154 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
decades by historians who have shown that people of past times did not, as
a general rule, live in large, extended family units.^9 The literary and
epigraphic evidence from Rome, limited though it is, certainly gives no
support to the traditional belief that the Roman household usually included
several nuclear families dominated by an authoritarian, elderly patriarch.
Classical authors assumed that it was exceptional for adult sons to live with
their fathers and for adult brothers to share a common household in a
consortium. 10 A survey of funerary inscriptions indicates that the validity of
this conclusion is not limited to the elite: not only are relatives such as
grandfathers and uncles rare as commemorators in comparison with
members of the immediate family, but also in comparison with friends and
servile dependants. We would expect that if paternal grandfathers, uncles
and cousins had regularly lived together in extended households, they would
have formed suffi ciently close ties to have been relied upon often for funerary
arrangements in preference to unrelated friends. And yet the paternal
grandfather and uncle are almost entirely absent from the thousands of
commemorations.^11
In the belief that for most Romans relationships within the nuclear family
were of the greatest importance, most of the remainder of this chapter will
be devoted to consideration of the legal, demographic, economic and
affective aspects of the husband–wife and parent–child bonds.
Husbands and wives
In early Roman law a woman entering a marriage under her husband’s
authority ( cum manu , presumably then the most common form) left her
father’s potestas and household to join her husband. The marriage could not
be broken off without serious cause and heavy fi nancial loss to the party in
the wrong. While the husband lived, the wife’s dowry and any property
accruing to her went into the husband’s full ownership. Upon the husband’s
death, according to the rules of intestate succession, the wife was entitled to
an equal share of the patrimony as a primary intestate heir along with her
children.^12
From this rather tight husband–wife bond the law developed in the late
Republic to the very loose relationship characteristic of the classical period.
The form of marriage in which the wife did not transfer to her husband’s
authority ( sine manu ) was common in the late Republic and almost
completely replaced the old form by the time the jurist Gaius ( Inst. 1.111)
wrote in the mid- second century after Christ.^13 In this type of marriage the
woman remained in her father’s familia and legal power, and participated in
her natal family’s property regime, not that of her husband and children.
Thus, while the woman’s dowry went to the husband for the duration of the
marriage, the woman was a primary heir of her father and upon his death
became an independent property owner. The separation of the wife’s