Mothers and Children

According to the Roman family system, a citizen of legitimate free origin belonged only to the paternal gens and familia. The mother was a member of another family. Theoretically, she had no rights to her children although she had not a few duties to them. Furthermore, there was between them no automatic right of succession. Thus the legal ties between a child and his/her maternal family were relatively weak. But we should not conclude that the same automatically held true for social and emotional expectations. Literary sources of the imperial era show that the Romans loved their daughters’ children, counting them as their true descendants, and took no less pride in their maternal ascendants than in the paternal ones.’ In the later principate, the increasingly polyonymous aristocrats often inherited names from their maternal line. Demographic conditions, too, favoured the mother’s family. Because of the age difference between spouses the maternal grandmother was on an average twenty years younger than the paternal grandfather, the maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother being in the middle. Of course, this pattern was often broken owing to remarriage or other individual deviations, but it is evident that the mother’s parents survived much more often to see their grandchildren.

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