During the Second Punic War Masinissa, king of Numidia, had befriended Scipio Africanus and become beneficiary of the kingdom of the Numidian Syphax and his interests in Africa. Masinissa's own son was Micipsa, but Masinissa also had two brothers, Mastanabal and Guluasa, who had predeceased him. In the next generation, Micipsa had two sons, Adherbal and Hiempsal, but Mastanabal also had a descendant, an older boy, Jugurtha, the son of a concubine.

Jugurtha was duly brought up in the palace, although his status was a little ambiguous because of his maternal heritage, and he was eventually sent to serve in the Roman interest at Numantia in Spain in 134 bc. There, according to Sallust, it was hoped he would meet his fate, and simplify the succession question (Iug. 7). He came back, however, with an enhanced reputation, and a letter of recommendation from Scipio (Iug. 9). Micipsa responded by adopting him, not immediately, as suggested in one passage in the Jugurtha (Iug. 9.3: statim may be intended to indicate a lifetime adoption rather than a testamentary one), but at some time between 121 and 118 bc (Iug. 11.6). He was also made joint heir along with Micipsa's own sons.

Naturally, the case cannot be viewed as a Roman adoption, but it is of interest for the attitudes exhibited by Sallust. Sallust no doubt had mixed feelings about the base-born Jugurtha.

The adoption of Octavian has in the past been considered controversial, but today there is something approaching consensus. Recent studies have suggested that the abnormal political circumstances can explain how an individual who was adopted under Caesar's will nevertheless underwent adrogatio (Schmitthenner [1973]; Kunst [1996] 93–104; Gardner [1998] 128–9). Dispute has previously been based on whether it was possible to encompass an adrogatio posthumously. Normally an adrogatio required the presence of the parties, and Octavian's case requires an explanation of how this condition was avoided or subverted.

Some Romanists have assimilated primitive wills to adrogation. This approach has behind it assumptions about the need for testators somehow to cater for continuity of the family in the absence of heirs of their own blood. By the time of the late Republic and early Empire, a will bequeathing an estate to someone who was not an automatic heir on intestacy (a suus heres) need not contain any obligation to continue the family or to take on the name. Nevertheless, use of the so-called testamentary adoption can be seen as an attempt to create obligations of this type, and this has been used to justify the interpretation that Caesar's will authorised an adrogation. The poor attestation of testamentary adoptions creates problems, because Octavian's undergoing testamentary adoption by Julius Caesar is our only detailed case.

A broad survey of adoption across cultural boundaries will reveal how different historical and contemporary communities have responded to the issue of introducing outsiders into their kinship network. This impressionistic account will attempt to comment on how issues of integration are handled in a wide range of contexts, under markedly different arrangements regarding kinship.

There is no attempt here to see kinship in evolutionary terms, or even to suggest direct comparability between the various communities surveyed. They have been chosen on the basis that they represent distinctive and potentially illuminating responses to particular kinship arrangements. It is hoped that this discussion will help an appreciation of how the Romans used the institution.

Other agnatic systems may superficially resemble the Roman one, at least in this strong emphasis on the perpetuation of the male line, but even communities with very strict customary procedures tend to find that factors other than mere kinship are important in selecting adoptees when their own line is in jeopardy. Rome undoubtedly fits this model. All adoptions create a fictitious proximate relationship for the purpose of inheritance of wealth, position or both. The adopter will in turn expect reciprocal obligations of some sort. These range from taking on the mantle of heir to emotional and physical support. Different communities with different social and political systems handle the details in different ways.

Once a community allows that adoption is a feasible way of bestowing social personality on the next generation, purely familial ties are potentially under threat.

There are relatively few known Republican adoptions. Gardner estimates a total of about three dozen in the elite including the so-called testamentary adoptions (Gardner [1998] 138). Political aims do not always lie behind Republican cases and many may in fact merely represent the designation of an unchallengeable heir to property. There will be some cases in which this also provided a very significant chance of making a claim to succession to whatever political power was at stake. Examples at a lower social level are not recorded, although one equestrian case is treated by Valerius Maximus, that of Anneius (Val. Max. 7.7.2; RE Annaeus no. 4; Shackleton Bailey [1991] 71; 79). The other well-known equestrian case – that of Atticus – is not a true adoption, but a testamentary case. Below this level, adoptions might have been used, but cases have not survived in the type of evidence at our disposal. As adoption was so closely related to succession, it was frequently employed where significant assets were at stake. Adoptions under the Republic have often been deduced from nomenclature alone, a technique now discredited for examples from the Imperial period (Chapter 6; Salomies [1992]). This discussion is restricted to full adoptions under adrogatio or adoptio, since they have different legal implications from testamentary adoptions.

The earliest known example illustrates the difficulty in ascertaining motives for adoption in individual cases. L. Manlius Acidinus adopted one of two sons of the plebeian Fulvius Flaccus (Vell. Pat. 2.8.2) into his patrician family.

Today, in the Western world, adoption is seen as a means for couples who are unable to have children to experience parenthood. In general, the idea is that people with a strong commitment to raising children will be able to take over children whose situation is in some way substantially impaired.

In the recent past, relatively large numbers of unwanted children became available in this way. An element that has changed is the attitude to sole parenting, and children resulting from unplanned pregnancies are more often retained than adopted out. Community attitudes have shifted considerably, and it is now seen as psychologically desirable for the child to be brought up in its birth family, if possible, rather than to be reassigned.

The result is that adoptees have to be sought from further away, from parts of the world where it is economically impossible for the birth family to bring up the child, or where social conditions, including famine and war, have created large numbers of orphans. Children brought in under these conditions raise complex issues such as the paternalism of rich countries, which lead on to other controversies, for example the cultural displacement of the children.

Rome from its inception was a different type of community, and conditions of family life differed substantially. The presence of slaves as well as an enormous gulf between rich and poor is only a beginning.

In the period after the Bona Dea scandal, during 60 bc in particular, Clodius engaged in a sustained effort to encompass a change from patrician to plebeian status, with the tribunate in his sights. A transition of this sort undoubtedly was possible, but both available mechanisms had certain complications, which are far from clear today. Eventually Clodius achieved his goal of becoming plebeian not through the procedure of transitio ad plebem, but through a form of adoption, the adrogatio.

background on transitio ad plebem

It is unfortunate that our best evidence about transitio involves Clodius himself, and his attempt to employ it was unsuccessful. Some consideration of other known cases of transitio ad plebem is required (cf. Smith [2006] 213).

The transitio ad plebem was used either by individuals or gentes to enable them to qualify specifically for the tribunate or to widen their eligibility for office (Botsford [1909] 162). The earliest attested cases are highly contentious and may reflect events of the late Republic rather than their ostensible timeframe. Suetonius says that the Octavii were raised to the patriciate by Servius Tullius but subsequently transferred back to plebeian status, until Octavian's father, an equestrian from Velitrae (modern Velletri), was given patrician status once more by Julius Caesar. This seems to be a reflection of the process of faking genealogy, a fiction linking the previously obscure municipal family to the origins of the city (Suet. Aug. 2.1; Carter [1982] 91).

Adoption is an important institution in Greek life. Coverage on the area in Classical sources is uneven. The earliest surviving evidence is from the Gortyn Code, which provides evidence from about the mid fifth century bc, applicable to a Dorian community on Crete. The significance of the provisions of the Code has given rise to some controversy. There is a gap between the extant legal provisions and any idea of their operation in context. We are well served for Athens, partly because more is known about domestic life at Athens than elsewhere in Greece, and at Athens the evidence is clearest for the fourth century, since the topic frequently arises in the orators, especially Isaios. These cases often involve complicated inheritance disputes in which issues of status are crucial, and details of community feeling and social reality emerge. The context is hardly objective; the orators attempt to influence their audience to believe certain ways of reading situations. Those involved are of high status, and there is no hint of adoption further down the social scale. There is also dispute over the extent to which adoption at Athens has evolved since the Classical period.