FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD 163his lifetime? Was the hostility between the generations as intense as the
stories of parricide have led some to believe? Daughters married and left
their natal home soon after reaching adulthood, even before in the case of
aristocratic girls, who were often married at the age of twelve.^50 As noted
above, the law gave the father power to arrange his daughter’s marriage,
and the evidence about the way in which husbands in fi rst marriages were
selected in elite social circles suggests that fathers did in reality take the
initiative.^51 It has been argued that aristocratic Roman fathers enjoyed a
special affective relationship with their daughters throughout their lives,
and that this produced a ‘fi liafocal’ kinship system in which kinship links
through daughters were especially prominent. The stories of father–daughter
affection, however, do not constitute an effective demonstration of such a
broad generalization, nor do relatives linked through daughters appear to
have been favoured (see below, pp. 145f.).^52
For young men there was an extended gap between physical maturity and
marriage.^53 This period was not as awkward as it might have been, because
for one reason or another many young men left their parents’ houses. Army
service could take up some or all of these years for rich and poor citizens
alike. Among the wealthy at Rome, it was expected that a young man
remaining in the city would set up a separate household. In the countryside
adult sons of local notables were often sent off to manage an outlying piece
of property. Various ways were devised to circumvent the legal incapacity of
those still in their father’s power to own property. While legal rules were
developed to govern the peculium , the literary sources, such as Cicero,
appear to suggest that the formality of the peculium was often dispensed
with, and the son was simply given an allowance which he spent as his own.
Presumably legal questions about his ‘ownership’ of the money were rarely
raised: it was no doubt assumed that, if the son had the money, he had been
given it by his father and hence had his approval. In all of Cicero’s
correspondence about providing funds for his son in Athens, the legal
technicalities of ownership or peculium were never raised. Only if a son’s
spending exceeded his allowance and he borrowed money without his
father’s knowledge, would legal and social problems arise. An attempt to
suppress such problems was made in the mid- fi rst century by the
senatusconsultum Macedonianum , which took away from creditors of sons
in their father’s power the right to reclaim their loans in court, even after the
father’s death.^54
The fi nancial dependence of an adult son on his father could result in
serious tensions, particularly if the son fell in with a disreputable creditor.
However, these tensions are not the peculiar consequence of patria potestas ,
but are found in many agrarian societies. The fundamental problem arose
from the fact that more than one adult generation sometimes had to depend
for support on a fi xed unit of land rather than on the variable labour of each
member of the family. Different societies adopted various strategies for
reaching a modus vivendi between father and son. One, which the Romans