Abstract

Abstract This brief chapter introduces some central legal concepts that underlie Roman family law. Most of them are related to the legal idea of “family” itself. As it turns out, the Latin word familia is usually better translated into English as “household” rather than “family”—and even this translation is none too accurate. It is easier, perhaps, to begin with the importance that Roman private law attached to the familia as the basic building block of the Roman state, since, metaphorically, the familia is often understood as the state in miniature. It has a form of governance that is theoretically vested in one person, a “head of the household” (pater familias, literally “father of the familia”). This person has extensive and virtually exclusive power over all property belonging to the household, including any slaves. But his power also extends to controlling the lives of those of his descendants related to him through males (sons and daughters, grandchildren through sons, and so on), that is, through what the Romans call an agnatic relationship; and in principle the power of the pater familias continues no matter how old these descendants are, unless the pater himself has released them from his power. Further, the power of the pater familias could be exercised over other free persons, including adopted children and also, in the archaic form of Roman marriage, his wife; but in the standard classical form of marriage the wife remained under the power of her own father (if he was still alive), and despite her marriage, she did not fall under her husband’s power. The Roman familia was thus, at least in legal theory, a little monarchy, with strict rules as to who was subject to the monarch’s power and who was not. This monarchy dissipated only on the death of a pater familias, to be replaced by new familiae governed by the father’s offspring.

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