In ancient Roman society, the Latin vocabulary used to describe family forms can be divided into Familia and Domus. Among them, the term Familia is closely related to the concept of PaterFmilia, emphasizing the family group under the control of the patriarchal parent, including family members and slaves under the ownership of the patriarch; Domus, on the other hand, derives the meaning of family from the meaning of specific places of residence, focusing on describing the relationship between family members in the same field of life, and the relationship between husband and wife is the de facto core of the family.
It can be seen that the concept of the Roman family is a combination of this connection established in daily life and legal ownership relations, and marriage is one of the important ties that ensure the continuation of this family structure from generation to generation.
In the Roman patriarchal system, the clustered clan structure maintained by the family father is the most typical family form under the Roman patriarchal tradition, and the development model of the large family is also one of the reasons why the power of the nobility can endure. However, during the Roman Empire, the nuclear family model consisting of husband and wife and children later prevailed and became a fairly common family structure in Roman society
｡ The late Roman Empire further continued the trend of family composition to the nuclear family, and with the economic development of the Roman Empire and the easier social atmosphere, the married Romans would be more inclined to separate from the large family to form a relatively independent family. Due to the increase in population movements between regions of the empire, it was not uncommon for husband and wife to emigrate together, and the act of a wife following her husband on a long journey was seen as an act of fidelity.
This will further alienate these new families from the original patrilineal family and bring the family ties created by marriage closer. 2. The nuclear family even became the mainstream family formation model in late imperial society. According to the text statistics of the existing inscription materials by foreign scholar B.D. Shaw, the proportion of the nuclear family dominating the relationship in the Roman civilian population during this period was about 80%, and in the Christian community, the proportion rose further, remaining above 96%, and almost all memorials from outside the nuclear family relationship disappeared into Roman Christian inscriptions, which raised the importance of the conjugal relationship to an unprecedented height.
In extended families, parents treat their family members as private property, and even the relationship between parents and children may be weak. The core family, which is independent of the original family, has fostered a stronger emotional atmosphere. In the new family maintained through conjugal and parent-child relationships, the relationship between the members is closer, and in a family space with a closer area of life, husband and wife depend on each other, parents need to take responsibility for the upbringing of their children, and children also need to take care of their parents.
Compared with the large family, the unitized family structure under the nuclear family is undoubtedly more conducive to the management of the government, in line with the expectations of the imperial rulers, and it is also the general trend under the role of social concepts, so in the Roman law of the late empire, it is also more inclined to protect the rights and interests of the nuclear family members, which further promotes the development of the nuclear family form in the late Roman society. One of the most obvious signs is the definition of the right to inheritance in the law.
Late Roman law enabled the priority of inheritance of property between nuclear family members. Children can inherit the property of both parents, and in the event of the death of the parents, in the event of intestate, the rights and interests of a legitimate child can be protected by the highest priority of the law. The guardian should use the family property for the maintenance needs, and return the property due after the ward reaches a certain age, so as to prevent the children from losing the amount of inheritance due to the guardian's partiality or the attempt to transfer the property to the outside world.
Even a posthumous son who has not yet been born cannot be deprived of his right to inherit the estate as long as he is the result of a legal marriage.
In order to avoid divorce and remarriage harming the interests of the family, classical Roman law tended to restrict the inheritance relationship between husband and wife, and the system of husbandless marriage in the early empire also made it impossible for the husband to own the ownership of his wife's dowry.
However, in the late Empire, the law strengthened the marital property rights to a certain extent, by dividing the usufruct of property from ownership, so that the husband could also use the property from the wife. Even if the wife dies, the husband can retain the usufruct of the estate. Moreover, according to Theodosius's decree, even if both spouses were under parental custody, their fathers could not intervene in the acquisition of property belonging to the husband or wife as long as they left property to their partners through a probate declaration or other legitimate name.
The mother's rights, which had previously been the least valued, were also given more legal protection by legislators, and in the census report of the Roman Empire, the names of mothers and maternal grandfathers went through the process of creating from scratch, which showed that the influence from the mother's side was gradually penetrating into the family life of the Roman Empire. With the dissolution of the period of forced marriage and childbearing and the loosening of custody of women, married women do not need to worry about being hastily appointed as the next husband due to the loss of their husband or the dissolution of marriage, and they can take care of their children with peace of mind in order to maintain the bond between mother and immediate children.
This will undoubtedly strengthen the relationship between the nuclear family members. When a child dies, the mother can also inherit his estate. When a mother complains that her child has failed to meet her maintenance responsibilities, the law punishes her child by depriving her child of half of her inheritance. However, mothers also had to take on their own upbringing responsibilities, and in Roman law at the time, women who remarried were generally seen as having chosen a new marriage and family and relinquished custody of their original children, so they were excluded from the scope of legal protection, they would lose custody, and their children would not have to provide for them.
In the late Roman Empire, although women obtained civil rights such as inheritance rights and child custody after marriage, and also had a certain degree of personal freedom in society, it was still difficult for them to show their faces like men and hold more prestigious civic positions due to Roman tradition. Therefore, most upper-class families still maintain the tradition of male dominance and female husbands and children.
In families with many domestic slaves, learning how to dictate to slaves is also a compulsory course for female masters, and due to the improvement of women's inheritance rights in late imperial law, some aristocratic women can also manage their own property, including land, slaves, real estate, etc. These properties belong to the wife personally or her guardian and can be distinguished from the husband's property even within marriage. For civilian families whose families are not very wealthy and their status is not prominent, in addition to raising children and taking on household chores, wives also have to work part-time to subsidize the family and share the pressure of life for their husbands.
Most of the jobs available to these women were lower-level jobs, the most representative of which was textile work, and in ancient Rome, where the textile industry was developed, women were considered good at weaving as a good virtue, and daughters who grew up in poor families could support the family as weavers at an early age. Therefore, textiles are also one of the jobs that wives often do outside of running the family.
In Roman married life, wives were subject to more strict control from their husbands. Most women still marry at a low age for the first time, and according to inscriptions, many women marry around the age of 2 or even younger, and die early at the age of 20-30 or younger. Therefore, after marriage, it is difficult for young wives to escape the personal control of their older husbands, and they need to avoid going out in public at the husband's request, avoid getting acquainted with strangers, and have a relatively lack of voice in the family.
They must carefully reconcile their husbands and their relatives to prevent abandonment because of disagreements with them. Thus, in Roman society during this period, the highest praise of female virtue still belonged to those industrious women who devoted themselves to family life, and the common phrases that appeared on Roman women's epitaphs were often words of praise for the conduct of married women, including adjectives such as thrift, obedience, and loyalty to the family, which could express the ideal virtues of traditional Roman women, and some noble women would be called worthy of honorable Roman housewives (matrona), which meant that they were not only noble.
They also have a harmonious marriage, and the duties performed in married life are recognized by family members.
In addition to running a family, in Roman tradition, having children is also an important part of Roman married life and the guarantee of marital stability, and marriages without children or early death are in jeopardy.
For Roman women, the word "mater" was a proud title, and in Roman society, the semantics of the word were further expanded, and the imperial government would use titles such as matercastrorum and matersenatus to honor elite women who played exemplary roles in society.
It can be said that the mother represents the most ideal female figure in Roman secular society. With the development of the nuclear family model in the society of the late Roman Empire, children, as one of the most important nuclear family members, not only remained an important labor force of the family and the property of the father, but also had more emotional connections with their parents.
In addition, the popularity of Christianity has played a major and positive role in promoting family reproduction, in the interpretation of religious discourse, the only legitimate reason for having sex in marriage is to produce offspring, and the union caused by eros is denounced, and fertility has further risen from practical reasons such as branching out for the family and contributing to the cause of imperial population to the height of theological speculation.
Women seduce men into depravity, and only when they become mothers and bear children can they play a role in society. In Jerome's writing, pregnancy and chastity even achieve self-consistency, and the birth of a virgin child who symbolizes chastity re-makes up for the lack of the mother's body, thus becoming an opportunity for married women to atone for their sins.
All in all, with the promotion of social traditions, family structure, religion and other aspects, fertility still played an extremely important role in the married life of the late Roman Empire.
However, it is worth noting that in the married life of the late Roman Empire, active birth control was not uncommon, and may even be widespread in society. Christian scholars such as Augustine and Jerome were sensitive to this phenomenon and described the various contraceptive methods they had heard about, including drinking herbal water with contraceptive effects, or smearing the genital area with herbs, blocking passages with sponges, etc.
This can also be found in the writings of Roman physicians in the 4th and 5th centuries who dabbled in the field of gynecology, such as Caelius Aurelianus and Oribasius.
This kind of deliberate birth control seems to contradict the Roman ideal of marriage, which the Christian church blames on pleasure and moral corruption. In the Roman picture of marriage, however, this may be for more realistic reasons. Due to the prevalence of early marriage among women, sexual intercourse is usually accompanied by around the age of menstruation, which greatly prolongs the reproductive period within marriage.
The average Roman middle-class family had between four and six children, a significant number even when babies died young. Therefore, the problem wives face in childbearing may not be childlessness, but need to experience frequent childbearing. Especially in the society where the nuclear family model dominates, in order to better protect the interests of the family and balance the proportion of family assets distributed by each heir, the need for upper families to reduce the size of offspring is stronger. Usually after having two or three children, noble women began to use birth control.
Raising too many children was also highly uneconomical for civilian families who lacked resilience, and the Romans had realized that having children was extremely risky and that wives were likely to die during childbirth. In addition, some men who choose to have a concubine will also have the need to avoid pregnancy of their sister-in-law. and artificially control the birth of children through birth control.
Bibliography:
1. Liu Wenming, "On the Cultural Transformation and the Change of Women's Marital Status in the Late Roman Empire", Journal of Capital Normal University (Social Science Edition), No. 6, 2005.
2. Long Xiuqing: "The Principle of Consent in Marriage Legislation of the Middle Church", Historical Monthly, No. 10, 2021.