The omnipotent paterfamilias

Filicide in ancient Rome

One of the main characters in my novel is Marcus, the errant son of a proud Roman. Twenty-three-year-old Marcus is far from home and the clutches of his controlling father. Unfortunately for him, this doesn’t mean that he can do whatever he likes. In antiquity, the paterfamilias, the head of the Roman household, had a long reach. Marcus’s father’s arm was about 2,300 km long, extending across the Mediterranean, from Ostia to Jerusalem, to slap Marcus back to submission. In this post, we’ll look at the rights of the paterfamilias in terms of Roman law, and the extent to which he enacted them. Did he really dispense with headstrong children using the pointy end of his sword, or did he grind them down with nagging and threats?

Blood and honour

In ancient Rome, “heritage and ancestry meant everything” (Starky). There were two basic classes: the honestiores (‘honourable’)—senators, equestrians, civil servants, soldiers and members of the provincial town councils—and the humiliores (‘humble’) — everyone else (Mousourakis).

Gender, class and rank in the family mattered the most; you were preferably male, a patrician (nobility) and the eldest living male ancestor. If you could arrange that, you were the boss. But you couldn’t simply do whatever you wanted. Romans were “deeply conservative and traditionalistic” (Mousourakis), so you had to uphold society’s values, and be seen doing it. Romans were deeply obsessed with honour (Seager), as were many ancient societies, throughout and beyond the Mediterranean, as best depicted by Mushu’s angry rant in Disney’s Mulan:

All right, that’s it. Dishonour! Dishonour on your whole family! Dishonour on you! Dishonour on your cow!

No one wanted to endure such shaming!

Law of the Twelve Tables

Roman values were reflected in Roman law. Most important to our post is that the patriarchy (or ‘Patrick Arky’ in comedian Sofie Hagen’s Danish accent) was enshrined in Roman law. Indeed, Patrick Arky ruled from the very beginning, when the Twelve Tables of Roman Law were set down 451 – 449 BCE. (It took a couple of years for them to go from draft to being inscribed on bronze.) Table IV granted specific patriarchal powers, including (worldhistory.org):

Husband can divorce wife by instructing her to take her belongings and leave
Father has authority over children’s lives
Deformed child should be killed at birth
Son becomes free if sold into slavery 3 times by the father

The list ranges from controlling to heinous to… mindboggling in the case of the last point. Why and how could you sell your son three times? Well, in the early days of Rome, there was a special sort of slavery where you could hire him out to pay off your debt (Wikipedia).

For amusement, here are some of the other laws the elite Patrick Arkys came up with during their careful deliberations (worldhistory.org):

Women (excl. Vestal Virgins) always under guardianship due to frivolity of character. Table V
Singing or creating harmful incantations leads to execution. Table VIII
No gathering of bones for second funeral, except for death in battle or abroad. Table X

Ladies, we must never be caught singing while frivolously poking around in the ashes of a funeral pyre. I know we’re all tempted, but we must try to restrain ourselves.

Looking back, scholars considered the Law of the Twelve Tables a “highly casuistic, case-oriented (in contradistinction to generalising, principle-oriented) piece of legislation reflecting the life of a fairly primitive agricultural community” (Mousourakis). Nonetheless it continued to be used for centuries, “but mainly through their interpretation by trained jurists, who adapted them to the changed conditions of later eras” (Mousourakis). In short, a bunch of later Patrick Arkys twisted the weird and wonderful primitive rules of Rome to suit their needs.

The mighty paterfamilias

Central to Roman values was the paterfamilias, the head of the Roman household, who held absolute power over his descendants, their families and the household slaves. He held this power until he died, meaning that a sixty-year-old man could still be subject to the whims of his elderly father. “Go to your room!” “But Dad, I’m a senator.” “I don’t care if you’re Caesar himself!”

The most potent of his powers were those over life and death. Specifically, the paterfamilias had the right to (Thompson):

Expose infant offspring
Sell a son into slavery
Administer physical punishment to household members
Hand over a household member accused of wrongdoing for punishment by the wronged party
End the marriages of his children
Violently take the life of his wife (if married in manu – more on that in the section on Wives), child, grandchild, or slave without legal consequences, provided he had good reason.

Provided he had good reason … “Your honour, mine was a peaceful household until my wife hired a pedagogue to teach our five-year-old the flute.” “Very well, you are excused.”

The paterfamilias’ dependants were “financially completely dependent on him, since they could not own or acquire any property of their own” (Thompson). Everything they acquired came into his possession. There were legal exceptions for sons, who enjoyed a sort of de facto right to property that would eventually become theirs. Can you imagine if your dad had a right to everything you earned? No wonder children feared disinheritance more than physical abuse (Goodman).

Wives

Early on, most Roman marriages were cum manu (“with hand”). Tee hee, that sounds rude, and elicits some unwanted images. It meant that the wife passed from the legal control of her father and his paterfamilias, to her husband and his paterfamilias (Bradly). Later on, during the Republic, most marriages were sine manu (“without hand”), which meant that the wife stayed under the control of her father. But, importantly, she retained ownership of her property, which basically meant that she took, among other things, her own slaves into marriage. I suppose it’s nice to see familiar faces. Some women were legally independent, sui iuris, if their father died, but remained under the guardianship of a male relative (Bradly), no doubt because of the women’s persistent frivolous nature.

Sine manu marriage wasn’t so much of a legal contract as a matter of will and cohabitation. “As Ulpian says, marriage is made in the mind not in bed” (Lewis). It could be as simple as the bridegroom (or a proxy if he couldn’t show up) leading the bride to his home. Marriages didn’t even need to be consummated. They did require consent from both parties (Lewis), but I do wonder whether this consent was the bride’s or her dad’s?

Similarly, “divorce, like marriage, remained a matter of will or lack of it” (Lewis). Note that only husbands, not wives, could initiate divorce in cum manu marriages. The paterfamilias could order his son to divorce no matter the type of marriage (Lewis). Furthermore, his consent was required for the marriage to take place.

The husband (and paterfamilias in cum manu marriages) had the power to slay adulterous women and their paramours (Dunstan). The rules changed somewhat in the time of Augustus (Lintott):

The father was almost forced to prosecute “on pain of being prosecuted himself as a pimp if the offending pair were not accused”.

A father could still kill his daughter and her lover, provided that he caught the pair in the act, that he killed both at once, that the act took place either in his own house or that of his son-in-law, and that the woman was legally either in his power or that of her husband.

A husband, however, was forbidden to kill his wife, and could only kill his wife’s lover if they were caught in the house and the lover fell into one of the categories of degraded persons, including slaves, freedmen of the family, actors, dancers, and prostitutes.

Lesson learnt: when committing adultery, do it with nobility, outside of the home.

A wife did not enjoy the right to prosecute her husband for his adultery with a married woman, but could engage in domestic spying to ensure his punishment by the errant woman’s kinsmen. (Dunstan)

Fair enough, and a bit of cloak-and-dagger is always fun.

Children

Romans apparently prided themselves on being good husbands and fathers (Goodman).

It was inappropriate to punish freeborn children with the whip, since that dishonoured them. (Thompson)

That’s nice. Someone should have told the Victorians.

So was the paterfamilias prone to the angry, homicidal rages that the law permitted? While it might have been inappropriate to whip his kids, he still had the legal means to kill them.. with good reason, of course.

There were only a handful of cases where fathers actually killed their sons and “it is clear that such conflict was normally settled, not by recourse to violence and killing, but by nagging and persuasion” (Thompson). If a dad got really fed up, he could drag his kid before the governor (Lewis). There was a general distaste for homicidal dads. “Hadrian deported a father who killed his son, observing that paternal power should be expressed in mutual respect not violence” (Lewis).

As an interesting counterpoint, the paterfamilias could be sued for the wrongdoing of his son, because the son was effectively powerless (Lewis). “Gaius, did you pull another dangerous overtaking manoeuvre on the Via Appia? We got a letter from the Department of Roads, addressed to me. FFS.”

Emancipation

Independence from the paterfamilias was gained in a number of ways, and most often when the old goat kicked the bucket.

When the paterfamilias died, sons who hadn’t reached puberty fell under the tutelage of an agnate, the nearest male relative (Lewis). Unlike the name implies, the tutor didn’t need to educate the child, but acted as administrator of the pupil’s property (Lewis). At the age of fourteen, the boy could deal with his own property, but the authorities kept an eye on his commercial transactions until he was twenty-five, so he didn’t do anything stupid (Lewis).

Daughters, of course, remained under guardianship, or were transferred to a new paterfamilias in cum manu marriages.

A paterfamilias could relinquish his control by giving a child up for adoption. Adoption was most often done to gain “younger men deemed appropriate successors” to the paterfamilias, not to start a family (Goodman).

The weirdest form of emancipation was one where the paterfamilias sold his son three times. In the Principate age this was no longer a debt bondage situation, but a play on an old custom for legal reasons.

This method was effected as follows: the father sold his son three times (daughters and grandchildren only once) to a confidant who then granted the son his freedom on two occasions, whereupon he returned to his father’s control, and on the third transaction sold him back to the emancipating father, who in turn freed the son or other dependant. (Mousourakis)

It took until the age of Justinian in the sixth century CE for this charade to stop, by which time independence was just registered in the court.

To conclude, let’s return to my character, Marcus. His father had no interest in emancipating him, which is great for fiction. Conflict = drama. But let’s spare a thought for all those kids who lived under the thumb of the paterfamilias in ancient Rome. They had to do what daddy said, and daddy did what Rome said in order to uphold honour.

Is life that different today? I was raised in contemporary Western culture. We have a kind of honour system in that we have values, and some of us have well-curated lives and well-crafted reputations (online, anyway). And none of us particularly set out to disappoint our parents. But, as adults, we’re not legally bound to them, which is a marvellous thing. To quote Disney again, this time Aladdin:

Oh, to be free! To be my own master.

… At the same time, I sometimes lament that my old man can’t be hauled into court for my misdemeanours.