The Roman Family in the Empire

[Ursus]

Michele George (ed.), The Roman Family in the Empire. Rome, Italy, and

Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 384. ISBN

0-19-926841-X. $125.00.

 

Reviewed by Aglaia McClintock, Universita\ degli Studi del Sannio

(aglaia.mcclintock@...)

Word count: 1603 words

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Table of Contents

(http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip057/2005002931.html)

 

"The Roman Family in the Empire" is a collection of essays edited by

Michele George set in the wake of the Australian conferences, begun by

Beryl Rawson in 1981, that produced three volumes published in 1986,

1991 and 1997. As the editor points out in her Introduction (pp. 1-8)

"quite coincidentally a number of scholars in different parts of the

mainly Anglo-American world were beginning to focus on the topic of the

Roman family as a distinct theme in ancient social history." This book

dedicated to Beryl Rawson collects the proceedings of a fourth

Conference held in Canada in 2001. George recalls as a starting point

Keith Hopkins's pioneering application of demography to the ancient

context and particularly the demographic study of Saller and Shaw on

the Roman family. Saller and Shaw, using funerary inscriptions from

Western Europe, arrived at the conclusion that the Roman family was

essentially nuclear, similar to our modern family based on solidarity

and affection. The editor gives an outline of some of the criticisms of

this view that have been expressed. Two of the main arguments are that

the Roman term familia cannot be translated as "family", but has other

meanings such as "household" and that there is widespread evidence

through the Roman empire territories of extended families with a more

complex structure than the nuclear one. But for George, the last

generation of scholarship that has focused on the component elements of

family life, "rather than resolving the question of structure", has

complicated it "by enhancing our understanding of the many dimensions

of experience which fall within the category of 'family life', but for

which the issue of structure has only minor relevance." The stated aim

of the collection is to extend research beyond Italy to investigate

regional diversity. The approaches of the essays vary but are very

centered on criticizing, furthering or detailing the theories of Saller

and Shaw. After an overview of the book's contents we will come back to

these strong opening statements of the editor.

 

The first three contributions feature general problems. Susan Treggiari

(pp. 9-35) focuses on how the idea of family was used by Cicero in his

forensic works to influence judges and audience. Treggiari analyses

Cicero's efforts in depicting favorable portraits of his clients with

the aid of examples drawn from their private lives. She observes that

these digressions of the orator concentrate on mutual affection and on

the 'proper behavior' that family members should uphold. The author's

conclusion is that Cicero's powers of influencing the general public

are based on a common idea of mutual affection (father-daughter,

son-father) among Roman social classes.

 

Michele George (pp. 37-66) analyses family portrait groups of the

Republican and early imperial ages. Although somewhat distant in time

and space these portraits reflect the image of a stereotyped family due

to the desire of the emerging Italian middle class, ex-slaves from the

city of Rome, and Cisalpine Gaul mixed citizens to position themselves

in the mainstream culture.

 

How parents dealt with important issues such as the health and sickness

of their children, and the fear of losing them, is discussed by Keith

Bradley (pp. 67-92) surveying a large number of literary texts. Given

the great infant mortality and consciousness of the inadequacy of

doctors in solving medical problems, Romans--"when survival was all

that mattered"--fell back on every expedient including, charms, amulets

and prayers.

 

Judith Evan Grubbs's essay (pp. 93-128) introduces us to an ideal

second part of the book centered on examining family life in the Roman

world outside Italy. The author examines cases of 'improper' family

conduct, namely of parent-child conflict, through the evidence of the

Justinian Code focusing on the third century imperial rescripts, to try

to understand to what degree the Greek east families mentioned therein

fitted a Roman pattern.

 

Richard Alston's contribution (pp. 129-157) on the Egyptian family, by

evaluating a vast array of sources (census returns, archives and

private letters of the first three centuries AD) arrives at the

conclusion that it is not possible to sketch a homogeneous family

structure for Roman Egypt. Altson discusses endogamous marriage in

Egypt as a degree of insecurity felt by family members in respect to a

harsher outside world. Although families appear to have had a fairly

tight-knit centre "often concentrating on a single conjugal

relationship" they could extend to include others that were not kin for

social and economic purposes. In some cases the author underlines that

family was so extended as to dissolve into community (an aspect

particularly shown by the letters).

 

The Jewish family in Judea from Pompey to Hadrian is analyzed by

Margaret Williams (pp. 159-182). Romanization, according to the author,

was mainly restricted to the elites who had the wealth to buy the Roman

status symbols, and--as far as regulation was concerned--it took place

in areas where the Thora was unprescriptive as in the fields of

marriage arrangements and burial. Without doubt Romanization brought

changes but they were superficial as the onomastic data would prove.

Williams argues that "it would not have cost non-elite Jews anything to

give their children Roman names," therefore if they chose not to,

preferring the names used by the Maccabees and the Hasmonean dynasty,

it is evidence of their intention of maintaining a cultural identity

but also of their political attitude towards Rome.

 

Jonathan Edmonson (pp. 183-229) investigates funerary commemoration and

family relations in Lusitania. He adopts Saller and Shaw's demographic

method aiming to concentrate on regional variation thanks to the great

number of inscriptions that have been published after the CIL. His

conclusion is that if nuclear families were predominant there were

subtle variations. According to the author, where Romanization had

penetrated to a lesser degree, women appear to have played a more

prominent role as commemorators.

 

Family structure and relations in Northwest provinces are discussed by

Greg Wolf (pp. 231-254) using a comparative approach given the little

epigraphic and funerary evidence that can be found in these areas.

Wolf, considering the seduction of Roman patriarchy with all the powers

on the members of the household that it entailed, argues that it was in

the interest of the adult males (of those who had Roman citizenship or

desired to acquire it) "that makes it likely that many chose to

organize their families in the Roman way even if they did not have to

do so."

 

Mirelle Corbier (pp. 255-285) examines marriages between cousins in

Roman Africa underlining that close-kin marriage, as well as remarriage

of a widow to her husband's brother were present and permitted until

the third century. It was with the Christians that this kind of union

became suspicious before being prohibited.

 

The peculiarities of the tombstones of Pannonia are discussed by Mary

T. Boatwright (pp. 287-318). The author focuses particularly on the

representation of a mother nursing her infant, found on three Pannonian

stelae, an image extremely rare in Roman art. Boatwright argues that

this picture is less striking in Pannonian context where usually

funerary art displays great emphasis on family ties in all social

groups cutting across "simplistic binary oppositions of 'native' and

Roman, civilian and military." The strong idealization of the nuclear

family may be connected to the harsh living conditions of a region

continuously exposed to war that rendered family life especially

precious.

 

Displaying a great array of sources the book provides useful

information especially on the Roman family beyond Italy, but the lack

of a unitary timeframe does not help the reader to understand the

peculiarities of Roman family in the empire and the differences with

the Republican period. Furthermore, at first glance the sources seem to

include also the legal ones. George stresses in her Introduction how

Evan Grubbs "concentrates on an undervalued juridical source". But

what seems to be undervalued is in general Roman family law. The legal

sources used in the book are isolated in Grubbs's study and are very

scarcely used in the rest of the articles. The legal debate on the

family taking place in European legal history seems to be totally

missing. George's opening statement that mainly the Anglo-American

world focused on the Roman family making it an autonomous topic

displays how auto-referential these studies appear to the European

reader. There is almost no trace in the references of the German,

Italian, French, and Spanish legal bibliography on the subject. It must

be said that also the European legal historiography has been at times

somewhat deaf to the Anglo-American world but certainly not to the same

degree. But it is difficult to think that the proposed study of the

Roman family in the Empire can avoid taking into consideration Michel

Humbert's social and legal study on remarriage, the analysis of

Augustus' legislation on marriage by T. Spagnuolo Vigorita, and the

studies of E. Cantarella on sexuality, just to mention a few. I would

like to end with an example of an article that could have been

particularly useful to the editor and the contributors: Famiglia romana

e demografia sociale (in Iura 43, pp. 99-111 published in 1995) by Eva

Cantarella on the structure of the Roman familia and its consequences

on family relations using a demographic, an anthropological and a legal

approach. Cantarella observes that the confrontation between different

disciplines and methodologies avoids us falling into

over-simplifications that take us far away from the comprehension of

reality. And this is valid both for the jurist who undervalues the

analysis analytical instruments of society, and for the historian or

the anthropologist who does not give proper consideration to the role

played by law. Unfortunately the latter seems to apply in the case of

this interesting book.

 

 

 

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