Images of children in Roman society abound: an infant's first bath, learning to walk, playing with pets and toys, going to school, and - all too often - dying prematurely. The child was prominent in private houses and public space in the teeming, cosmopolitan city of ancient Rome and other towns of Italy. Such a vivid picture does not recur until the twentieth century. This study builds on the dynamic work on the Roman family that has been developing in recent decades. Its focus on the period between the first century BCE and the early third century CE provides a context for new work being done on early Christian societies, especially in Rome.

The family continues to be seen as a central institution in Roman as well as modern, Western society. The Roman family is often used as a stereotype, sometimes of severity, sometimes of decadence, with its decline often cited as a cause of wider decline and fall. Definitions and concepts continue to be modified and nuanced, however, as the availability of new evidence and new methodologies make possible a much less simplistic picture. In this volume, the study of the family draws on a wide range of disciplines to develop the intertwined themes of status, sentiment, and space. For example, on status there are contributions about Junian Latins and a survey of senators' monuments, while sentiment is represented by a gloomy but convincing picture of old age, and a paper on the sentimental ideal which argues that conflict as well as concord is a feature of Roman life. One of the contributions on space examines who commemorates whom in Roman Italy, pointing up the regional variations in custom and the difficulties in tracing complete families. The final contributions focus on the house: how people lived in the Roman house, the use of the rooms, and the artefacts which might indicate this use. The book makes use of many types of evidence - from the legal and literary to the iconographical and archaeological. Visual and material evidence play an important role in reconstructing real lives in considerable colour and variety. The book moves beyond the city of Rome to the rest of Roman Italy and even into the provinces, just as Roman culture moved outwards and mingled with other cultures. Chronologically too there are new directions, towards the later Empire and Christianity. So, although the contributors do not abandon any of the territory already gained in Rome, literary and epigraphic sources, and the late Republic or early Empire, there is an exciting sense of new discovery.

Concepts of childhood and the treatment of children are often used as a barometer of society's humanity, values, and priorities. Children and Childhood in Roman Italy argues that in Roman society children were, in principle and often in practice, welcome, valued and visible. There is no evidence directly from children themselves, but we can reconstruct attitudes to them, and their own experiences, from a wide variety of material - art and architecture, artefacts, funerary dedications, Roman law, literature, and public and private ritual. There are distinctively Roman aspects to the treatment of children and to children's experiences. Education at many levels was important. The commemoration of children who died young has no parallel, in earlier or later societies, before the twentieth century. This study builds on the dynamic work on the Roman family that has been developing in recent decades. Its focus on the period between the first century BCE and the early third century CE provides a context for new work being done on early Christian societies, especially in Rome.

The Roman family is a key concept in the understanding of Roman society at all levels, from the aristocratic elite to slaves. The intertwined themes of status, sentiment, and space, with the use of many types of evidence, from the legal and literary to the iconographical and archaeological, enable the contributors to this book to set out new insights into the family life of the people of Roman Italy.

Recent studies of ancient Rome have shown that the sentimental ideal of a core nuclear family was strong throughout the period - but that the reality was often very different. Beryl Rawson here examines why this was the case, with contributions from ten experts in the field on various aspects of sex, marriage, and family life in Rome.

Little has been published on the Roman family, a subject of central importance to political as well as social history. It was the family that determined political power; it was within the family that the distinctive relationships of one citizen to another were forged and exemplified. The Family in Ancient Rome provides an overview of the state of research by presenting some of the most important work being done in this area.

In addition to a survey of the literature on all aspects of the Roman family, the book begins with a general picture of the main features of the family. More specialized essays deal with the legal evidence, wills and property rights which were of particular importance for the position of women; with the link between property disposition, dowry, and divorce; with the authority of the male head of the household and its relation to political power; with the status of children born of unions between slaves and citizen; and with the rearing of, and attitudes toward, children.

Contributors: Edyth Binkowski; Ian Blayney; Keith R. Bradley; J. A. Crook; Suzanne Dixon; W. K. Lacey; Beryl Rawson; P. R. C. Weaver"