The Roman Family in the Empire

Abstract

This book examines family life in the Roman empire and Italy, focusing on the influence of Rome on provincial family structure and attitudes towards family life as well as regional differences in family structure, forms of marriage, and kinship patterns. The chapters cover Roman Egypt, Judaea, Spain, Gaul, North Africa, and Pannonia, and make use of both conventional textual sources and epigraphic evidence, as well as material that is less frequently treated, such as the medical writers and the Justinianic receipts. Notions surrounding the family are explored in the abstract and in reality, such as the idea of family as used in the forensic works of Cicero as a touchstone for elite morality, especially for men, and how the social family norms of pietas and affection informed the identity of the Roman nobility. A discussion of family portrait groups on Republican and early imperial funerary commemoration takes up the same set of attitudes toward family life and shows how the emerging urban middle class of Italy, former slaves in Rome and citizens of mixed origins in Cisalpine Gaul, used family imagery to position themselves in the mainstream culture. There is also a chapter on the harder side of ancient family life in a survey of diseases and treatments of illnesses, thus retrieving a sobering dimension of ancient experience which is radically different from the modern. The remaining chapters look at family life in the Roman world outside Italy in a systematic way focusing on specific regions.