FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD 161of their patrimony. Yet the father could preempt this procedure by leaving a
mere fraction of his estate, a quarter, to his primary intestate heirs.^40 This
latitude in disposition of the patrimony no doubt gave the father more real
power to exact obedience from his adult children than the harsher power of
life and death.
The consequences of this strong paternal authority have recently been
stressed by various social historians. The oppressiveness of patria potestas is
said to have provoked a marked hostility of sons toward fathers, the direct
result of which was the Roman propensity for parricide.^41 The fortunate
Romans, so it is said, were those whose fathers died young. Patria potestas
has also been invoked to prove that Roman women were really not so free:
though they were not subject to their husbands, they continued to be in the
power of their fathers.^42 For various reasons these portrayals of Roman
family relations tend toward caricature.
The demography of the family can provide some help in understanding
the context of the legal rules and social behaviour. Comparative evidence for
pre- industrial societies suggests that the average life expectancy at birth for
Romans was in the range of twenty to thirty years; it was probably in the
middle of that range to judge from the very inadequate Roman evidence.^43
Infant mortality must have been very common, with a quarter or more of
newborns not surviving their fi rst year, and perhaps as many as half not
living to age ten. Those who did survive the childhood diseases of their fi rst
decade could expect to live another thirty- fi ve to forty years on average.
Because of the high infant mortality rate, Roman women who lived to
adulthood had to bear fi ve or six children on average, if the population was
not to go into decline. Yet many couples had more children than they could,
or wished to, raise. The father most often exercised the legal power of life
and death in exposing unwanted children. In the literary sources, those
peoples of the empire, such as the Jews, who did not expose unwanted
children were regarded as anomalies (Tacitus, Hist. 5.5; Strabo 17.824).^44
(‘Exposure’, rather than ‘infanticide’, is used advisedly here, since the literary
sources reveal a clear expectation that the exposed infant would not die
immediately, but would be picked up and enslaved.)^45
It has not been appreciated that the late marriage age of men reduced the
effects of patria potestas. Marriage of men in their late twenties rather than
their late teens had the consequence that the generation gap was rather
large, and that relatively few fathers were alive to witness their sons’
marriages. A computer simulation incorporating the Roman demographic
variables suggests that the average difference in age between father and
child was about forty years. By the time children reached their late teens or
early twenties – when women usually married – more than half had already
lost their fathers. It is unrealistic, then, to argue that a husband’s lack of
authority over his wife did not normally leave her free because she remained
in her father’s power. Only a fi fth or so of men at the time of their marriage
in their late twenties or early thirties were still in their fathers’ power and