Pater Familias, Mater Familias, and the Gendered Semantics of the Roman Household

Abstract

F EW LATIN TERMS COME as heavily loaded with conceptual baggage as paterfamilias. In both scholarly and popular discourse, paterfamilias, defined as head of household, evokes patriarchal organization characteristic of Roman family and of wider society.' Debates over family values in contemporary popular discourse make shorthand (and clumsy) references to model of family or the Roman code of Paterfamilias, as if everyone understands content of that model.2 A survey of undergraduate syllabi and study guides on internet shows that paterfamilias is often listed as a key term for understanding Roman society. At other end of scholarly spectrum, Real-Encyclopddie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft includes a long entry on paterfamilias by E. Sachers, who asserts that in reverence and obedience toward paterfamilias lay characteristic foundation for greatness of ancient Rome.3 A comprehensive survey of all uses of paterfamilias in classical texts, however, reveals a major disjunction between this modern understanding of term (rooted in Roman law) and ancient usage. The following sections draw on survey to generalize about where term is used and where it is not, and present quotations from ancient texts to illustrate what term connotes. I begin by illustrating common modern understanding of pater familias as severe patriarch whose power defined Roman family. The next sections analyze use of paterfamilias in legal texts and then nonlegal texts. The full word study shows that term appears predominantly in legal texts and much less densely in literary texts. In both discourses, most common meaning of pater familias is estate owner without reference tofamilial relations. The final section of this paper seeks to offer a gendered perspective on meaning of paterfamilias by a parallel survey of uses of materfamilias in classical Latin prose. Sociolinguists