Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Ser. II, Vol I:
The Life of Constantine with Orations of Constantine and Eusebius.: Chapter XXXIV

Chapter XXXIV.—The Liberation of Free Persons condemned to labor in the Women’s Apartments, or to Servitude.

“Lastly, if any have wrongfully been deprived of the privileges of noble lineage, and subjected to a judicial sentence which has consigned them p. 509 to the women’s apartments 3187 and to the linen making, there to undergo a cruel and miserable labor, or reduced them to servitude for the benefit of the public treasury, without any exemption on the ground of superior birth; let such persons, resuming the honors they had previously enjoyed, and their proper dignities, henceforward exult in the blessings of liberty, and lead a glad life. Let the free man, 3188 too, by some injustice and inhumanity, or even madness, made a slave, who has felt the sudden transition from liberty to bondage, and ofttimes bewailed his unwonted labors, return to his family once more a free man in virtue of this our ordinance, and seek those employments which befit a state of freedom; and let him dismiss from his remembrance those services which he found so oppressive, and which so ill became his condition.

Footnotes

In the Greek houses there were separate suites for men and women. Compare article Domus, in Smith, Dict. of Gr. and Rom. Antiq.

[That is, the free subject of inferior rank, accustomed to labor for his subsistence, but not to the degradation of slavery.]