Runaway-Collar Tags Attest Coercion

Collars do not euphemize. In museums today, bronze bands from the early Empire carry inscriptions that once circled throats: “teneo me ne fugiam”—“hold me lest I flee.” They rang softly when wearers walked across the Forum of Rome, clinked louder on Ostia’s docks as cargo shifted, and echoed even in Herculaneum’s narrow streets [11].

The hardware is simple: bronze, sometimes iron, with rings for tags. The color is a dull brown-green of patina; the sound is a constant reminder of surveillance. In an economy where trained enslaved workers handled accounts and goods, collars were an answer to temptation and opportunity: a portable notice to every passerby of status and control.

Three places fix these objects on the map: Rome’s marketplaces, where flight was easiest; Ostia’s warehouses, where anonymity might be found in crowds; and Pompeii’s streets, where human traffic mixed with commerce under red frescoes. Here coercion was literally worn.

These collars sit alongside laws that both tightened and loosened bonds. The Lex Petronia, later preserved in the Digest, limited spectacular punishments like consigning a slave to beasts, while manumission rules outlined exits via vindicta, census, or will [20,5]. Collars and laws together formed a management system: iron at the neck, paper in the archives.

The artifacts also throw freedmen inscriptions into stark relief. For every Augustalis carving his name in marble, another person wore a tag that begged strangers to return them to a master. The city’s soundscape contained both triumphal banquets and the soft rasp of metal on skin [11].