Review: The Single Life in the Roman and Later Roman World, edited by Sabine R. Huebner and Christian Laes

Abstract

Sabine R. Huebner and Christian Laes, ed., The Single Life in the Roman and Later Roman World . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 434 pp. ISBN 9781108470170. $130.00. “All the single ladies” will not be surprised nor will their male and gender fluid counterparts: there was never a time in history without persons who lived the single life, however defined. What is surprising is that the single life has received comparatively scant scholarly attention, especially in the premodern period. Indeed, as Christian Laes observes, “sociocultural research on the single life in the Roman empire has been virtually absent so far” (21). Once one considers how to define “the single life,” however, the relative scarcity of scholarly investigation becomes easier to fathom. What is “the single life?” In his detailed and sophisticated introduction to this important volume Christian Laes makes it clear that Christian asceticism is not what is primarily at issue (though it does of course play a role), but rather something akin to “not married and not in a sexual partnership” without a religious motivation to forgo either and while of an age at that allows for both. In other words, many human beings experience such a situation at some point in the course of their life, for example while not yet married or no longer married because of being widowed or divorced. But does that mean they live a single life? After all, they could be part of an extended family; does that count? In short, analyzing the single life in premodern societies such as the Roman and Later Roman world poses significant conceptual and methodological challenges. As Laes points out, even in today's Western industrialized societies that form the basis of his comparative analysis (3–5), the single life encompasses such potentially contradictory elements as “the legal fact of not being married or not being in an exclusive relationship” (whereby being in an exclusive relationship is only sometimes a legal fact); “living alone and the possible …