This article examines marriage as a pathway to free status for enslaved women in the early imperial Roman world, arguing that women manumitted for marriage to their former owners experienced a qualified form of freedom. Analysis of a funerary altar from early imperial Rome alongside larger bodies of legal and epigraphic evidence shows that in this transactional mode of manumission, enslaved women paid for their freedom by foregoing certain privileges, including, to varying degrees, the ability to enter and exit the marriage at will and the separation of their property from that of their husbands. Through a close examination of one mode of manumission and the unequal unions that resulted from it, this paper offers further evidence that freedom was not uniform, but varied in its meaning depending on who achieved it and by what means.

中文翻译：

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婚姻自由？罗马世界的婚姻遗物

本文将婚姻视为早期罗马帝国世界中被奴役妇女获得自由地位的途径，认为与前主人结婚的妇女经历了一种合格的自由形式。对早期罗马帝国的葬礼祭坛以及大量法律和铭文证据的分析表明，在这种交易方式中，被奴役的妇女通过放弃某些特权来换取自由，包括在不同程度上进入和退出罗马帝国的能力。随意结婚，将他们的财产与丈夫的财产分开。通过仔细研究一种授权方式和由此产生的不平等结合，本文提供了进一步的证据，证明自由不是统一的，而是根据谁以及通过什么方式实现的，其含义各不相同。