Introduction: Familia and Families

Abstract

Abstract According to Roman law, Roman society was made up offamiliae; in real life, the Romans belonged to families. The two might sometimes coincide in composition, but only to a limited extent and for limited periods of time, since whereas theJamilia, being a legal construct, had a universal and unchanging, clearly defined structure and a fixed membership, with only a few variables, there were almost infinite possibilities of variation in the make-up of individual family groups, and these could also undergo considerable alterations, from the point of view of an individual, within his or her lifetime. Another difference was that thefamilia was self-contained; it not only had a very restricted membership but it was entirely separate and discrete from all other familiae. Families, on the other hand, overlapped with each other, and were constantly creating new overlaps, through the usual means of marital couplings and births. The main thing that the familia and families had in common was biological connection between the persons each contained. This was real for ‘real’, i.e. natural, families, while for the familia there was a presumption that those free persons under the control of its legal head, the paterfamilias, were biologically descended from him-although such descent could also be fictitiously created by the legal mechanism of adoption.