freedom is a modern invention; that the evidence for manumission in the Greek world suggests overwhelmingly that polities constructed liberty and slavery as a binary pair, rather than poles on a spectrum.