The Original Constitution of Rome

The Roman House

Father and mother, sons and daughters, home and homestead, servants and chattels—­such are the natural elements constituting the household in all cases, where polygamy has not obliterated the distinctive position of the mother.  But the nations that have been most susceptible of culture have diverged widely from each other in their conception and treatment of the natural distinctions which the household thus presents.  By some they have been apprehended and wrought out more profoundly, by others more superficially; by some more under their moral, by others more under their legal aspects.  None has equalled the Roman in the simple but inexorable embodiment in law of the principles pointed out by nature herself.

The House-father and His Household

The family formed an unity.  It consisted of the free man who upon his father’s death had become his own master, and the spouse whom the priests by the ceremony of the sacred salted cake (-confarreatio-) had solemnly wedded to share with him water and fire, with their son and sons’ sons and the lawful wives of these, and their unmarried daughters and sons’ daughters, along with all goods and substance pertaining to any of its members.  The children of daughters on the other hand were excluded, because, if born in wedlock, they belonged to the family of the husband; and if begotten out of wedlock, they had no place in a family at all.  To the Roman citizen a house of his own and the blessing of children appeared the end and essence of life.  The death of the individual was not an evil, for it was a matter of necessity; but the extinction of a household or of a clan was injurious to the community itself, which in the earliest times therefore opened up to the childless the means of avoiding such a fatality by their adopting the children of others as their own.

The Roman family from the first contained within it the conditions of a higher culture in the moral adjustment of the mutual relations of its members.  Man alone could be head of a family.  Woman did not indeed occupy a position inferior to man in the acquiring of property and money; on the contrary the daughter inherited an equal share with her brother, and the mother an equal share with her children.  But woman always and necessarily belonged to the household, not to the community; and in the household itself she necessarily held a position of domestic subjection—­the daughter to her father, the wife to her husband,(1) the fatherless unmarried woman to her nearest male relatives; it was by these, and not by the king, that in case of need woman was called to account.  Within the house, however, woman was not servant but mistress.  Exempted from the tasks of corn-grinding and cooking which according to Roman ideas belonged to the menials, the Roman housewife devoted herself in the main to the superintendence of her maid-servants, and to the accompanying labours of the distaff, which was to woman what the plough was to man.(2) In like manner, the moral obligations of parents towards their children were fully and deeply felt by the Roman nation; and it was reckoned a heinous offence if a father neglected or corrupted his child, or if he even squandered his property to his child’s disadvantage.