Release Your Inner Roman by Marcus Sidonius Falx by Jerry Toner

Author:Jerry Toner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books

COMMENTARY

The family was the basic unit of Roman society and the father sat at its head. He had a duty to protect those within the household but also to guide and discipline them. His family was expected to show him deference and obedience. The state was often seen as simply the household structure writ large, with the senators acting as the fathers of the state. One of the most significant titles of the first emperor, Augustus, was pater patriae, ‘father of the state’, which symbolised his total power over his subjects and his right to intervene in all aspects of their lives.

While the father was probably fairly hands-off for the first few years of his children’s lives, he was expected to actively direct his sons’ education (see Seneca On Providence 2.5; Quintilian Institutes of Oratory 1.1.4–6 and 1.4–5). One fascinating text from the first century AD that, apart from a few fragments, survives only in a later Arabic translation, is Bryson Arabus’s Management of the Estate. This details the father’s involvement in all aspects in the running of his household, from raising the sons, to farming, to managing the slaves and choosing a wife (and is now available in translation with detailed commentary by Simon Swain). Of course, this was a text for the rich. Whether it reflected how ordinary Romans thought is impossible to say.

Roman male attitudes to women were condescending at best. They could hold wives in the highest regard (see Pliny the Younger Letters 4.19 or the eulogy known as the Laudatio Turiae, ‘In Praise of Turia’) and often worshipped their mothers. But women were also seen as naturally inferior, designed specially for the purposes of childbirth and bringing up children. As Plutarch’s Marriage Precepts make clear, women were expected to play second fiddle to their husbands in all respects. Some of the stranger male writings about pregnancy are to be found in Soranus’s Gynaecology. Lucian mocks some of these in his account of life on the moon (True History 1.22).

Mortality rates were extremely high in the Roman world, especially in an urban environment, with comparative evidence suggesting that almost a third of children perished within their first year of life and that more than half were dead by the age of ten. This hard but simple fact meant that Roman women were under enormous societal pressure to reproduce. The average woman needed to produce five or six live births, not including miscarriages and stillbirths, just to keep the population level stable. Many women died in childbirth meaning that stepmothers were a common phenomenon, and it was assumed that they would favour their own children to ones they had inherited from a husband’s former wife (see, for example, Artemidorus The Interpretation of Dreams 3.26 and The Aesop Romance 37).

A child did not exist legally until the father accepted the infant into his household, which usually took place on the eighth or ninth day after birth. Prior to that, it was completely at the discretion of the father whether to throw the baby away.

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