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2 - The demographic background

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Sabine R. Hübner
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
David M. Ratzan
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
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Summary

The severe mortality regime of the ancient world caused many minors to lose their fathers. In Classical Athens men attained legal maturity at the age of eighteen while women commonly married in their mid-teens and passed under the control of their husbands. In Roman society, males entered legal adulthood at the age of fourteen and assumed unqualified competence at twenty-five. Women were considered mature at twelve and often appear to have begun marrying in their late teens. In Roman Egypt men started paying poll tax at fourteen and the majority of women found husbands in their mid-to-late teens. According to the Old Testament, Jewish men became liable to conscription and taxation at the age of twenty, whereas the later rabbinic tradition set the age of majority at twelve years for women and thirteen years for men. Under these circumstances the loss of fathers during the first fifteen to twenty years of life mattered most and merits our attention here.

The average scale of loss was a function both of the overall age structure of the population and of male marriage practices. With the help of a computer simulation of the Roman kinship universe, Richard Saller established the basic parameters. In his own words, this exercise “generates a model population by simulating the basic events of birth, death and marriage, month by month, in accordance with the age-specific probabilities of those events as established by the demographic parameters.”

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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