Introduction: From Oikos to Familia: Looking Forward?
The study of the family or families in ancient societies has been one of the most productive areas of research in the fields of social history and social archaeology. The bibliography has continued to steadily grow and recognition of the centrality of the subject matter to the study of antiquity can be seen in the recently published Wiley-Blackwell A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds edited by Beryl Rawson (2011). Her commentary on the state of the subject and the nature of current work that makes for interesting reading, after all for many (especially in the Anglophone world) she built up the subject of the Roman family through the holding of conferences and a determination to situate family in its rightful place as a central institution for understanding the cultures of antiquity. The news of her death in late 2010 caused the editors of this volume and those of volume II to reflect on her contribution to the subject and to the development of the discipline of Roman history – something that is impossible to encapsulate in words – but we all felt a sense of loss. She traced the academic pedigree of the subject back to the 1960s but could connect recent work from the first decade of the twenty-first century back to work from a half century earlier.1 She had lived through a period of academic change, just as the editors of these volumes grew up as undergraduates and then postgraduates reading the papers delivered at the Roman Family conferences organized by Beryl Rawson. Her publications also endeavoured to make clear how the study of the family was progressing both in the 2011 volume and in an earlier paper from 2003 – again looking forward to the further development of the study of the family.
If we are to look back to the history of the study of the family in antiquity, we can point to a trend by which the discipline expanded from existing work undertaken primarily by legal experts (the Wiley-Blackwell companion contains four contributions by such scholars, about 10 per cent of the volume) to include a greater range of evidence. Nowhere is this clearer than in the use of archaeological evidence for dwelling in the Classical past. Not surprisingly, the Wiley-Blackwell companion opens with this subject matter, archaeology plays its part not least to demonstrate the presence of women and children in Roman forts; reading the chapters (over almost 200 pages: 35 per cent of the volume), what characterizes these studies of the household is a shift away from archaeological evidence towards textual evidence for household formations. There is quite simply no archaeological theory for the construction of the family, even though there is much written on gender and on age (including childhood). In Rawson’s final volume, we see that the study of the family has effectively colonized a wider range of evidence that can include house-plans, evidence of artefacts, and also at the same time expanded the range of sources to include Egyptian papyri, families of freed slaves and foreign residents, military families, and then the Christian families of Late Antiquity. As Rawson observes, far more of the subject matter is focused on families of the Roman period than on what we may call families of the ‘Greek period.’2 This reflects the uneven development of the discipline, something that we wished to address in holding the conference in Gothenburg in November 2009. Even so, we did not end up with a volume on the Greek Family and a volume on the Roman Family. We see a transition or a variation to the institution that today we call the ‘family’ in Europe in the twenty-first century. This institution can also include histories of migration and family formation, as well as, an evolving tradition of what a family is (with or without the legal institution of marriage being involved). There can never be and never was, a single defined version of the family, now or in antiquity – as even the most casual reading of the Digest of Justinian reveals. Indeed as Sabine Huebner points out, looking from Egyptian census evidence across to evidence from Tang China and then Medieval and Early Modern Italy: the nuclear family while prominent in most of these societies (43–55 per cent of examples) is matched by a significant proportion of extended and multiple families (10–17 per cent and 18–22 per cent respectively of all examples).3 It is only in northern Europe in the late 16th and early seventeenth century that she locates a domination of the nuclear family (78–84 per cent of examples). This contrasts with the evidence of funerary inscriptions that leads Huebner to find that in this medium of commemoration the relations we associate with the nuclear family appear predominant and in line with epigraphic patterns from the Latin west, but quite dissimilar to the pattern found in Asia Minor in antiquity.4 The disjuncture between census data and commemorative epigraphy points to the difficulty of reconstructing the family: a frustration that is common to other forms of evidence from antiquity. Families are not neat and tidy, they are often messy and complicated and vary within a culture. The evidence we have, like that from Egypt, may indicate that even with a presence of multiple or extended families, the biological close kin are those that are commemorated. The impulse to reconstruct or recreate households and family structures is a strong one, but should not be the only impulse in the study of the family (see discussion below).
Just as the history of the family has colonized types of evidence, it has also colonized new periods: the most intriguing is perhaps the Hellenistic period, in which as Coloru points out in this volume: the language of kingship developed a language of family formation, something that we also find in the Wiley-Blackwell Companion.5 Unlike in the study of the family at Rome or in Greece, the Royal Families are subjects for analysis and can be included alongside the study of soldier’s families in the Roman Empire or other people of a much lower status. The relationship of how royalty articulated and/or how people discussed the families of the elite reflects and shapes forms of marriage. Suetonius might only be able to find two examples of marriage between uncles and their nieces, after Claudius’ marriage to Agrippina; but nevertheless as the biographer notes – those marriages did exist.6 There is much that might be learnt from the socio-linguistics of royal families in all societies in antiquity, and not just that of the Hellenistic rulers.
The contrast between this type of work on the Hellenistic family that focuses on the public face of royalty and the stress in the study of the Roman family on the domestic or household setting has implications for both sides of this academic equation.7 In the development of the study of the Roman family, we can trace an increase in the interest in the domestic or the ‘private’ over work on the family and public life. This coincides with how female and male practitioners tend to play on the study of the everyday or routine activities of modern life. Female academics have been shown to study to a greater degree activities associated with ‘the home’; whereas male academics have chosen to turn their attention to ‘the street.’8 This crude dichotomy of interest is relevant to the study of the family in antiquity, since it points to a historiographical fact that the study of the Roman Family was pioneered by women and was informed by feminist thinking from the 1960s and 1970s and lies at the heart of ARACHNE – The Nordic Network for Women’s History and Gender Studies in Antiquity.9 The Marriage in Antiquity conference held at the Swedish Institute in Rome, organized by ARACHNE, featured very few male academics.10 The greater involvement of men in the study of gender is the subject of discussion at a one-day workshop in London at the time of writing.11 To a degree, this image of female and male academic foci is a stereotype and is perhaps one that should be broken. Saskia Hin, in this volume, seeks to link the social and demographic structure of the family to that of the state. Equally Ann-Cathrin Harders, also in this volume, relates family and kin to a wider set of social relations and thus expands the range of discussion beyond that of the domestic setting. What perhaps also needs to be considered is the mobility of families (for example that of Agrippina and Germanicus), in for example the Roman Empire, we might equally consider such roles of the elite as signs of the creation of ‘transnational families.’12 These are first steps in a new direction that relates the family in antiquity to other structures of ancient societies. The approach is also reflected in numerous papers in our own volume. What we have now in connection with the study of the family is an understanding of its nature and variation, something that we could not have seen 10 or 20 years ago, let alone 30 to 50 years ago.
Being in this position, with decades of work behind us, it would appear that we might shift our perspective on how we study the family and move out of our comfort zone and consider alternative perspectives with a view to producing a rather different reading of the family in antiquity for the twenty-first century. I wish to set out some perspectives, mostly drawn from James White’s and David Klein’s book Family Theories (London, 2008), that could be said to be theoretical in origins but that have immense practical value for the study of the family. Frequently, the socialization of children is a familiar topic for those who have read the literature.13 It is a process we find in discussion of childhood in antiquity that explains many actions. However, what we do not find in the literature alongside the socialization of children in its corollary the stabilization of adult personalities through incorporation and anchoring within a family.14 The relevance of the latter is particularly relevant to the discussion of freed slaves,15 but this needs to be seen within a broader understanding of ‘stabilization’ in Roman society that might include a discussion of the context of childhood. The adjustment to these modes of discussion to consider parental roles in families seen in the early twenty-first century are well covered in the existing literature on fathers and daughters, the Roman mother and so on. This obviously does not cause the discussion to shift far from our current mode of discourse.
Looking across what has been written on the family and how students in seminars in the UK and Sweden talk about the ‘family,’ we can easily identify how ancient historians have utilized a framework of rational choice based on the legal powers of fathers and absence of legal power on the part of other family members. This causes discussion to become utilitarian and seeks to explain options to imagined family members. The choices made are rationalized with reference to law (particularly Roman law), the seemingly less-than-rational familial choices made by Augustus for his family members are often explained as being unrepresentative or politically motivated in order to rationalize them. Such explanatory frameworks converge with an approach in the social sciences that is implicitly underpinning work on the family in antiquity.16
There has been a surprising neglect of the role of language in the creation of symbolic meanings of the family and the language associated with it. For example, the names of items of clothing associated with a Roman bride was a subject that was (and is today) investigated by ancient ethnologists to establish the meaning of the words to reveal ideas of the origins of the clothing.17 We can see these items as symbols and the focus of explanation, but there is a wider set of meanings to be discussed in relationship to the daily lives of family members and their life course. The family is a structure replete with symbols that act as reminders of past events, both personal and related to a wider social world. Yet, the symbolic meaning and deployment of familial terms has only partially been investigated. What we see in literary texts is a representation of the family, but what we do not find in the current scholarship is the analysis of the deployment of words associated with the family. The same could be said of legal texts, we find symbols of the family in these rather than the family as a lived experience. Obviously, the commemoration of the dead in inscriptions leads us into the discussion of the symbols of familial relations. Yet, surprisingly little work has yet to address how the family is represented. The exception, of course, is in the visual representation of the family.18 However, we need to be aware that the representation or picture associated with a familial space could shift in meaning according to the temporal position of viewers within the life course of a family – a point made by Natalie Kampen in this volume.
The life course approach to the family has been implicit in the study of marriage and family formation, but has become explicit through the development of Richard Saller’s (1994) demographic simulation of the Roman Family.19 Mary Harlow and Ray Laurence have pulled into the study of the family individual concepts associated with the exponential increase of interest in the life course and ageing within social theory in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.20 What is only partially approached is a conception of the life course of families that can plot out the potential of families to become socially expansive or to contract, and thus to engage with wider historical trends such as the non-biological replacement of the senatorial elite established by Keith Hopkins and Graham Burton.21 We have seen the introduction of age alongside gender as an organizing social principle for the individual, but have yet to define the development of families over the temporal period of more than a human life span.22
Much of the above will be familiar to ancient historians and Classical archaeologists, but where family theory diverges more dramatically from the study of the family in antiquity is in discussion of the sociological phenomenology of families.23 Practitioners of this strand of thinking look at how assumptions and stereotypes of society construct the everyday life of the family. What is highlighted is that the existence or inclusion in a particular family ensures that everyday life is different to that experienced by society in general. This ensures that families create particular, or of their own, explanations – these are private and contrast with explanations that are public. It is an approach that could be applied to discussion of specific houses or particular ethnic groups,24 but also could be applied to the material realm to suggest that the phenomenology of a house or tomb could embody particular familial phenomenologies. This causes each family to become a particular cultural form and to have its own context. The realization of this aspect of the family in cultures causes the possibility of generalization to become far more problematic than before, and returns us to the study of the single house and to see within a house the inscription of the culture of its inhabitants and their predecessors.
Looking at how the practice of the study of the families of antiquity is constructed, we find that there is a common practice of building cases based on evidence (mostly drawn from literary and legal texts). These are deployed to create a narrative that ‘makes sense’ or is rational. Yet, in so doing, as ancient historians, we are perhaps missing the role of the deployment of familial terms: father, mother, son, daughter, wife, husband, boy, girl, virgin, youth and so on. There is a sense that these words found in texts have been placed there by authors, who were fully aware of the power of language and the creation of a sense of meaning that could play on emotions or could make a text simply much more interesting. Tim Parkin has shown how the schemes to account for the ages of man in antiquity should be seen as literary games that are clever in their construction as representations of the human life span.25 We are perhaps looking at the beginning of a new historiographical trend to seek a better understanding the role of familial language by ancient authors for the construction of narratives that represent people and actions from the past.26
Allied to this observation with reference to texts, we might wish to suggest that lives lived within families should be seen as associated with a system of representations that normalize gender roles, for example through the production of imagery associated with a male and female couple. There is, in short, a style or aesthetics to the ancient family and to its everyday existence.27 Certainly, nearly all literary texts engage with an aesthetically pleasing ideal of how to live a life – something that most, it must be said, were seen not to be capable of achieving. What we may also observe is that through objects many people remember or even have memories jogged, when suffering from dementia, of their life at an earlier point in time. The objects recovered by archaeologists constitute an aesthetics of the family, not just by presence or absence, but by their shape and form and, above all, their familiarity. These objects create a sense or aesthetics of living that may be integrated with the human senses in the consumption of food and drink especially.28 Just as other human senses are engaged in the production of the family through sex for biological reproduction, but also through touch and smell in the creation of memory. These senses and the association of objects with the past cause us to consider the very concept of time in families. The life span of a human being can be reported as a narrative, but at the same time is lived at any moment with respect to past moments in the life course and an imagination of the future based on the observation of the lives of those older than oneself. However, it is also recognized that the narrative of life is actually ‘redrafted and replotted’ as self-identity is re-thought and the situation of the everyday is subject to major change (for example becoming a parent or death of a family member) that inevitably causes the view of past existence to alter or can resist change and become set.29 Observing such a phenomenon in antiquity is virtually impossible, but the presence of the phenomenon needs to be understood and it is essential for us to accept that Cicero in later life is a quite different person to Cicero in his thirties. Moreover, his own past self had become the subject of a self-nostalgia associated with the suppression of Catiline in his consulship, some 20 years prior to his death in 43 BC.
The discussion in this introduction has shifted back and forth between texts and archaeological material, just as Rawson’s A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds does. It is this interplay of two disciplines that shifts discussion from royalty and the elite in texts to the objects found in houses used by the ordinary people (slave, dependent, and/or master) in a household that makes the study of the family in antiquity a vibrant and varied discursive practice. We have opportunities to discuss representations, but also instances of how we recover the everyday. The latter has become an area much theorized in recent years, as the ordinary or unremarkable has become an area of study and seen to have been constituted by the objects that are encountered and are utilized.30 This shifts us, not back to the study of everyday life in the manner of Jerome Carcopino, but towards a new theorized understanding of the everyday that resists generalization and points to the family as not just central to culture, but central to the production of an aesthetics of living in antiquity. In connecting these realms of discourse in this way, in the future, we may see a different understanding develop of the family. In short, the current study of the everyday or the ordinariness of the ancient family engaged with current thinking in cultural theory has the potential to shift the subject towards new lines of enquiry.31 In the meantime, the papers in this volume draw in new evidence and new methodologies to demonstrate that the study of the family in antiquity is not ‘done and dusted’, but instead is still in its phase of young adulthood and seeking to define its identity through difference to what has gone before in its academic life course.
Rawson, 2011b |
Rawson, 2011b, pp. 8–9. |
Huebner, 2011, p. 79. |
Huebner, 2011, pp. 87–88. |
E.g. Ogden, 2011. |
Suet. Claud., l. 26. |
E.g. Parkin, 2011, p. 284. |
Laurence, 2007, features an assertion of the street as a subject of study at the expense of the domestic and reflects this trend. |
See Rawson, 2011b, pp. 8–10; for Arachne see http://www.arachne.hum.gu.se/english/ |
Published now by Larsson Lovén and Strömberg, 2010. |
Entitled ‘Gender in the University Classics Curriculum’, a key question was posed: ‘Can more male students be encouraged to do “gender” (or “women”)?’. See for programme: http://icls.sas.ac.uk/institute/meetingslist/conferences.html. |
A subject addressed in part by Noy, 2011; but see Goulbourne et al., 2010. |
E.g. Morgan, 2011. |
White and Klein, 2008, p. 48. |
See Mouritsen, 2011, for an approach to slave families. |
White and Klein, 2008, pp. 65–91. |
Hersh, 2010, provides the evidence and some discussion, but other approaches to this evidence remain open. |
Cohen, 2011; Huskinson, 2011 and Tulloch, 2011, provide examples. |
The progression from implicit to explicit can be seen in a comparison of the following: Treggiari, 1991; Saller, 1994 and Parkin, 2011. |
Harlow and Laurence, 2002. |
Hopkins, 1983. |
White and Klein, 2008, pp. 121–149. |
Ibid.,pp. 212–215. |
E.g. Noy, 2011. |
Parkin, 2010. |
Treggiari, 1999, shows the way to understanding symbols and their association with emotion. See also in this volume the linking of imagery to emotion. However, the deployment of familial terms in texts awaits study. |
Highmore, 2011, pp. 9–12 and elsewhere in arguing for the conjunction of the study of aesthetics with that of the ordinary lives of people. |
Laurence, 2009, for discussion. |
Highmore, 2011, p. 93. |
There is much bibliography on this subject. Highmore, 2002, captures the development of the discipline, but is somewhat updated by Highmore, 2011. Jacobsen, 2009, contains essays on various approaches to the study of the everyday. |
Highmore, 2002, provides an overview of a means to theorize the everyday. |
Cohen, A. (2011), ‘Picturing the Greeks’, in Rawson, B. (2011a), A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 465–487.
Goulbourne, H., Reynolds, T., Solomos, J. and Zontini, E. (2010), Transnational Families: Ethnicities, identities and Social Capital, London: Routledge.
Harlow, M. and Laurence, R. (2002), Growing Up and Growing Old in Ancient Rome – A Life Course Approach, London: Routledge.
Hersch, K. (2010), The Roman Wedding: Ritual and Meaning in Antiquity,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Highmore, B. (2002), Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: an Introduction, London: Routledge.
—(2011), Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday, London: Routledge.
Hopkins, K. (1983), Death and Renewal, Sociological Studies in Roman History, Vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Huebner, S. R. (2011), ‘Household Composition in the Ancient Mediterranean – What do we really know?’, in Rawson, B. (2011a), A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 73–91.
Huskinson, J. (2011), ‘Picturing the Roman Family’, in Rawson, B. (2011a), A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 521–541.
Jacobsen, M. H. (2009), Encountering the Everyday: An Introduction to the Sociologies of the Unnoticed, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Larsson Lovén, L. and Strömberg, A. (2010), Ancient Marriage in Myth and Reality, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishers.
Laurence, R. (2007), Roman Pompeii: Space and Society, (2nd edn), London: Routledge.
—(2009), Roman Passions: A History of Pleasure in Imperial Rome, London: Continuum.
Morgan, T. (2011), ‘Ethos: The Socialization of Children in Education and Beyond’, in Rawson, B. (2011b), A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 504–520.
Mouritsen, H. (2011), ‘The Families of Roman Slaves and Freedmen’, in Rawson, B. (2011a), A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 129–144.
Noy, D. (2011), ‘Foreign Families in Roman Italy’, in Rawson, (2011a), A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 145–160.
Ogden, D. (2011), ‘The Royal Families of Argead Macedon and the Hellenistic World’, in Rawson, B. (2011a), A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 92–107.
Parkin, T. (2010), ‘The Life Cycle’, in Harlow, M. and Laurence, R. (eds), A Cultural History of Childhood and Family, Vol. 1: Antiquity, Oxford: Berg.
—(2011), ‘The Roman Life Course and the Family’, in Rawson, B. (2011a), A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 276–290.
Rawson, B. (2011a), A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
—(2011b), ‘Introduction: Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds’, in Rawson, B. (2011a), A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 1–12.
Saller, R. P. (1994), Patriarchy, Property and Death in the Roman Family, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Treggiari, S. (1991), Roman Marriage, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—(1999), ‘The Upper-Class House as a Symbol and Focus of Emotion in Cicero’, JRA, 12, 33–56.
Tulloch, J. H. (2011), ‘Devotional Visuality in Family Funerary Monuments in the Roman World’, in Rawson, B. (2011a), A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 542–563.
White, J. M. and Klein, D. M. (2008), Family Theories, (3rd edn), London: Sage publications.