What Did Many Families Do in Ancient Rome When They Had No Son to Carry on the Family Name

Family Values in Ancient Rome

by Richard Saller

due north politics we hear a lot virtually family values. That is hardly surprising, considering the family is key to our sense of social well-being. Trends in divorce rates or in numbers of single-parent families are serious causes of concern and as well sources of heated political rhetoric. The well-being of the family is so basic that it is a good not reducible to affect on gross national product, though our economistic rhetoric today sometimes tries to make it one. I was shocked by a report on National Public Radio in which the harm done by abusive husbands beating wives was measured by the dollars lost to the economy. I would accept thought that the damage washed by spousal violence cannot exist captured in dollars--at least, the ancients would never have dreamt of applying such a measure out. The value of historical knowledge is that it gives us a sense of perspective to understand and assess our own condition and values.

A historical perspective is especially useful in thinking about the family and the moral values that contribute to our ideals of family life. In ideas about the lamentable state of the contemporary family unit, there is almost always some explicit or implicit historical narrative. When nosotros lament the fact that families today are falling apart, it is generally understood that this represents a deterioration from a better past when families were salubrious and whole--the paradigm of the Cleaver family unit in "Get out It to Beaver," with a gentle father, a wise housewife-mother and 2 basically decent but mischievous sons. The politics of such an image of the family are powerful. In the conservative view, if families were healthy and whole again, government wouldn't have to have a good many social back up programs. In the feminist view, this prototype of the family idealizes a subordinate role for women equally housewives.

I accept no intention of entering these gimmicky political debates. My point is that these debates, and the social issues underlying them, look different depending on your historical perspective--that is, whether you lot believe that history is a long struggle against patriarchy or a evolution toward fragmentation of the family, or whether you believe women accept e'er been in the home until the aberration of the final few decades.

Now, I am non a sociologist, able to comment authoritatively on trends in family unit life over the past 3 decades. Rather, as a Roman historian, I have a longer historical perspective. Though 2,000 years afar in time, ancient Rome is still relevant to our debates and assumptions today, because it was a formative menstruation in European history; it was the time when Christianity emerged with a set up of moral doctrines that are still with united states of america today. The Romans besides adult a body of law from which important elements of family police force in the United States and Europe are descended. Furthermore, Rome was the starting point for some of the standard historical narratives about the evolution of the family and country that inform our modern assumptions.

Allow me sketch what I have to exist the standard evolutionary narrative, which might be summarized as a long-term shift from the patriarchal family unit of early on times to the contemporary democratic family. There are numerous strands to this narrative, some happy and some not so happy. By patriarchal family I hateful a large family dominated by a male elder who sternly wielded dominance over women and children. By democratic family unit I mean the smaller family of today in which father, mother and children all have rights, all accept a vocalization, and where children's needs are lovingly tended to. To the great nineteenth-century social theorists, such as Henry Maine, the patriarchal family was the starting signal for their story of the evolution of lodge. In primitive times, before the being of the state, family unit and kinship were the organizing units of a simple order.

Earlier the invention of the country, Henry Maine imagined, it was the father who wielded authorization and kept order. And the prototypical father for Maine and other nineteenth-century social theorists was the Roman paterfamilias. The Roman begetter was a powerful type, because he possessed almost unlimited powers within the family, co-ordinate to subsequently Roman law. He had the power of life and death over his children, meaning that at birth he could choose to raise them or kill them, and afterward he could punish them by execution. (The celebrated legendary founder of the Roman Republic, Junius Brutus, had his sons executed for disobedience.) In addition, the early Roman begetter owned all property in his family; his children, no thing how former, were unable to own annihilation in their ain proper noun every bit long as the father lived. A 45-year-old senator could hold the highest part of the state, the consulship, just if his father was still alive he couldn't own a denarius' worth of property. The father also had the power to make or intermission his children's marriages. In early times, fathers ruled their households, and their potency maintained order and stability.

Then, in a wide social-historical evolution, patriarchy declined, as paternal dominance and control were weakened by the increasing independence of wives and children. Fathers were no longer able to use limitless force arbitrarily confronting family members. Wives and children were no longer the property of the paterfamilias, and came to enjoy the right to ain and dispose of their own property. Children began to be allowed to cull a spouse, and those choices were more influenced by romantic love. As a result of this historical evolution, we now live in an age of the affectionate family, an age when women have more independence, financial and otherwise, and when children are loved and less apt to receive corporal punishment.

I want to advise that this story makes for dubious history, though it makes for powerful political rhetoric. It is non that all of the strands of the story are completely wrong. Rather, it is a story that is grossly oversimplified to serve the political rhetoric of the ages. One of the reasons that I say it is dubious history is that family historians of widely differing periods seem to exist able to detect in their ain age the refuse of patriarchy, the growth of individualism, and the invention of family unit affection characteristic of the democratic family. How many times can family affection have been invented? The modern historians Edward Shorter and Lawrence Stone placed the invention in modern Europe; the Roman historian Paul Veyne placed it in Rome in the get-go century after Christ; and the medievalist David Herlihy placed information technology in his own period of written report, the Center Ages.

The Romans had their ain evolutionary story about family mores, and information technology had nothing to practise with the invention of affection, which they took to be natural and eternal in the family. However, their story did incorporate elements of the turn down of paternal authorization and the stable family. Roman authors--all men--often lamented that in the late Republic wives no longer played the ideal role that they had fulfilled for centuries. According to the Roman writers of the first century BCE and beginning century CE, divorce became increasingly frequent after 200 BCE, initiated easily by the husband or the wife. In addition, wives had their own property, which they could sell, give away or bestow as they liked. As a result, women became more liberated and less dependent on their husbands. In fact, by the tardily Republic a rich married woman who could divorce and take her wealth with her had a real threat against her husband and could wield influence over him. The sense of independence also showed up in increasing sexual promiscuity and adultery.

Roman men deplored the fact that these rich women were more than concerned with their own figures and luxuries than with their families. Unlike the good, old-time matrons, according to the historian Tacitus around 100 CE, these mod women did not spend fourth dimension with their children and did not nurse their infants just left them to slave moisture nurses. Furthermore, children were handed over to be raised by child-minders, usually the about useless slaves of the household.

Roman authors don't say much about daughters in full general, but they wrote near the moral decline of sons. In the age of degeneracy, sons in their youth no longer obeyed their fathers the fashion they used to, they spent profligately on women and wine and they became increasingly sexually promiscuous. This moral degeneracy took an ugly turn in the social anarchy of the civil wars that brought the Republic to an end after Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE: Roman authors reported that sons turned on their fathers during the violence.

After Caesar'south successor, Augustus, won the ceremonious war in 31 BCE and established his autocratic rule over the empire, he sought to institute his political legitimacy by reversing the moral decline of the past century. To do so, he passed a body of moral reforms, nearly of which were directed at the restoration of family values. In particular, Augustus made adultery a public offense and tried to force Romans to marry and to have a sure number of children, past establishing financial penalties for failure to practice and then. Augustus apparently didn't believe in the dictum that "you tin't legislate morality." Co-ordinate to Tacitus, these laws didn't have the intended improving effect, and they certainly aroused the resentment of upper-course Romans at the intrusion into their private lives.

Any the furnishings of Augustus' family laws, they demonstrate a perception on the part of Augustus and his contemporaries of a serious moral decline that needed to be remedied. But had the Roman family actually declined in the final century of the Republic--that is, the period from 146 BCE to 49 BCE--or was the decline a figment of Augustus' ideological imagination? In fact, the historical reality of the decline is very hard to demonstrate. The problem for the states historians is ane of accurate sources. The Romans emerged into the total calorie-free of history only in 200 BCE, at the time the first Roman historian wrote; for the period earlier 200 BCE we have nigh no gimmicky written testify. By 200 BCE, Rome was already the ruler of Italian republic and a globe power. The earliest contemporary Latin writings date from the years immediately later the 2nd Punic War and just before the supposed moral decline; these texts engagement from 200-150 BCE and have the form of comic plays past Plautus and Terence and prose treatises past Cato.

What is interesting almost these earliest Latin authors is that they are already deploring the moral decline of their own time. The stern, self-righteous moralist Cato, writing in the decades before his death, in 149 BCE, was already decrying independently wealthy women; he complained of wives who were rich plenty to loan coin to their husbands and then hounded them to repay when they became unhappy. A standard grapheme type in the comedies of Plautus, written not long after 200 BCE, was the loose-living son who was smitten with dearest, oft for a prostitute. In the plays--aboriginal versions of sitcoms-- there is a debate about whether fathers should exist strict or indulgent toward the moral failings of their sons--unremarkably they were indulgent in the end, only as in modern sitcoms. In fact, sons in these plays are never browbeaten for their disobedience, equally slaves are. Plautus' errant sons are not a fictitious type invented by his imagination but are characters that had their counterparts in reality. The historian Polybius, who lived in Rome around 160-150 BCE , described the lifestyle of his senatorial friend, Scipio Aemilianus. Co-ordinate to Polybius, Scipio was an unusual youth precisely considering he did not indulge in the fast living of his peers.

In short, the primeval Latin authors were already writing of the breakup of the good, orderly family in which the paterfamilias maintained authority over his wife and children. If there was always a better age before the decline, it must have been in the prehistoric era. An alternative interpretation--one that I lean toward--is that the golden age before the moral decline never existed in reality simply was a later invention by Roman authors who certainly had no reliable historical testify for moral trends. That is to say, the narrative of moral decline of the family was based on a historical mirage of a meliorate past, and information technology was no more than a mirage. It is fascinating that one of Plautus' comic characters, an unusually introspective father, is made to wonder out loud whether the sons of his day actually are worse behaved or whether fathers just like to imagine that in their own youth they were more obedient and morally virtuous.

Now, I am not suggesting that things never change; sociologists can document trends in family life today with sophisticated evidence and analysis. But I am suggesting that nosotros should not confuse the moral and political rhetoric of decline with real show for trends. The rhetoric has been repeatedly manipulated through the ages--at least as far back every bit the Greeks and Romans--because it carries such a powerful charge.

On the surface, the terms of the rhetoric of family unit values have changed over the past 2,000 years, though some of the key issues haven't. Take the issue of the proper function of the wife or mother in the household. How much independence should women enjoy? In Roman literature, it was invariably represented as a bad thing that husbands had lost command over their wives, simply more or less all Roman authors were males, and then nosotros get only one side of the debate. To Roman men, an independent wife or, worse nonetheless, a superior wife represented an inversion of the natural hierarchical relationship of men and women. And men didn't like it, a feeling voiced most vehemently in Juvenal's misogynistic Sixth Satire. Juvenal didn't want a rich married woman to lord it over him, and in fact he didn't like superior women at all.

Juvenal's extravaganza of the independent-thinking woman is and then exaggerated that I wonder whether information technology is a parody of misogynistic rhetoric, but that may exist to impose my twentieth-century values. What I, as a social historian, would actually similar is women'due south voices to say whether they accustomed the male view of family values. Merely, as I said, the Roman woman's voice has been almost entirely extinguished.

I would non be surprised if in fact Roman women discussed and debated their part. Today, in our egalitarian age, although few would speak openly of a natural gender hierarchy, the talk of natural differences between women and men tin slide from neutrality to what feminists would meet as a reinforcement of the subordination of women in the household.

On the result of the father's exercise of authorization over children, the Romans did not question the value of paternal authority or propose a democratic model of the family, but they did fence how best to wield that authority. Some Romans argued for the positive effect of corporal punishment of children, but in the surviving texts the more than common view is that children should non be beaten. The advice to parents not to hit their children sounds like to advice almost kid-rearing today. For the Romans, all the same, the logic was a bit unlike, because it was role of an ideology of a slave society. An author of a tract on child-rearing written around 100 CE had this to propose:

Children ought to exist led to honorable practices by means of encouragement and reasoning, and nigh certainly not by blows nor by ill treatment; for it is surely agreed that these are fitting rather for slaves than for the freeborn [emphasis added]; for then they grow numb and shudder at their tasks, partly from the pain of blows, partly also on account of the hybris. Praise and reproof are more than helpful for the freeborn than whatever sort of ill-usage, since the praise incites them toward what is honorable, and reproof keeps them from what is disgraceful.

In other words, in this slave society corporal punishment was regarded as fit for slaves, not for free citizen children. To beat free children risked making them slavelike. Around the same fourth dimension, another Roman author, the philosopher Seneca, suggested that corporal penalization be used equally a last resort on children before they were of an age to understand
reason.

Though the Romans themselves treated the employ of corporal punishment to enforce paternal authority as a affair of give-and-take, modernistic social thinkers have characterized the Romans in this respect in a way suitable to their own political rhetoric. Let me offering two examples--one from the sixteenth century and one from the 1970s. In the sixteenth century, the peachy political theorist of absolute sovereignty, Jean Bodin, claimed that the coercive authority of the Roman male parent did indeed decline over fourth dimension, and he took this to be the cause of the fall of the Roman empire, as indicated in an early English translation of Bodin'due south Commonwealth.

For Bodin, farthermost paternal ability was essential to the maintenance of social order, and when Roman officials started messing with the family unit, the begetter's power of life and death over his children was undermined and the whole Roman empire came tumbling downward. Now, Bodin's estimation is not backed up past the evidence--neither the proposition that officials interfered much in the family unit, nor the proposition that sons started killing their fathers regularly, nor that this had anything to exercise with the fall of ancient Rome.

Why did Bodin make the argument? Because information technology fit with his political statement that it was essential for practiced social order that the French male monarch savour absolute power of life and expiry over his subjects, merely equally the Roman father had over his children. If the French king lost this ability, every bit the Roman male parent had washed, and then Frenchmen could await disorder comparable to the plummet of the Roman empire.

In 1974, a psychologist and historian named de Mause wrote an influential volume on the history of childhood. In it, he sketched five stages of development in the handling of children, from the showtime stage--infanticide and child abuse in antiquity--to the fifth stage-- loving attention to the best interests of children today. This progressive history is no more accurate than Bodin's, and is equally political. It is no more accurate because de Mause completely ignored all of the Roman advice against corporal punishment of children. It is political insofar as it represents equally retrograde the physical punishment of children.

Most of us probably take the sense that children are beaten less often today than in past generations, and that children are less obedient, only in fact those propositions are very hard to prove. We don't know how often children are physically punished or driveling today, and we don't take the slightest idea how often children were browbeaten in artifact. All we can do is trace the advice, and that advice over the centuries has fluctuated, rather than evolved from severity to indulgence. The earliest Latin prose writer, Cato, said that a man should never lay hands on what was nigh precious to him--his wife and children. Then, 500 years after, the Christian theologian Augustine recommended that the father apply corporal punishment for his children's sins, on the grounds that it was far better for a kid to suffer a beating than eternal damnation. Arguments for beating the sin out of children tin can be found into the early modern period. Today, the debate almost the role of corporal penalty in the socialization of children continues, with family morality invoked past both sides.

Today, family unit values are inextricably leap up with religious beliefs, about obviously in Catholic doctrine confronting abortion, divorce and nativity command--some of which are shared past fundamentalist Christians. My colleague Dieter Betz, in the Divinity School at the Academy of Chicago, describes a uncomplicated historical evolution from pre-Christian atrocity to Christian Enlightenment to twentieth-century post-Christian neobarbarism. The distinguished medievalist David Herlihy, a expert Catholic, claimed that the Catholic Church deserves credit for the family unit as we know it--that is, a family unit unit of father, female parent and children spring together by reciprocal dearest and obligation. These historical views contain a strong religious political message. In them there is some truth and much gross baloney.

The Christian Church cannot actually be credited with inventing the family as we know information technology. Romans earlier Christ took the essential family unit unit to be father, mother and children. The central value binding that family together was pietas, which tin be translated as affectionate devotion. Husbands and wives, parents and children, were supposed to honey ane another.

The kernel of truth in Betz'southward and Herlihy's claims is that the early Christians chose the domain of family values to mark themselves off from their non-Christian neighbors in the Roman empire. The early Church fathers preached against divorce, against infanticide and abortion, and against sexual activeness outside marriage. For each of these doctrines, there were some infidel philosophical antecedents, but the early Church tried to impose these family values on its believers on a scale that heathen philosophers couldn't. With the Church building and its priests came wider broadcasting of these values and structures for policing behavior. It is hard to know how successful that Church building was in suppressing divorce, infanticide and then on.

As for the idea that we are returning to neobarbarism today--what a depressing thought. While few of us might formulate the issue so starkly, many of u.s. probably have the uncomfortable feeling that we live in a time of disintegrating family values. Taking the long view, I would say that it is not then elementary. For example, the number of abortions today may incline us to retrieve that we are returning to an era before the rising of Christian doctrine against abortion and infanticide (a stardom that the Romans didn't recognize). The historical realities are far more complex. The problem of unwanted and unplanned babies is historic period-former; Church building doctrine didn't make the problem go away. David Kertzer's book, Sacrificed for Honour: Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Command, makes for horrifying reading. In the strongly Catholic Italy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Church not only forbade ballgame but too stigmatized unwed mothers. These mothers were forced to requite upwardly their babies to orphanages and then to nurse other women's babies. Contemporary observers described awful scenes in which these poor women were surrounded by hungry infants who were screaming because they were slowly starving. The mortality rates of these infants went as high as 90 pct in some orphanages. This was done in the proper noun of Catholic family values, though some contemporaries denounced the practise equally infanticide. To my mind, the problem with the statement that we are returning to neobarbarism is that it confuses ideals with realities and compares the ideals of the past with the realities of today. Many of the realities of today are disquieting, but so were the realities of the past.

By way of decision, I desire to echo that I am not suggesting that family life and values have non inverse; rather, I believe that these changes practise not fit into whatsoever simple evolutionary scheme, either positive or negative. Cardinal issues, such as the disciplining of children and the independence of wives, have been the subject of fence as far back equally Latin literature goes. Over the past century, we have experienced major socioeconomic changes that accept had an important bear on on the family. The nigh obvious one is the demographic transition, which has led to a not bad increase in life expectancy and a subtract in fertility. Considering of much shorter average life spans in aboriginal Rome, most children so did not have a living father to impose his say-so all the way through their teenage years. The 2d huge change is the nature of family wealth. From Roman times until this century, the economic well-beingness of children depended mostly on how much land their parents left them by inheritance. Today, existent property has been surpassed as a class of wealth by human capital--that is, the value of the education and training children receive. These primal social and economic changes seem to me to offer the potential for a better future, but and so, I should refrain from my own political rhetoric almost family values.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR | Richard Saller

Richard P. Saller is the provost of the University of Chicago and Edward Fifty. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of History and Classics. Saller earned his Ph.D. from Cambridge Academy in 1978 and has developed field specialties in Roman purple society, especially family history, Roman constabulary and ancient economic history. His research has full-bodied on Roman social and economic history, in particular patronage relations and the family. He is interested in the use of literary, legal and epigraphic materials to investigate issues of social bureaucracy and gender distinctions.

Among his publications are Personal Patronage Nether the Early on Empire (1982) and Patriarchy, Belongings, and Death in the Roman Family (1994). He has co-edited Economy and Society in Ancient Hellenic republic: Papers of Sir Moses Finley (1981) and The Family in Italy From Antiquity to the Nowadays, with an introduction by Kertzer and Saller (1991). With P.D.A. Garnsey, Saller has co-authored The Early Principate: Augustus to Trajan, Hellenic republic & Rome, New Surveys in the Classics No. 15 (1982) and The Roman Empire: Economy, Gild and Culture (1987).

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