Mancipium
Although presented in our sources as part of a series of formal legal manoeuvres in connexion with emancipation and adoption, there is evidence that the status of mancipium was a substantial reality until the end of the Republic.
This impression is reinforced by the appearance of the term together with manus and potestas in the lex Irnitana of the early Empire, quoted above (151). Although we cannot be certain what status distinctions existed in the peregrine communities to which the clause applied, it is clear that the Romans expected them to deploy a range which encompassed all three types of status. As we have seen, potestas elides two quite different types of subordination within the family: that of slaves and that of children. Manus applies only to women subordinated within marriage. Mancipium seems to be a term to describe the temporary subordination of a freeborn person to a stranger, a status akin to slavery but without the permanent loss of free status that this involved. In particular, one manumitted from mancipium recovers his freeborn citizen status and is in no way affected by the inconveniences of freed (libertinus) status. However, as most of our information comes from a period when the status has become largely formalized as part of legal procedures it is difficult to be certain. Gaius reports an opinion of the jurist Labeo, a contemporary of Augustus, regarding the status of a child born to one in mancipio pending his release after a third mancipatory sale in the course of an emancipation. The child is said to be subordinated in mancipio like his father. Gaius reports that in his own day this was no longer true and the child’s status was in suspense.42 If the one in mancipio is eventually manumitted, then the child falls under his patriapotestas; but were he to die in mancipio, the child would become independent without any apparent need for an act of manumission: mancipium has become merely a fictive stage in the emancipation process. But Labeo’s decision belongs in a world in which mancipium has real effects, and a child born to one in mancipio seems to require release from it.4.
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