1.1 The graying of the Western world and intergenerational solidarity

This study deals with one of the most crucial social issues of our times – generational relations, familial organization, and the support that elder generations can expect to receive from their adult children and the wider kin group. This topic has only recently found heightened attention, owing to rapidly aging societies in the Western world over the last few decades, a process that after a time lag will also affect the developing countries. The combined effects of higher life expectancy and a decline in birth rates have been producing fundamental changes. By the middle of the twenty-first century, the old and the young will represent an equal share of the world’s population. Globally, the proportion of those aged 60 years and over is expected to more than double, rising from 10 to 21 percent between 2000 and 2050, while the proportion of children will decline by a third, from 30 to 21 percent. We will soon enter an unprecedented period of history in which persons over 60 years old will outnumber those aged 15 years and younger. The same trend is expected in developing countries, where the proportion of elderly persons is expected to rise from 8 percent at present to 19 percent by 2050, while the proportion of children will fall from 33 percent to 22 percent.¹ Just one hundred years ago, the average life expectancy was somewhere in the mid-forties in Western Europe; at the turn of the millennium it had reached already the late seventies and is expected to rise another 10 years by the year 2050.² In comparison, the average life expectancy in the ancient world was somewhere between the early twenties and early thirties depending on the local disease environment.³

The graying of many modern societies goes hand in hand with considerable medical, social, and financial long-term consequences, a process that has alarmed social scientists, politicians, and the public alike. To give just one example, while in Germany today roughly 2.5 working adults support one retiree, in 2020 there will be only 2 workers for every dependent pensioner, and in 2050 the projected number is 1.3 working adults for every retiree.⁴ Increasing life expectancy and decline in fertility will lead inevitably to higher taxation of the working population and/or reductions in the financial support of the elderly, if more drastic measures such as the development of private pension alternatives or the delay of retirement age are not taken very soon. Lagging far behind traditional discourses about equity between classes, milieus, genders, or races, discourse about equity between generations has thus gained momentum and is currently one of the most fiercely debated issues in many developed nations. As the aging society endangers the stability and sustainability of social security schemes, policy makers faced with these national challenges in dealing with an aging society are advocating measures to strengthen intergenerational solidarity. Some scientists argue that the expansion of public welfare has negatively influenced the foundation of family solidarity. For the history of the modern welfare state beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing through the twentieth, we can see in general an increasing involvement of the state in the life of the individual through the implementation of national programs on health, housing, and income security – not only for the elderly but also for other weaker members of society, such as widows, orphans, the ill, and the unemployed.⁵ The question of intergenerational support is therefore tightly interwoven with broader issues in the development of modern Western society.⁶ Industrialization, urbanization, the demographic transition, increased migration, and globalization have also been accused of contributing to a deterioration of traditional intergenerational obligations and the erosion of the extended family network, ostensibly perceived to provide a safe haven for the elderly.⁷ Increasing divorce rates, single parenthood, delayed childbearing, decreasing family size, and voluntary childlessness are further factors which significantly transformed the dynamics of family ties and solidarity. Some scientists have even warned of an intergenerational warfare over limited resources, a discourse that manifested itself in an astounding media hype in the 1990s.⁸ These fears have been mitigated, however, by more recent studies. Generational relations and networks prove to be quite resilient to these changes.⁹ In addition, increasing economic wealth has not only benefitted the working generation but has also caused the standard of living for the elderly to rise constantly.¹⁰

The Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing was produced during the United Nations World Assembly on Ageing in 2002. It recognizes the vital role the family still plays for the well-being of the aged, and further advocates respect for their dignity, equality, and non-discrimination. The Plan promotes intergenerational interdependence, solidarity, and reciprocity in order to ensure support and care, alleviate poverty, especially in developing countries, and integrate the elderly better in society to advance their health and well-being.¹¹

While today functions such as education and old-age support are mediated by the state, this sphere was, in earlier times, almost exclusively organized by the family and household. Thus these institutions will be the main focus of our study. In antiquity in the absence of public provision the household was the most important institution for the health and welfare of its members, and the basis for redistributing resources between generations, which depended on their stage in the life cycle, their special needs, and their capabilities during this phase. The household played a critical role in caring for the vulnerable members of society: children, the ill, the disabled, and the old. Both kinship by blood and bonds established by marriage and joint living were important. Household social networks could balance needs and authority, while organizing housework, childcare, care for the elderly, and financial assistance. To make such an endeavor work, it was necessary to put the interests of the family and household above those of the individual. The fulfillment of these obligations to provide mutual support and assistance was based on traditions, social expectations, affection, and reciprocity. Informal codes of behavior and traditional patterns of family support that formed public opinion were supplemented by formal laws that regulated the measures of intergenerational support. Household formation, economic means, and the availability of kin, seem to have been the most determining factors. Many, if not most, of these strategies involved the interplay of different generations from one family.

However, this model mediated by the family, not the state, also had its demographic pitfalls. High mortality left many children orphaned and many elderly parents without children. We can thus observe a multitude of strategies that were used to cope with life’s uncertainties, such as widowhood, childlessness, early orphanhood, and frail old age. The regulations, debates, and struggles concerning these challenges left their traces in our sources, providing us with precious information about intersections of family relations and family economies in the society of Roman Egypt.

1.2 Intergenerational solidarity in the ancient world

In this study I want to ask what were the normative ideals of intrafamilial support in Graeco-Roman Egypt, and how did these ideals play out under real-life conditions. By intrafamilial support I mean the duties and the responsibilities of parents towards their children, on the one hand, and of adult children towards their elderly parents, on the other hand. My study pursues these questions on the household level, the basic unit of society, often described as a microcosm of society in which social relationships, economic systems, and cultural norms find their reflection. In a comparative, cross-cultural approach with specific emphasis on other preindustrial patriarchal societies, I want to study the role of intrafamilial support as a source of security and mutual assistance, and shed light on the question of how these patterns of mutual assistance and support were formed over the course of life.

In the present study I do not aim to portray old age or the elderly, but rather to provide insights into intergenerational interactions among family members of all ages. I would like to explain how these continuing interactions generated expectations and how they should be seen as strategies to secure support in later life. I will further discuss different forms of property transmission from one generation to the next, and link them to different family types and household patterns. Inheritance and succession patterns of a society reveal information about its cultural values, the idea of reciprocity between generations, the relationships between parents and their children, males and females, the relationships between siblings and those between spouses. The study focuses on the urban and rural middle class as documented in our papyrological material from Roman Egypt: individuals who owned some property but were not rich, small and moderate landowners, veterans, small traders, craftsmen, merchants, doctors, and scribes are the focus of this study.¹² The elite and upper social classes, which dominate the literary accounts, will take a back seat. Such a study, looking explicitly at intergenerational solidarity on the household level of the common population, is lacking not only for the ancient world, but for many other preindustrial societies as well.

The importance paid to interdisciplinary methods from historical demography, anthropology and sociology will become evident over the following pages. Graeco-Roman Egypt, thanks to its dry climate, has left us with rich source material not found anywhere else in the Mediterranean, and thus provides the natural regional focus for such an inquiry. Close to 50,000 published documentary papyri give us rare unmediated access to the humble and middle strata of society and their daily lives. Nonetheless, a consistent problem in the study of the ancient family is the lack of evidence for particular aspects of daily life, something which this study aims to deal with in part by investigating the possibilities of comparative studies.¹³ Therefore, this study will not only limit itself to the situation in Egypt, but will also raise questions of a broader comparative historical sociological bent, making extensive use of studies on other early modern and modern societies’ domestic groups, household complexities, and intergenerational support networks. These societies which will be addressed and taken for comparison in this study share some features: a common base in agriculture, high fertility and mortality rates, a proportion of the population aged over 60 of about 5 percent (compared with 20–30 percent in today’s Western societies), a high preponderance of the very young, a patriarchal family system, and the lack of a public pension system and regular retirement.¹⁴

When studying the ancient family and household, historians usually stay within the realm of the Mediterranean, and thereby tend to localize explanations for phenomena and developments. While a comparative approach is still unusual for traditional studies on the ancient family, it is intrinsic to the study of early modern household form and composition.¹⁵ I strongly believe, however, that only by placing the Graeco-Roman world in a wider global context is it possible to recognize general aspects, on the one hand, and specific, particular ones, on the other. Comparative history can liberate historiography from these self-imposed restrictions, and make a less local or regional, or even less Eurocentric, historiography of the ancient world possible. Effects and phenomena suddenly seem less self-evident. Looking at a different unknown society can help to distance oneself from the society one knows best.

Ideally, by using comparison in historical research, we can study two or more phenomena, regions, or events systematically with respect to their similarities and differences, and thereby can clarify the profiles of the respective cases. However, since I want to focus in my study on Egypt in Roman times, I attempt here what Kocka calls an “asymmetric comparison.”¹⁶ If I refer to family structures in the Ottoman Empire or early modern China, I do not intend to study these societies in their own right but rather use them as a background and reference point, to instrumentalize these cultures for a better understanding of the culture under question, Roman Egypt.¹⁷ By turning to evidence of early modern Europe and Asia, denser information allows us to reconstruct, by analogy, patterns and facts for Roman Egypt that would otherwise be lost for the ancient world. Because of gaps in our evidence or lack of clear indications, certain patterns and structures that we find elsewhere in early modern societies have escaped the attention of the ancient historian.

Such a form of comparison has, of course, its risks, namely because it does not and cannot pay equal attention to the other societies. We simply cannot reach equal proximity to the original sources of these societies owing to the missing command of ancient Chinese, Arabic, or Hindi, and have to rely on secondary literature with the inherent risks of accepting interpretations of these studies without any possibility of rechecking them. And time constraints also forbid studying the historical context and its continuity in detail. So we merely concentrate on certain issues that are of interest, an approach that risks superficiality and distortion. On the other hand, in this case, it is the only way to open the possibility of comparison at all, and widen our horizon in the study of intergenerational relations, the household and the family. For example, with an understanding of the structures, patterns, and mechanism of household formation in these societies, the case of Roman Egypt can be put in perspective, making common features and respective uniqueness apparent. Comparisons across time and across culture and region will allow the construction of concepts that go beyond one region or period of time, and allow recognition of some “world pattern” of intergenerational support in connection with household composition.

To get an idea of daily life as it must have been for people in the ancient world, the best thing would probably be to live in a developing country for some time. Reading studies on daily life in various preindustrial societies, which were also affected by high fertility, high infant mortality, and short life expectancy, but for which we have as well denser sources than for the ancient world, is a step in this direction. Descriptions of the daily routine of the lower social strata, their households, and their families have vastly expanded my horizons, pointing me to discoveries that helped me to understand aspects of Roman Egyptian family life that I would otherwise have missed in my sources. Of course, there is always the inherent danger that whatever distinctive traits there were in Roman Egypt (or any other part of the Roman world) are potentially disregarded in the process of applying a comparative model, and we have to be aware of this. Nonetheless, studies on ancient family life have too often restricted themselves by particularism, ignorant of theories and models developed by social historians of other historical periods for studying the same phenomena. Comparisons between the ancient world and other preindustrial societies do exist, of course, but have taken place mainly in the fields of religion, production, and economic growth.¹⁸ Social history, and especially the history of the family and household, is a further very fruitful area that still awaits exploration. Ancient Mediterranean household formation has never been the object of comparative analysis,¹⁹ even though we have quality data that hardly ranks behind the data from much later societies inviting comparisons. This study will be a first step in this direction.²⁰

By conducting this study I came to the conclusion, as far as family and household structures are concerned, that early modern and modern north-western Europe seems problematic for a comparative approach owing to quite different family and succession patterns. In Roman Egypt, marriage of women was early and universal. The young couple generally joined existing households, and rarely formed new ones. Brothers inherited equally, and often resided together. In contrast, in north-western Europe, the prevalent albeit not exclusive pattern was late marriage for both men and women. A relatively high proportion of men and women never married at all, and young couples generally formed new households upon marriage. When the young couples co-resided with parents after their wedding, it was often only temporary. Early modern and modern southern Europe, however, exhibited quite similar structures and actually provides good comparative material,²¹ as do many early modern and modern Near Eastern and Far Eastern societies. Fieldwork studies on households and family life in pre-twentieth century China and India, as well as those on the Arab world, point to remarkable similarities with Roman Egypt, and might give us insights into the potential aspects and realities of ancient family life that cannot be recovered from our Roman Egyptian sources. Furthermore, these studies offer the opportunity to employ methods and theories developed for other periods of history.²² Although the early modern and modern family in north-western and southern Europe has received a tremendous amount of attention from anthropologists during the past forty years, the same cannot be said of the family in the Near and Middle East. The number of scholars who have advanced groundbreaking studies is still in the single digits.²³ Of particular interest for the family in Roman Egypt are the studies on earlier and later periods of Egypt, that is Pharaonic and Ptolemaic times and Egypt in the Middle Ages and the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that allow us to consider household and family forms in this region as a continuum and not in their usual isolation, thus enabling us to see the developments and broader pictures of Eastern Mediterranean households and family structures.²⁴

Discussions on intergenerational equity focus on the economic, social, and moral obligations of the young and middle-aged toward the older members of society, and in return the obligations that the adult generations have to the younger ones. The main aim of policies concerning the aging population is to secure the economic, social, and emotional well-being of the weakest generations of society, the old and the young. The heightened attention this subject received in academic literature, owing to developments in contemporary societies, led in the 1970s to the establishment of the new field of social gerontology, which studies intergenerational solidarity multidimensionally. On the macro level, the field takes into consideration the social-structural and institutional contexts, cultural and religious values, legal norms, and political agendas that govern reciprocal relations among kin. On the micro level, the field takes an in-depth look at single families, studying how they interacted with and were influenced and affected by historical processes. The American sociologist Vern Bengtson and his colleagues developed the theoretical paradigms and frameworks for studying intergenerational solidarity, a model based on social exchange theory.²⁵ They took on the definition of solidarity by Durkheim as the structural forms by which individuals are integrated within groups.²⁶ According to their classification, intergenerational solidarity, defined as the bond between parents and children, is based on six variables:²⁷ (1) structural solidarity, which means the geographic proximity between parents and children, with co-residence as the highest level of structural solidarity; (2) associational solidarity, i.e., the frequency of contact between individuals; (3) affective solidarity, such as emotional assistance and the degree and reciprocity of positive sentiments among family members; (4) consensual solidarity in the form of shared opinions/worldviews; (5) functional solidarity, i.e., the degree of support and exchange of resources among family members, which includes practical assistance; and finally (6) normative solidarity, the persisting cultural and religious norms and values pertaining to obligations across generations. In Bengtson’s view intergenerational solidarity is the sum of these six dimensions, which can be substantially divided into two groups: (a) structural-behavioral (associational, functional, and structural) and (b) cognitive-affective (affectual, consensual, and normative) solidarity. More recently, Bengtson and others have turned to the solidarity/conflict model, in part responding to previous criticism that the solidarity model implies an emphasis on harmony and consensus and closes out any negative aspects of family relationships.²⁸ Bengtson thus stresses that solidarity and conflict are not mutually exclusive in family relationships and can be present at the same time.²⁹

While Bengtson and other modern sociologists study relations between parents and their adult children by conducting quantitative studies testing the model of intergenerational solidarity/conflict through empirical data from surveys and in-depth interviews, this approach is difficult to pursue for studying intergenerational solidarity in ancient societies for which we often have only anecdotal evidence. Nonetheless, we want to read our sources available for the period and region under study with these definitions in the back of our mind. Even if we lack the quantitative data, we will see that we will find all six dimensions of intergenerational solidarity also reflected in our ancient source material.

The study of the history of aging and old age is also a fairly recent field in historical studies, having begun in earnest in the early 1980s with the study of early modern and modern England. At that time Peter Stearns declared the research on the elderly in societies before the industrial revolution “virgin territory.”³⁰ Since then, however, an increasing number of studies have appeared in which scholars approach the subject from a historical, demographic, sociological, and anthropological perspective. This recent interest is not surprising, if we take into account that there are few historical topics that have as much contemporary relevance, involving economic as well as moral issues. These in-depth studies have unmasked the “golden age” theory where the elderly held a high status in societies of the past owing to prevailing moral standards, elderly people’s scarcity, and their control of wisdom and economic resources as a historical myth.³¹ Laslett has called this phenomenon “the world we have lost” syndrome – people have forever lamented the moral downfall of their own times compared with those of the past.³² We find many examples of this sort in antiquity as well.³³

The last few decades have now seen the study of old age blossom into a thriving subfield of social history for the early modern and modern period³⁴ and also the ancient world.³⁵ They show that the perception and experience of old age depended on social class, regional and economic circumstances, specific family situation, the individual’s health and control over property, and last, but not least, the individual’s gender. These studies examine old age through the analysis of various evidence, such as literary, legal, medical, visual, papyrological, and epigraphic sources, which study definitions of and attitudes toward old age, employ life-course approaches, and consider the impact of age on the construction of identity. The authors of these studies agree that the sources reflect a great ambivalence toward old age and the elderly. Depending on the literary genre, the elderly are shown in a more positive or negative light and either the positive or negative characteristics of old age are stressed. The respective, often multilayered picture drawn of old age correlated with the perspective and intention of the author and the respective society, social status, and individual background in question. On the one hand, we have examples of old people being depicted as frail, vulnerable, spiritless, whiny, and lecherous,³⁶ especially old women past childbearing age.³⁷ On the other hand, we have numerous examples in our sources for elderly people who were highly esteemed for their wisdom and balanced judgment.³⁸ While in earlier studies the influence of demographic factors for social history and old age in particular had been widely ignored, the more recent studies on old age and aging benefit greatly from the demographic sophistication we have acquired in recent decades.³⁹ Parkin’s book, a solid and highly original introduction to the experience of old age in the Roman world, is a fine example of the benefits that derive from such an approach.⁴⁰

In a society with high fertility and mortality rates household composition in Roman Egypt changed much more rapidly than today. Child mortality was high, about half of all live-born children did not live up to the age of 5, and the risk of dying of infectious diseases, in childbed, or in warfare remained high over the lifespan.⁴¹ At birth, an individual had an average life expectancy in the low or mid-twenties. With high fertility and low population growth, the census population of Roman Egypt of classical antiquity ranged on the same level as India and China as late as the early twentieth century.⁴² While our best sources for establishing average life expectancy are the census returns from Roman Egypt,⁴³ skeletal evidence – considered unhelpful as evidence for life expectancy – can tell us something about diseases and disabilities these ancient people suffered from during their lives, from traces left in their teeth and bones.⁴⁴ Studies on the skeletal evidence have shown that, because of malnutrition and heavy physical work from a young age on, serious health problems were common. A high percentage of examined skeletons from the Roman world were affected by porotic hyperostosis, a condition that causes bone tissue to appear soft and spongy, which is usually triggered by anemia, probably due to an iron deficiency in the diet. Another pervasive condition found in the examined skeletons was enamel hypoplasia, a condition of the teeth likewise caused by malnutrition, but also by illness, parasites, infections, or fever during tooth formation. Unsanitary conditions due to fecal contamination of drinking water facilitated the spread of tuberculosis, cholera, typhus, and the plague bacillus, which also left skeletal lesions. Many succumbed to endemic diseases such as malaria at certain periods of the year. The victims’ bones show pathological lesions caused by severe anaemia.⁴⁵ Furthermore, we know that infectious viral diseases, such as meningitis, measles, mumps, scarlet fever, and, most famously, the Antonine plague (believed to have been smallpox), afflicted many individuals and periodically killed a considerable percentage of the population, distorting long-term demographic trends. In general, life in the countryside was healthier than in cities. Densely settled environments were a fertile soil for the spread of infections, which negatively affected life expectancies. Respiratory diseases due to air pollution from indoor heating and cooking were also widespread. Literary accounts tell us of many more diseases and health problems going along with certain life stages. Poor eyesight and loss of hearing were common for elderly people, as were complaints of pain in joints of the knee, neck, foot, and ankle, probably caused by arthritis.⁴⁶ Elderly people in the papyri from Roman Egypt complain especially about frailty, infirmity, and poor eyesight.⁴⁷

One of the major issues in the history of old age – and one that ties historical study quite closely to contemporary policy debates – is that of the residence of the elderly as it has a direct effect on availability of support and their quality of life. In order to examine the living conditions of the elderly in a given society and the options that the elder family members had when it came to sustenance and maintenance, it is crucial to study the dominant forms of household composition.⁴⁸ In contrast to the modern individualized Western world which is characterized by institutionalized old-age support and thus often isolation of elderly people, the elderly in past societies were believed to have regularly lived in multi-generational households, cared for by their children and grandchildren. Yet, as more sophisticated studies have shown over the past decades, there was a wide diversity of living circumstances and household forms. In early modern Europe, for instance, one finds several different forms of living circumstances of aged parents, depending on cultural patterns, an urban or rural context, social class, occupation of the head of household, economic considerations, and respective labor demands. Some parents remained living on their own in the family home after their children married and moved out. Others left the family home to their eldest son on his marriage and moved to a smaller house on the same lot. Still others continued to live in the same household as their married sons, with the father remaining head of the household until his death. Finally, some elderly parents were circulated among their children and lived with each of them in turn for some duration.⁴⁹ Peter Laslett and his Cambridge Group were the first to conduct systematic research on the form and size of the preindustrial family and household and advanced standardized definitions of household types.⁵⁰ Methodological considerations about the joint family household were later discussed by Wheaton and Kertzer.⁵¹ On the multiple family household, the best overall discussion is to be found in Kertzer, who also elucidates the differences between stem and multiple family systems.⁵² The clearest and most comprehensive exposition of the geography of historical Italian family life has been advanced by Barbagli and Kertzer.⁵³ I will address this field of research on historical household forms in more detail in Chapter 2.

This study has also been tremendously enlightened by the vast scholarship on the family, one of the most prolific areas of historical research over recent decades. Studies on the ancient family have used juridical, literary, medical, visual, archeological, and epigraphic sources, depending on region and period and availability of respective source material. More recently, the study of the family has received additional impetus from other disciplines such as gender studies, anthropology, comparative studies, and historical demography. In the progression and refinement of the field, regional and cultural differentiations within the ancient Mediterranean – development over time, on the one hand, and continuity from pagan to early Christian times, on the other hand – have been stressed.⁵⁴ Of particular interest for our endeavor are those studies that treat family strategies concerning life course, marriage patterns, child rearing, and old age.⁵⁵ Most studies have concentrated so far on the classical Greek⁵⁶ and Roman families,⁵⁷ with dominance on the Roman side, and here especially on the city of Rome, Italy, North Africa, Gaul, and Spain. Works on family and kinship in the Eastern Mediterranean are still rare.⁵⁸ Cox has advanced an admirable study on household interests in classical Athens. She discusses marriage patterns, the relations among family members, property transmission, and the structure of the oikos of the Athenian elite.⁵⁹ Her analysis, however, relies mainly on literary sources (court speeches and politic biographies), while my study is primarily indebted to the papyrological evidence (mainly the census returns, marriage contracts, legal petitions, and private letters) and thus stresses different aspects and covers different strata of society. The same applies to Gallant’s examination of the Greek household.⁶⁰ The problem with his study is the scanty literary evidence, produced by a literate elite, from which he tries – with the help of modern proxy data – to extrapolate information about average household size and composition of the Greek peasant population. Earlier studies that have addressed sociological aspects of housing in Roman Egypt have been done by Luckhard (Reference Luckhard1914), Calderini (Reference Calderini1924), Montevecchi (Reference Montevecchi1941), Hobson (Reference Hobson1985), and Alston (Reference Alston, Wallace-Hadrill and Laurence1997, Reference Alston and George2005, Reference Alston, Lewin and Pellegrini2006). In my 2007 article in the Journal of Roman Studies I discussed the peculiar marriage pattern of Roman Egypt, responding to and partly refuting earlier works.⁶¹ I have also studied remarriage and stepfathers in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, household structures and family relations in the inscriptions from Graeco-Roman Egypt, and adoption and fosterage in Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean more generally.⁶² Furthermore, we have several studies on the life and status of women in Graeco-Roman Egypt, the most notable by Pomeroy (Reference Pomeroy1984), Rowlandson (Reference Rowlandson1998), Melaerts and Mooren (Reference Melaerts and Mooren2002), and Bagnall and Cribiore (Reference Bagnall and Cribiore2006). Studies on women in later Byzantine periods include Beaucamp (Reference Beaucamp1990–2), Krause (Reference Krause1994–5), and Arjava (Reference Arjava, Kramer, Luppe, Mähler and Pöthke1997). Montserrat (Reference Montserrat1996) advanced a study on sex and society in Graeco-Roman Egypt and Yiftach-Firanko (Reference Yiftach-Firanko2003) on marriage documents of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. Nonetheless, there is not a single study in monograph form so far that explicitly deals with family and household in Roman Egypt, which is surprising in view of the region’s richness of sources which provide us with fascinating information about family life below the social and political elite, and the variations between urban and rural families.

Despite the enthusiasm with which findings on early modern household forms which have dramatically altered widespread views about the family in past times were met by historians of later periods, these methods developed to study household composition and household strategies have rarely been exploited by ancient historians for studying the ancient family and household. Household forms in the Graeco-Roman world have never been studied in comparison with other preindustrial societies either, even though communication between these two areas of research could tremendously enhance our understanding of ancient family life, and could help us to recognize common features and identify cultural specifics or unique characteristics. One of the problems for such a study on ancient household structures is the lack of reliable source material. Saller and Shaw produced a study on commemorative patterns and likely household composition among the non-elite strata in the early Roman Empire in the West based on funerary inscriptions; Edmondson and Martin did the same for Roman Lusitania and Asia Minor.⁶³ On the basis of their conclusions drawn from the epigraphic evidence, the assumption that the nuclear family was the typical form of living in the western Roman world has found its way into virtually every publication on the Roman family of the last two decades.⁶⁴ I have argued elsewhere on the basis of an extensive survey of inscriptions for Roman Egypt that our epigraphic evidence might not be reliable for any assumptions about actual household structures.⁶⁵ Moreover, studies on later periods of the Mediterranean stress the great diversity of family and household forms even within the same region. The idea of there being just one “Mediterranean family” clearly has to be abandoned.⁶⁶ These studies on the family in later periods of the Italian peninsula should make us very wary that anything like the “Roman family” existed at all. We should rather expect to find enormous variations between regions just within Italy, not to speak of the other provinces of the Roman Empire. I will return to a discussion of the epigraphic evidence and the conclusions drawn from it regarding ancient household structures in Chapter 2.

I believe that the only available source material for the ancient world that provides us with empirical data on household structures for the common people is in fact the census returns from Roman Egypt. In combination with more qualitative sources such as rental or sales contracts or divisions and registrations of property, we are able to reconstruct everyday life on the household level, a field of study that, despite its interest for the history of the family, the history of childhood and old age, and the history of household economy, has not received its due attention so far.

This study is thus indebted to four areas of research: (1) studies on intergenerational solidarity with their current focus on contemporary Western and increasingly modern developing countries’ societies; (2) old age studies, a specialized field within social history that has also found heightened attention by ancient historians over the last two decades; (3) household studies, a flourishing field since the early 1970s that so far has focused mainly on early modern and modern societies; and finally (4) family studies, which have experienced a boom over the last three decades in the field of classical studies.

1.3 Definitions

Various terms in this study need definitions. The study employs the concept of the life cycle of the household, which refers to periodic recurring processes during which households and families undergo changes in size and composition. Life-cycle concepts are well known in the discipline of economic history. We have the cycles of growth and recession on the macro level, and individual economic life cycles that exhibit a changing ratio between period of labor earnings to consumption and dependency over the individual’s lifespan. Household life cycles mean the different stages in the development of a household, from the point of its foundation over periods of expansion and contraction to its dissolution. Transition between stages is marked by changes in the individuals’ biographies, such as marriage, the birth of children, the death of a spouse, and so on. Not every household goes through the same cycle of stages, and each stage can vary in its length depending on the respective household members’ needs and options.⁶⁷

The term “generation” can take on many different meanings varying from popular to scientific use, and varies between the disciplines such as sociology, demography, and history. Its many uses are destined to cause a confusion of concepts.⁶⁸ In this study I understand generation as descent relationship, not as a concept referring to age or historical time. When talking about intergenerational relations, solidarity, and conflicts in Roman Egypt, I am referring to interfamilial conflicts, not larger society-level processes. I understand generation as liberated from age-bound connotations, which does not mean that age does not play a significant role in the interaction of generations. I study parents and children and their relations that change over the family’s life course. Moreover, I wish I could study these changing relationships and contingencies also through historical time and note changes from first- to third-century Egypt, but for this our source material is unfortunately not abundant enough.

Likewise, I try to avoid marking out a chronologically defined age group as “the young” or “the elderly” in this study. If I need a cutoff age, as in Chapters 3, 5 and 7, I use 14 as the end of childhood and 60 as the starting point of old age. At the age of 14, boys reached legal majority and started to pay the poll tax. Many girls entered their first marriage at this age. At the age of 62, poll tax liability ended in Roman Egypt, and the age of 68 qualified for membership in the gerousia of Oxyrhynchus, and the age of 70 for excusal from participation in certain liturgies.⁶⁹ In general, it is, however, more helpful for this study to define the individual by their status in a specific life-cycle position. To give an example, her age was much less decisive for the position of a young woman in the household than whether she was the unmarried daughter of the head of the household or the young bride of one of the sons of the household. For a daughter-in-law, as long as her parents-in-law were alive and her children not yet grown up, whether she was 15 or 35, her situation and status did not really change. Likewise, for a widow with adult sons it did not really have a bearing whether she was 45 or 60 at the time when her husband died. The authority and headship of the household would regularly go over to an adult son. Since it was not likely that the widow remarried, she often took up a subordinate position in the household, dependent on financial support by her children. On the other hand, as long as an elderly woman’s husband was alive, she occupied the role as the female head of the household regardless of whether she was 40 or 70. For an elderly male head of the household it likewise did not matter whether he was 50 or 70, since it was up to his death that he enjoyed control over all household matters. Chronological age becomes almost irrelevant in terms of these considerations. However, what mattered apart from their status in a specific life-cycle position was the old man’s or woman’s physical well-being, and their need for financial support and practical care.

Usually the term “caregiving” has a wide range of meanings that go beyond distinct medical care. In this study I understand caregiving as a form of “social care” that ranges from medical care and nursing, in the case of an acute or chronic illness or old age frailty, to social care as an everyday activity, which included living together in one household, helping with housework, emotional support, and personal affective attention.

Studying the household is an attempt to understand past societies from the bottom up, still a new approach to understanding ancient Greek and Roman societies. The fascinating thing about the household is the fact that it occurs as a concept and structure across cultures and societies. Nonetheless, as we have seen above, the household has become an analytical concept only a few decades ago, and ever since then its definition has been a highly debated issue in modern scholarship. “Household,” “family”/“kinship,” and “houseful” are categorically different concepts.⁷⁰ While household usually defines the domestic group, including lodgers and servants, living under the same roof and sharing activities and the same table, the family can reach beyond household walls and encompass all those related by blood, marriage, or adoption, regardless of where they live.⁷¹ The “houseful,” on the other hand, comprises all the people who live in the same building or the same premises but form independent households. Furthermore, what has been understood in recent years is that the household cannot be tackled as a monolithic entity, but has to be studied as a flexible and permeable concept, as the sum of the interactions of its members, such as production, consumption/distribution, and reproduction.⁷² Household has to be understood as a process rather than a norm.⁷³ Household boundaries are fluid, defined by the everyday practices and relationships of household members and influenced by inheritance and marriage patterns, the allocation of authority within the household, organization of production, resource allocation, and labor participation.⁷⁴

I often refer to patriarchal societies and mean by them societies in which the eldest male of the family, usually the father or grandfather, holds authority over all women and children as well as the younger men of the household, with children belonging to the father’s lineage. Women in these patriarchal societies, being assigned a role primarily in reproduction and administration of the household, were usually barred from any political leadership, but were not necessarily excluded from control over property or the right to inherit. The concept of patria potestas in its absolute form as defined in Roman law and tradition, however, was unknown in Egypt, and even after 212 CE, when Roman citizenship was given to basically all free inhabitants of the Roman Empire, was never as rigorously interpreted there as in classical Roman Law.⁷⁵

1.4 Sources

The study of the life of the lower social strata, focusing particularly on the humble peasants and craftsmen, children and the elderly, is enormously constrained by the limitations of our source material. Literary texts were written by and for an elite, and their value is curtailed when one is studying the experiences of the majority of the population. Literary sources become more informative for the middle and lower classes only in the later period of the Roman Empire. Moreover, we have few contemporary accounts about household structures in general. Ancient authors mention the topic only en passant, but never make it their central point, as domestic arrangements were probably too obvious or tedious to talk about. So the exceptional receives attention, not the typical. The description by Plutarch, for instance, of the crammed living conditions of the Licinii Crassi of the first century bce,⁷⁶ or of the Aelii Tuberones of the second century bce,⁷⁷ might indeed portray the typical living style of the humble peasant population in ancient Latinum. In this context, these cases serve, however, rather as literal examples rendering an ideologically transfigured view of Rome’s glorious past when senators were still unassuming and hard-working men than as an account of historic realities. Moreover, when assessing the ancient family support system, literary accounts provide us with the major features of its ideal working, but often not with its historical reality. The juristic writings can give us the framework but does not tell us much about lived reality. Also archeology’s contribution to this interdisciplinary problematization has been limited, despite the publication of several archeological works on ancient houses and households in recent decades.⁷⁸ One problem is that the definitions and methodology developed by sociologists for studying the household have not yet been incorporated in the archeological studies of the Greek and Roman household, or in their theoretical and interpretative practice. This might be partly due to the fact that archeological studies cannot recover household dynamics, and theories and models used for household studies have little bearing on the archeological material remains of the house.⁷⁹ Nevett (Reference Nevett2010) has recently advanced an innovative study which tries to push the archeological evidence further and explores new approaches to contribute to the academic mainly text-based discourse on the ancient family and domestic space. Daniel has contributed an analysis on architectural orientation in the papyri (2010). However, recovering the size and composition of a family from archeological remains alone seems to be a difficult endeavor. The papyrological evidence from Graeco-Roman Egypt, however, is an exceptional case for the study of the ancient world for which information about the common population is very scarce. It yields information about the life of the lower social strata, such as farmers, small traders, and craftsmen who constituted the vast majority of the population, and therefore has special importance in our inquiry.

1.5 The Roman Egyptian census

The population of Egypt in Roman times consisted of Roman citizens, citizens of the Greek cities, and indigenous Egyptians who mainly lived in the small towns and villages and doubtless constituted the vast majority of the population. The Roman government took every effort to maintain this clear separation by a complex set of rules. They eventually became obsolete in 212 ce with the Constitutio Antoniniana, which granted all free inhabitants of the Roman Empire full Roman citizenship.⁸⁰ The capital, Alexandria, had in Roman times about 200,000 to 600,000 inhabitants and was, after Rome, the largest city in the Roman Empire.⁸¹ The low estimation for population size of a nome capital or metropolis (Arsinoe and Oxyrhynchus being two of the around fifty nome capitals in Roman Egypt) is about 15,000 to 25,000 inhabitants.⁸² The total number of people living in the metropoleis is thus estimated to be about 0.75 to 1.25 million. The number of villages in Roman Egypt ranged, according to Bagnall and Frier, from 2,000 to 3,000 with an average population of 1,000 to 1,500, thus totaling approximately 3 million.⁸³ While in 1994 Bagnall and Frier set the percentage of the population who lived in the cities to one-third of the total population of Roman Egypt,⁸⁴ Bagnall, influenced by subsequent studies that argued for smaller urban population sizes,⁸⁵ later lowered his estimate to about 15–25 percent of the total population, which would still mean a fairly high degree of urbanization due to the high population density in the inhabitable portion of land.⁸⁶

Among the papyri many private letters, contracts, court proceedings, wills, and, most importantly for our angle, census lists have survived.⁸⁷ Our modern term “census” comes from the Latin word censere, “to count or estimate.”⁸⁸ The procedure of counting people is already testified in our earliest historical records. Knowing the number of the (adult male) population was decisive for a government’s ability to assess its labor availability, defense readiness, and potential tax revenues. The first known census was taken by the Babylonians in 3800 bce. Every six or seven years the Babylonians systematically recorded people, livestock, and agricultural products. In Egypt the practice of conducting a periodic census reaches as far back as the late third millennium bce. The principal aim of the pharaohs was to establish the availability of labor. Household listings have also survived from the Egyptian workmen’s village Deir el-Medina from the second half of the second millennium bce. For late eighth- to early seventh-century Assyria, a collection of tablets known as the “Harran census” have come down to us, on which the heads of all households, their family members, landholdings, animals, and all other property were recorded. Most of the individuals recorded were common people, farmers, gardeners, and shepherds, and average household size was four individuals. The Bible refers to several censuses for ancient Israel.⁸⁹ For Attica, the orator Demetrius of Phalerum is said to have held the first census in 317 bce. He counted 21,000 adult male citizens, 10,000 metics, and 400,000 slaves.⁹⁰ The Ptolemaic census in Egypt, in operation at least from the reign of Ptolemy II, seems to have been based both on occupational groups and on the household as declaration unit, and was used mainly as the basis for raising taxes.⁹¹ The declarant gave the names of all adult members of his or her household, their gender, and their relationships to each other. Their livestock and agricultural produce were also listed. In contrast to the later Roman census in Egypt, however, ages were not supplied and minors were not recorded, which makes the earlier census unsuitable for any more detailed demographic analysis. From the few declarations we have so far, we can only conclude that the Ptolemaic census was little organized and standardized, and it did not yet take place periodically. Existing lists were, however, updated on a fairly regular basis.⁹²

The Romans according to tradition conducted a census as far back as the sixth century bce, an introduction of Servius Tullius. It was first organized by the consuls, and the office of the two censors was introduced in the mid-fifth century to release the consuls from this burden.⁹³ Varro gives an account of the procedure.⁹⁴ Every five years all adult male citizens had to register themselves with their full names and ages. Each head of household also had to declare his wife, his children, and all other members of the household, including slaves. Finally, he had to list all his property and give an assessment of its total value. Widows and orphans were registered by their legal guardians, but their number was not included in the total count of capita civium.⁹⁵ First, only citizens of the city of Rome itself were included, until later in the early third century bce citizenship was extendedto Italy as well. Caesar Augustus finally included the entire Roman Empire. The Roman census was conducted for taxation and military purposes, and played a crucial role in the administration of the empire. Taking part in the census was obligatory, and voluntary absence or refusal was punished severely.⁹⁶

Censuses were also held by the Roman provincial governments, though they do not seem to have taken place all at the same time or with the same frequency. We are best informed about the census of Roman Egypt, conducted at a fourteen-year interval from at least 11/12 ce to 257/8, for which nearly 400 individual census returns have survived among the papyrological evidence. For most parts of this study we focus on the 304 returns which almost exclusively originate in Middle Egypt and have been treated in Bagnall and Frier’s first edition of The Demography of Roman Egypt (1994). They record 1108 persons. The additional 63 households (of which 36 are complete or nearly complete), probably from Lykopolis in Upper Egypt, published as P.Oxy.Census, which record an additional 256 individuals, are fraught with various problems, partly due to the small size of the sample, and partly due to the bad preservation of the papyrus roll they were written on.⁹⁷ The Upper Egyptian returns also exhibit a high degree of lost ages and the tendency of age-rounding. After the first edition of The Demography of Roman Egypt was in print, about 33 additional census returns from Middle Egypt became available to the authors, which they added as a supplement to the second edition (Reference Bagnall and Frier2006), but did not take into consideration for the discussions and the tables. These additional census returns record around another 100 individuals.

All inhabitants of Roman Egypt, even those exempt from the poll tax, had to take part in the census.⁹⁸ The principal use of the census was to gain accurate lists of men liable to the poll and other capitation taxes, but this was not its only use as otherwise women, children, and men above the age of 62 (when the capitation tax ceased to be due) would not have been included. Because they are all-encompassing, the census documents allow studies into the domestic group, household complexity, and marriage patterns. In order to facilitate the operation of the census, individuals had to return to their legal domiciles, as difficult as in some cases it must have been to define this legal or fiscal domicile. We have a fragmentary edict on papyrus of the prefect of Egypt, Gaius Vibius Maximus, from 104 ce: “The census by household having begun, it is essential that all those who are away from their nomes be summoned to return to their own hearths so that they may perform the customary business of registration and apply themselves to the cultivation which concerns them.”⁹⁹ The text of the edict reinforces of course the famous passage in the Gospel of Luke 2:1–3. The census of 257/8 ce seems to have been the last of this regular fourteen-year cycle to take place in Roman Egypt. The discontinuation might be connected with changes in the system of capitation taxes. Under Diocletian the tax system of the late Roman Empire was restructured, which should probably be seen in connection with his other efforts in reorganizing provincial administration and the coinage.¹⁰⁰ Diocletian introduced a five-year census in 287, before the fifteen-year indiction cycle was established in 312 ce.

The quality of the Roman Egyptian census, “the best available demographic source for any population prior to the Renaissance,”¹⁰¹ is in general regarded as very high. The quality of reporting ages is, for instance, comparable to that of census data from Western European countries in the nineteenth century, and considerably higher than the quality of reported ages in census data from any country in the Middle East and Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.¹⁰² This evidence is, however, biased in several ways. First, those several hundred surviving documents constitute only a tiny fraction of the original number of about 18 million documents that must have been produced over those more than 250 years.¹⁰³ Furthermore, following the general pattern of our papyrological documentation, most of these documents originate from the second century ce, and most come from Middle Egypt, where papyri had a better chance of surviving in the dry desert sands. That means that we have almost no evidence for the large part of the population that lived in the Nile Delta and in Alexandria. As a result of unequal preservation almost half of the returns come from the big cities, and the metropoleis Arsinoe and Oxyrhynchus are predominant. The countryside is under-represented, with returns from villages being much less well preserved. The returns that we have from a rural environment are also unevenly distributed. Nearly two-thirds of our evidence comes from the Arsinoite nome in the Fayum, a fertile region of agricultural towns and villages where in Roman times most of the inhabitants were independent small-scale farmers.¹⁰⁴ We have one separate census register from one city in Upper Egypt, probably Lykopolis, already referred to above.¹⁰⁵ When discussing individual census returns in this study, I refer to the numbers in the catalogue that Bagnall and Frier provided as an appendix to their study on the demography of Roman Egypt.¹⁰⁶

As in modern censuses, in Roman Egypt the household was the unit for the declaration.¹⁰⁷ The usual term given in these documents to define the registration unit is oikia.¹⁰⁸ Every fourteen years the head of each household, normally the eldest male, had to file such a census return to facilitate future taxation. He had to declare his property and the persons who lived in it, that is, not only his immediate family, but also lodgers, freedmen, and slaves.¹⁰⁹ The returns record the number of members of a household and give their name, age, and relationship to the other members of the household. Status is given only for declarations from the major cities and is missing for villages. The same applies to occupations. Living off land revenues was not considered as an occupation in antiquity, and words such as ἄτεχνος (without a trade, not trained to any craft or profession), ἰδιώτης (unskilled, lay person) and ἀργός (not working the ground, living without labor), which we find in the census declarations for some adult males, seem to have been the terms for it.¹¹⁰ Most often only names, ages, and family relations are given, the most important information for our analysis. Unless the papyri are heavily damaged, “the kinship between household members can virtually always be reconstructed with considerable confidence.”¹¹¹

Most of the women and men who registered in the census lists for Roman Egypt were of relatively humble origin and belonged to the lower and middle social strata of their community. We have many artisans, small traders, and peasant farmers. The rest were landowners who were able to live off the revenue from their land, and only a few professionals. The number of town councilors recorded in these returns is very small, also because town councils were only created under the rule of Septimius Severus at the start of the third century ce.¹¹² Some 11 percent of all persons registered in the census lists were slaves who belonged to less than one-sixth of all households. Slaves were a symbol of status and the fact that five-sixths of all households registered without slaves seems to indicate that they were of modest means.¹¹³ As we have seen, villages are under-represented. Returns from the metropoleis account for roughly 50 percent of all our data, though their population constituted probably only one-third to one-half of those of the surrounding villages.¹¹⁴

Moreover, the limitations of the census returns, as has often been noted for other regions and periods, are that they rarely state what criteria the people who drew up these documents used to define a household. The possibilities are sleeping under the same roof, residing on the same farm, sharing meals, or participating in the same economic activities. By studying the household within a specific society we thus need other sources to establish residence and production patterns, and put the information we gain from the census returns into context.¹¹⁵ I will discuss the definition of a household and the history of household studies more in detail in the following chapter.¹¹⁶ I will thus also draw on other documentary evidence, especially private letters which survive among the papyri and bring to light ancient family life. For practical purposes and since our source material is severely limited, I assume when analyzing the census returns from Roman Egypt that each return represents one household, defined as a residential unit, with members sleeping under the same roof, preparing meals together, and sharing common living and production space, even if some of the members of the family might have spent a considerable time of the year away from home traveling for business matters, seasonal work, or visiting relatives.¹¹⁷ We also know little about how the Roman returns were filed. We can probably assume that teams of officials visited the villages for a certain period of time and filled out the form in conjunction with each head of the household, but we do not know if other household members were also required to be present – probably not, because occasionally absent sons, married daughters, or runaway slaves were listed as well. In the towns the heads of each household probably had to address themselves to the local census bureau within a certain period of time after the edict had been issued and enrol their household members for the census.

Finally, we cannot stress often enough that family and household are constantly changing units: their respective compositions depend on the individual’s point of progress through the life course, marriage, divorce, and remarriage, all of which could change its composition, as well as births, deaths, and the dissolution of formerly joined households. The census returns catch only one specific moment in a household’s life cycle. They are unable to record a historic progress through time except in those few cases in which we have several consecutive returns for the same household. However, here we are just given snapshots of the households’ composition at a specific point at an interval of fourteen years. This is counterproductive for the study of family dynamics and family as a social organism, for which we again need to fall back on additional sources such as private letters, petitions, and contracts. In conclusion because we do not have the same quality and quantity of evidence for other regions of the ancient world as we have for Roman Egypt, there is simply no way for making any conclusive assumptions about family and household structures in the ancient Mediterranean in general.

1.6 Overview of the chapters

The present chapter having laid out the aim of this study, the second chapter delves into detail and gives an overview of the history and methodology of household studies, and tries to locate the Roman Egyptian household pattern within this system. I will discuss the physical structures of a typical household, the average number of residents, household life cycles under the demographic regime of high fertility and mortality, differences between rural and urban regions, and inheritance patterns that affect and were shaped by prevalent household structures. This chapter sets the scene for later chapters which will refer back to it. Chapter 3 looks at intergenerational reciprocity on the household level. While economic support for children and the elderly are two separate systems in most modern societies, and intergenerational transfers from adult to elderly generations occur through taxation and social expenditure, old-age support in antiquity was based on direct reciprocity. By contrast to most parents in the modern West, elderly parents in Roman Egypt expected to be cared for by their children in direct reciprocity for raising them and providing them with an education or dowry in earlier years. This chapter investigates normative obligations parents had toward their young children and children toward their elderly parents, authority struggles between the generations living in one household, gender differences between sons and daughters and mothers and fathers, and strategies such as retirement contracts that elderly parents employed to secure old-age support. Chapter 4 tackles an important subject in the sociology of the Roman Egyptian family, thinking through the consequences of widowhood within concrete household formations. The chaste widow who remained faithful to her late husband was the ideal in Graeco-Roman society – at least among the upper classes. The census returns from the first to third century seem to confirm that also in Roman Egypt remarriage for widows was in fact quite rare: the recorded instances in the census returns indicate that most widows, especially those over 30 years of age, apparently did not remarry but raised their children alone and managed their husbands’ property single-handedly until the children came of age. I argue, however, that we should not take the information in the census returns at face value, since these documents only record a woman’s previous marriage if it met two conditions: first, her previous union resulted in children; and second, these children lived with the mother and her new husband, a very unlikely living situation given the prevalent postmarital residence patterns in Roman Egypt.¹¹⁸ Drawing on cross-cultural studies on various preindustrial patriarchal societies, I suggest that the likelihood of remarriage for widows is directly linked to household composition upon the husband’s death.

Living arrangements and household forms were closely connected to the quality and quantity of the care and support for the aged. To examine the living conditions of the elderly in Roman Egypt and the options that existed to provide for the elder family members, an analysis of the dominant forms of succession patterns and household structures is relevant. Urban and rural areas in early modern Italy, for instance, show considerable differences as regards inheritance patterns and the organization of old-age support, as, e.g., Kertzer and Hogan have emphasized.¹¹⁹ In Chapter 5 I want to examine if the same can be said for Graeco-Roman Egypt. Inheritance patterns, often viewed as the “engine that drives household composition itself,”¹²⁰ were decisive for residence patterns and thus for the decision regarding which child was chosen as a primary caregiver in old age, and both inheritance and residence patterns thus have to be studied in unison. Property has always been the most powerful leverage in achieving support in old age. Chapter 6 addresses for the first time the crucial role of the daughter-in-law in a patriarchal household. Under the system of patri-virilocal marriage patterns, a young daughter-in-law could face a dire fate during her first years of marriage. She had little influence in her husband’s home, and was subdued and potentially mistreated. Classical sources tell us that a young bride in her husband’s household was expected to act in a demure and shy manner, and endure the hardships and constant criticism by her mother-in-law to work harder without complaint. It was the task of the mother-in-law to familiarize her new daughter-in-law with her new duties and responsibilities and supervise her work. Consanguineous unions, the marriage to a cousin or uncle, softened tensions that arose from this constellation as they accorded the daughter-in-law a higher value within her husband’s family and a greater autonomy in household decision-making. And in fact consanguineous marriages were and are very common in societies where the multiple family household is the ideal. In consanguineous marriages the mother-in-law was, instead of a stranger, an aunt or otherwise closely related woman whom the young bride had known since childhood. The retention of family wealth and the dowry within the family and the strengthening of kinship solidarity were further motives that led parents to look for a groom for their daughters among their close relatives. As we will see, also in the Hellenistic world in general and in Roman Egypt more specifically we find a strong tendency toward this form of unions.

When assessing the ancient family support system, literary accounts provide us with its major features, but often not with its historical reality. The ancients indubitably relied on their children in old age, but we should not underestimate the impact of the demographic regime. Although co-residing sons and their families were the most important factor in old-age care, this family model constituted only the ideal that could often not be achieved due to high mortality rates and the migration of adult children. Chapter 7 will be especially informed by the life-course perspective that has proven to be successful for studying aging in other periods of history. The life-course approach traces how historical circumstances and individual events challenged, converted, improved, and transformed over the life course an individual’s provision for old age. We will see that the support system of the elderly was generally shaped by relationships formed early in life, and that often from young adulthood strategies were pursued to secure support in one’s later years.