Beryl Rawson (ed.), A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds.

Atkinson, John

Beryl Rawson (ed.); A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds. Maiden, Oxford & Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Pp. xix + 643, 3 maps, 80 figures and 8 tables. ISBN 978-1-4051-8767-1. Price UK120.00[pounds sterling], 144.00[euro].

The title of this volume is well-chosen and inspires confidence. Beryl Rawson carefully disavows any claim to presenting an over-arching view of 'the family' and avoids the constrictions of defining the scope as 'Greece and Rome'. This is a very wide-ranging collection of studies reflecting advances in scholarship that are being made across a broad sweep of methodologies covering a similarly broad range of materials. So conceived, the volume is not framed by the restrictions of geography and periodisation. Thus after Rawson's tight introduction, the collection is arranged thematically and can begin with a study by Lisa Nevett of households in Kellis and Karanis in Roman Egypt through to the 4th century AD (pp. 15-31).

Rawson's approach allows greater use of case studies, and more questioning of assumptions that generalists might have taken as generally accepted. Thus, for example, in Part I, 'Houses and Households', Walter Scheidel's chapter on 'Monogamy and Polygyny' (pp. 108-15) addresses the peculiarity of Graeco-Roman monogamy, perhaps 'the single most important phenomenon of ancient history that has remained widely unrecognised' (p. 108). Scheidel argues that prescriptive monogamy emerged as a concomitant of growing male egalitarianism (as a counter to resource inequality) and slave ownership. To narrow this down in the Athenian case one might consider the implications of isonomia and the way that the further development of democratic systems necessitated tighter definition of citizenship. (61)

Penelope Allison pushes the boundaries in her 'Soldiers' Families in the Early Roman Empire' (pp. 161-82), where she argues that provision of space in camps for wives went beyond accommodation for the wives of senior officers, even before 197 when it was made legal for soldiers to enter into marriage. Similarly surprising is Sabine Huebner's 'Household Composition in the Ancient Household in the Ancient Mediterranean' (pp. 73-91), in that while she takes issue with the Saller and Shaw line that 'the nuclear family was the starting principle in the organisation of the Roman [my emphasis] household' (cited at p. 81), she leads with evidence from the census returns of Roman Egypt. Saller and Shaw were building on Laslett's attack (62) on the old orthodoxy that the nuclear family was an evolutionary stage ushered in by the Industrial Revolution: Laslett claimed that the nuclear family was more the norm, at least in earlier England and in earlier Europe. Working from Roman funerary texts, Saller and Shaw could show the clear prevalence of the nuclear family, but they emphasised elements of conjugal family units in composite texts, which Huebner would rather count as evidence of extended or multiple family households. Then, while Saller and Shaw gave the tally for extended or multiple family households as only 5% in epigraphical evidence from the Roman West, Huebner gives the proportion as 13% for Graeco-Roman Egypt. But her more significant point here is that on the evidence of census returns the percentage rises to 45.5%. Thus, allowance for bias must be made where, as in the Roman West, epigraphical evidence cannot be balanced against census data. The problems in working from epigraphical sources are further illustrated in David Noy's 'Foreign Families in Roman Italy' (pp. 145-60).

Huebner's work on the composition of households is complemented by Triimper's chapter on 'Space and Social Relationships in the Greek Oikos' (pp. 32-52) and Jens-Arne Dickmann's 'Space and Social Relations in the Roman West' (pp. 53-72), Triimper being open to the idea that wealthier households may have accommodated extended family groups, while Dickmann starts from the Saller and Shaw line that the conjugal family unit was the norm.

Part 2 reflects shifting paradigms in the study of 'Kinship, Marriage, Parents and Children'. Here Veronique Dasen, in her chapter 'Childbirth and Infancy in Antiquity' (pp. 291-314), asserts that these are 'new topics within the broader field of the history of childhood' (p. 314), and her section on the burials of foetuses and newborn babies (pp. 305-07) reflects on what the new focus has achieved at various archaeological sites within the last fifteen years. Texts and images relating to nursing care and rituals for newborn babies and toddlers, and the archaeological evidence for infant burials attest at least profession of parental emotional commitment to their young. Christian Laes develops this further in 'Grieving for Lost Children, Pagan and Christian' (pp. 315-30), where he opposes the line that childhood was a Christian 'invention', and argues that funerary texts from Rome indicate continuity and not change between pagan and Christian models.

A recurring point in the book is quite rightly the age differential between husband and wife at the time of marriage, particularly among the elite, if the generalisation holds that the Greek (or more certainly Athenian) or elite Roman bride would have been about fourteen years of age, while the groom would have been more like thirty (thus, for example, Cox at p. 232 and Ada Cohen at 471, though noting that this age gap is not so apparent in Greek art; and Dixon at 257 on Roman couples). If the wife was more likely to produce surviving children only from the age of about eighteen, by which time the husband would have been thirty-four, then the reproductive rate would have been lower than if they had both been about eighteen at marriage. Contributors to this volume note the high incidence of women widowed while still relatively young. But it needs to be added that in early society men tended to live longer than women, which prompts the further point that in the study of the Ancient World historians tend to work with fairly simple statistical tools. Averages abound, but little reference is made to modes, medians and standard deviations. A little help from a friendly statistician should be fostered, (63) and there are programmes that can add depth to the study, as Tim Parkin, 'The Roman Life Course and the Family' (pp. 276-90) illustrates by reference to Richard Saller's Patriarchy, Property and Death in the Roman Family (1994), which offers computer simulations of the life courses of a range of families. Mark Golden, in 'Other People's Children' (pp. 262-75), acknowledges the problems, especially where comparative material has to be used. The latter problem is bad enough when dealing with lifeexpectancy tables, but even more so for those who have now begun to tackle the less quantifiable but more sociological and psychological subject of 'children's own attitudes and actions' (p. 262).

In Part 3, 'The Legal Side', Eva Cantarella's 'Greek Law and the Family' sets out, inter alia, the complexities of the Athenian law of succession, which is somewhat easier to follow because of the preceding chapters by Jerome on kinship in Ancient Greece (pp. 217-30) and Cheryl Cox on 'Marriage in Ancient Athens' (pp. 231-44). Cantarella adds value with sections on the Spartan and Gortyn models of family law. The chapters on

Roman law cover the long history of progressive adaptation which nevertheless meant the strengthening of patria potestas and some bizarre restrictions, but with provisions that made sense in 'working class' contexts (p. 383).

Part 4, 'City and Country', provides a striking contrast with the normal Athenian model in Sara Saba's presentation in 'Greek Cities and Families' (pp. 395-407) of the way cities in the Hellenistic era could address a manpower shortage by obligatory intermarriage, as in the sympoliteia agreement between Latmos and Pidasa, or the enrolment of mercenaries as citizens, as with Miletus' extension of citizen rights to Cretan mercenaries, or even by selling citizenship, as in the case of Dyme.

The influence of the annalistes, briefly introduced by Suzanne Dixon at pp. 256-57, is suggested in Christopher Johanson's 'A Walk with the Dead' (pp. 408-30), though it is given the more imposing label of an exercise in digital humanities and analytical methodologies. He explores the funerary cityscape of ancient Rome in two experiential narratives, the first relating an imaginary aristocratic (which might sit uneasily with the label annaliste) funeral of 169 BC. The second envisages a similar procession in AD 211, but this reads more like a brief to the camera crew than a script for a drama.

Part 5, 'Ritual, Commemoration, Values', opens with Janett Morgan's 'Families and Religion in Classical Greece' (pp. 447-64) where she complains that the traditional approach has become 'a straightjacket from which we cannot or do not choose to be free' (p. 449). This approach has monotonously focused on the families' identification with specific gods and rehearsal of traditional rites to mark the usual cycle of births, marriages and deaths. Morgan calls for due recognition of fluidity within and between different geographical settings and time frames. She would make greater use of archaeological evidence, with good effect in the case of Olynthus, and in the case of Classical Athens she finds a correlation between the archaeological and textual evidence that points to the continuum between city and family practices.

Ada Cohen, 'Picturing Greek Families' (pp. 465-87), notes Pomeroy's warning against 'emotionology' and recognises the limitations of historical semantics, but carefully explores the coding of emotions in Greek art. Then Janet Huskinson explores the problems of 'Picturing the Roman Family' (pp. 521-41), duly noting the influence of convention and genre.

All in all, this is an excellent collection of studies that has the potential to improve, materially, courses on social history and to stimulate new research projects. It has been well edited and the papers well written. Beryl Rawson can be congratulated on achieving her aims for the volume.

John Atkinson (University of Cape Town)

(61) Clearly the citizenship law of 451/0 (reaffirmed in 403/2), whose enactment resulted in the removal from the citizen roll of some 5000 was a major factor in determining the status of marriage (alluded to by Cox at p. 233).

(62) R.P. Saller & B. Shaw, 'Tombstones and Roman family relations in the Principate', JRS 74 (1984) 124-56; P. Laslett, 'Introduction: the history of the family', in Laslett & R. Wall (edd.), Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge 1972) 1-89.

(63) Kate Cooper's figures for the explosive growth of Christianity through to the end of the 3rd century (p. 192) invite some critique. Cooper trustingly followed R. Stark, The Rise of Christianity (Princeton 1996), though Stark's approach to statistics was roundly criticised by J.M. Bryant, The Sociology of Religion 58 (1997) 192-93.