FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD 167cementing relationships between unrelated Romans is considered in the next
chapter.
These features of Roman society and family life – the relatively weak
stress on natural sons as successors, the acceptability of daughters in this
role, the recourse to adoption, the fi nancial and other pressures to limit
family size severely, the advantages of childlessness in an inheritance system
that dispersed patrimonies widely – all contribute to our understanding of
why the senatorial aristocracy failed to reproduce itself (i.e., failed to fi ll the
ranks of the next generation of the senate with its own sons). It has been
suggested that in this respect the Romans simply fall under the general law
that aristocracies do not reproduce themselves. Certainly the statistical
probabilities are that even in a fully reproducing population a signifi cant
proportion of families will fail in the male line.^64 But the Roman aristocracy’s
failure was on a much grander scale than in many later European societies.
The English nobility was one of the more successful in the early modern
period: yet in the three generations from 1558 to 1641, 65 per cent of the
families failed to produce a direct male descendant in each generation, while
33 per cent failed in the male line altogether. The old Danish aristocracy, one
of the least successful, suffered a decline in the total number of males of 73
per cent over the 170 years after 1550.^65 The disappearance rate of Roman
consular families (roughly the more successful half of the senate and the
ones we are likely to know about) was about 75 per cent in each generation.
Only one in four Roman imperial consuls had a son who reached the
consulship.^66 Of course, these fi gures are not precisely comparable to those
from later European societies – the Roman son had to reach middle age and
win high offi ce – but even allowing for that, it is clear that the Roman
aristocracy’s failure was at a markedly higher level, partly because some
sons withdrew from public life but largely because many aristocrats did not
have adult sons. Whatever Augustus may have wished, the senatorial order
was far from hereditary. The corollary of the massive 75 per cent failure rate
each generation was that 75 per cent of the consulships were open to men
of upwardly mobile families. Italians and provincials moved in to take up
the vacancies in the senatorial aristocracy and married into already
established families.
Extended kinship relations
The Digest (38.10.10) preserves a long passage of the jurist Paul detailing
the classifi cations of Roman kin. The list extends to the sixth degree of
kinship, which, as the author says, includes no fewer than 448 categories of
relations, beginning with the fi rst degree of parents and children, and
proceeding as far as the great- great- great- great-grandfather ( tritavus ) in one
direction and the great- great-great-great-grandson or daughter ( trinepos or
trineptis ) in the other. As Paul noted, the jurisconsult needed to know the