=117. The Ceremony of Manumission.=--Nevertheless, many slaves need not wait for their masters to die. They are perhaps suffered to work at a trade, and accumulate their “peculium,” and then very likely to purchase their own and their wives’ and children’s liberty. With rich masters of the better sort, it is also a gracious act at certain intervals to select a few extra-deserving slaves and say to them the blessed words, “Come with me to the prætor!” When they are all before the magistrate a solemn legal formality is gone through. One of the official lictors steps forward, gives a light tap with his rod upon the head of each slave and says loudly, “I declare this man is free!” The master laying hold of the slave and turning him around, replies, “And I desire that this man should be free!” adding a slight blow on the cheek; whereat the magistrate declares officially, “And I adjudge that this man is free.” This completes the “manumission”; then home the happy “freedman” (_libertinus_) goes to be greeted with the congratulations of his former fellow-slaves, showers of sweet cakes, dates, and figs and all kinds of humble rejoicings. =118. The Status of Freedmen. Their Great Success in Business.=--Henceforth, the ex-slave is the freedman of his former master. He takes the first part of his master’s name; thus that Cleander, manumitted a few years ago by Publius Junius Calvus, now swells about proudly as Publius Junius Cleander. His children will henceforth be Junii, no less lawfully than Calvus’s children; with a result that the gentile names of some of the proudest houses in Rome are now also borne by families perforce acknowledging swart Africans or tow-headed Batavians as very near ancestors. Once escaped from actual slavery a great career in life can open before an energetic freedman. If his ex-master is a Roman citizen, he also is now a Roman citizen without any naturalization process. True he is under a social stigma. Not merely he, but his children also, are excluded from the Senate and all the higher offices of the state; but an ex-slave is not likely to suffer from thinness of skin. Compelled in his youth to use his wits and put forth all his energies, he now often possesses abilities, often not very refined or delicate, which carry him far in trade, general business, and finance.