Lex Fufia Caninia

Roman law regulating slavery

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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. The lex Fufia Caninia may or may not have limited the demographic impact of former slaves on Roman society, and the law is not seen by most scholars in the 21st century as primarily aimed at reducing the total number of manumissions. But since testamentary manumission is thought to have been the most common of the three forms creating a new citizen through manumission, the numerical limits may have led to more informal manumissions, which did not come with full rights of citizenship. The lex Fufia Caninia was abolished in AD 528 under the emperor Justinian, during reforms that dismantled most of the Augustan legislation on manumission.