Discovering the Roman Family: Studies in Roman Social History. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1993 by T.A.J. McGinn

Discovering the Roman Family: Studies in Roman Social History. By Keith R. Bradley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. viii plus 216 pp. $32.50/cloth $11.95/paperback).

Taking their cue from students of the family in more recent times, Roman social historians have in the last decade shown increasing interest in defining and describing this institution as it existed in the central period of Roman history, roughly from 200 B. C. to A. D. 200. Differences of method and the ever-unsatisfactory quality and extent of the evidence have fostered controversy. Keith Bradley's collection of eight essays, five of which appear in print for the first time, makes an important contribution to this debate.

Aspects of social role and structure are at the heart of Bradley's study: there is relatively little on demography, law, and physical setting, nothing on cult. Bradley is chiefly interested in family relationships for what they tell us about composition and sentiment. A recurring theme is the quality of family life for children.

The argument poses a serious challenge to the recent inclination to view the Roman family as nuclear in structure, a type much like that said to prevail in the modern West. Bradley's own conception of the "contemporary Western family" is not free from objection, insofar as it takes no account of such phenomena as daycare, single-parent families, and class differences. Only late in the book is the modern "divorce revolution" acknowledged. Despite this, Bradley's presentation of the pronounced variety and flexibility exhibited by the Roman family has considerable merit and should influence future discussion on the subject. His scholarship is careful, detailed, and sensible.

After an introduction in which he lays out the main lines of his approach in the context of recent discussion, Bradley presents three chapters on childminders. "The Social Role of the Nurse in the Roman World" takes up the theme of an earlier essay by Bradley on wetnursing at Rome to show that the practice was also common in the provinces. Bradley relies mainly on epigraphic evidence to demonstrate that the relationship between nurse and nursling was affectionate, and frequently extended into the latter's adulthood. Nurses' status tended to be low (slave or freed), while that of their employers varied considerably.

"Child Care at Rome: The Role of Men" again considers the status of the childminder, almost always of servile origin. The status of the children minded appears to have varied, though the best evidence concerning slaves comes from the familia Caesaris. Once charges were weaned, male and female nurses played a largely identical role. Older children tended to be supervised by a male paedagogus, a moral preceptor and protector, who in Bradley's view served as surrogate parent.

In Chapter 4, "Tatae and Mammae in the Roman Family", Bradley explains these affectionate nicknames, which were used of biological parents, nurses, and other care providers. Typically of low status, like their charges, Tatae and Mammae are associated with very young children, though here again the tie might last many years, even when they were not the child's parents. Often, they coexisted with biological parents, in a collaborative practice of child-rearing. The physical setting of the slave family discouraged the formation and maintenance of a "nuclear" structure, and opened up a role for "quasi-parents" in place of or side-by-side with natural parents.

Chapter 5, "Child Labor in the Roman World", makes another contribution to our knowledge of how family life was structured for some non-aristocratic children. The material ease and freedom of discretion enjoyed by the sons and daughters of the elite contrast sharply with the lives of lower-order children as represented in 30 apprenticeship contracts from Roman Egypt. These documents show how children were sent, at the behest of parents, to work at a given craft in a given place under conditions of some rigor.

Making the obvious point that upper-class children were better off is hardly Bradley's purpose. He is able to show once again how flexible family structure could be in the Roman world. Just as nonkin are brought in as quasi-parents, so kin sometimes exit the household. In some cases it seems as if new familial units are formed--the relationship of master and apprentice at times resembles that of parent and child--without the complete sundering of ties between apprentice and family of origin.

Chapters 6 and 7, "Dislocation in the Roman Family" and "Remarriage and the Structure of the Upper-Class Family at Rome", argue first that, although an ideal of family existed, this was largely devoid of emotional content, second that this was true of the actual experience of family life.

The thrust of Chapter 6 is that Roman family members were as a rule not warmly affectionate toward one another. One explanation lies in the system of arranged marriage: "to marry for love at Rome was to engage in a socially deviant form of behavior." The frequent dissolution of marriage by divorce or early death, followed by remarriage, had a decisive impact on emotional ties within the entire family. Numerous offspring of varying ages produced in different unions could not have enjoyed the close relationships Bradley posits for siblings in the "modern Western nuclear family." The picture was further complicated by the introduction of care-providers who themselves became objects of affection.