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Dive into the intricate dynamics of Roman families with insights on familia, paterfamilias, women's roles, and marriage customs in ancient Rome.
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Suggested Reading • Beryl Rawson, “The Roman Family,” in The Family in Ancient Rome: New Perspectives. Ed. Beryl Rawson, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986, pages 1-57. • Ann R. Raia and Judith L. Sebesta, editors. Companion to the Worlds of Roman Women (https://feminaeromanae.org/)
Familia and Paterfamilias • Familia: the conjugal family and dependants (i.e., a man, his wife, and their unmarried children, together with the slaves and sometimes freedmen and foster children who lived in the same household). It was not an extended or joint family because it did not normally include more remote relatives or several conjugal groups or even several generations of the stem family. The size of the familiavaried greatly, depending largely on the wealth of the head of the household. • Paterfamilias: the formal head of the legally recognized family who was the oldest surviving male ascendant. His authority over his descendants lasted until his death, unless formally dissolved by a legal act. In all families the paterfamilias retained full powers over the family property. His children (regardless of their age) could own nothing in their own right while he was still living. Women and grown children could have a very inferior legal status. In practice, they enjoyed considerable independence.
Women and Marriage • Women's prime societal role was to marry and produce legitimate children. Marriage was: liberorum quaerendum gratia, a phrase attested in the ancient sources, perhaps a legal or ritual formula. • The form of marriage most common in the late Republic and Empire was the "free" marriage (sine manu) in which the woman remained under the authority of her original paterfamilias if he was still alive, or, if her father was dead, remained independent and did not come under her husband's formal authority (sui iuris). However, a guardian (tutor) would be assigned to her (customarily a male relative), regardless of her age and marital status. The tutor was expected to watch over her financial and legal affairs and to protect any property that she inherited. To some extent, then, she did not belong to her husband's familia, but remained a member of her own familia. In marriage sine manu, the wife had greater freedom to manage her own property and to initiate divorce. • Marriage sine manu represented a shift from the earlier form of Roman marriage in which a woman normally entered her husband's control (cum manu).
Roman Marriage • Roman marriage was monogamous, so there was only one woman in the household whose role was wife and mother. A husband might take pleasure from his female slaves, but he could not set a woman up in the special role of concubine in his house while he had a wife living. • The Roman household was usually quite small, providing an opportunity for close relations between its members. The prime public purpose of marriage continued to be the procreation of children, but many families did not produce sufficient children to perpetuate themselves. This enabled the membership of the more numerous slaves and freedmen to assume a special importance. The small number of children and the monogamous nature of marriage must also have heightened the conjugal couple’s awareness of themselves as spouses rather than parents.
Roman Marriage • No marriage relied on any particular ceremony for its validity. Cohabitation of eligible partners, accompanied by “marital intention and regard” constituted marriage. But traditional ceremonies of betrothal and wedding helped to establish marital intention and were frequently observed. The bride's family normally provided a dowry, which was used by the groom's family for the economic maintenance of the bride. The husband was accountable for the money and property which his wife brought as dowry, and this was usually reclaimable by the wife if the marriage was dissolved. She might also have other property put at her disposal by her father, and even if she remained technically under her father’s authority this was probably not very effective – financially or otherwise – when she lived in a different household.
Roman Marriage • First marriages were normally arranged by the parents of the couple. Although these marriages must often have been intended to suit the interests or ambitions of the parents rather than the inclinations of the couple, the law required that when betrothal and marriage took place both partners should be old enough to understand the vows and both should consent. • Since boys were normally older than girls at marriage (a 5-year age difference was probably most common) and would already have begun some of the activities of a citizen, a son's wishes may have been taken more seriously than a daughter's. The grounds on which a daughter could withhold her consent were severely restricted: she had to claim and prove that the proposed husband was of bad moral character. At a girl's first betrothal she was probably very young and not in a position to press her preferences against those of her parents.
Legal Age and Status of Marriage • The legal minimum age of marriage was 12 for girls and 14 for boys, and betrothal could take place some time before that. Augustus fixed the minimum age for betrothal at 10. In exceptional circumstances, such as the need to make dynastic arrangements in the imperial family, betrothal sometimes was made in infancy. Evidence shows that most upper-class girls were first married between the ages of 11 and 17. • Legal marriage could not take place if the couple was too young. Also, people could not legally marry if they were non-citizens, too close in blood-relations, or of radically different social class (e.g., if one partner was of senatorial family and the other an ex-slave).
Status of Parents and Children • Legitimate children born of a legal marriage belonged to their father's family and bore his family name (nomen). Continuance of the family name (nomen) was of great importance. • Illegitimate children belonged to their mother's family and bore her family name. • In a regular Roman marriage, children took their status from that of their father at the time of their conception, otherwise they took their status from that of their mother at the time of their birth. So, two slave parents (no legal marriage was possible) produced a slave child. If one parent became free, there still could be no legal marriage. A further child would be a slave if the mother had remained a slave, but freeborn (and illegitimate) if only the father remained a slave. If both parents finally won their freedom, any children born to them would be freeborn and legitimate.The possibility of such different status among parents, brothers and sisters, must have encouraged much freedom of movement between different classes.
Children • For the Republic and Empire, for poor and rich, the nuclear family was generally small and rarely exceeded 2 or 3 children. • Many rewards and penalties were intended to encourage people to marry and produce legitimate children and to discourage childlessness and adultery. Caesar's laws of 59 B.C. made land available to fathers of 3 or more children as well as to Pompey's veterans. Cicero in 46 B.C. in pro Marcello 23 urged Caesar to use his influence to promote larger families. Augustus sponsored legislation in 18 B.C. and again in 9 A.D. (the lex Iulia and the lex Papia Poppaea) to assign political advantages to fathers of 3 or more children, and to impose political and financial penalties on childless couples and unmarried women over the age of 20 and unmarried men over the age of 25. Parents gained full privileges of the ius liberorum by producing 3 or more children; the privileges included earlier candidacy for political office for men and freedom from tutela and the restrictions of the lex Voconia for women.
Reasons for Declining Birthrate • The sources agree that the laws failed in the aim of encouraging Romans to marry and have many children and were also unsuccessful in discouraging adultery. • Some have theorized that there was possibly a general sterility from the lead used in certain processes. Other reasons suggested for the low birth rate have included biological weaknesses, poor medical standards, political repression, financial greed, poverty, and the liberation of women. There was also a high death rate among infants. But the general view is that people were deliberately limiting their families to 1 or 2 children. Elite Romans risked disenfranchisement with successive division of their estates in each generation. Poor families may have been unable to support more children and probably aborted them or exposed them at birth. Exposure was accepted as a means of family planning, and various forms of contraception were used.
“Surrogate” Mothers • Keith Bradley argues that wet-nursing was practiced at Rome extensively among the upper classes. It may have provided parents with a device which prevented them from investing too much emotion in their children, or with a cushion against the grief accompanying premature death of their children. • Suzanne Dixon has shown that, in addition to wet-nurses, other relatives in the household, grandmothers, aunts, and foster parents cared for the young children in upper class and working class homes. All these were given respect and affection, excepting step-mothers who were seen to care primarily for their own children. Given the variety of mother surrogates involved in the rearing of the young child, Dixon argues that mothers may have had a more emotionally distant relationship with their infant children than with their adolescent and adult children. The plentiful number of surrogate mothers not only weakened the affectionate and emotional bond between mother and young child, but also permitted the upper class mother more mobility and freedom outside the home, for work or social pursuits. Women broke from the identification of motherhood as their only role.
Education of Children • In families that valued their children's education, the mother was traditionally responsible for the earliest years. • There are many direct references to upper-class well-educated mothers and to women noted for their literary or intellectual gifts. They had a significant role in the family deliberations or when their husbands were absent, using keen intellect as well as good sense. • In elementary or secondary stages girls’ and boys’ education may have been very similar: some girls went to public schools. Girls as well as boys participated in public religious ritual. • From a boy's coming-of-age ceremony he became a citizen in a sense that his sister would never be: he would have a vote and could have a public career. It was at this point that the father's influence must have been decisive, and the unequal political roles of men and women differentiated the father-son relationship from the father-daughter relationship.
Claudia, 2nd century B.C., Rome, CIL I .1211 = CIL VI.15346 • Hospes, quod deico paullum est, asta ac pellege. • Heic est sepulcrum hau pulcrum pulcrai feminae: • nomen parentes nominarunt Claudiam. • suom mareitum corde deilexit souo: • gnatos duos creavit: horunc alterum • in terra linquit, alium sub terra locat. • sermone lepido, tum autem incessu commodo. • Domum servavit. Lanam fecit. Dixi, Abei. • Stranger, what I have to say is brief, stand near and listen. • This is the not at all beautiful tomb of a beautiful woman: • her parents named her Claudia. • She loved her husband with her heart: • she bore two sons; one of these • she has left upon earth, the other she has placed under the earth. • Her speech was charming, and her walk was graceful. • She preserved the house. She worked the wool. I have spoken, farewell.
Women and Wealth • From the 2nd century B.C., great amounts of wealth accrued to women, and this happened despite the laws restricting this: the lex Voconia of 169 B.C. forbade those belonging to the top property class to designate women as heirs (there were, however, many means of benefiting women if the testators wished it); the lex Oppia was passed in the 2nd Punic War to restrict women's display of wealth but later rescinded in 196 B.C. • Certainly, the widowing of many upper class Roman matrons during the Punic Wars was a contributing factor in the great amount of wealth passing into women's hands. The establishment of an actio rei uxoriae in 230 B.C. for the return of a dowry to a woman after she was divorced or widowed suggests that divorce and the departure of the widow from her marital home had already become more common than in early Rome. Certainly in the late Republic, we see upper class women highly prominent for their wealth. By the mid-Republic, elite women could make wills and apparently bequeathed their wealth freely; it was expected that they would pass their property on to their biological children rather than to their relatives on their father's side (i.e., cognate over agnatic inheritance).
Widows • When a husband died, a widow was expected to go into mourning and not remarry for 10 months. The reason for this particular length of time must have been to prevent any doubt about a child's paternity. No such period of mourning was required of men, but widowers often did observe mourning. • There was an emphasis in early Rome on the univira, the woman with one husband. The term was also used to designate the widow who declined remarriage out of loyalty to her husband's memory. But Augustus, anxious that a woman's child-bearing years should not be wasted, required widows up to the age of 50 to remarry within a period of two years. This was probably never enforced in the lower classes, with whose birth rate Augustus was not particularly concerned. From the time of the late Republic or earlier, widows commonly remarried. • By the late Republic, it is assumed that women will move into other marriages, taking their property with them but on the understanding that their children will ultimately share it.
Divorce • Either husband or wife or sometimes the paterfamilias could initiate divorce. A simple notification of intent to divorce was sufficient, and no cause need be given; the concept of a “guilty party” was not important. • The causes of divorce are varied: childlessness, political arrangements, and adultery were among the most common. Until Augustus, the state normally took no interest in divorce and the relations of married couples except to recognize a husband's right to kill a wife and her lover if they were caught inflagranti delicto.
Adultery • Augustus' moral legislation in 18 B.C. made adultery a criminal offense. • Adultery strictly applied only to affairs with married women. If a husband had caught a wife in the act of adultery he was required to divorce her and then bring her to trial for adultery: this was his public duty. If he failed to do so, he made himself liable to prosecution by any outsider. • A woman could divorce her husband for extra-marital activities, and could on this count make more rigorous her demands for the restoration of dowry, but she could not initiate a criminal charge against him. • The independence of Roman wives but also their separateness from their husband's family is highlighted by the absence of any concept of alimony (beyond the return of the dowry). The husband almost certainly retained the children of the marriage, so the divorced wife was very much “on her own.”
Impact of Augustus’Moral Legislation • Augustus' concern was to protect the “purity” or official legitimacy of upper-class family descent. He aimed to guard against married women bearing illegitimate children who would inherit an unsuspecting husband's name and property. He also aimed to prevent women of good family producing children outside the conjugal family unit – these children could not inherit a father's name or rank, they were under no paterfamilias, and would not fit naturally into the career structure of equestrian or senatorial families. • There was strong public opinion in the upper classes against all of Augustus' moral legislation, and a number of women made their own protest in Tiberius' time by registering themselves officially as prostitutes so that the law would not apply to them. The motive for this extraordinary action was surely women's liberation -- to free women's lives from the intolerable interference by the state and perhaps to claim for themselves the freedom granted to men to have "disrespectful" liaisons without the fear of punishment.
