Richard Saller on the Ancient Rome—Entitled Opinions 10/25/2011

10/25/2011

Richard Saller on the Ancient Rome

Richard Saller is the Vernon R. and Lysbeth Warren Anderson Dean of the School of Humanities & Sciences at Stanford University. He is also the Kleinheinz Family Professor of European Studies as well as Professor of Classics and History. Dean Saller received Bachelor’s degrees in both History and Greek at the University of Illinois in […]

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00:00:00.000	[Music]
00:00:06.680	This is KZSU Stanford.
00:00:09.320	Welcome to entitled opinions.
00:00:11.920	My name is Robert Harrison.
00:00:14.040	We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
00:00:17.520	[Music]
00:00:29.160	[Music]
00:00:57.160	In title opinions has a number of different constituencies among its listeners.
00:01:02.040	There are those who prize our heavy philosophical shows.
00:01:06.120	There are those who love most of all our music shows.
00:01:10.000	Others are poetry and novel shows.
00:01:12.760	There are those who think we're at our best and most relevant when discussing science
00:01:17.160	and the fate of modern technology.
00:01:19.720	And then there are those who relish above all the shows devoted to antiquity.
00:01:24.400	And who can blame them?
00:01:26.040	And tickwity is where it's at.
00:01:28.400	Always has, always will, providing the basic principles of our modernity.
00:01:34.920	The good news, I have with me in the studio one of the leading scholars of ancient Roman history
00:01:40.680	and today we'll be discussing the domestic and social institutions of the ancient Romans, including
00:01:47.600	patriarchy, marriage, inheritance laws, divorce, death, and gender relations.
00:01:54.920	Stay tuned friends, this is a show for everyone.
00:01:58.120	[Music]
00:02:06.160	[Music]
00:02:34.160	[Music]
00:02:46.160	Looks so good, it looks so cool, your pleasure lives in truth or poor, but don't give
00:02:49.600	me no beautiful, let's tell you about our waters cool.
00:02:53.760	That theme song of ours is a good little example of antiquities after life in our own age.
00:02:59.920	It's called Echo.
00:03:01.920	Echo was the nymph who in Ovid's version of the story fell in love with Narcissus who
00:03:07.720	was too in love with himself to be bothered with her.
00:03:11.280	She tries to get him to look away from the pool, but he's so transfixed by his own image
00:03:15.880	that he wastes away as Echo looks on helplessly.
00:03:20.440	Echo's voice still echoes across the ages, warning all the self-absorbed individuals in
00:03:25.960	our midst to turn away from their Facebook pages.
00:03:30.560	I'm to listen to her, I'd say, look over here at the ancient Romans, for example.
00:03:38.040	Ovid was a great Roman poet whose book the metamorphoses reworks a whole host of stories
00:03:43.560	that come mostly from Greek mythology.
00:03:46.880	What I admire about the Romans is that they were secure enough in their Roman identity
00:03:51.600	not to be worried about cultural originality.
00:03:55.080	They recognized the superiority of the Greeks in this domain and had no problems imitating
00:04:00.520	and adapting Greek art, Greek thought and Greek literature.
00:04:05.680	Think of Anias, the legendary ancestor of the Roman people.
00:04:10.160	Anias is a minor character in Homer's Iliad.
00:04:13.480	He's the Trojan son of Anchisis and Aphrodite goddess of love.
00:04:18.920	The Romans had no qualms about simply adopting Anias as their mythic ancestor, and they
00:04:23.960	did this relatively late in their civic history.
00:04:29.280	Book six of Virgil's Aniaad is the book where Anias descends into Hades to consult with
00:04:36.080	the dead, and that descent is based largely on Book 11 of the Odyssey, where Odysseus
00:04:42.120	visits the dead in Hades.
00:04:44.160	Now Virgil was a pious devotee of Homer, yet I've always been struck by the subtle differences
00:04:50.040	between Homer's representation and Virgil's remake of it.
00:04:54.880	In Homer, Odysseus is encountered with the dead, has much more to do with the private sphere
00:05:00.000	than the public sphere.
00:05:02.160	It is more domestic than political in its pathos.
00:05:06.320	Here Odysseus encounters the shade of his recently dead mother, Antichlea, whom he tries
00:05:12.320	to embrace three times in vain.
00:05:16.240	She's a disembodied spirit.
00:05:19.000	After conversing with his mother about their home in Ithaca, Odysseus goes on to speak
00:05:23.600	with a number of Greek women, mostly queens, who tell him stories about their various households.
00:05:32.160	In Virgil's underworld, the scene is very different.
00:05:34.960	It is far more male oriented.
00:05:37.720	Instead of his mother, Anias meets his recently dead father, whom he tries to embrace three
00:05:43.520	times.
00:05:45.480	Anchisis goes on to show his son Anias the long line of male progeny that will issue from his
00:05:51.520	line and that will bring the future city of Rome to its imperial dominion over the world.
00:05:58.520	What is on full parade in Virgil's underworld is the August power and authority of Roman
00:06:04.440	patriarchy.
00:06:06.720	Patriarchy is the essence of the Roman social and political life, and if we hope to understand
00:06:11.160	anything about Rome, we need to understand the institutional foundations and history of
00:06:16.640	Roman patriarchy.
00:06:19.960	The person who joins me in the studio today is one of the world's leading experts on this
00:06:23.520	topic.
00:06:24.520	Richard Saller is the Vernon and Elizabeth Warren Anderson Dean of the School of Humanities
00:06:30.080	and Sciences at Stanford, as well as the Klein Heinz family professor of European studies
00:06:37.080	in Stanford's Department of Classics and History.
00:06:40.600	Professor Saller is the author of several books among them.
00:06:43.880	Personal patronage under the early empire.
00:06:47.480	The Roman Empire, economy, society and culture, and most importantly for our topic today,
00:06:53.200	patriarchy, property and death in the Roman family.
00:06:57.880	He has also co-edited the Cambridge Economic History of Greco-Roman Antiquity Richard.
00:07:02.520	Welcome to entitled opinions.
00:07:04.360	Thank you.
00:07:06.640	So before we jump into our topic, which has to do with the main institutions of Roman
00:07:10.680	social life and society, it might be helpful first to address the question of the source
00:07:15.040	materials.
00:07:16.040	Namely, where exactly does our knowledge about phenomena such as Roman patriarchy come
00:07:21.760	from?
00:07:23.720	I think that that's a critical first step in understanding.
00:07:27.200	And I guess what I'd like to do to begin with is distinguish between early Rome, say
00:07:33.080	Rome down to 200 BC and classical Rome.
00:07:37.080	The first Roman historian wrote only about 200 BC.
00:07:41.400	So all of the centuries prior to that would qualify as prehistory in early Rome.
00:07:48.480	And the important thing about that is that much of the material that we rely on for Roman
00:07:55.680	patriarchy is later classical writing about what they imagined early Rome to be.
00:08:03.320	And there was no good contemporary material from early Rome or virtually none to actually
00:08:12.240	provide reliable evidence for the period.
00:08:14.120	So even for the Romans, this patriarchy was to some extent an exercise in imagination.
00:08:22.160	But you're not suggesting that the institutions of patriarchy had become obsolete by 200
00:08:26.760	BC and subsequently.
00:08:30.320	Not obsolete, but for example, the position of Roman women, the Roman wife, had dramatically
00:08:38.640	changed by the classical period if we believe in the Romans imaginative reconstruction
00:08:44.720	of early Rome.
00:08:46.640	So are we to understand then that it's the imaginative reconstruction of later Romans
00:08:52.720	that gives us the conventional understanding of Roman patriarchy as a kind of absolute monarchy
00:08:59.760	of the family father who has absolute rights over his wife and his children and his slaves
00:09:08.080	and they are all part of, I don't want to call it personal property, but more or less.
00:09:14.000	And that everything was subjected to the sovereign will of the family father and that
00:09:20.480	you're suggesting that this is actually more of an imaginative reconstruction than verifiable
00:09:27.680	reality prior to 200 BC.
00:09:30.640	That's exactly right.
00:09:31.920	The one thing that we have that probably is reliable from the earlier era are fragments
00:09:38.280	of the 12 tables, the earliest Roman legal code and that gives us a little bit of guidance.
00:09:43.840	But the story is preserved in authors like Livy for early Rome, for the foundation of
00:09:50.480	the Roman Republic in 509 BC.
00:09:54.000	That was largely a later imaginative reconstruction.
00:09:59.200	Well was the construction merely imaginative and therefore random or arbitrary or was it
00:10:09.480	it's not possible that the reconstruction has a certain significant quotient of truth about
00:10:16.760	it?
00:10:17.760	It's certainly based on what the Romans believed about their past and I don't think that
00:10:24.400	they invented it out of whole cloth.
00:10:26.920	On the other hand, I also don't think that they had any contemporary material that they
00:10:32.400	could rely on that would take them out of the realm of oral tradition and I think oral
00:10:38.160	tradition is a particularly unreliable form of transmission of historical memory.
00:10:46.240	So can you tell us since we can't, I gather we don't want to speak about Roman patriarchy
00:10:54.480	prior to 200 BC because the information we have about it is unreliable.
00:10:58.720	What do we know about it in historical times?
00:11:01.640	Well let me challenge what is the premise of what you said.
00:11:05.320	I think we can take an interest in Roman patriarchy before 200 BC as evidence of what
00:11:13.360	the Romans thought their past was about and what their identity was after 200 BC.
00:11:19.560	So I think it's certainly worth studying for purposes of cultural history even if the historian
00:11:26.080	can't be confident that the legends of early Rome actually happened in the way that they're
00:11:32.240	described.
00:11:34.600	Well this raises some interesting issues, tangential Richard which is the reliability of ancient
00:11:42.160	legend and oral traditions passed down by word of mouth.
00:11:49.560	And I guess because I am a big devotee of Jumbati Stavico, the 18th century Italian author
00:11:58.080	of the new science which most of which is devoted to trying to reconstruct the earliest
00:12:02.560	institutions of what he calls the Gentiles and Rome was for him, his major point of reference.
00:12:09.440	But the interesting thing about Vico and others is that where at the time 18th century and
00:12:15.320	into the 19th century so many people were assuming that Homer was nothing but poetry, imaginative
00:12:20.760	invention and fantasy, or that the founding legends, the legends of Rome's founding and
00:12:27.960	so on and so forth were merely fanciful.
00:12:29.920	Then it turns out that subsequent archaeology and philology determines that well, there's
00:12:35.720	a great deal of actual historical truth in the legends.
00:12:39.240	And therefore Shiliman who goes naively with Homer under one arm and goes and discovers the
00:12:46.240	city of Troy because he believed that Homer was not just poetry but that there was a
00:12:51.560	substrate of historical truth in that.
00:12:54.360	So I would imagine that a number of these founding legends about Rome or patriarchy were
00:13:00.920	that I think that because they're in oral form or in folkloric form that doesn't necessarily
00:13:11.320	make them dismissive that you can't dismiss them as evidence, right?
00:13:17.160	Well I don't think that it means that they're necessarily wrong but I don't think you
00:13:22.280	can say that they're necessarily right and actually Shiliman is an interesting example
00:13:26.560	because he claimed to have found primes Troy but it turns out that the level of excavation
00:13:32.960	that he identified with primes off by about 400 years from when Troy was supposed to
00:13:40.160	have been destroyed.
00:13:41.160	So there's a very uncertain relationship between these legends and the archaeological record.
00:13:49.320	Sometimes they coincide but often they don't and unless you have some kind of external
00:13:54.040	check to verify them in another way I think you can't be confident that they contain historically
00:14:04.360	accurate description.
00:14:05.800	I think this particularly true in areas of social relations and family relationships.
00:14:12.000	I think it's in human nature to project back the kind of conventions that one associates
00:14:22.280	with one's own world and not to be sensitive to the possibilities for very big differences
00:14:30.000	in family relationships from one's own experience.
00:14:36.440	So what do you think is the one of the most egregious misconceptions about Roman patriarchy?
00:14:44.720	Well I think one would want to start with defining what you mean by patriarchy and there
00:14:50.440	are two different aspects of patriarchy.
00:14:53.960	There's the husband's authority over the wife and then there's the father's authority
00:14:58.800	over the children and those two are often conflated and yet in law and actually in legend
00:15:05.560	those play out in very different ways.
00:15:09.160	So in classical Rome for which we have really good evidence the husband actually had virtually
00:15:16.480	no authority over the wife who could walk out of the house and divorce with her own property
00:15:22.800	regimes were kept separate and we can talk more about that if you like.
00:15:27.360	Very different from in law the father's authority over the children and so one needs to
00:15:34.440	distinguish between those elements of patriarchy.
00:15:37.360	I think the legal description of the father's relationship over the children, the kind of
00:15:47.680	legal contents of patriarchy are important to understand but also then to compare with
00:15:55.560	the descriptions that we have of actual working daily social relationships in letters and
00:16:01.400	in other forms and I think that it presents a somewhat different picture from the stark
00:16:05.880	legal image of patriarchy.
00:16:11.120	What about the word pate in Latin because one tends to define it as father but it means
00:16:19.000	a lot more than that and in some cases I think it's we just confuse matters when we equate
00:16:25.120	pate with the biological paternity.
00:16:28.440	I think that that's right and I would add to that I think that familia is a real problem
00:16:34.400	as well as in Potter familius because the Roman familia though it is the root for the English
00:16:41.880	word family actually has a very different meaning from today's family it overlaps but
00:16:49.600	it's by no means identical.
00:16:53.040	Would the familia be an extended family in the sense that it would include father or I mean
00:16:58.680	that's a husband, wife, father, mother, children but also household servants, slaves and
00:17:06.520	perhaps even other would it be more like a house in the European classical sense of the
00:17:12.000	house of the board ball or the house of the Habsburgs or something of that sort.
00:17:17.880	Exactly right it would include this broader group living in the house and in fact by the
00:17:22.800	classical period by the late republic the word familia is most often used simply to mean
00:17:29.800	a group of slaves it has no kinship content at all in many cases.
00:17:36.800	Right famually, Vigo makes a big deal about the family as being surf so or and then there
00:17:43.800	is the clients.
00:17:45.800	No, the client is a big word in American, American lexicon because every time you're
00:17:52.120	I'm the client and therefore I'm the king but of course the client was anything but a sovereign
00:17:59.440	entity in the Roman family what was a client?
00:18:03.120	A client was a hanger on a dependent and it was a word that indicated degradation so
00:18:13.240	Cicero famously said he would rather die than be called a Cleans of another Roman.
00:18:21.680	The clients typically were humbler men who and women but mainly men who came to attend the rich
00:18:29.800	and powerful and so one of the aspects of the Roman household is that every morning in
00:18:35.840	Rome these clients would scurry to the doorstep of the great and powerful men their patrons
00:18:43.800	in the hopes of either getting handouts of the leftovers from last night's banquet or
00:18:50.200	small sums of money.
00:18:51.960	So social life in Rome was organized in that way.
00:18:54.920	I don't know of any other society in European history that had this sort of overt form
00:19:03.240	of recognition of social dominance across the board of course royal houses had something
00:19:10.040	similar but the idea that every important senator in Rome had his cliente's running to greet
00:19:17.760	him in the morning in return for leftovers from the table from the night before I think
00:19:23.440	gives a pretty stark image of the hierarchy.
00:19:27.000	So when we speak in our own day and age and especially in Italy about clientellism and
00:19:33.000	relation to Berlusconi's government and I think that when the Italians bemoan the
00:19:38.680	Cleans de Lismo they are talking about an institution that has a long history on the Italian
00:19:45.120	peninsula I guess.
00:19:46.600	It certainly does although I would want to add that the valence of the word Cleantela has
00:19:55.840	changed a lot.
00:19:57.000	I think today that word almost universally carries connotations of corruption whereas in
00:20:04.440	the Roman world it largely didn't.
00:20:06.520	It did carry connotations of social inferiority but there was nothing illicit about it because
00:20:12.920	the Romans didn't start from a premise of egalitarianism among citizens.
00:20:19.440	But nevertheless I know having grown up in Italy that I don't want to dwell too much
00:20:28.160	on the contemporary situation but there's ways in which people in certain kinds of positions
00:20:35.200	of political authority and power are so many people depend on them and the system is
00:20:42.480	all structured in such a way that that person is in the role of a certain kind of I don't
00:20:49.120	want to say Patrifices but of a minority where the clients really do depend on his and
00:20:57.520	in some cases her sort of generosity or willingness to hand out favors.
00:21:05.040	I think that that's right in the cording to my friends it's a very big part of academic
00:21:10.800	appointments in Italy whereas I think in the United States today by contrast we go out of
00:21:18.160	our way to limit the influence of the patron in any selection process.
00:21:25.160	Exactly.
00:21:27.160	Good so now I invoked the descent of a niez into the underworld and there we're talking
00:21:35.320	about Virgil he's writing during the reign of Augustus so we're talking about way later
00:21:40.440	than 200 BC but nevertheless it is very male dominated and you see a kind of male lineage
00:21:49.120	going from niez all the way down to Augustus himself and I said that what's on parade
00:21:55.960	there is a certain kind of image of Roman patriarchy.
00:22:00.320	Now I understand that the path that is not the biological father and per se is more
00:22:06.080	of a power or authority and so forth but the status of the male in that institution was predominant
00:22:14.400	if not exclusive would you agree with that at least?
00:22:17.520	Yes although even there I think I'd want to draw some qualification because after all Augustus
00:22:23.560	and his adoptive father Julius Caesar claimed to sent from Venus to begin with so it doesn't
00:22:31.160	completely exclude women in authority but I absolutely take your point the whole Roman naming
00:22:41.280	system was one that followed the male line either the biological male line or the repaired
00:22:49.040	male line through adoption.
00:22:53.000	So Richard can we what can we say about what we call patriarchy in the historical times
00:22:59.920	of the Romans what are its main features?
00:23:03.680	In historical times there's no doubt but that the males and in particular the fathers in
00:23:10.600	the household thought of themselves as the dominant being and in fact even though in law
00:23:20.040	women the wives often had nearly equal property rights there was still an ideology of male
00:23:27.800	superiority and female inferiority.
00:23:31.360	Now here there's a different kind of source problem and that is that nearly all of the
00:23:38.440	material written materials that we have from Rome all of the literature was written by men.
00:23:43.960	We know that women did in fact write during this era but virtually none of that has been
00:23:51.040	preserved and so what we have to remember is that we have the male voice and the male voice
00:23:56.280	regarded males as the dominant figures in the household.
00:24:04.520	The supremacy of the males I suppose is linked to the institution of patriarchy.
00:24:15.120	It's not identical with it because you have told me before you know coming on air that
00:24:20.720	there in some cases women were the Patet familius in certain rare cases.
00:24:27.240	Can I qualify that a little bit?
00:24:31.040	They were the Potter familius in the sense that they were the head of household.
00:24:38.280	So if you imagine a situation in which a woman is widowed she might well have a house
00:24:47.680	that she inherits and she then controls the slaves in the household she controls the wealth
00:24:54.960	of the household.
00:24:55.960	So in that sense she's a head of household.
00:24:58.440	She's not referred to directly as a Patet familius but in the legal materials they will
00:25:04.120	have a heading about the legal rights of the Patet familius and examples of women in
00:25:09.200	control of households will creep in as examples of the Patet familius's power.
00:25:16.360	And when we talk about the political sphere, not the private sphere, obviously women were
00:25:22.640	not entitled to become senators and that was certainly mailed.
00:25:30.360	Senate from what I would like to hear you say something about whether it's true that
00:25:37.000	Roman Senate at least in Republican times in the earlier said we know about it was it composed
00:25:44.400	strictly of the Patet familius, a family father, let's say patriarchs and that it was a federation
00:25:51.400	of heads of households.
00:25:54.880	In legends about early Rome I think that's true but by the classical era it's certainly
00:25:59.980	not true.
00:26:01.640	So just to be clear the Potter familius is the oldest living male ascendant in the family.
00:26:08.920	That would mean in a case of a grandfather, a father, and a son it would be the grandfather
00:26:13.960	who would be the Patet familius and the 30 year old son with a son himself would not be the
00:26:21.440	Patet familius.
00:26:22.440	He would become the Patet familius when his father died.
00:26:26.480	We know for certain that there were sons in the Senate and there was a minimum age requirement
00:26:33.000	but in fact there are some very famous stories in Roman legend about, or we know this
00:26:38.440	actually is not legend, these are historical accounts about the father, the Potter, deferring
00:26:47.480	to his son when his son was in office with the consulship and this is a story that illustrates
00:26:55.200	a broader theme of putting civic responsibility ahead of family responsibility.
00:27:02.880	So going back now to the family, is it true that when a child was born into a Roman family
00:27:11.880	it was the father had to lift the child up and accept that child as his own.
00:27:20.400	Otherwise he could also refuse.
00:27:24.760	That's right and the father legally had the power to let the child live or not.
00:27:34.400	There's argument among historians about what the power of life and death of the Roman
00:27:38.640	father amounted to in practice but one thought is that it was this power of raising the
00:27:46.160	child or not that he had.
00:27:49.520	And oftentimes children unwanted would be sold either put up for adoption or sometimes
00:27:56.560	sold in to slavery even though.
00:27:58.960	So there are a couple of stages there that are worth distinguishing.
00:28:04.120	The newborn could be exposed and picked up by any passerby as a slave.
00:28:11.240	Once the father had accepted the infant into the family and the infant had citizenship,
00:28:18.600	it was in law illegal to sell that child but we know that it went on because families were
00:28:24.360	so poor and desperate that it was better to sell the child in order to let it live rather
00:28:31.560	than to have it starve in an impoverished home.
00:28:36.960	So when it comes to the recognition of when it comes to the birth of children there's
00:28:44.160	also this fascinating for me completely fascinating widespread practice of adoption and adoption
00:28:53.160	as a legal issue but also I just also as I mentioned my introductory remarks the idea
00:28:59.960	of how Rome freely adopts Greek legacies and so forth.
00:29:07.200	I still cannot figure out who the hell Octavian is.
00:29:14.200	He is some kind of adopted son of Julius Caesar who's like so many other Romans really
00:29:20.280	hard to know what is the bloodline.
00:29:23.240	This is very different than the Jewish tradition for example where there is a much more rigid
00:29:29.080	adherence to actual biological genealogy rather than adoptive genealogies.
00:29:36.040	And I take it that the only way to understand this widespread practice of adoption is to
00:29:42.960	at least from what some people say is that it's only when you understand that children
00:29:48.560	are at private property of the father that adoption makes sense because it's like you're
00:29:53.720	buying or you're purchasing a son when you adopt a son or daughter or that's another way
00:30:02.320	of making relations between different families but that once someone adopts that child it's
00:30:08.640	legally entirely belongs to the family and so forth.
00:30:13.160	Do you have other speculations about why adoption was such a widespread practice in ancient
00:30:18.840	Rome?
00:30:19.840	I think it's tied back to your opening comments about patriarchy and male line.
00:30:24.560	One of the things to remember is that adoption not of infants but adoption of grown
00:30:32.060	children and in particular grown sons and the idea was that if an aging Roman did not have
00:30:42.980	a son of his own, a biological son of his own, the way to repair the family line was
00:30:50.100	to adopt a teenage early 20-something son and the reason for doing that was to make sure
00:30:59.040	that you could perpetuate the cult of the male genius of the family.
00:31:06.040	So, you have to imagine that the households had a cult devoted to the particular male
00:31:13.140	family line representing that household and it needed to be carried on in the next generation
00:31:18.540	and so the principal duty of the adopted son was to carry on that cult and with it
00:31:24.140	came then the family property.
00:31:27.860	And that again for me is infinitely fascinating because that family cult and here you
00:31:32.060	and I spoke before in preparation for the show my one of my favorite books of all time
00:31:37.000	which is Fustel de Koolal, the ancient city in 19th century kind of early classic of philology
00:31:44.460	where he keeps insisting throughout that book at the only way to understand the ancient
00:31:49.040	world is to understand the importance of the cult where the Patrech Familius, the father
00:31:53.920	is not a biological, he's the high priest of the cult and of the Lars Familius, the household
00:32:01.280	gods and which he Fustel de Koolalus associates with ancestors and the dayification of ancestors
00:32:09.560	and that basically it's not so much a blood genealogy it was who is going to occupy
00:32:15.120	the role of the high priest of that cult, of the household cult and each family had its own
00:32:21.640	particular set of domestic deities, ancestors if you follow Fustel, that required this constant
00:32:32.360	ritualistic enactment and that the father's power derived from the fact that he was the
00:32:38.880	high priest of that domestic religion.
00:32:43.080	Is that what you were referring to when you say the need to keep the cult alive?
00:32:47.160	Right, the genius that is transmitted from one generation to the next through the male line
00:32:54.680	but you're right it's not necessarily biological, it was biological in the first instance
00:32:59.720	so if you had a son who survived the ravages of infant mortality then that would be the natural
00:33:08.800	successor but if you didn't have a son and often they didn't, I mean my demographic
00:33:16.080	simulation suggests that maybe one in three Romans at the age of 50 wouldn't have had a son
00:33:25.320	coming along to take that role then you go out and adopt, yeah.
00:33:30.600	Would that be because of early death or early death, right unpredictable mortality and other
00:33:39.160	families had two sons, so the whole issue of how you match the number of children to the family
00:33:47.560	resources in an age of high mortality is a recurrent one through human history and adoption
00:33:54.480	is one way that you can deal with that.
00:33:58.560	A lot of fascinating issues, so here when let's talk a little bit about inheritance because
00:34:05.240	obviously when we're talking about adoption we're talking about carrying on the line,
00:34:10.920	the cult, whatever but that it has to do with inheritance and I gather that you have assured
00:34:20.600	me that primogener was never a real institutional reality among the Romans or any kind of
00:34:27.880	ancient peoples that we know of.
00:34:29.160	Is that correct?
00:34:32.000	It's astonishing because we have, we hear so much about primogener as particularly merciless
00:34:43.120	kind of law, where does our notion of primogener come from?
00:34:47.840	I think it comes from the Middle Ages, Dubees work which I don't know well and it's after
00:34:55.480	the period that I know the source materials for but Dubees work about the rise of this
00:35:01.000	in what 10th, 11th centuries I think is relevant but what we do know about Rome going all the
00:35:07.520	way back to the 12 tables of 451, 50 BC so this is the one bit of good evidence I think
00:35:13.360	for early Rome.
00:35:16.000	Already they have a part of inheritance system in the case of succession where there's
00:35:21.880	no will.
00:35:23.240	They have a part of inheritance system that splits the estate among daughters as well
00:35:29.400	as sons.
00:35:30.400	It's not even exclusively male.
00:35:36.160	That was different in Athens.
00:35:39.040	In classical Athens the property was split among the sons.
00:35:42.360	The daughters got a dowry but in Rome going right back to the early days, all family
00:35:49.080	members stood to inherit a share of the property when there was no will.
00:35:55.080	How did they keep their households with its property intact if that was the case?
00:36:01.240	I think absolutely one of the problems that they had was fragmentation of estates and in fact
00:36:07.000	by the classical period Roman senatorial families were notoriously reluctant to have very many
00:36:14.640	children or any children at all and I think part of what's going on there is that there's
00:36:21.080	a real fear of fragmentation of the estate and the impoverishment of the children.
00:36:27.040	The problem is that if you live in a society where half of the newborns don't live past
00:36:31.920	the age of ten and that's roughly true of Rome we think.
00:36:36.480	There's a lot of guess work in knowing how many children to have in order to end up with
00:36:41.000	one son to inherit the name and to inherit a part of the estate.
00:36:51.640	That's quite surprising given the way Rome achieved its dominion around the Mediterranean
00:36:59.560	world which is primarily through wars.
00:37:01.640	You would think that the constant war machine that Rome developed would have exacted a
00:37:07.640	terrible toll on the male, well the sons born into families and that therefore rather than
00:37:17.320	being afraid to have too many children that you would assume that it would be the other
00:37:23.880	way around that you felt like you would have to have as many as possible in order to repair
00:37:28.160	the losses that war incurred in the social fabric.
00:37:33.560	That's right but we know that going back to I think it's 131 BC the sensor, Roman sensor
00:37:40.600	of that year of macadonicus gave a speech in which he lamented the fact that Romans were not
00:37:47.000	having enough children to maintain the population in the face of this incessant warfare
00:37:53.840	and he pleaded with Romans to do their civic duty and to have more children and that's
00:37:58.880	certainly a theme that Augustus picks up on Augustus' marriage legislation was notorious for
00:38:05.240	invading Romans' private lives in order to try to compel them to have more children.
00:38:12.480	No I know that he forbade bachelor's to go to the Colosseum at a certain point.
00:38:19.320	At a certain point you have to have a marriage certificate to get into the Colosseum.
00:38:24.000	Well not Colosseum was only built about 80 years later but yeah into the games.
00:38:32.000	Right, right.
00:38:33.000	Yeah, no that's right and there were other penalties in terms of the ability to accept
00:38:40.560	legacies from unrelated friends, penalties for not having children.
00:38:49.400	And I always thought that the reason there was such a reluctance to get married is that after
00:38:54.960	a certain degree of prosperity in a society, a flourishing that we see at sometimes in
00:39:01.160	advanced First World countries today where the birth rate just starts declining because
00:39:08.040	people are enjoying their lives too much and it's too much of an obstruction and therefore
00:39:16.400	it was dominated by the pleasure principle rather than the actual economic hardship of sustaining
00:39:23.800	a larger family.
00:39:25.000	I think there's something to that although there have been some very big changes today
00:39:31.600	in modern developed societies.
00:39:33.880	I think it's a matter of having fewer children but investing more in each one of them
00:39:39.360	because you can be pretty confident that a newborn is going to survive through adulthood.
00:39:46.360	The Romans didn't have any reason to have that kind of confidence in the survival of their
00:39:51.800	children but we hear various stories from classical Rome about how bachelor's were the focus
00:40:02.160	of a lot of attention because they didn't have children so people stood to inherit from
00:40:07.360	them when they died.
00:40:09.360	Yeah.
00:40:10.360	Well Richard, perhaps we could talk about the things related to, well we've been talking
00:40:18.400	about the inheritance laws a little bit and I guess I wanted to just wrap that up by asking
00:40:22.840	whether all children inherited equally from what we know.
00:40:27.440	I'm to say male children, you said the females had dowries so was it an actual kind of
00:40:35.080	egalitarian inheritance?
00:40:37.480	Well I want to distinguish between inheritance with the will, through a will, and inheritance
00:40:42.720	without a will.
00:40:44.680	In cases of inheritance without a will, the property the estate was divided evenly between
00:40:51.360	among all of the children male and female.
00:40:55.960	The whole point about Roman wills is that they allowed the test stator, the will writer,
00:41:01.800	to fashion his distribution of his property as he liked within certain limits and there
00:41:11.000	as far as we can tell daughters typically got some share but probably not as large a share
00:41:17.280	as the sons did through written wills but there's no sense in which there's a practice,
00:41:23.840	a regular practice of primogenitor where one son is picked out to inherit the estate.
00:41:29.120	So not completely egalitarian but much more egalitarian than one might imagine.
00:41:39.480	Well here this question I might have missed something but when you were talking about the
00:41:44.800	Patre familias but was the title or the role of Patre familias inheritable?
00:41:53.680	And if someone became the Patre familias wouldn't he automatically like claim to the totality
00:42:01.360	of the estate?
00:42:04.240	In the case of a family where a father dies leaving several sons each one would become a
00:42:10.800	Patre familias in his own right and that simply has to do with the law of property ownership.
00:42:18.400	So this Patre familias could be two years old but he would be the Patre familias if there
00:42:25.200	was no living male ascendant to be his Patre familias.
00:42:31.840	So that actually I think is a good indication that the phrase Patre familias didn't necessarily
00:42:39.000	carry the kind of authority that we associate with it today.
00:42:42.880	It meant property ownership and that property ownership could be by a two year old or
00:42:46.680	by a 60 year old.
00:42:50.280	So referring to the title of your book that first came out in 1994 about patriarchy,
00:42:56.200	property and death in the Roman family we've talked about patriarchy we've been talking
00:43:00.120	now about you know property and death we've talked a little bit about it but there's
00:43:05.520	some really astonishing well there you deal a lot with the mortality rates in that book
00:43:13.040	and you also point out how young the fathers of families actually seems we're dying.
00:43:22.160	That's right.
00:43:23.640	We think that the life expectancy on average was between 25 and 30 years at birth and roughly
00:43:30.360	what that meant was that probably a third of the newborns died in their first year and
00:43:36.800	about half of the newborns died before the age of 10 and then at the age of 10 those
00:43:42.040	that survived had an additional life expectancy in the range of 35 to 40 years.
00:43:49.640	That means that given that Roman men married relatively late in life around the age of
00:43:57.040	30 their life expectancy beyond their marriage age was pretty limited and so they were
00:44:06.720	very keenly aware of the fact that they might well die before their children came of age
00:44:12.800	and that's why property families were so attentive to making sure that there was a written
00:44:18.280	will that was up to date.
00:44:22.200	I would have thought that with the increasing affluence of Roman society that maybe the
00:44:27.920	mortality rate would improve.
00:44:30.120	Those who made it beyond age 10.
00:44:33.880	So there are a couple of things about that.
00:44:37.000	One of the aspects of increasing affluence was increasing urbanization and of course the
00:44:43.200	city of Rome was the biggest of them all.
00:44:45.880	It was the biggest city in Europe with a population of about a million biggest city in Europe
00:44:50.480	until London of about 1800 until the 19th century so less than 200 years ago until the 19th
00:45:01.880	century cities were death traps.
00:45:04.720	They were the concentration of population made the transmission of disease very easy and
00:45:12.680	so they were always population sinks and Rome was no exception.
00:45:16.200	In fact here Walter Shidel, who's my colleague in the classics department, has done some
00:45:21.960	of the most interesting work showing that the city of Rome probably had the worst seasonal
00:45:29.720	mortality that we know of in European history and that's because malaria was absolutely rampant
00:45:38.920	in the city of Rome and we have a body of inscriptions that show when people died through
00:45:45.880	the year and they died in the late summer early autumn.
00:45:49.040	That's a characteristic of a transmissible disease particularly malaria.
00:45:56.480	So Rome would have been really an awful place to live in a lot of ways I think but people
00:46:03.440	kept flocking to it.
00:46:05.480	So that's a good question.
00:46:07.560	Why would they keep flocking to it?
00:46:11.480	It was a place where at least through the classical era there were grain handouts that
00:46:18.480	meant that people could get some of their sustenance in Rome.
00:46:23.360	Literally there was a big attraction.
00:46:25.240	The drudgery of agricultural life shouldn't be romanticized.
00:46:30.480	The city had a variety of amenities to offer that kind of offset the mortality rates.
00:46:37.880	It's also a little unclear how much they understood about how dangerous cities were.
00:46:45.040	It's also true that this has been true of cities through the ages.
00:46:48.800	So London was a death trap through the early modern period and it's only in the 19th century
00:46:54.920	the first half of the 19th century that they begin to develop public health measures that
00:46:59.040	diminish the mortality in cities.
00:47:02.200	Was there a police force in ancient Rome?
00:47:05.600	Not during the Republican era.
00:47:06.920	So one of the things that Augustus does is he sets up a regular police force to police
00:47:12.120	the city of Rome.
00:47:13.120	But one of the reasons that Republican Rome, so before Augustus, was so chaotic, was that
00:47:20.320	it grew to be a city of about a million people and it had no police force to keep order.
00:47:25.480	And so by the late republic you have senators marching around the city with bodyguards
00:47:31.760	of gladiators in order to protect themselves because there were no police to do that.
00:47:38.840	And I also gathered that there was an excruciating noise levels and that Julius Caesar contemplated
00:47:51.400	but I guess never even attempted to ban chariots running through the streets at night
00:48:01.080	time so that people could sleep but that's kind of nowhere.
00:48:04.760	It must have been actually quite hellish.
00:48:07.760	But certainly the impression that juvenile, the best known Roman satirist, gives.
00:48:14.000	I think probably wasn't chariots so much as wagons.
00:48:20.240	I think there's a misconception that the Roman version of our car was the chariot.
00:48:25.200	That's not true.
00:48:27.560	But certainly wagons.
00:48:28.680	The wagon traffic taking goods in and out of the city must have generated a phenomenal
00:48:33.440	clatter because the wheels were wood with a metal strip around it on very hard rock pavement
00:48:42.440	cobblestones.
00:48:43.440	So it must have created a tremendous racket and there was a kind of terrible choice.
00:48:51.080	They could make sure that the wagon traffic came only at night in order to avoid tying
00:48:57.200	up the pedestrian movement around the city.
00:49:01.200	And if they did that then nobody could sleep and that's what juvenile says.
00:49:08.200	Well, here's a paradox I'd like to draw attention to.
00:49:13.520	It's a paradox in my mind but I may be misconceiving the issue.
00:49:19.680	So I insisted on the way in which Virgil's scene of the descent into the underworld is
00:49:30.320	a male dominated and in the Odyssey.
00:49:34.440	They're all these women that are the first people that Odysseus speaks to.
00:49:39.960	But the reality is that women in Greek society were really sequestered and it was a complete
00:49:47.600	apartheid, almost Taliban-like.
00:49:53.880	In Rome, despite all this ideological kind of triumphalism about the male line and Patrificamigias
00:50:01.520	and all that, I gather that women, even legally speaking, were far better off and that gender
00:50:09.080	equality was a much greater reality, probably not certainly on a perfect way in Rome.
00:50:14.200	Visa, Visa, Visa, Society, like Greece, is that the case?
00:50:17.360	It absolutely is the case.
00:50:18.760	That's right.
00:50:25.760	In terms of private property and private law, women had very extensive powers and in fact,
00:50:26.400	I think it would be right to say that women had stronger property rights, more nearly
00:50:31.880	equal property rights in classical Rome than in any other European society up to the mid-20th
00:50:37.680	century.
00:50:42.000	That ideological, or that contradiction with the ideology, is one that in fact a lot of Roman
00:50:49.120	authors wrestle with.
00:50:50.440	So the satirist, juvenile, whom I mentioned before in his famous sixth satire or infamous
00:50:56.320	sixth satire, rails against women who were behaving above their station, behaving
00:51:05.800	as if they were superior to men.
00:51:08.640	The dimensions in which he rails, I think, are really revealing.
00:51:13.560	One is that he doesn't like women who are learned, who can cite their virtual or
00:51:18.960	a homer.
00:51:19.960	He doesn't like women who are property and so can threaten to leave the family to divorce
00:51:25.480	their husbands and take their property with them.
00:51:29.520	He thinks that women's empowerment leads to their promiscuity.
00:51:36.480	Surely that's wildly exaggerated for the sake of what he thought was humor.
00:51:43.320	I think we today might not find it quite so humorous.
00:51:47.640	So yeah, this is a contradiction.
00:51:50.840	The analogy, I think, is the contradiction between the social station of ex-slaves freedmen
00:51:58.680	and in the ideology which placed them at the bottom of the citizen ladder and the reality
00:52:05.400	that some of these freedmen were the richest men in Roman society and had very considerable
00:52:11.080	social powers of result.
00:52:13.120	Is that right?
00:52:15.080	And I know that some of them were Greek tutors teaching and they were very learned at
00:52:21.080	erudite people teaching the sons of the Greek philosophy and art and literature and so
00:52:27.720	forth.
00:52:29.040	That's right.
00:52:30.840	And there there was a shift during the Republic, the sort of typical pattern, I think,
00:52:36.880	among the elite was that they had a Greek slave in the household to teach the children
00:52:43.400	when they were younger and they taught the girls as well as the boys.
00:52:47.920	But then for their advanced education, the sons went off to the eastern Mediterranean
00:52:54.320	centers of learning like Athens or Rhodes.
00:52:57.680	By the time of Augustus, the center of learning really has become Rome itself.
00:53:03.320	So it switches from, it switches to a system in which slaves are still educated within
00:53:10.520	the household and doing the education within the household.
00:53:13.440	But then the higher learning is in the city of Rome.
00:53:18.000	Okay.
00:53:19.000	Well, in the few minutes as we remain, can I ask you how you got your personal interest
00:53:24.000	to become a historian of Rome?
00:53:27.560	What is it that drew you to this study in the first place?
00:53:30.760	I started out my college career as an engineer at the University of Illinois and that was
00:53:39.000	mostly a matter of not having the imagination to think about anything else.
00:53:44.000	I took a Roman history course to meet a distribution requirement in the spring of my freshman
00:53:49.040	year and was completely smitten by it.
00:53:53.200	I think it was just much more engaging as subject matter than the courses that I was taking
00:54:00.760	in engineering at the time.
00:54:03.040	And so at the end of my first year, I flipped into classics and started taking Greek and
00:54:08.480	Latin and then went off to University of Cambridge for graduate work.
00:54:14.600	And that happened to be, I think, the kind of the leading center of ancient history in
00:54:20.040	the world at that point arguably.
00:54:22.880	Because were you tempted by the Greek to go to specialize in Greek history rather than Roman
00:54:28.240	history?
00:54:29.240	When I went to Cambridge as a graduate student, I really hadn't picked one or the other
00:54:35.400	and it was really the guidance of Moses Finley who was the kind of patron saint of all
00:54:40.000	of the graduate students at Cambridge.
00:54:43.240	It was his influence that pushed me in the Roman direction.
00:54:46.680	The irony here is that he was a Greek historian, but he pushed me away to work with somebody
00:54:53.240	else, Peter Garnsey.
00:54:55.680	And who are your favorite Roman authors?
00:54:58.040	Oh, I think Tacitus is my favorite.
00:55:02.440	His sense of political irony, I think, can't be beaten.
00:55:09.680	One of the regrets that I have as a teacher is that it takes students with some considerable
00:55:16.480	skill in Latin to be able to appreciate his remarkable writing style and the irony that
00:55:24.680	it carries.
00:55:27.600	But I think after Tacitus probably Virgil's in the it.
00:55:33.680	Great.
00:55:34.680	Yeah.
00:55:35.680	Well, all I can say is that it's great to have a dean of the humanities and sciences who
00:55:41.960	doesn't need any sort of instruction about what the value of the humanities are in the
00:55:49.360	face of the university because you're obviously right at the very thick and the foundations
00:55:54.560	of it.
00:55:55.560	So I'd like to thank you for coming on again, Richard.
00:55:58.080	I want to remind our listeners we've been speaking with Professor Richard Saller from the
00:56:01.560	Department of History and classic, Sarah Stanford about ancient Roman history and we invite
00:56:08.160	you to tune in to entitled opinions next week.
00:56:11.080	Thanks again, Richard.
00:56:12.080	Thank you.
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