"Familia, Domus", and the Roman Conception of the Family

Abstract

THE ENGLISH WORD has undergone a transformation of primary meaning in the modern period. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was used to signify (1) persons related by blood or marriage (kin in a wide sense), or (2) a or (i.e., those descended from the same stock or blood), or (3) all those living under the same roof including servants and other non-relatives. As Flandrin has shown, dictionaries of the period did not define family as father, mother, and children, a primary definition today. That has emerged as a standard definition only in the past two centuries and is, in Flandrin's view, to be connected with the development of the father-mother-children triad as the typical household unit among the educated classes as the servants were excluded.' This change prompts two questions about the Roman world. First, when Latin lexicons give as a meaning for familia or domus, what sense of is to be understood? Secondly, what insights do the meanings attached tofamilia and domus by the Romans offer into their conception of the family? The conception of the family can be related in important ways to fundamental aspects of familial behaviour, such as inheritance, marriage strategies, and adoption. So, for instance, today we conceive of the family as made up of the individuals of the father-mother-children triad, and we rarely talk of the welfare of the family apart from the welfare of each of its members. In earlier times, however, the family in the sense of house or lineage was thought of in some places as an entity of great importance apart from the members. With such a conception, as Bourdieu has stressed, it made good sense to develop marriage and inheritance strategies that sacrificed the welfare of most of the children in order to preserve the house with its patrimony at full strength.2 In this paper I hope to clarify the meanings of familia and domus. Both words had a wide range of meanings, some of which are not related to