Motherhood in the Delphic Manumission Inscriptions

<p>This paper focuses on a set of twenty-seven manumission inscriptions from the Delphic corpus. My analysis denotes that the mother-child relationship contained in these manumissions serves as a legitimizing definition of both the mother and the child’s place within society. I rely heavily on the two primary collections of Delphic manumission records for the project: <i>Die Delphischen Inschriften,</i> in Hermann Collitz’s <i>Sammlung der griechischen Dialekt-Inschriften Volume II</i>, and Daux’s <i>Fouilles de Delphes, Volume III: Épigraphe. </i>Although the manumission inscriptions at Delphi have enjoyed a rich history, only a few scholars such as Hopkins and Zelnick-Abramotitz have turned their attention to the presence of women. My work expands upon these existing contributions in various ways. </p><p></p>The first chapter evaluates the group of twenty-seven inscriptions which include the mother-child clause by running statistical analysis to determine patterns or deviations in chronology, price, gender, syntax, and place of origin. After a detailed investigation, the second chapter turns to the wider manumission corpus at Delphi and investigates instances of motherhood within the <i>paramone </i>clauses of enslaved women. The final chapter situates the mother-child clauses within their greater context and concludes that the <i>paramone </i>clauses include motherhood because the slave’s status during <i>paramone </i>was inconsistent. Thus, the status of any child born during this time of deferred manumission was variable. Since motherhood in the <i>paramone </i>clauses serves as a necessary clarification of either slavery or freedom, the same can be said of the mother-child corpus. The mother-child clauses, which appeared decades before <i>paramone </i>clauses concerning motherhood, delineated the statuses of slave children and added legitimacy to the mother’s and children’s emancipation. In this way, the mother-child clauses represent a tangible example of both the societal concern surrounding the roles of these women and children as well as their attempt to address these concerns through the manumission inscriptions. <p></p>