After young Calpurnia's miscarriage, Pliny wrote as a concerned husband to her grandfather, Calpurnius Fabatus, to soothe his disappointment at being deprived of posteri (descendants) late in life: “You do not desire greatgrandchildren more passionately than I desire children, to whom I expect to leave, from my side of the family and from yours, an easy path to honors with names widely known and ancestral masks of respectable age” (Ep. 8.10.3). Fronto two generations later expressed a similar hope for posterity from the marriage of his daughter. The concern for posterity and the reference to imagines (death masks) may summon up notions of lines of descent through the generations. The difficulties of successfully planning male lines of descent have been elucidated: in order to have male descendants with property to maintain their status, families had to try to strike a delicate balance between bearing too many children and bearing too few.1 A Roman father producing many was more likely to have male heirs to succeed him, but also to have to divide his property in a partible system among so many heirs that each would be left with too little to maintain the family's status; a father producing two or three children lessened the risk of fragmentation of his estate, but also was unlikely to have a son to succeed him. The unpredictability of high mortality often spoiled the most careful strategy to leave one and only one male heir to perpetuate the family name with its splendid patrimony intact.

The Antonine senator Fronto wrote a moving account of his anguish over the deaths in infancy of his first five offspring and of his first grandson – an experience that would be so rare in the contemporary developed world that it would raise suspicions of criminal wrongdoing. High infant mortality is only one aspect of the very different patterns of births and deaths that separate our own family experiences from those of antiquity. Those demographic patterns are fundamental to an understanding of Roman family relations, and yet are problematic to study. Demography is a discipline based on quantitative data. For the Roman historian, the obstacle to demographic study is the lack of reliable statistics from antiquity and the nearly complete lack of samples of data from which meaningful statistics may be constructed. At the level of family and household, we have records neither of births, marriages, and deaths – the basis of reconstitution studies – nor of household census data for the empire outside Egypt. The absence of solid data may suggest the impossibility of worthwhile demographic studies to many classicists, accustomed to constructing arguments from fixed texts, though of course the fixity of the classical text is sometimes an illusion.

Against any attempt at demographic understanding, the skeptical classical scholar will point out that comparative evidence from other societies cannot supply the data that we do not possess for ancient Rome. The argument against filling in the blanks from comparative material is certainly valid for the types of history usually pursued by classical historians.

This book has taken shape gradually over the past decade, prompted initially by a sense that too little research had been done on the subject of the Roman family. Since the early 1980s a stream of valuable books and articles has appeared, many of them designed to bring the neglected people of the Roman empire, women and children, into the historical narrative. I have only a little to add to those works. Instead, I wish to return to the figure represented by (male) Roman authors as the center of the family and household, the paterfamilias, so familiar in his severe authority. The familiarity has bred neglect or the repetition of stereotypes. There is more to be said about Roman patriarchy, in my view, in order to appreciate the complexities of daily experience in the Roman household and to understand the nuances of paternal authority in Roman ideology.

Some of the basic themes of the following chapters have been presented in my articles, but none of the chapters is a reprint of those articles. I have substantially rewritten to take account of criticisms, to reformulate arguments, and to add new materials. Perhaps the most substantial change in my thinking from the earliest articles is an increased awareness of the need to distinguish between the normative order of Roman culture and the diffuse experiences and individual choices of daily social life. Failure to pursue that distinction, it seems to me, has left Roman historians arguing at crosspurposes about issues such as the “nuclear family,” which was at once central to the normative order and in practice often disrupted by death or divorce.

The subject of “family” may seem self-explanatory, but different cultures have defined the “family” and its boundaries in various fashions. This chapter seeks to elucidate the Roman understanding of family through a close examination of the basic Latin vocabulary and how this fundamental social unit was represented in certain important contexts. An analysis of the semantic ranges of familia and domus will enable us to explore some of the implications of Roman characterizations and representations of their families and households.

Understanding the Roman conception of the family is a delicate task, encountering the problematic relation between words and patterns of social behavior. There is no easy, one-to-one correspondence between vocabulary and social entities, and it is well to recognize from the outset the futility of attempting to define or to characterize the Roman family. Certain definitions were appropriate to, and clarified by, particular contexts. In other contexts the meaning of the word was left ambiguous, sometimes deliberately so. Moreover, the Romans represented their family bonds and household groups in visual art, ritual, and symbolic behavior in varying but related ways. Finally, if the Romans conceived of family and household variously according to context, each Roman had to construct his or her own family and household out of the kin and resources available, with the consequence that in the real world family and household came in innumerable shapes and sizes.

In view of the definitional messiness of familia and domus, and, even more, of the real living unit, it is pointless to endeavor to identify the form of the Roman family.

The vagaries of high mortality in the Roman world resulted in weak links, to be taken into account by any Roman planning the perpetuation of his family name and the transmission of his patrimony. There was uncertainty whether he would have children and whether any of them would live long enough to inherit his fortune and status. If not the institution of adoption was available to repair the deficiency, though it was not regularly used. When children did survive their father, the transmission of the estate was not necessarily unproblematic. The prospect of one or more heirs being underage required the testator to reckon with a significant problem: how to protect his child-heir and patrimony from a greedy world.

The solution lay largely in the Roman institutions of guardianship, tutela impuberum and cura minomm, which have received little attention in social histories of Rome. Guardianship of women, tutela mulieris, has attracted more interest than tutela impuberum, even though the former came to have little force in the classical era, while the latter gained in strength and legal rigor. Moreover, the forty-year-old man still subject to patria potestas looms larger in many classicists' image of the Roman family than the twelve-yearold fatherless child, even though the latter was fivefold more common in Roman society. Some historians who have commented on the subject of fatherless children have treated the phenomenon as a result of special crises, in particular bloody wars. Yet, though wars certainly exacerbated the problems, fatherless children have been a pervasive and perennial issue in all societies before the demographic transition to modern mortality and birth rates.

To translate paterfamilias as “head of the household” is to capture only a part of its semantic range. For modern students of Roman society the term evokes that most powerful image of the Roman family, the authoritarian father exercising autocratic control over the members and property of his house. The classical Romans, however, more often used the term to mean simply “property owner.” The opposition between the bonus and malus paterfamilias involved a judgment about estate management: whereas the malus paterfamilias handled his property carelessly, the bonus paterfamilias diligently managed his patrimony and came to represent a legal standard of sound administration in juristic thought. Although classical prose authors frequently use paterfamilias without any thought of a family, for fathers the responsibilities for family and property were closely linked. In a society in which property was essential to the well being and status of the family, good husbandry was among the most important duties to the generations to come. Seneca expressed the ideal succinctly (Ep. 64.7): “Let us act as the bonus paterfamilias. Let us increase what we received. Let that inheritance pass enlarged from me to my descendants.”

Seneca's words make the matter of transmission of property to the next generation sound simple, but it was not. For those Romans who made use of the written wills and dotal pacts available in law, nothing was automatic. Decisions had to be made in the face of unpredictable mortality and in the context of a legal system that permitted divorce and gave the right to own property to wives but not to adult children in potestate.

Basic demographic events influenced the shape of Roman families through the life course, but did not define the boundaries of the family and relations within it. Within a regime of high mortality and limited private property, significant cultural differences may be found from one society to another: one example would be Roman exogamous marriage in contrast to the endogamy characteristic of some eastern Mediterranean cultures. Despite J. Goody's effort to depict the pre-Christian, Eurasian plough cultures, including Rome, as broadly similar in the practice of close kin marriage, and to ground that practice in common economic exigencies, the empirical evidence supports Plutarch's perception of a basic cultural difference between the exogamous Romans and the endogamous Greeks. The distinction dates back as far as the historical texts and is probably beyond the reach of historical explanation.

Against any position tinged with economic or demographic determinism, other historians have adopted radically cultural interpretations, claiming the irrelevance of biological reproduction to the construction of the family. It has been suggested that the Roman family was purely a ritual construct to which newborns were admitted by being ceremoniously “raised up” from the ground by the father. The implication is that there is nothing “natural” about the family, and little constraint of any kind in its construction. The Roman texts, however, do not support this interpretation. Family membership was not defined solely by ritual.

The discipline of history began nearly two and a half millennia ago with the study of war and politics. Little more than two and a half decades old, the subfield of family history is still struggling to agree on the right questions and the appropriate level of generalization. The family as a historical phenomenon can be both banal and symbolically charged. It can be banal in the sense that family life so thoroughly permeates our experience that a description of mothers, fathers and children may hold few surprises and little interest. Roman authors believed family formation and the organization of the household to be natural steps in social evolution, rather than a matter of culturally specific development susceptible to historical analysis (Cicero, Off. 1.54).

At the same time, as a nearly universal experience, family relations have been used as a politically charged barometer of moral and social wellbeing. This is true today, as sociologists attempt to measure the disintegration of the family and the popular media carry stories such as the Chicago Tribunes front-page series entitled “Killing our Children.” The moral preoccupation with the family can be found in ancient Rome as well. In accounts of the horrors of the civil wars of the last century before Christ, stories of the violation of family bonds were narrated to illustrate social breakdown, and stories of family loyalty were told in praise of individual virtue. When Augustus enforced a new regime on the Romans, his legislation to improve society focussed primarily on matters of family and household – marriage, child-bearing, and slavery.

When travelling on the river Ohio in 1841, Abraham Lincoln was struck by the sight of twelve shackled slaves who were being taken down river to be sold. ‘A small iron clevis’, he later wrote in a letter describing his experience, ‘was around the wrist of each, and this fastened to the main chain by a shorter one at a convenient distance from the others: so that the negroes were strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trot-line.’ He thought of the way the slaves had been uprooted from their homes, of the families and friends they had left behind, of the cruelty they would endure from their new owners, finding himself at a loss as he did so to understand how the slaves could continue in such a plight to seem so cheerful. Lincoln was long disturbed by the episode, and as he recalled the sight to a fellow traveller in another letter fourteen years later he remarked what ‘a continual torment’ the image of the shackled slaves had been to him ever since.

In the Americas slavery was destroyed with astonishing speed. From 1807, when Britain placed a ban on the transatlantic slave trade, to 1888, when the last slaveowning State in the New World, Brazil, abolished slavery, less than a century was required to eradicate an institution that for hundreds, even thousands, of years had gone unchallenged until early in the eighteenth century philosophers and religious thinkers began to raise questions about the moral legitimacy and acceptability of slavery.

THE ACCESSION, 336–335 B.C.

This and the following chapter are intended to provide an outline survey of the reign of Alexander. The king himself is central to the narrative, for the vast preponderance of the source tradition deals explicitly with his actions. Events, however important, in which he was not the protagonist depend on chance testimonia. The subject of this first chapter is the campaign and court history of the reign, the details of the process of conquest. That provides the thread of continuity for the historical interpretation of the reign and records the imperial expansion of Macedon, the most obvious – and important – aspect of the period, as well as the increasing autocracy and elimination of dissent around the person of Alexander. The next chapter deals more with the effect of Alexander: the impact of the new universal empire upon the traditional world of Greek city states and the organization of the territories and peoples acquired by conquest. The approach is encapsulated in the final section, where I examine Alexander's claims to divine status, possibly the starkest illustration of the gulf which he had created between subject and sovereign. Although the exposition is by necessity centred around Alexander, I have tried to avoid value judgments and psychological speculation. The besetting sin of traditional Alexander scholarship has been an obsession with the person of the king, who becomes less a historical figure and more a symbol of contemporary aspirations. In Droysen's hands he was the embodiment of Prussian imperialism, in Tarn's a liberal humanitarian.

THE CAUSES AND OUTBREAK OF WAR

The outcome of the Peloponnesian War had left many of the victors discontented. Sparta had totally disregarded the wishes and interests of her allies and had pursued a policy of aggressive expansion in the Peloponnese, central and northern Greece and the Aegean which had at times seemed directed specifically against them. Though Lysander had been a prime exponent of this policy, it had not been his alone, and his temporary eclipse in 403 had not led to any softening of Spartan attitudes. Corinth had wanted to see Athens annihilated, but her desire had been thwarted and she had had no share in the spoils of victory (Xen. Hell. II.2.19). Moreover, Spartan intervention in Syracuse had damaged Corinthian interests there (Diod. XIV.110.2ff). Thebes had been even more displeased. She alone of Sparta's allies had ventured to claim her share of the profits, but in vain (Xen. Hell. III.5.5, Plut. Lys. 27.2), and she too had demanded to no avail that Athens be destroyed. Instead Sparta had put ominous pressure on Thebes by strengthening her own position in central Greece and Thessaly, securing control of Heraclea in about 400 (Diod. XIV.38.3f) and garrisoning Pharsalus (Diod. XIV.82). Thebes had responded by making a major contribution to the overthrow of Sparta's puppet government at Athens, the Thirty, only to be somewhat disappointed by the cautious behaviour of the restored democracy, whose subservience to Sparta had led to tension between Athens and Thebes (Lys. XXX.22). Both Thebes and Corinth, with the Thebans taking the lead, had pursued a policy of military non-co-operation with Sparta.

In the Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus in AD 79, Herodes son of Apion sent word to local officials that two slaves named Amarontos and Diogenes, one a slave in the Service of his brother, the other in that of his wife, had died. The papyrus document that records the news (P.Oxy. 3510) gives little information about the slaves. But because Herodes described them as slaves ‘without a trade’ it makes clear that while alive they had not been trained to perform specific Jobs – say those of weavers or fullers or stenographers. An orator of the second Century AD observed that in a poor household the same slaves did the cooking, kept the house and made the beds, and even a weaver who had been rented out might have to return at night to bake bread for her master. So perhaps Amarontos and Diogenes had been slaves, like Apuleius’ Photis, who did anything and everything required of them – in Photis’ case portering, stabling horses, carrying messages, preparing food, attending guests, waiting at table and putting her mistress to bed; Photis even knew something of her master's money-lending business. In wealthy, upper-class households, by contrast, it was conventional for slaves to be assigned very precise duties, a point that Tacitus emphasised (Ger. 25.1) when comparing Roman and German slaveowning practices.

AFTERMATH OF THE PEACE OF PHILOCRATES

Most Athenians had not been privy to the detail of what had happened. Their conviction of Macedonian perfidy had been mitigated somewhat during the two or three months of the middle of 346, but was now redoubled by the settlement of the Third Sacred War. The foreshadowed benefits were not, could not be, delivered: Oropus remained in Theban hands, Euboea under Theban influence, Thespiae and Plataea depopulated. What the Athenians did not see was that their expectations were beyond reach, since Philip must not drive Thebes, already disaffected, into open opposition while Athens’ adherence remained any less than certain. Those like Demosthenes declined to point this out, and their credibility, in the circumstances, stood high. Philip, for his part, if he was serious about a settlement based on Athens, must devote himself more than ever to courting the disenchanted inamorata. Generous diplomacy would have to accomplish, if anything could, what artifice had not. It is not that Philip was without supporters in Athens. Nine of the ten envoys of 346, all but Demosthenes, continued to support the new peace as the vehicle of potential Macedonian benefaction, refusing to repudiate it or its architect. In the current climate that may have seemed foolish, certainly suspect. They believed, so we must infer, what he had told them about his interests and intentions and judged, presumably, that they would eventually be vindicated. Aeschines, who had successfully countercharged Timarchus with immorality, thus temporarily invalidating the charge of parapresbeia against him, was prominent among them. Their opponents, foremost among them Demosthenes, while realizing that for safety's sake the peace must be upheld since the alliance was now a dead letter, were nevertheless determined that any further Philippic overtures must be rejected.