La designazione dei liberti nella documentazione venetica: strategie linguistiche e riflessi istituzionali

This paper deals with the freedmen in the Venetic world, focusing on the ways of expressing such a status in the inscriptions. Taking also into account some Venetic inscriptions recently found in Montebelluna, it seems possible to distinguish two systems for naming freedmen. Specifically, freedmen appear to be named either by using a second name derived from the patron’s second name with the suffixes -iaio-/-iako- < *-ia-io-/*-ia-ko- or by adding the Latin loanword libertos “freedman” – sometimes variously abbreviated – to the onomastic formula. Despite the fragmentary nature of the evidence, the use of a second name in -iaio/-iako can be considered as the original Venetic system for naming individuals previously not included in society, such as freedmen. Following cultural and linguistic contact with Rome, such a system of naming freedmen seems to have been replaced or accompanied by the Roman system, that is to say by the use of the patron’s second name (gentilicium) and possibly individual name (praenomen), which makes it necessary to add the term libertos for disambiguation