Salutatio
Salutatio the name given to one of the forms of attention (officia) expected from clients by their patrons at Rome. The client would wait even before daybreak (cf. Mayor on Juv. 3.127 and 5.19) in the vestibule until the doors of the atrium were opened. There he attended until the patron appeared, and the nomenclator announced the name of the dependent, who brought his morning greeting (ave). The callers were commonly divided into various admissiones, according to their rank and intimacy, and even men of good position found themselves in the number (Juv. 1.100; Sen. de Ben. 6.33). The clients who were invited to do so, accompanied the patron wherever he might be going. Others, after receiving the dole [SPORTULA] at one house, would hurry off to another, to be similarly rewarded there (Mart. 10.74). The name salutatores was used of the clients who earned their living by these attentions. (Cf. Friedländer, Röm. Sitteng. i.6 382 ff.; Becker, Gallus, ii.3 159 if.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.