Family and Household

Familial relationships recorded in funerary epitaphs appear sometimes very simple, sometimes rather complicated, but the inscribed text always gives us only part of the picture. The epitaphs record some, but not all, family ties, and the actual extent and complexity of familial relationships the deceased once enjoyed whilst alive cannot be reconstructed with any real confidence. Although most soldiers in the first and second centuries were commemorated by their comrades, for example, it cannot be assumed that they had no blood relatives anywhere, just that they may not have lived near the base where the soldier was stationed. It was not the ‘job’ of an epitaph to provide a complete family tree or to record all the relatives of the deceased.

Ancient history · Epitaph · Family tree · Genealogy · Geography · Inscribed figure · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Classical Antiquity Studies · History · Mathematics