Restriction of Civic Rights in the Roman World: The Ius Suffragii of Liberti and Incolae

This article examines the restrictions that Roman law imposed during the Republican and Imperial periods on the exercise of political rights – both active and passive – by freedmen. It will be shown how the rules introduced from time to time, on the one hand, aimed – by a variety of means – to limit the exercise of the active electoral right of freedmen, whose vote, also in those cases when it was cast, lacked any real political weight; and on the other hand, they tended to restrict freedmen’s access to magistracies in Rome and the local centers of the empire in an increasingly restrictive manner, even allowing for some exceptions.