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

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

That there was an ideal of affectionate marriage at Rome was first adumbrated by Paul Veyne over a decade ago and has of late been conclusively demonstrated by Suzanne Dixon and Susan Treggiari. Bradley concedes the existence of an ideal, but argues that its content was quite mild.

The evidence is admittedly difficult. Yes, the cases of affectionate marriage offered by the moralist Valerius Maximus are few and atypical, but in fact these are intended as instances of an almost heroic affection, an extreme or, if you will, an ideal of an ideal. True, the legal phrase bene concordantia matrimonia is passionless, but what does one expect from lawyers? It merely means to describe "successful marriages" and says nothing about actual or ideal sentiment: the jurists wanted a formula that would embrace a large number of unions of varying emotional content. The same holds for affectio maritalis, a term which denoted the subjective requirement for marriage, i.e. the necessary consent of the partners. This has the virtue of being somewhat less dry, and is ignored by Bradley.

Next Bradley holds that marriages did not live up to the bland ideal he sets for them. In his view, the high rate of divorce was caused in part by a lack of emotional investment by spouses. Given the paucity of evidence, one might also argue that the lack of emotional investment was caused by the high rate of divorce. Better still, we can say the existence of an ideal was one reason for the divorce rate. High expectations, when unsatisfied (the higher the expectations, the more likely the dissatisfaction), often contributed to the disintegration of unions. In other words, when marriages turned loveless, they foundered, which may suggest existing unions were by and large affectionate. It does not prove this, but the reader will see on what uncertain ground we stand.

We can know little about the impact of serial marriage on the emotional life of Roman children (p. 138). I find it difficult to accept, as Bradley does, that the inscriptional record proves strong affection between children and members of the familia (slaves and freedmen), but does not for parents and children or husbands and wives.

The theme of remarriage and its effects on family life returns in chapter 7, which begins with an inquiry into the frequency of this practice among the Roman elite (a version of this chapter now appears in B. Rawson ed., Marriage, Divorce and Children in Ancient Rome [Oxford, 1991]. Bradley takes as a test sample the consuls in office from 80-50 B. C. and their wives. Even for this high-profile group, crucial information is lacking and the size of the sample (59 consuls) is too small to allow the easy inclusion of cases that are not certain. The attempt to chart the consequences of the "familial blending" generated by serial marriage is again hindered by lack of information on the emotional texture of the families in the sample.

Bradley goes on to explain how the situation of domestic staff in the Roman household differed from that found in more recent European societies. The special status of slaves and freedmen influenced the organization of their labor, length of stay, and consequently the formation of affective bonds with other members of the household. When this factor is combined with other prominent attributes of the Roman family (including neo-local marriage, frequency of divorce and remarriage) it becomes difficult to fit this institution into any of the typologies developed for other historical periods, in particular Laslett's "Mediterranean" type, proposed for Rome by Richard Saller and Brent Shaw.