This project focuses on the strongly undervalued group of Roman freedmen. The aim is to determine which processes influenced and determined the interaction between Roman elites and freeborn civilians on the one hand and the ambivalent 'class' of the freedmen on the other hand. Rather than just accepting 'the stain of slavery' and using it as an explanans, we want to study it as an explanandum: a social phenomenon that deserves research attention in itself. More specifically, the discrimination mechanisms that both defined and excluded freed persons are central to this.