170 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Addendum
The original edition of this book was published at a moment when the study of
Roman families and households was set for striking expansion, for reasons laid out
by Dixon (2011). The expansion was propelled by a series of conferences and
collected volumes organized by Beryl Rawson and Paul Weaver (Rawson 1986,
1991, Rawson and Weaver 1997), and then extended by Michelle George (2005).
These volumes, together with Rawson (2011), illustrate a widening range of
questions and an increasing sophistication of methods used in the study of families
in the Roman world. Dixon (1992) provides a general treatment of the Roman
family, as does the collection by Laurence and Strömberg (2012). Useful sourcebooks
have been assembled by Gardner and Wiedemann (1991), Rowlandson (1998), and
Evans Grubbs (2002).
Some of the core issues raised in this chapter – the structure of the household, the
demographic and legal frameworks of Roman family and kinship, and the values
and symbolism associated with family relations – were further elaborated in Saller
(1994, 1998, 1999).
The demographic contexts of families and households have received increasingly
sophisticated analyses but are still matters of debate owing to the scarcity of evidence,
especially for the countryside outside Egypt. For Roman Egypt Bagnall and Frier
(1994) was seminal in illuminating life course and household composition in urban
and rural areas based on census returns. The current state of the debate over nuclear
versus multiple- family household organization is summarized by Huebner (2011).
For Roman demography in general, see Parkin (1992, 2011), Shaw (1996), Scheidel
(1996a, 2001), and Frier (2000). Sallares (2002) is important for the impact of
malaria on mortality rates and their regional variation.
The use of funerary inscriptions to delineate demographic parameters and
household structure for regions of the empire other than Egypt continues to be the
subject of disagreement. See Martin (1996) and Lelis, Percy and Verstaete (2003) for
critiques of Saller and Shaw, along with responses by Rawson (1997) and Scheidel
(2007a, 2009b).
Extensive research on funerary inscriptions from different regions of the empire
has made it clear that one should not conceive of the Roman family as a uniform
social entity across the empire on account of both regional variation and changes
through the life course: Alston (2005), Edmondson (2005), Woolf (2005), Corbier
(2005), Boatwright (2005), Revell (2005), and Carroll (2006). For Egypt, see Bagnall
(2007).
The basic familial relationships have received intensive study. Treggiari (1991)
provides a magisterial treatment of marriage; see also Crook (1990), Larsson and
Strömberg (2010), and Dixon (2011). For the role of mothers, see Dixon (1988). The
father’s power of life and death over children has been examined by Harris (1986),
Saller (1994), Shaw (2001b), and Corbier (2001). For more general studies of
children see Wiedemann (1989), Bradley (1991), Dixon ed. (2001), Rawson (2003),
Cohen and Rutter (2007), Dasen and Späth (2010), Dasen (2011), and Laes (2011).
For the wider kinship network, Bettini (1991) and Saller (1997). There has been a
growing awareness, based partially on the computer simulation of Saller (1994), that
families and kinship networks were often incomplete on account of the ravages of
high mortality (Parkin 2011); the pervasive presence of orphans and widows has