Much family law is concerned with inheritance and the transfer of the family property from one generation to the next. In Athens inheritance was partible, among sons. Daughters were entitled to only a dowry, itself often a sizeable portion. In Rome the dowry, however, was not considered the daughter’s sole claim to the patrimony. The figure of the epikleros did not exist in Roman society, where by the second century AD women were legally allowed to dispose of property themselves; the law here was clearly following social practices established much earlier.
The difference in the status of Athenian and Roman wives is illustrated by what happens at the end of a marriage, whether through death or divorce. Demosthenes’ father had made arrangements for his widow’s remarriage. The wealthy Roman widow or divorcee might choose to remarry, and under the Augustan laws was actively encouraged to do so, but she might be independently wealthy if her father had already died. Cicero’s daughter Tullia married three times, presumably returning to her father’s house between husbands; Terentia, on the other hand, remained a widow (although there developed an intriguing rumor that she married the historian Sallust after her divorce). On the death of the father children in Athens would be in the care of a guardian (kurios) who would usually be a male relative. In the case of Demosthenes, as we have seen, this was not a successful arrangement, but it highlights the strong sense of power and family control lying in the male line. At Rome guardianship was also common in the sense that those under age could not engage in financial dealings, and the sense of the dominance of the paternal line in the legal construction of the familia meant that children were supposed to stay with close paternal relatives, rather than with their mother. Again, demographic realities not infrequently subverted this idea and there are many instances of widowed mothers raising their children.
Fundamental as the family was to ancient societies, at its heart it was also a fragile institution. Both Demosthenes and Cicero experienced the vagaries of life in both the public and the private spheres. The unpredictable nature not only of human emotions but also of high mortality levels meant that the Greeks and Romans lived with the notion of instability ever present. Familiar as so many aspects of the ancient family may appear to us in modern Western societies, we should always be aware that the ancient framework for envisaging the family was fundamentally alien to our own.
World History
