FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD 169The provision of a dowry for a kinswoman was another common form of
support (Pliny, Ep. 2.4, FIRA III, no. 69, 11.42ff.) and raises the more
general question of the place of kin in marriage and property considerations.
It has been argued that the desires to keep the dowry and women’s property
in the family and to reinforce clan unity inclined Romans to choose
spouses from among kin, particularly parallel cousins. Marriage of fi rst
cousins was legal in Rome until the fourth century, but close scrutiny
shows marriage among close kin to have been exceptional. Stemma after
stemma of aristocratic families yields no case of marriage between cousins,
nor do the letters of Cicero and Pliny concerning marriage arrangements
give any thought at all to the kinship of the proposed husband or wife. In
this respect, then, there is no reason to believe that Christianity, with
its wider incest prohibition, forced a change in familial behaviour for
most Romans.^68
Conclusion
In a classic article, Hajnal drew a basic distinction between a pattern of late
marriage for men and women who typically lived in nuclear family
households in western Europe and the pattern of early marriage and large,
extended family households in eastern Europe. In an expansion of the
typology, a ‘Mediterranean’ type has been added, characterized by much
later marriage for men than for women and a signifi cant proportion of
extended family households.^69 The Roman family described in this chapter
seems to fi t the Mediterranean classifi cation in certain important respects,
particularly the pattern of late male/early female marriage with the
consequent age gap between husband and wife. But the Romans diverged
from the Mediterranean type insofar as multiple family households were
neither the norm nor common in practice.
The family offers the Roman historian a promising subject for an analysis
of the complex relationship between the law and social behaviour. On the
one hand, the emperors and the jurists did move with the current of changing
attitudes and practices in their legal innovations, though rather belatedly in
cases like the recognition of the mother’s legal relationship with her children
and the limitation of the father’s power of life and death. On the other hand;
a fundamental conservatism in regard to basic legal principles led to a
substantial disjunction between those principles and widespread mores.
Insofar as the literary sources provide insights, the legal powers of the
paterfamilias , oppressive as they were in theory, did not dominate the
Roman family experience. A fortiori , if patria potestas is of limited value in
understanding the Roman family, we may be sceptical of broad arguments
that explain basic differences in later Europe between northern and
Mediterranean patterns of family life by the reintroduction of Roman law
into Mediterranean lands.