ROMAN FAMILY LIFE
Mater means “mother” because it is the source from which things are produced, for mater (“mother”) is as it were the materia (“material”). (St. Isidore, Etymologies, 9.5.6)
Romulus ensured that his city should be large and populous by requiring the inhabitants to rear all their male children and also their firstborn daughters. He forbade the killing of any child under the age of three years unless it was born crippled or with deformities. In such cases he did permit exposure, provided the parents had first shown the child to five neighbors and obtained their agreement (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, 2.15.1).
Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, was praised for amending the law that allowed fathers to sell their sons into slavery. He gave immunity to married sons, so long as the father of both bride and groom had approved the marriage, for he regarded it as unfair that a woman who married a man whom she thought to be free should fi nd herself living with a slave. (Plutarch, Life of Numa, 17).
A marriage can be arranged even when the parties are absent. This is an everyday occurrence (Justinian’s Digest, 23.1.4). A proviso was later appended: So long as the marriage is arranged with the knowledge of the absent parties, or they agree to it subsequently (23.1.5).
There is not the same strict age requirement for the contracting of an engagement as there is for an actual marriage. An engagement can there-fore be arranged even at a very young age, provided that both parties understand what is happening: that is to say, they must not be less than seven years old (Justinian’s Digest, 23.1.14).
Marriage is the joining together of a man and a woman in a lifelong partnership, in accordance with laws both human and divine (Justinian’s Digest, 23.2.1). It is on record that for almost fi ve hundred years after the founding of Rome there were no law suits or other actions about dowries either in the city or in Latium, because there were no divorces (Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, 4.3.1). There is, however, a very considerable amount of space devoted in the legal texts to laws relating to divorce.
Divorce was easy for a man to obtain if he was willing to return his wife’s dowry. He simply had to recite the ancient formula "tuas res tibi habeto" (“Have your own things for yourself”).
If a man does not take a mistress and give regular payments to someone else’s wife, all the married women regard him as pathetic, addicted to shameful practices, a chaser of slave girls ... No man gets married except by taking away another man’s wife ...Can there be any disgrace in divorce, when no woman gets married except to retain her lover’s interest? Sexual restraint is taken as proof of ugliness. What woman is so wretched, so ugly, as to be satisfied with only a pair of lovers? Any woman who doesn’t know that having just one lover is called “marriage” is stupid and quaint (Seneca, On Benefits, 1.9, 3.16).
As censor, with a responsibility to defend traditional morality, the elder Cato (234–149 b.c. ), expelled a member of the Senate for kissing his own wife in broad daylight in front of his daughter. He claimed that he himself never embraced his wife except after a loud peal of thunder, adding that he was happy when it thundered (Plutarch, Cato the Elder, 17).
The elder Cato praised a young man when he saw him leaving a brothel, since he felt that this would mean he would leave other men’s wives alone. But, when he saw him leaving the brothel on other occasions also, he said to him, “Young man, I praised you for coming here from time to time, not for living here” (Ancient Commentators on Horace Satires, 1.2.31).
When a woman visited her and was showing off her jewels, the most beautiful in Rome at that time, Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, kept her talking till her sons returned from school, and then she said, “These are my jewels” (Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings, 4.4).
Do you not see how differently fathers and mothers treat their children? Fathers order them to be roused early to start their chores; even on holidays, they do not allow them to be idle, and draw sweat and sometimes tears from them. Mothers, however, cuddle their children in their lap, and try to keep them in the shade, away from sadness, tears, and hard work (Seneca, On Providence, 2).
The best slingers came from the Balearic islands, where mothers would not allow their young sons anything to eat unless they were able to hit the dish containing their food with a slingshot (Vegetius, Military Affairs, 1.16). The islands’ name was associated with the Greek word "ballein", “to throw”) (Diodorus Siculus, The Library, 5.17).
If ever we bumped into a rock when we were children, going along with our mouths gaping open, didn’t our nurse smack the rock instead of scolding us? But what had the rock done wrong? Should it have moved out of the way because of our childish stupidity? (Epictetus, Discourses, 2.19.4).
The children of the wealthy were regularly given over to wet nurses. In the second book of his treatise Gynecology , written in the second century a.d., Soranus makes the following recommendations:
1. A wet nurse should be between twenty and forty years old and have had two or three children of her own.
2. She should be self-controlled, sympathetic and even-tempered, Greek, tidy.
3. She must not be superstitious.
4. She must not allow the diaper to get smelly .
5. She should not drink, because the psychological and physical damage done to her by wine spoils her milk; she may lapse into a stupor, and then neglect or fall over the child; the wine’s characteristics are passed into the milk, and this can make the child slow and drowsy, sometimes even apoplectic, just as sucking piglets become slow and drowsy if the sow has eaten plants with narcotic qualities.
Putting goat dung in their diapers soothes hyperactive children, especially girls (Pliny, Natural History, 28.259).
The elder Seneca records a simple but ingenious law by which the fair division of an inheritance within the family was ensured: "maior frater dividat patrimonium, minor eligat" (“Let the elder brother divide the patrimony, and let the younger one choose”) (Controversies, 6.3).
They say that, when the few survivors straggled back to Rome after the massacre at Cannae in 216 b.C. , one woman died at the very gate of the city in the arms of her son who had returned safely; another, who had been told erroneously that her son was dead, was sitting sadly at home and died of joy as soon as she saw him coming back (Livy, History of Rome, 22.7).
Aristocratic families kept death masks of their ancestors on display in the atrium of their houses. These images were paraded at funerals: Sulla’s cortège in 78 b.c. is said to have been accompanied by six thousand such masks, and that of Marcus Claudius Marcellus in 23 b.C. by six hundred. (Servius’s, Commentary on Vergil Aeneid, 6.862).
"HIC IACET CORPVS PVERI NOMINANDI": "Here lies the body of a child whose name is to be added" (L’Année Epigraphique [1931] no. 112); the stonemason has absentmindedly copied the general rubric onto a tombstone instead of adding the dead child’s actual name).
It was a cliché that stepmothers (but not stepfathers) were cruel:
1. If parents treat their children unjustly in their will, their action should not be condoned. People usually pass a harsh judgment like this on their flesh and blood when they have been corrupted by the wheedling and urging of a stepmother (Justinian’s Digest, 5.2.4).
2. If you marry a man who has children by a former wife, no matter how gentle you may be, all the comic plays and all the mime writers and all the commonplaces of the orators will present you as a very savage step-mother (St. Jerome, Letters 54.15).
3. A young man studied medicine after his father disowned him. When his father fell ill, and the doctors said he could not be cured, he cured him. His father took him back into the family. Subsequently, his stepmother fell ill, and the doctors despaired of saving her. The father begged his son to cure his stepmother and disowned him again when he refused (Seneca, Controversies 4.6).
4. In soldiers’ slang, a military camp pitched on disadvantageously uneven ground was called a “stepmother” (noverca).
Marcus Aurelius was said to have declined to marry again after the death of his wife, the younger Faustina, so as not to inflict a stepmother on so many children [they had at least twelve children, and perhaps as many as fifteen] (Historia Augusta, Life of Marcus Aurelius 29).
"Pater... nam tum esse conceptum, patet, inde cum exit quod oritur"
A father (pater) is so called because, at the birth of a child, it is evident (patet) that conception has taken place.
(Varro, On the Latin Language, 5.65)
By J.C. McKeown in "A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities" - Strange tales and surprising facts from the world's greatest empire -, Oxford University Press, 2010, excerpts pp. 1-7. Typed, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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