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Roman legal distinction of personal status
In the later
Roman Empire , honestiores and humiliores emerged as two broad distinctions of
social and legal status , those who had held the higher offices (
honores ) and humbler people. The division starts to become apparent near the end of the 2nd century AD.
[4]
Those of
senatorial and
equestrian rank and those who had held an office at the level of
decurion or higher possessed greater honors and therefore were honestiores . They made up around 1% of the Roman population.[
citation needed ]
Humiliores were any free persons who held
Roman citizenship without having achieved the privileges of higher office, including ordinary working people,
freedmen (liberti) ,
peregrini (free non-citizens who lived within the empire),
tenant farmers , and
coloni .
The
granting of universal citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire in AD 212 seems to have exacerbated the division between the upper and lower classes. As the principles of citizen equality under the
Roman Republic decayed, humiliores were increasingly subject to harsher
legal penalties , such as
corporal punishment or
public humiliation , formerly reserved for
slaves . Honestiores retained the rights that had been held by all Roman citizens, at least in theory, during the Republic, including freedom from
corporal and
capital punishment .
Paul B. Duff characterizes the attitude of the elite toward humiliores as a kind of loathing that regarded them as lazy and dishonest.
References
^ Ville Vuolanto, "Selling a Freeborn Child: Rhetoric and Social Realities in the Late Roman World," Ancient Society 33 (2003), p. 191.
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Literature
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"Honestiores/Humiliores" . Brill's New Pauly.