The Head of the Roman Extended Family Was Known as the Pater Familias.

Oldest living male in an Ancient Roman household

The pater familias , besides written as paterfamilias (plural patres familias),^[one] was the head of a Roman family unit. The pater familias was the oldest living male in a household, and could legally exercise autocratic dominance over his extended family. The term is Latin for "father of the family" or the "owner of the family estate". The form is archaic in Latin, preserving the sometime genitive ending in -ās (see Latin coast), whereas in classical Latin the normal offset declension genitive singular ending was -ae . The pater familias always had to be a Roman citizen.

Roman police and tradition (mos majorum) established the power of the pater familias within the community of his own extended familia. In Roman family police, the term "Patria potestas" (Latin: "ability of a father") refers to this concept.^[ii] He held legal privilege over the property of the familia, and varying levels of authorisation over his dependents: these included his wife and children, certain other relatives through blood or adoption, clients, freedmen and slaves. The same mos majorum chastened his authorisation and determined his responsibilities to his own familia and to the broader community. He had a duty to father and heighten good for you children equally future citizens of Rome, to maintain the moral propriety and well-being of his household, to accolade his clan and bequeathed gods and to dutifully participate—and if possible, serve—in Rome's political, religious and social life. In event, the pater familias was expected to be a good denizen. In theory at least, he held powers of life and decease over every member of his extended familia through ancient right. In practice, the farthermost form of this correct was seldom exercised. It was eventually limited by law.^[three]

In the Roman tradition, the term has appeared more often than not in legal texts, and to a lesser extent, in literary texts. In both types of discourses, the term has been most ordinarily used to refer to the "manor owner," a title considered conceptually separate from his familial relations.^[4]

Roman familia [edit]

The Roman household was conceived of as an economic and juridical unit of measurement or estate: familia originally meant the group of the famuli (the servi or serfs and the slaves of a rural estate) living under the same roof. That meaning later expanded to signal the familia equally the bones Roman social unit, which might include the domus (house or home) merely was legally distinct from information technology: a familia might own one or several homes. All members and properties of a familia were subject to the authority of a pater familias: his legal, social and religious position defined familia as a microcosm of the Roman state.^[5] In Roman law, the potestas of the pater familias was official but distinct from that of magistrates.

But a Roman citizen held the status of pater familias, and there could be only one holder of that office within a household. He was responsible for its well-beingness, reputation and legal and moral propriety. The entire familia was expected to adhere to the core principles and laws of the Twelve Tables, which the pater familias had a duty to exemplify, enjoin and, if necessary, enforce, so within the familia Republican police and tradition (mos majorum) immune him powers of life and death (vitae necisque potestas). He was also obliged to observe the constraints imposed by Roman custom and law on all potestas. His decisions should be obtained through counsel, consultation and consent within the familia, which were decisions by commission (consilium). The family consilia probably involved the almost senior members of his own household, peculiarly his wife, and, if necessary, his peers and seniors within his extended clan (gens).^[6]

Augustus'southward legislation on the morality of union co-opted the traditional potestas of the pater familias. Augustus was not merely Rome's princeps simply also its father (pater patriae). As such, he was responsible for the unabridged Roman familia. Rome's survival required that citizens produce children. That could not be left to individual censor. The falling nascency charge per unit was considered a marker of degeneracy and self-indulgence, especially among the elite, who were supposed to fix an example. Lex Julia maritandis ordinibus compelled marriage upon men and women within specified historic period ranges and remarriage on the divorced and bereaved within certain time limits. The Lex Julia de adulteriis coercendis severely penalised adulterous wives and any husbands who tolerated such behaviour. The Lex Papia Poppaea extended and modified the laws in relation to intermarriage betwixt social classes and inheritance. Compliance was rewarded and infrequent public duty brought exemption, but dictatorial compulsion was deeply unpopular and quite impractical. The laws were later softened in theory and practise, only the imperial quaestio perpetua remained. Its public magistrates now legally over-rode the traditional rights of the family concilium and pater familias. The principate shows a clear trend towards the erosion of individual patria potestas and the increasing intrusion of the land into the juridical and executive independence of the familia nether its pater.^[7]

Every bit priest of familia, gens and genius [edit]

Statuary genius depicted equally pater familias (1st century AD)

Main article: Gens

The domestic responsibilities of the pater familias included his priestly duties (sacra familiae) to his "household gods" (the lares and penates) and the ancestral gods of his own gens.^[eight] The latter were represented by the di parentes as ancestral shades of the departed, and by the genius cult. Genius has been interpreted as the essential, heritable spirit (or divine essence, or soul) and generative power that suffused the gens and each of its members. As the singular, lawful caput of a family derived from a gens, the pater familias embodied and expressed its genius through his pious fulfillment of bequeathed obligations. The pater familias was therefore owed a reciprocal duty of genius cult by his entire familia. He in his turn conferred genius and the duty of sacra familiae to his children—whether by blood or past adoption.^[ix]

Roman religious police defined the religious rites of familia equally sacra privata (funded past the familia rather than the land) and "unofficial" (not a rite of state office or magistracy, though the state pontifices and censor might arbitrate if the ascertainment of sacra privata was lax or improper). The responsibility for funding and executing sacra privata therefore fell to the head of the household and no other. As well equally observance of common rites and festivals (including those marked by domestic rites), each family had its ain unique internal religious calendar—marking the formal acceptance of infant children, coming of age, marriages, deaths and burials. In rural estates, the entire familia would gather to offer sacrifice(s) to the gods for the protection and fertility of fields and livestock. All such festivals and offerings were presided over past the pater familias.^[x]

Wife [edit]

The legal potestas of the pater familias over his wife depended on the form of marriage between them. In the Early on Democracy, a wife was "handed over" to the legal control of her hubby in the form of marriage cum manu (Latin cum manu ways "with hand"). If the human divorced his married woman, he had to give the dowry back to his wife and her family unit.^[eleven] Past the Late Republic, manus union had become rare, and a adult female legally remained part of her nascency family.^[12]

Women emancipated from the potestas of a pater familias were independent past police (sui iuris) only had a male guardian appointed to them. A woman sui iuris had the right to take legal action on her ain behalf only not to administer legal matters for others.^[xiii]

Children [edit]

The laws of the Twelve Tables required the pater familias to ensure that "evidently deformed" infants were put to decease. The survival of congenitally disabled adults, clearly evidenced among the elite by the partially-lame Emperor Claudius, demonstrates that personal choice was exercised in the affair.

The pater familias had the power to sell his children into slavery; Roman law provided, however, that if a child had been sold as a slave three times, he was no longer subject field to patria potestas. The pater familias had the ability to approve or reject marriages of his sons and daughters; all the same, an edict of Emperor Augustus provided that the pater familias could non withhold that permission lightly.

The filii familias (children of the family unit) could include the biological and adopted children of the pater familias and his siblings.

Considering of their extended rights (their longa manus, literally "long manus"), the patres familias also had a series of actress duties: duties towards the filii and the slaves, simply some of the duties were recognized not by the original ius civile simply only by the ius gentium, peculiarly directed to foreigners, or past the ius honorarium, the law of the Magistratus, particularly the Praetor, which would emerge only in a latter menstruation of Roman law.

Adult filii remained under the authority of their pater and could non themselves acquire the rights of a pater familias while he lived. Legally, whatever property acquired by individual family unit members (sons, daughters or slaves) was caused for the family unit estate: the pater familias held sole rights to its disposal and sole responsibility for the consequences, including personal forfeiture of rights and belongings through debt. Those who lived in their own households at the time of the death of the pater succeeded to the status of pater familias over their respective households (pater familias sui iuris) even if they were but in their teens. Children "emancipated" by a pater familias were effectively disinherited. If a paterfamilias died intestate, his children were entitled to an equal share of his manor. If a will was left, children could contest the estate.

Over time, the absolute potency of the pater familias weakened, and rights that theoretically existed were no longer enforced or insisted upon. The power over life and expiry was abolished, the right of punishment was chastened and the sale of children was restricted to cases of extreme necessity. Under Emperor Hadrian, a male parent who killed his son was stripped of both his citizenship and all its attendant rights, had his property confiscated and was permanently exiled.^[14]

Slavery [edit]

Roman context [edit]

The original classical Roman definition of familia referred to "a body of slaves," and did not refer to wives and children.^{[15] [16] [17]} The classical legal concept of pater familias equally "caput of household" derived from this early on formulation of familia and, thus, from the legal relationship between slaveowners and their enslaved laborers rather than that between fathers and children.^[18] Since the early on classical period, Roman writers and jurists have interpreted aboriginal writers' invocation of pater familias as the ground of the concept of "head of household"—over the alternative Latin word for slaveowner, dominus—as a purposeful pick, intended to mitigate the harsh connotations that the human activity of slaveholding conferred onto heads of households and expanding the applicability of the term to non-enslaved members of the household.^{[nineteen] [xx]} As a semantic term, pater familias thus connoted heads of household who were idea to combine the affective tenderness of a male parent with the stern coercion of a slaveowner in ordering their households.^{[nineteen] [21]}

As Roman jurists began to articulate the legal conception of pater familias from the early on classical period onwards, the minimum qualification for bold the status of pater familias came to be understood as one'due south capacity to ain holding. Notwithstanding, in Roman police, this was considered a distinct dimension of the pater familias' authorisation from their chapters to hold dominion over enslaved persons.^[22] While both enslaved people and the estate itself were considered role of the familia unit over which pater familias held potency, they were recognized every bit singled-out from family members (wives, children, and grandchildren). Despite these distinctions, what all members of the household shared was their subjecthood to the authority, or potestas, of the pater familias. By the second century, A.D., the distinction betwixt family members and enslaved persons residing in the aforementioned household had lessened, fifty-fifty as the patria potestas also weakened over fourth dimension.^[16]

Patres familias wielded complete and separate dominance over members of their households, including their enslaved laborers. In cases of adjudicating legal transgressions committed by enslaved persons, patres familias exhibited equivalent jurisdiction as that of local civil magistrates, including the ability to absolve the enslaved of any wrongdoing, trying them by jury, or sentencing them to capital letter punishments.^{[23] [24]}

While some Roman patres familias permitted enslaved individuals in their households to establish quasi-marital unions (known as contubernia) as a means of forming communal bonds among the enslaved, these unions were only recognized within the household and carried no legal bearing outside of the household. The children that resulted from these unions were themselves enslaved and considered the legal belongings of their female parent's possessor.^[25]

Roman legal sources often recognized enslaved people as part of the instrumenta (roughly translated as "equipment") of the household to highlight the service they provided the pater familias. This definition included both enslaved people working in field settings and those living in the domestic household and working in direct service of the pater familias. ^[26]

Roman women sui iuris ("of their ain power," and non under the authorisation of any pater familias) possessed the legal right to own enslaved people as instrumenta, though jurists decided on a case-past-instance footing whether to extend the status of pater familias to them in their capacity every bit slaveowners. In full general, however, the status of pater familias could not be fully extended to women sui iuris because Roman law recognized the authority that pater familias wielded over members of the immediate family as strictly gendered, i.e., male. Even so, historians and legal scholars have often overlooked this exception to the rule that allowed some women sui iuris (usually wealthy and of the upper socioeconomic stratum of order) to accomplish legal recognition as pater familias through their ownership of enslaved persons.^[26]

Historical applications [edit]

Exterior of the Roman context, various slavery regimes in globe history have adopted the concept of pater familias to structure the legal, cultural, and social relationships between slaveowners and enslaved people. The police code of fifteenth-century Valencian society, for example, adopted the classical Roman conception of familia to recognize servant laborers and enslaved persons as members of the domestic household, roughly equal in status to family members given their subjecthood to the authority of the pater familias.^[27] Equally a consequence of this, patres familias maintained honour and condition within their communities by fulfilling both the fabric and spiritual needs of all members of the household, including enslaved persons. This included providing for the nutrient, clothing, shelter, didactics, and baptism of enslaved persons. When they reneged on these obligations, the law code considered them to forfeit their correct to ownership of their enslaved, leading in some cases to disputes between paternal heads of household over the condition of enslaved persons whom they each claimed to have "raised."^[28]

In the context of plantation slavery in the antebellum U.S. South, slaveowning planters developed a rhetorical defense of slavery equally a benevolent, paternalistic establishment based on the aboriginal Roman model of the pater familias.^[29] Some planters employed the concept as a legal protectionary measure, instructing renters to whom they "hired out" their enslaved laborers to "treat" them "every bit proficient pater familias," in an try to stymie calumniating practices.^[xxx] Others used the concept to rationalize planter rule, challenge themselves sovereigns of their households who provided for all constituent members, and demanding their loyalty and labor in render.^[31] Drawing on the Roman precedent in this mode, these planters claimed that their enslaved laborers were their "dependents," who ultimately benefitted from the paternalistic ordering of the household. Southern newspapers and print media repeatedly promoted this idea in guild to square the intrinsic brutality that defined the institution of slavery with the democratic ideals the nation was supposedly founded on, often developing this paternalistic ideology to irrational heights and ignoring the contradictions that it masked.^{[32] [33] [34]} This paternalistic ideology persisted afterwards the legal abolition of slavery, as white employers and political leaders in the South attempted to maintain a hierarchical socioeconomic course status over formerly enslaved persons, as well every bit women and poor laborers, whom they viewed as "dependents," thereby expanding the Roman household model of pater familias to the level of broader society.^{[35] [36]}

The patriarchal mode of slavery that Southern U.S. and Caribbean slaveowners attempted to constitute oftentimes clashed with the familial structures enslaved people themselves synthetic. Some of these family structures had roots in Westward African societies. The Akan lodge of the Golden Declension, for example, was largely matrilineal and composed of individual "clans or lineages," descended from a unmarried female parent.^[37] Mandé society, while more than oftentimes organized forth patrilineal lines, exhibited some matrilineal lines and mostly reserved powerful positions of political and household authority for women.^[38] In Igbo club, women were "near celebrated" for their roles as mothers and wives, merely also participated in contained market activeness and in communal defense.^[39] Equally a sizable proportion of enslaved people transported to the New World in the trans-Atlantic merchandise originated from Akan, Mandé, and Igbo societies, some historians have noted a connection between the matrilineal elements of these West African cultures and the centrality of women and mothers in enslaved peoples' family units.^{[40] [41]} These culling modes of structuring household and family life among enslaved people threatened some planters' intentions to serve as the solely acknowledged pater familias of their households.^{[42] [43]}

See also [edit]

• Kyrios

References [edit]

1. ^ Familias is an archaic genitive course that survived into classical Latin in this stock-still expression.
2. ^ Patria potestas, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., March 30, 2016, https://www.britannica.com/topic/patria-potestas. Access Date: April 11, 2018
3. ^ Severy, 9–x.
4. ^ Richard P. Saller, "Pater Familias, Mater Familias, and the Gendered Semantics of the Roman Household," Classical Philology, 94, no. ii (Apr., 1999): 182.
5. ^ Frier et al., 18–20, for familia instance-police force definitions (Ulpian) and relations during and earlier the Imperial period. Limited preview available via Google Books [1]
6. ^ Parkin & Pomeroy, 72–80. Limited preview bachelor via Google Books [ii] (accessed 24 September 2009)
7. ^ Galinsky, 130–2. Augustus couched the changes and similar ones as a restoration of traditional values. In one debate, he reiterated a "misogynistic" accost of 131 BCE past the censor Metellus Macedonicus on wedlock as necessary to Rome's survival. Limited preview via Google Books: [three]
8. ^ Such as the Julli (Julians) of Julius Caesar. Encounter Beard et al., vol i, 67–8.
9. ^ Severy, nine–ten.
10. ^ Beard et al., vol. ane, 49: citing Cato the Elderberry, On Agriculture, in Beard et al., vol. 2, 141, source 6.3a.)
11. ^ Bingham, Jane: The Usborne Internet Linked Encyclopedia of the Roman World, p. 45. Usborne Publishing, 2002.
12. ^ Frier et al., pp. 88–ninety.
13. ^ Pauline Schmitt Pantel, (ed.) A History of Women in the Westward, Book I, From Ancient Goddesses to Christian Saints, p. 133.
14. ^ Frier et al., 199.
15. ^ Richard P. Saller, "Pater Familias, Mater Familias, and the Gendered Semantics of the Roman Household," Classical Philology, 94, no. 2 (April., 1999): 191.
16. ^ ^{a b} David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge: Harvard University Printing, 1985), 2-3.
17. ^ Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, edited by William Smith (London: Walton and Maberly, 1859), 1041.
18. ^ Richard P. Saller, "'Familia, Domus,' and the Roman Conception of the Family unit," Phoenix 38, no. 4 (Winter, 1984): 343.
19. ^ ^{a b} Richard P. Saller, "Pater Familias, Mater Familias, and the Gendered Semantics of the Roman Household," Classical Philology, 94, no. 2 (April., 1999): 191-2.
20. ^ Henrik Mouritsen, The Freedman in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge Academy Press, 2011), 41-42.
21. ^ Lindsay Allason-Jones, "The Family in Roman Britain," in A Companion to Roman Britain, edited by Malcolm Todd (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 282.
22. ^ Richard P. Saller, "Pater Familias, Mater Familias, and the Gendered Semantics of the Roman Household," Classical Philology, 94, no. two (Apr., 1999): 184.
23. ^ James Stephen, The Slavery of the British West India Colonies [...], Vol. I, Existence a Depiction of the State in Bespeak of Law (London: Joseph Butterworth and Son, 1824), 340-341.
24. ^ Steve Estes, Charleston in Black and White: Race and Ability in the South After the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Colina: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 16.
25. ^ Jonathan Edmonson, "Slavery and the Roman Family," in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Vol. I: The Ancient Mediterranean World, edited by Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 347.
26. ^ ^{a b} Richard P. Saller, "Pater Familias, Mater Familias, and the Gendered Semantics of the Roman Household," Classical Philology, 94, no. ii (Apr., 1999): 187.
27. ^ Furs de Valencia §798. See too Debra Blumenthal, "Sclaves Molt Fortes, Senyors Invalts: Sex activity, Lies and Paternity Suits in Fifteenth-Century Spain," in Women, Texts and Say-so in the Early Modernistic Spanish World, edited by Marta V. Vicente and Luis R. Cortega (London: Routledge, 2017), 17-36.
28. ^ Debra Blumenthal, "Enemies or Extended Family? Slaves in the Household," in Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 122-153, esp. 122-130, 135-139, 149-153.
29. ^ Kwame Anthony Appiah, "What'due south Wrong with Slavery?" in Buying Freedom: The Ideals and Economics of Slave Redemption, edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martin Bunzl (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 254.
30. ^ Cécile Vidal, Caribbean area New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Social club (Chapel Loma: UNC Press, Omohundro Establish of Early American History and Culture, 2019), 324.
31. ^ Tristan Stubbs, "A 'continual exercise of our Patience and Economy': The Structure of Oversight, Patriarchism, and Dependence in Pre-Revolutionary Virginia, Due south Carolina, and Georgia" in Masters of Violence The Plantation Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018), 10-11.
32. ^ Brian Gabrial, The Press and Slavery in America, 1791-1859: The Melancholy Effect of Popular Excitement (Columbia: University of Southward Carolina Press, 2016), esp. 53-56.
33. ^ Lacy Yard. Ford, Deliver U.s. From Evil: The Slavery Question in the Erstwhile Southward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. 143-298, 505-534.
34. ^ James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982).
35. ^ Steve Estes, "Pater Familias" in Charleston in Black and White: Race and Power in the South Afterwards the Civil Rights Move (Chapel Loma: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), fifteen-34, esp. sixteen.
36. ^ Paternalism in a Southern City: Race, Religion, and Gender in Augusta, Georgia, edited past Edward J. Cashin and Glenn T. Eskew (Athens: University of Georgia Printing, 2001).
37. ^ Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum Southward (Chapel Loma: University of Due north Carolina Press, 1998), 110.
38. ^ Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum Southward (Chapel Colina: Academy of North Carolina Press, 1998), 93.
39. ^ Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Printing, 1998), 126-7.
40. ^ Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum S (Chapel Loma: Academy of North Carolina Printing, 1998), 151.
41. ^ Deborah Greyness White, Ar'northward't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1985), 106-108.
42. ^ Libra R. Hilde, Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty in African American Communities over the Long Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2020), 253.
43. ^ John Hearne, "Mural With Faces," Caribbean Quarterly 47, no. 1 (March 2001): 61-62.

Sources [edit]

• Beard, Yard., Price, S., Northward, J., Religions of Rome: Book 1, a History, illustrated, Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-521-31682-0
• Bristles, Thou., Cost, Due south., North, J., Religions of Rome: Volume 2, a sourcebook, illustrated, Cambridge Academy Press, 1998. ISBN 0-521-45646-0
• Frier, Bruce Due west., McGinn, Thomas A.J., and Lidov, Joel, A Casebook on Roman Family unit Police force, Oxford Academy Press (American Philological Clan), 2004. ISBN 978-0-nineteen-516186-1
• Huebner, S. R, Ratzan, D. M. eds. Growing up Fatherless in Antiquity, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Parkin, Tim, & Pomeroy, Arthur, Roman Social History, a Sourcebook, Routledge, 2007. ISBN 978-0-415-42675-six
• Severy, Beth, Augustus and the family at the nascency of the Roman Empire, Routledge, 2003. ISBN 0-415-30959-Ten

External links [edit]

• George Long, "Patria Potestas", in William Smith, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities London, John Murray, 1875, pp. 873‑875.
• "Roman Police force", in Cosmic Encyclopedia New York, Robert Appleton, 1913.
• Olga Tellegen-Couper, "A Short History of Roman Constabulary".

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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pater_familias

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