Customer Reviews

Patriarchy, Property and Death in the Roman Family (Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time)

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Beginning in 1984 in a series of articles, Richard P. Saller, joined a bit later by his ally Brent D. Shaw, mistakenly contended that the ancient Romans married late - males on average at age twenty-eight, females at nineteen. They cited hundreds of Latin epitaphs from the late Republic into the Christian empire which proved beyond reasonable doubt that fathers normally commemorated their sons who died before age twenty-eight and their daughters who died before age nineteen; after those ages spouses became the predominant commemorators of each other. From this solid base they erroneously concluded that those were the average ages of marriage. Although otherwise erudite, much of Saller's Patriarchy, Property and Death is based on these miscalculations. His corollary about marriage ages, upon which most all of his other conclusions were based, was deduced from a faulty axiom. That is, he claimed that the patria potestas was really rather insignificant because most Romans married for the first time after the deaths of their fathers. In fact very, very few of the specific references collected to date corroborate such a late age for first marriage. Regardless, the text has been praised to the skies in numerous reviews and gained a seemingly widespread acceptance, most notably in Debating Roman Demography (Brill, 2001), authored in part and edited by Walter Scheidel, the dean of Roman demography, and containing a long article by Shaw. No one has yet seriously criticized this gross mistake.

Saller sometimes seems more a sociologist than a historian and this book is no exception. These articles exam a wide range of subjects which may interest historians and laypeople studying the family, law, or even sexuality in the ancient world. Very worth reading but not for the uninformed reader I'm afraid.