Vocabulary and Practices of Manumission in a Fragment of the ‘Life of Philonides’ (P.Herc. 1044)

The biographical work on Philonides of Laodiceia on the sea in Syria (P.Herc. 1044 + 1715 + 1746) is not merely a source of information about the life of the philosopher, it also bears witness to both well-known and lesser-known aspects of Hellenistic history and civilization, not to mention the fact that it is an extremely rare and precious example of Hellenistic biography. This paper presents a new edition of a passage of the text in which references to vocabulary and procedures of Greek manumission can be detected, which suggest a parallel with papyrological and epigraphical documentary sources. This parallelism allows, in turn, to understand better the text of the papyrus and to supplement a technical term referring to relatives’ consent to the manumission of slaves.