Judith Evans- Grubbs

• Emory University

Adoption - Lindsay(H.)Adoption in the Roman World. Pp. xiv + 242, figs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Cased, £55, US$95. ISBN: 978-0-521-76050-8. - Volume 61 Issue 1 - Judith Evans Grubbs

IntroductionPietas, Obsequium, and Proper Family FeelingMaternal ExpectationsUndutiful WillRoman Law and Provincial Practice: Accommodation and ConflictFurther Reading

This chapter explores the dynamics of infant exposure in the Roman Empire, especially the Roman legal attitude toward those who abandoned newborn infants and the fate of the children themselves. Roman legal sources, especially imperial rescripts (responses) to petitioners inquiring about the situation of abandoned infants, suggest that such exposit...

Displaying Family Feeling: Ausonius on His KinAlternative Households: Asceticism and the FamilyWives and Concubines: Augustine and Marital LifeEpilogue: Family Feeling at the End of AntiquityBibliographical Note

There has been a great deal of scholarly interest in marriage and the family in pre-Christian Rome in the past ten years, and recent work has called for a reevaluation of older scholarly views al mores and family life. At the same time, much work has been done on attitudes toward sexuality and marriage in the early Christian period, particularly in...

Using legal, papyrological, and literary sources of the Roman imperial period, this paper looks at the fate of abandoned newborns (expositi) who were picked up and reared by someone other than a parent, usually for future use as slaves. Particular attention is given to the legal conflicts that ensued when, as sometimes happened, parents attempted t...

“Marriage is the joining of male and female and a partnership [consortium] for all of life, a sharing of divine and human law,” wrote the jurist Modestinus early in the third century. The lawyer thus expresses the Roman idea of marriage as a joint enterprise, in which each partner has both emotional and financial interests (consortium can also conn...

Using a lesser known source, rescripts mostly from the east, which are preserved in the Justinianic Codex, this chapter examines the domestic conflict that arose between parents and adult children in ancient Rome, and shows how certain social values such as marital happiness were prized above patria potestas, the central doctrine of Roman family la...

On I April A.D. 326 the Emperor Constantine issued a strongly worded edict ( CTh IX. 24. 1) violently attacking the practice of abduction marriage or bride theft. Addressed ‘to the people’ (‘ad populum’), the law demands the punishment of all persons involved in such cases, including even the girl herself and her parents, if they had later agreed t...