Roman family

“ With the laxness of the family life, the freedom of divorce, and the inflow of wealth and extravagance, the purity and dignity of the Roman matron declined, as had before declined the manhood and the strength of her father and her husband. It must be remembered, however, that ancient writers did not dwell upon certain subjects that are favorites with our own. The simple joys of childhood and domestic life, home, the praises of sister, wife, and mother may not have been too sacred for the poet and the essayist of Rome, but the essayist and the poet did not make them their themes. ”

“ As from the point of view of charity the well-being of the community depends upon the vigour of the deep-laid elemental life within it, so in passing to Roman times we consider the family first. The Roman family was unique in its completeness, and by some of its conditions the world has long been bound. Roman times. The father alone had independent authority (sui juris) , and so long as he lived all who were under his power—his wife, his sons, and their wives and children, and his unmarried daughters—could not acquire any property of their own. ”

“ How do I account for it? why, I will tell you, by the break up of a Roman family, brother,—the father of a small family dies, and perhaps the mother; and the poor children are left behind; sometimes they are gathered up by their relations, and sometimes, if they have none, by charitable Romans, who bring them up in the observance of gypsy law; but sometimes they are not so lucky, and falls into the company of gorgios, trampers, and basket-makers, who live in caravans, with whom they take up, and so . ”

“ Religion lost its prestige and the family bond loosened, until from being one of the purest of social institutions in the early days of the republic, the Roman family became one of the most degenerate. ”

“ The Roman character was, at all periods of history, devoted to the hereditary theory. It is one that was so strongly believed in that it asserted itself in spheres where it was never contemplated—during the later Republic in succession to office, in the early Empire in the succession to the Principate—and as applied to property it was an essential condition of the permanence of the Roman family. For the maintenance of a house a rigid system of intestate inheritance is bad; it may not produce great wealth, but it often produces great poverty. ”

“ It is possible to trace the daily life of a Roman family in the Middle Age from its regular routine of today, as out of what anyone may see in Italy the habits of the ancients can be reconstructed with more than approximate exactness. ”

“ We may be certain that this was the one essential kin-division of the Latin stock when it settled in Latium, and all through Roman history it continues so, a permanent entity though families may die.137 Every Roman lawyer will recognise this fact as true, and I need not dwell on it now.
It is when the gens has settled upon the land that the family begins to appear as a fact of importance for our purpose. ”

“ It is remarkable that a Will never seems to have been regarded by the Romans as a means of disinheriting a Family, or of effecting the unequal distribution of a patrimony. The rules of law preventing its being turned to such a purpose, increase in number and stringency as the jurisprudence unfolds itself; and these rules correspond doubtless with the abiding sentiment of Roman society, as distinguished from occasional variations of feeling in individuals. ”

“ Relationship in the Early Roman Family was determined by community of worship, inasmuch as only descendants upon the male side could perform religious rites, and inasmuch as married women worshiped the household gods of their husbands' ancestors ”

“ The principles regulating Roman marriage may seem to us at variance with human nature, but they are the principles to which all peoples wishing to trust the establishment of the family not to passion as mobile as the sea, but to reason, have had recourse in times when the family was an organism far more essential than it is to-day, because it held within itself many functions, educational, industrial, and political, now performed by other institutions. ”

“ In the change of religion, too, all customs were transformed, private and public, in a way impossible to realize today. The Roman household, with the father as absolute head, lord and despot, gradually gave way to a sort of half-patriarchal, half-religious family life, resembling the first in principle but absolutely different from it in details and result, and which, in a measure, has survived in Italy to the present time. ”

“ Marriage was, therefore, a solemn religious duty, entered into only with the approval of the gods ascertained by the auspices. In taking a wife to himself the Roman made her a partaker of his family mysteries, a service that brooked no divided allegiance. He therefore separated her entirely from her father's family, and was ready in turn to surrender his daughter without reserve to the husband with whom she was to minister at another altar. The pater familiās was the priest of the household, and those subject to his potestās assisted in the prayers and offerings, the sacra familiāria. ”

“ There are far too many Romans," he continued, "who have no family altar nor ancestral tomb. They have fought well for Rome, and are falsely called the masters of the world; but the results of [Pg 168] their fighting can only be seen in the luxury of the great, while not one of them has a clod of dirt to call his own." ”

“ To him the heredium might be given, while the younger sons were drafted into colonies. We do not [31] know the principles; but that the principles tended to the preservation of the family is proved by the long traditions of the noble Roman houses.
A legal view of the Roman family would be incomplete without consideration of the rights or infringement of rights dependent on it.
The full legal status of a Roman citizen was designated by the word caput. ”

“ Such an association, comprehending a number of families from which one may go out, but into which one either cannot enter at all, or only by the adoption of the whole association, is a clan, and by no means what we call family, which implies an origin from a common root; for when these clans have patronymics, they are always merely symbolical, and derived from heroes. [66] I assume it as a certain fact that among the Romans the division of the nation was into gentes, which were analogous to the γένη of the Greeks, and to the Geschlechter of our German forefathers. ”

“ In such houses the Roman family lived, composed as families must be, of parents and children, to which were usually added servants, for after the earlier times of simplicity had passed away it became so fashionable to keep slaves to perform all the different domestic labors, that one could hardly claim to be respectable unless he had at least ten in his household. ”

“ No one could pass from a Patrician family to a Plebeian, or from a Plebeian to a Patrician, unless by that form of adoption which could only be made at the comitia curiata.
No Roman citizen could marry a slave, barbarian or foreigner, unless by the permission of the people.
A father among the Romans had the power of life and death over his children. He could not only expose them when infants, but when grown up he might imprison, scourge, send them bound to work in the country, and also put them to death by any punishment he pleased. ”

“ But the oldest Roman law shows the head of the family ruling with a strictness hardly imaginable to our modern minds, for the father might chastise or put to death his grown-up sons, give them in marriage or divorce them, and even sell them. ”

“ History has failed to notice the powerful influence of a priestly family composed entirely of women during its most flourishing days, and which, so long as the dynasty of Severus lasted, did imperceptibly, yet most really and powerfully, turn the tide of events and direct the current of thought in the Roman empire. ”

“ The Senators, when addressed, were called PATRES, or "Fathers," for they were Fathers of the families.
The Romans, as we saw above, were divided at first into three tribes, Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres Each tribe was subdivided into ten districts called CURIAE, and each curia into ten clans called GENTES (3 tribes, 30 curiae, and 300 gentes) . Every Roman citizen, therefore, belonged to a particular family, at the head of which was a pater-familias; every family belonged to a particular gens, named after a common ancestor; every gens belonged to a particular curia ”

“ As confarreatio had as its immediate object the providing of a materfamilias fully qualified in all her various functions, and as its further object the providing of persons legally qualified to perform the most important sacra of the state; so marriage, in whatever form, had as its object at once the maintenance of the family and its sacra and the production of men able to serve the State in peace and war. To be a Roman citizen you must be the product of a iustum matrimonium. ”

“ Such things will be considered as the family, the Roman name, marriage and the position of women, children and education, slaves, clients, the house and its furniture, clothing, food and meals, amusements, travel and correspondence, funeral ceremonies and burial customs, etc. These things are of interest to us in the case of any ancient or foreign people ”

“ It seems that women of the upper and middle classes, if they were not positively deformed and physically unsuited for matrimony, all married. Furthermore, inasmuch as marriages,72 especially among the upper classes, were arranged from political and social motives, no account was taken of the beauty of the bride, but of her social position, her family, and so on. Historians always tell us how many wives the numerous prominent figures in Roman history married, and to what families they belonged. ”

“ Those persons made up the Roman familia, in the sense nearest to its English derivative, who were subject to the authority of the same Head of the House (pater familiās) . These persons might make a host in themselves: wife, unmarried daughters, sons real or adopted, married or unmarried, with their wives, sons, unmarried daughters, and even remoter descendants (always through males) , yet they made but one familia in the eyes of the Romans. ”

“ If the comitia gave consent, the adrogātus sank from the position of Head of a House to that of a fīlius familiās in the household of his adoptive father. If he had wife and children, they passed with him into the new family, and so did all his property. Over him the adoptive father had potestās as over a son of his own, and looked upon him as flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone. We can have at best only a feeble and inadequate notion of what adoption meant to the Romans. ”

“ Above all, the healthy moral traditions of early Rome were maintained by the discipline of the family, resting on the supreme authority of the father—the patria potestas—and the powerful influence of the mother, to whom the early training of the child was entrusted. ”

“ The Children.—The Roman child belongs to the father like a piece of property. The father has the right of exposing him in the street. If he accepts the child, the latter is brought up at first in the house. Girls remain here until marriage; they spin and weave under the supervision of their mother. The boys walk to the fields with their father and exercise themselves in arms. The Romans are not an artistic people; they require no more of their children than that they know how to read, write, and reckon; neither music nor poetry is taught them. ”

“ And the Romans—the true Romans—of the Regola and the Popolo, of the Monti district and the Trevi district, who add the adjective Roman to their name like a title of nobility, who eat dumplings on Thursdays, tripe on Sundays, and lamb at all times, who like white wine and the fireworks at Sant' Angelo, who are proud of their March water, and calmly allow the beetles to swarm in their old houses, the sceptical, clever, impassive, and industrious Romans, who are good husbands and kind lovers, they certainly are not asleep. ”

“ This supremacy of the economic instinct transformed all the relations of life, the domestic as well as the military. The family ceased to be a unit, the members of which cohered from the necessity of self-defence, and became a business association. Marriage took the form of a contract, dissoluble at the will of either party, and, as it was somewhat costly, it grew rare. As with the drain of their bullion to the East, which crushed their farmers, the Romans were conscious, as Augustus said, that sterility must finally deliver their city into the hand of the barbarians. ”

“ I, a slave and ostensibly a Greek, am fifteen-sixteenths Roman noble, by ancestry, according to my reckoning. No wonder my descent shows in my bearing, manner and conversation."
This answer was, actually, not so far from the facts, my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother had, certainly, been Roman noblewomen, daughters indeed, each of one of the oldest and longest-lineaged houses of our nobility; and, like my father, grandfather and great-grandfather, my great-great-grandfather had been a Roman nobleman. ”

“ Civil Organization of Rome.—The organization of the government of early Rome rested in a peculiar sense upon the family group. The first tribes that settled in the territory were governed upon a family basis, and their land was held by family holdings. No other nation appears to have perpetuated such a power of the family in the affairs of the state. The father, as the head of the family, had absolute power over all; the son never became of age so far as the rights of property are considered as long as the father lived. The father was priest, king, and legislator for all in the family group. ”