Introduction

This volume follows from the three Australian conferences begun by Beryl Rawson in 1981, a time when, quite coincidentally, a number of scholars in different parts of the mainly Anglo-American world were beginning to focus on the topic of the Roman family as a distinct theme in ancient social history. Research on family studies in the ancient world was in part the result of a growth of interest in the 1960s and 1970s in the history of the family among historians at large (e.g. Laslett, MacFarlane, Stone), and, for some, the growth of a very ‘scientific’ approach to demographic studies, represented especially by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure.¹ From these new historical methodologies emerged Keith Hopkins’s pioneering application of demography to the ancient context, which opened up a new form of analysis that continues to thrive while remaining highly controversial.² Rawson, who herself had had interests in the Roman family since the time of her graduate studies, had the acumen to recognize this nascent movement in Roman history and to gather these scholars together to produce the conferences in Australia.³ The subject has matured since the 1980s and each of the three volumes shows a growing refinement of approach and a better set of results.

One of the problems that was faced by these scholars but which has never been satisfactorily resolved is that of how the Roman family is to be defined. The need for definition seems essential but the problem is more complicated than appears at first sight. In modern western societies ‘family’ is an ambiguous term, but it connotes something that most people most of the time can understand. In 1984, using funerary inscriptions from the western empire, Saller and Shaw argued that the Roman family was essentially nuclear, not extended, a claim that has dominated the discussion ever since. There are, however, problems with this view. First, the Romans themselves had no term for ‘family’ in any modern sense, and there are many contexts in which they show interest in non-nuclear or partial-nuclear family members in ways that are distinct from the modern cell-like concept of the nuclear family. Secondly, the demography of Roman Egypt shows that many households in that province had non-nuclear family members and offers a far different model from the paradigm traced by Saller and Shaw of what was normative in Roman society at large. For example, although it is only one region of the Roman empire, the existence of sibling marriage in the Fayum raises questions about household composition and domestic organization at large, and about how to identify and account for discrepancies from the Italian norm. The insistence of some scholars on regional demographic variability and scepticism about applying model life tables to ancient populations underlines the difficulties of the demographic approach. Valid as they may be, however, such debates do not affect the legitimate questions about household composition that are related to the issue of family definition. Thirdly, the term familia to the Romans meant ‘household’ rather than ‘family’ in any biological sense, and it is in terms of household organization and structure that family relations are therefore best understood.⁴

A significant complicating factor that modern historians of the family (in Europe at least) did not have to face was the presence of slavery. When, as in Rome, slaves were responsible for most childcare, at least in elite circles, to think in terms of nuclearity without any nuance or allowance for cultural specificity is an oversimplification. Because Romans had no concept of the family as a collective unit, referring instead to their wives and children specifically, or just to ‘their own’, it is questionable whether a definition of the Roman family is possible without injecting anachronistic and therefore culturally irrelevant elements. A challenge to Saller and Shaw was raised by an examination of funerary commemorations in Asia Minor which identified an emphasis on the ‘extensive’, rather than the nuclear, family, proving that epigraphic evidence can be used in different ways to paint a variety of pictures and highlighting the problems inherent in seeking a specific family type that dominated the Roman Mediterranean. In turn, however, the conclusions of this study have been criticized for not fully acknowledging the regional diversity that emerged in its results.⁵

Definition, however, is not the only issue which has engaged historians of the family. The last generation of scholarship has focused on the component elements of family life that are regarded now and were regarded then as important: paternal power, family law, marriage patterns (including divorce and remarriage), the history of children and childbearing, the life course, old age, relations between family members (spouses, parents, and children), as well as between kin and non-kin members of the household.⁶ Instead of trying to contain the Roman family within a particular set of parameters, such studies have adumbrated the diverse elements of domestic life and considered their interplay. Rather than resolving the question of structure, they have complicated it by enhancing our understanding of the many dimensions of experience which fall within the category of ‘family life’, but for which the issue of structure has only minor relevance.

This fourth volume builds logically on its predecessors and on the scholarship on the family that has appeared in the intervening years. It has a twofold approach. A number of the studies complement the emphasis of the earlier conference volumes on Rome while also looking to a wider orbit. Using evidence from Italy, and most often Rome, the first three articles (Treggiari, George, Bradley) explore notions surrounding the family in the abstract and in reality. Treggiari examines the way the idea of ‘family’ was used in the forensic works of Cicero as a touchstone for elite morality, especially for men, and how the social family norms of pietas and affection informed the identity of the Roman nobility. George’s discussion of family portrait groups on Republican and early imperial funerary commemoration takes up the same set of attitudes toward family life and shows how the emerging urban middle class of Italy, former slaves in Rome and citizens of mixed origins in Cisalpine Gaul, used family imagery to position themselves in the mainstream culture. Bradley, by contrast, investigates the harder side of ancient family life in his survey of diseases and treatments of illnesses, thus retrieving a sobering dimension of ancient experience which is radically different from the modern.

The remaining chapters begin the examination of family life in the Roman world outside Italy in a systematic way focusing on specific regions. These studies revisit the issue of family structure, both directly and obliquely, as they tackle the enormous problem of how the Roman family, or forms of the Roman family, may have revealed themselves in Rome’s provinces in the imperial age. Using a lesser known source, rescripts mostly from the east which are preserved in the Justinianic Codex, Evans Grubbs examines the domestic tensions that arose between parents and adult children, and shows how certain social values such as marital happiness were prized above patria potestas, the central doctrine of Roman family law. In raising the question of precisely how ‘Roman’ these third-century families from the Greek east were, this study introduces the problem of Roman identity, the issue at the heart of the remaining chapters. Williams and Alston examine family life in the eastern Roman empire and the different points of access, in the form of various kinds of evidence, which might allow us to discern its shape and track its development. Williams looks at the impact of Roman political rule on Jewish family life in the early imperial period, charting the relatively minor changes in circumcision, onomastics, and burial practices and drawing attention to the crucial role of Hellenization. Adopting methodologies from anthropological theory, Alston considers family structure in Roman Egypt, the role of local practices such as sibling marriage, and variations in patterns between urban and rural families.

Pursuing similar questions, but in quite different cultural contexts, the four final studies consider regions within the western empire, ranging from areas such as Spain and Gaul, which might justifiably be expected to have adopted more Roman practices and institutions than the Greek east, to the farther corners of North Africa and Pannonia, where multicultural layering poses special challenges. In his search for family structure, Edmondson’s statistical analysis of funerary commemorations in the province of Lusitania provides an illuminating pendant piece to Alston’s. Examining factors such as gender, age, and onomastic conventions, Edmondson argues for a direct relationship between the Roman political presence and the shape of social relations in the province, while at the same time tracing the presence of indigenous cultural attitudes, such as the particularly high valuation of women, which diverged from Roman norms. In Lusitania, as in Egypt, it seems that families might have assumed a Roman form to some degree while at the same time maintaining attitudes and behaviours rooted in the pre-Roman context.

This might well have been true in Roman Gaul as well, but, as Woolf explains, the three Gauls taken as a whole offer far less evidence on which to base an analysis. In the absence of sufficient conventional sources, Woolf contemplates the potential value of certain aspects of culture, such as a rhetorical education and Roman law, as agents of change and as inducements for family members to adopt Roman family values and structure. ‘Going Roman’ had the greatest appeal for men, Woolf suggests, but in many aspects Gallo-Romano families, like those in Egypt and Lusitania, probably exercised choice in the ways in which they conformed to Roman models. The delineation of cultural identity presents similar problems in North Africa for Corbier, not for lack of evidence but for its complexity. In extricating possible Roman influence on family structure and practice from among the varied cultural influences (indigenous, Hellenized Greek, Punic, Roman, and eventually Christian) which shaped family life, Corbier finds conventional Roman approaches to funerary commemoration (albeit with the occasional local twist), but speculates that distinctive North African customs might be visible in, for example, regional variations in marriage customs. In distant Pannonia, Boatwright’s funerary stelae portray affectionate family groups attired in both Roman and local traditional dress, making a statement about family identity in a way that is not exclusively Roman, yet is congruent with Roman attitudes. Behind these studies lies the thorny question of ‘Romanization’, the process of acculturation that has conventionally been viewed as a kind of local imitation of Roman attitudes and institutions. In recent years, however, this assumption has come under careful scrutiny, and increasingly it is argued that, far from being a straightforward mimicking of the dominant power, the evidence from the provinces illustrates the formation of new regional cultures and identities through the blending of Roman and local forms. New debates about the meaning of ‘Romanization’ and the extent to which local cultures adopted and absorbed Roman norms, practices, and ideologies add another complicating element in the search for the family in the Roman provinces.⁷

The collection does not pretend to cover the whole Roman empire, nor do the authors presume to offer definitive coverage of the family in their respective areas. On the contrary, a shared characteristic of the provincial chapters is an awareness of the difficulties inherent in exploring issues such as family structure and more intractable matters such as affective relationships in social contexts which cannot be assumed to have been entirely ‘Roman’. The authors in this volume exploit different kinds of evidence in diverse ways, reflecting the reality of often vastly heterogeneous material which exists in differing degrees of quantity and quality. Some (Alston, Edmondson) rely extensively on papyrological and epigraphic material, while others (George, Boatwright) focus on visual imagery. Treggiari and Bradley draw from conventional texts, while Evans Grubbs concentrates on an undervalued juridical source. Still others (Williams, Woolf, Corbier) adopt an eclectic approach, taking advantage of the evidence available in their respective regions. Yet, even in the face of limited sources, it seems clear enough that in different parts of the empire variations in family practice existed within a set of accepted social values, whose precise shape admittedly we cannot always see. This is not surprising, considering the flexibility the populace at Rome itself enjoyed in matters of marriage, adoption, and inheritance, while operating within the bounds of Roman law.

Although preliminary in many respects, this volume takes a definite step outwards from Rome and Italy to try to understand family life in the Roman imperial period on a wide geographical basis in a way that has not been previously attempted. The exploratory approaches selected here lay the groundwork for further provincial studies and, ultimately, for a better understanding of family life across Rome’s empire as a whole. In opening up new lines of inquiry into the Roman family, this volume raises questions about how the terms ‘Roman’ and ‘family’ are defined, and suggests numerous avenues which might be followed in future research. The anthropological and theoretical methodologies in Alston’s and Woolf’s chapters, for example, might fruitfully be applied to other provinces, as might Williams’s and Corbier’s selection of particular kinds of epigraphic and archaeological material for family life and social values. Another potential topic for discussion is the possible variation in attitudes and practices over time, both within particular regions and in comparison with one another. For example, did Apuleius or Plutarch mean the same thing as Cicero when they wrote about family, and to what extent is modern scholarship able to elucidate the distinctions that must have existed among them? What are the differences between the west and the east, where the Greek traditions of family life automatically come into play? Scholarly interest in the Greek family has followed from the growth of Roman family studies, but the extent to which family behaviour as evidenced in classical Greece was the same as or different from family life among the Greeks of the Roman imperial age remains to be examined. What, if any, were the ramifications of the spread of Christianity on family life and forms of family interaction? While family studies within early Christianity have been undertaken by New Testament scholars, only rarely has there been any significant engagement with the conventional Graeco-Roman texts or secondary literature, nor in general have classical scholars ventured into the unfamiliar territory of biblical sources. Finally, family life in late antiquity, for which there are numerous good sources, has received less attention than it deserves.⁸

The subject is far from exhausted. No one has as yet produced the definitive book on the Roman family that combines all these approaches, uses a comprehensive theoretical framework, or considers how the Roman family changed over time. Despite the problems of definition and of available evidence, it is clear that there is still much to be learned about Roman family life, and that great advances in scholarship have been made in the last twenty plus years. This collection, like all conference volumes, is partial and lacks the consistency demanded of a single-authored monograph. It does, however, offer answers to a number of specific questions while setting new challenges for another generation of scholars in a field still ripe for investigation.