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Distant Mirrors, Dimly Lit: Family
Friday August 22, 2003
at 2:30pm
 Listen Real Media
Part 5 of 6
The family appears to be under duress. Divorce, consumerism, mass media and an overtly sexualized society are said to be eroding the basic unit of our society. What can Ancient Rome and Greece tell us about family arrangements and filial bonding?
We are often tempted to reach back to a golden period to illustrate how things should function. The 1950s is one such slice of time. But what of antiquity? We can imagine that attitudes between family members might be modified by the impact of infant mortality, parental life expectancy, and the size and type of family. Do we love our children less or more than they did? What if dad goes to gay parties or has a young slave boyfriend? How pliable the family form?
Transcript:
Peter Toohey: Is the family under siege? Divorce, consumerism, mass media, and an overtly sexualised society are often said to be eroding the family, the basic unit of our society.
So we reach back to a golden age to show how things could be better. The 1950s is the usual culprit. But what about ancient history?
SOUNDS OF JOLLITY
Peter Toohey: Can ancient Rome and Greece tell us anything new or different about family arrangements and filial bonding? Do we love our children less or more than they did?
We can imagine that attitudes between family members might be modified by the impact of infant mortality, parental life expectancy and the size and type of the family. But what if Dad goes to gay parties, or has a young slave boyfriend? How pliable is the family form?
The issue that I’d like to explore relates to family structure, and to the sorts of emotions that such structures encourage.
One of the most peculiar aspects of the Roman family is the existence in aristocratic families of delicia or pet children. These were young slave children who had been taken into family life and who were subsequently treated more or less as real children of the family, at least until they matured.
They were often the special favourites of the male head of the house, who had adopted them. But at maturity, they seem to have resumed the normal life of a Roman household slave.
They do not necessarily seem to have been the objects of paedophiliac, sexual lust.
Perhaps the closest thing that they resemble in a modern household is a much-loved dog. But they were human.
Here Statius laments the death of a pet child.
Statius Reading: What? Wonder if your good father honours you with so grand a funeral?
You were to your master the peaceful haven of his old age. You are now his delight, now the sweet object of his care. No outlandish revolving stage turned you around, no slave boy were you among Egyptian wares to utter studied jests and well-prepared speeches and by impudent tricks to seek and slowly win a master.
Here was your home, here you were born; both of your parents have long been loved in their master’s house. And for your joy, they were freed so that you would not complain of their birth.
As soon as you were born, your master exultantly raised you and as your first cry greeted the shining stars, he appointed you his own and held you close to his bosom and deemed himself your father.
Peter Toohey: Delicia or pet children are interesting in an unexpected way. They present an absolutely bizarre addition to any family.
They also tell us something significant about the structure of the Roman family. The traditional view of the Roman family is that it was nuclear, like the family of the 1950s or the 1960s.
What these delicia tell us is that the Roman family had a much looser organisation than had been expected. The core may have been nuclear, but the full-time hangers-on were many and varied.
It’s a topic of special interest to Professors Hanne Sigismund Nielsen of the University of Calgary in Canada, and David Konstan of Brown University in the USA.
Hanne Sigismund Nielsen: I really have difficulties recognising the nuclear family. I see households, relationships of course existed between spouses and their children.
This goes fairly deep down in society with those who really didn’t have very many relationships, they had slaves, perhaps one or two, they would have a patronus or patrona, or they would have work relationships.
And it seems that these relationships were as close as what we would recognise as the nuclear family. I see households.
David Konstan: To think of the nuclear family as a very modern invention, and that’s probably not correct, at least not the two children and parents versus an extended family of the sort that Tacitus describes for the ancient Germans or that we see in let’s say the Wigwam Longhouse community that anthropology has taught us about.
The Roman family was not quite as narrow as the two-parent structure, but certainly far more limited than societies that are organised around moieties and clan structures that are more powerful than the individual small family, assuming that such families have existed.
So it’s not the intimate privacy of the mid-20th century American family, but it’s not all that different from what a well-to-do household in 19th century England would have looked like.
Hanne Sigismund Nielsen: I think that’s very precise, and I think that one of the problems what an ancient family looked like is that we think that it must either be extended or nuclear, and that we define nuclear as something with a lot of privacy, something with being able to lock your door and not letting anybody in, I mean, we cannot imagine at any point that neither Greek nor Roman society had any kind of privacy anywhere.
There would have been people everywhere. Perhaps a distinction is there, rather than anywhere else.
But there’s another thing I think we should emphasise. This is the emotional relationship, I mean their use of wet nurses that was so widespread in all classes of society, and that would mean of course that some other persons than mothers and fathers had close relationships with the little children and had it for quite a few years, and then afterwards would remain close emotionally.
Peter Toohey: Hanne Sigismund Nielsen and David Konstan.
Let’s reflect on the death of a child in antiquity.
WHISTLING WIND
Quintilian Reading: My youngest boy was barely five when he was the first to leave me, robbing me, as it were, of one of my two eyes. I have no desire to flaunt my woes in the public gaze nor to exaggerate the cause I have for tears. Would that I had some means to make it less.
But how can I forget the child with his face? The sweetness of his speech, his first flashes of promise, and his actual possession of a calm and incredible though it may seem, a powerful mind.
Such a child would have captivated my affections even had he been another’s. Nor was this all to enhance my agony, the malignity of designing fortune had willed that he should devote all his love to me, preferring me to his nurses, to his grandmother who brought him up, and all those who as a rule win this special affection of infancy.
Quintilian.
Peter Toohey: Were the emotions within the ancient families similar or dissimilar to those of the modern world? Or did they change through time?
Small children are one of the cornerstones for understanding emotion within the ancient family. How did parents relate to their small children?
In the passage just reproduced, the famous theotrician of oratory, Quintilian, laments the untimely death of his young son and the terrible grief that this has caused him. It’s a very moving passage, yet this passage is not typical of Greek and Roman reactions to the death of small children.
For the ancients the emotional reaction to the death of the very young was shaped by two factors: first grief was tempered by the fact that so many small children died so young; second, grief was also tempered by an element of self-interest: children were one’s old-age providers.
Here again, are David Konstan and Hanne Sigismund Nielsen, two experts in the emotions and structure of the ancient family.
Hanne Sigismund Nielsen: Well we know that demographically, half of the children who were born in Rome would have been dead before they were five years old.
So before they were five years old, they wouldn’t really expect them to be there.
David Konstan: Roman legal restrictions on the length of time for mourning drew a difference between very young children and children who had reached I think it was five years old, five or six years old, where you mourned for a lesser period of time for those who were very, very young.
Also in some philosophical discussions of consolations for people who have suffered losses, it is a theme that if a child dies at a very, very young age, you couldn’t have invested as much affection as happens when the child is older and really more of a person, one whom you love.
So it was at least in the consciences of the Romans themselves however the women and parents in general might really have felt, there was a thought that a child dying at a very young age elicited less grief than one who had lived let’s say already to 2, 3 or 4 years old and had some possibility of growing up.
That being said, the consolation literature also shows cases many of them of women who grieved so deeply that years and years after the loss of a child, they were still suffering massive depression.
Hanne Sigismund Nielsen: Yes the legal term is sub-lugenda - children are sub-mourned. I believe that they’re mourned for one month for each year, so it’s actually up to the age of 10 that they are sup mourned, compared to two adults.
And you’re right about the very little children. This very well-known letter of Seneca where he says ‘Well you have lost a little child, he was only two years old, he was basically not – you didn’t know him, did you?
He was only known by his nurses. It’s a very short little span of time, actually a little point in time that has perished, not a person.’
Seneca says a little dot of time that has perished.
Peter Toohey: In Greece and Rome, marriages were arranged. Did this impact on the emotions felt towards one another by marriage partners?
Did this diminish the role of marital love, friendship, and faithfulness within such relationships? It appears not.
Reader: Alnus Caicina Severus proposed that no-one appointed to a governorship in a province outside Italy should be allowed to take his wife. ‘My wife and I are good friends,’ he said, ‘and have produced six children.
But I have practiced what I preach by keeping her home in Italy during my 40 years of the service in various provinces. The rule which forbade women to be taken to provinces or foreign countries was salutary.
A female entourage stimulates extravagance in peace time, and timidity in war.
This speech pleased only a few people. There was a chorus of interruptions. He was answered by Marcus Lilerius Masala Misellenis.
‘The city is no longer beleaguered, the provinces no longer hostile, so we make nowadays a few concessions to women’s requirements but not the sort to upset their husbands’ households, much less the provincials. And why not, in peacetime? Certainly men must travel light in war, but when they return from their labours, they’re surely entitled to relax with their wives?’
Caicana’s proposal was evaded.
Tacitus.
Peter Toohey: The passage we have just listened to provides a commentary on the emotional status of aristocratic marriage. Roman Senators, working under the Emperor Tiberius in 21CE were very keen indeed to have the company of their wives when away from Italy on protracted business. What does that tell us about family feelings?
David Konstan and Hanne Sigismund Nielsen argued Greek and Roman parents usually tried to arrange a marriage for the children that would match their interests and expectations.
In such situations, it comes as no surprise that affection should follow.
David Konstan: Well I’m not sure that arranged marriages are less loving on the whole. I am inclined to side with those philosophers and other critics who have believed that being in love is the worst situation in which to make a life choice.
There were some theologians in the medieval church who held that making a marriage agreement when in sufficient reason to annul the marriage on the grounds that you did not make a free choice of your partner.
When marriages were arranged in antiquity they were usually arranged among families who knew each other well. Younger people, even when there was a significant disparity in age, were familiar with one another; they were neighbours.
For perhaps 200 years, Greeks living in Egypt in fact favoured marriages between brothers and sisters, full brothers and sisters. The Romans were aware of it, they thought of it as unusual but not shocking.
Even in Greece, Athens, classical Athens, marriages between half brothers and sisters were permissible and in fact though of as desirable. The wealth stayed within the family and when explanations are offered, among the things that are said is that young children growing up together know each other well, are used to each other, have developed an affectionate bond.
So that an arranged marriage need not mean a mail-order marriage. It could very well mean one that was planned as families with deep feelings of mutual friendship and affection among themselves, thought of their children as natural partners, and the children themselves acquired some sense of one another that disposed them to affection.
Hanne Sigismund Nielsen: It’s interesting what David says about close-kin marriages. We have it in the Roman aristocracies. I mean if you hand out family trees of Roman aristocratic families to your students, they initially are in total despair, until they discover that it’s actually a question of you looking at first and second cousin marriages, because they all married close relations.
Another thing is the question of what an arranged marriage is. When do you think you choose and what do you choose, and between whom do you choose?
Do you choose to secure your family financially, to prosper, to have a good spouse with whom you will have good children that can help your family etc., or do you act out of more or less selfish interests?
Which is actually I think what we may see in our society, where we have this silly idea of falling in love as a requirement for marriage.
Peter Toohey: I think that some emotions change within antiquity. Like depression, they have a history, like privacy and like leisure and boredom, they have a history.
We can see that sometimes the way these conditions were experienced is very similar to that of the modern world. Sometimes it is not.
The ancient Roman family seems to have been very different from the models which we now understand as family. There were a variety of individuals attached to it, of varying relationships.
Despite this, heterosexual marriage was seen as the absolute basis of the ancient family. But the ancient Roman family was probably not nuclear.
As for love between partners, the concept itself may not be helpful. Love may not have figured in ancient marital balance sheets. But affection and friendship certainly did.
Then as now, companionship played a crucial role within marriage. And a life of companionship brings with it a trove of memory, and it has obvious relevance for family feelings, a family name, offsprings, and a family burial plot goes some distance towards guaranteeing that a group or an individual will be remembered.
And memory will be our focus next week.
More information:
"The Greeks - Crucible of Civilization" PBS Series
Comprehensive site accompanying the United States Public Broadcastisting Service (PBS) television special on Ancient Greece.
"The Roman Empire in the First Century" - PBS Series
Comprehensive site accompanying the United States Public Broadcastisting Service (PBS) television special on Ancient Rome.
American Philological Association
Founded in 1869, the American Philological Association is the principal learned society for Classical Studies in North America.
Childhood in Antiquity
Bibliography of Childhood in Antiquity by Meir Bar-Ilan, Senior Lecturer, Talmud and Jewish History Department, Bar-Ilan University, Israel.
Feminae Romanae
Bibliography and links on women in Ancient Rome.
The Ancient Greek World - University of Pennsylvania
Ancient Greek World virtual gallery at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
The Perseus Digital Library
Perseus is a an evolving digital library, edited by Gregory Crane at Tufts University.
Worlds Intertwined: Etruscans, Greeks, and Romans
Site accompanying the suite of four permanent classical galleries at the University of Pennsylvania Museum.
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