The Roman Family.

The present uncertainty, not to say disagreement, regarding the family and its attendant "values" points to a need for understanding the institution in historical societies. If nothing else, we might at least gain an idea of the range of possibilities and so provide ourselves with a partial basis for judging the merit of competing ideological positions. The case of Rome can make a contribution here once we have, following Dixon's convincing lead, dismissed the schematic formulations of earlier scholars based on the assumption that legal texts are somehow reflections of the family's actual composition and functioning. Dixon's own investigation instead draws on norms, statistics, and, most importantly for her approach, recorded feelings. In the end, rigid traditional models, above all the three-generation joint agnatic household dominated by an all-powerful father, give way to one characterized by a high degree of variety and adaptability to changing circumstances.

To make the case against a strictly legalistic inquiry requires extensive discussion, and chapter 2 persuasively examines the law in relation to socially determined attitudes and to what Dixon calls "the ideology of competing systems of obligations and priority" (36-37). Traditional law, mirroring the mores and customs of an earlier age, is found to be out of step and to have been regularly circumvented by pragmatic Romans through various means. Thus the legally limitless authority of the father was checked by the will of the family council, by public opinion, and by "common sense." Mothers, despite the absence of specific rights in this area, played a role in the selection of their children's marriage partners, and the law eventually came to recognize popular feeling in debarring a husband from treating his wife's dowry as his personal property. Slaves possessed no legal right to marry, but in time ties of kinship were occasionally acknowledged in statutes. In the case of soldiers, for whom marriage was similarly banned, legal prohibitions were at first mitigated, then eventually lifted altogether. Thereby moral notions, current attitudes, and personal feelings ultimately prevailed over the artificial system of kinship, centered on the citizen father, handed down from archaic Rome.

This approach is extended, first, in chapter 3, to marriage. Marriage served to reproduce the citizen class and, more generally, to transmit status and property from one generation to the next. But it is in the affective sphere that Dixon situates, in contrast with earlier studies, the principal matrimonial ideals. Partnership, harmony, and love (including sex) perhaps paradoxically (to our minds) manifested themselves in Roman marriages despite the fact that a betrothal represented the "communal" decision of family members on the basis of criteria not necessarily related to the feelings of the parties themselves. Yet it had not always been so. Earlier, conjugal relations had centered on such "external" factors as the wife's fertility, industry, and chastity. Dixon's explorations, however, fail to uncover an adequate explanation, economic, ideological or otherwise, for this change in sentiment. Nor is it clear why, if conjugal relations were becoming progressively more emotional, a woman in this same period, as Dixon suggests, favored the claims of her children and close natal kin over those of her husband. But one thing is clear, that marriage, whatever its internal dynamics, remained a society-wide ideal. Even an "irregular" union such as concubinage, approved by the elite as a strategy for containing the fragmentation of inherited wealth, represented an indirect endorsement of marriage in that it closely imitated the "regular" union and, since all who could marry evidently did so, in any case was entered into only by those in special legal or social circumstances.

If marriage for Dixon combined instrumental and affective aspects, the same is no less true of her Roman children. Parents prized their offspring as companions, potential supporters in old age, and, upon death, as perpetuators of the family name and cult. At the same time, Dixon enters the "indifference" debate firmly on the side of a "sentimental interest" in children as an element in an ideology stressing the domestic comfort of the conjugal unit (103). But I am not prepared to accept her notion of intense parental involvement (116) in view of the (apparently normative) upper class practice of turning young children over to the care of others, e.g. wet nurses or tutors. No less unsettling is the choice of childlessness, by the elite when confronted by the prospect of the partition of their estates, by the poor out of economic necessity. Dixon insists that family limitation need not imply dislike of, or indifference to, children, but on a more economical hypothesis--and this applies as well to marriage--affection may after all be a secondary phenomenon, developing or not developing under varying circumstances in the context of overriding instrumental purposes.

Turning to the diachronic dimension, Dixon goes on to consider the family throughout the life cycle (chapter 5). Rejecting static models, she opts instead for "dynamic process" (159), with conflict as often as not the prevailing condition. Sympathies notwithstanding, Dixon freely acknowledges the unpleasant facts. Tensions between the father and his children were exacerbated by prolonged dependence of the young, particularly sons of the elite, on the support of the older generation. Remarriage often involved the introduction into the household of a stepparent, giving rise not infrequently to disputes over property rights. Nor did the old, portrayed in literary sources with contempt or disgust and seldom commemorated by their children or grandchildren in surviving funerary epitaphs, always receive the hoped-for attention and support. Nonetheless, when disintegration threatened, stabilizing influences might be exerted by the upper-class career structure, by the demands of the inheritance system, and by the observance of the widely-held ideals of "piety," harmony, and solidarity.

Dixon's family, resilient, pragmatic, ever ready to adopt "strategies" in the face of changing conditions, survived both the vicissitudes of individual human growth and the catastrophic upheavals of Roman political history. But the Romans themselves were not so sure. The later Republic witnessed an alarming incidence among the upper class of failure to marry, adultery, and childlessness, and when Augustus twice addressed the crisis with social legislation, most agree that he did not meet with success. Survive it did, but the Roman family's health, when measured against the Roman value system, had been seriously impaired. A less optimistic investigator, or one lacking Dixon's own high valuation of the traditional family, might on this evidence have been led to undertake a positive assessment of alternative life styles.

Nicholas F. Jones University of Pittsburgh