Over the past twenty-five years, scholarly interest in the study of the family in antiquity has grown dramatically. Scholarship of the 1980s focused on the family in the classical period but, more recently, attention has turned to Late Antiquity. There is a greater variety of relevant source material for this period than for earlier centuries: legal sources, funerary inscriptions (especially from Rome), papyri (less plentiful for the fourth century, but picking up again in the fifth and sixth centuries), letters, orations, and other literature, as well as abundant Christian writings: treatises, hagiographies, sermons, and the beginnings of canon law. Moreover, both legal and patristic sources evince a greater interest in those below the urban elite, because of an imperial desire to regulate the social orders and Christian concern for the poor and marginal. Women are more visible as well; although there are few extant writings by women, the new genre of saints’ lives brings us the first full-length biographies of women in antiquity.
But, despite the variety and scope of the source material, there are serious drawbacks to its use for social history. A large proportion of the material is prescriptive, presenting norms, which we cannot assume were always followed. Documentary source material is very sparse, except for Egypt. And none of these writings, even the most modest funerary inscription, is entirely unselfconscious: all were written with an audience in mind, and all are to some degree tendentious. It would be disingenuous to use these sources to construct a straightforward, ‘‘factual’’ account of late Roman family relations.
In this chapter, I shall use instead personal narratives to map out some of the most striking features of family life in the late antique west. By ‘‘personal narratives,’’ I mean primarily autobiographical writings, letters, and biographies by friends or relatives - most of them, necessarily, written by and for the literate elite. A focus on personal narratives rather than on laws or didactic texts allows one to pay more
A Companion to Late Antiquity. Edited by Philip Rousseau © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-11980-1
Attention to the emotional responses of late antique men and women in their family relationships - or rather, the representation of these emotions in polished writings intended for publication. Although historians have been reluctant to talk about emotions in antiquity, recently there has been more willingness to consider the emotional life of ancient men and women by taking a microhistorical approach to individuals for whom we have a variety of documentation (Van Dam 2003a: 11-14).
Such an approach cannot lead to any quantifiable or universally valid conclusions. But it can offer a perspective on broader issues, like the impact of Christianity on the family in Late Antiquity, which is part of the much larger issue of the ‘‘christianization’’ of Roman society. Almost all of the material discussed here was in fact written by Christians, because Christians, with their interest in sexuality and in the tension between secular relationships and the Christian’s relationship with God, had more to say about marriage and family relations than did non-Christians. The impact of Christian teachings on late Roman family life has been addressed by several recent studies (see bibliographical note below), which have stressed the continuity of preChristian mores rather than radical change, and have noted that changes arise from the interplay of social, military, political, and religious factors, and not from one cause only. At various points in this chapter I shall address the question of what ‘‘difference’’ Christianity made to family relationships and norms; but, as will be seen, there is no clear answer.
World History
