Introduction
When Romans of the Augustan age compared their own times with their
idealized past, they lamented, among other things, the decline in family
morality. In early Rome discipline in the family was hard and standards of
virtue high: in paradigmatic exempla fathers executed adult sons for
disobedience in battle, and virtuous women esteemed their chastity more
highly than their lives. Augustus clearly considered family mores to be of
considerable importance, devoting much of his reforming legislation to
marriage and child- bearing.^1
The fi rst emperor was right about the importance of the family in society,
though unduly optimistic about his ability to produce effective reform. The
family was the basic social unit through which wealth and status were
transmitted. As such, the perpetuation of the aristocracy, the possibilities for
social mobility, the distribution of landed wealth, and other matters
depended fundamentally on patterns of family behaviour. Beyond the social
realities of the time, the image of the Roman family has had a continuing
infl uence on western legal, political and social thought. Following the
reintroduction of Roman law in late medieval Europe, political thinkers
used the nearly absolute legal power of the father in the family as a model
for the power ascribed by nature to the absolute sovereign in the state.
Again, nineteenth- century theorists concerned with the evolution of society,
generalizing from the Roman family, proposed a universal stage in human
history characterized by patriarchy.^2
There is good reason to believe that this image of stark patriarchy is not
an accurate refl ection of family life in the Roman imperial era, but the image
persists, in part because modern social historians have devoted little of their
attention to the subject.^3 The family does not so much as appear in the index
of the standard social histories of Rome written in the past decades. Research
on the family has been left to Roman legal historians, with the result that
much of the current image of the family is based on the law, in which ‘the
9
Family and household
151