Roman Tombs and the Art of Commemoration

Abstract

Th e importance in Roman society of the family, and especially of an extensive family line, has long been taken for granted. It is the pattern that dominates literary texts concerned with the social elite as well as legal sources. During the Republic, the family group that mattered most was the gens , an extended clan whose members all descended in the male line from a common ancestor-which is what we call the 'agnatic family'. 1 Later, so it is assumed, the agnatic family became less important while cognate family relations-that is, relations that also include kin in the female line-became more relevant. 2 In 1983, Keith Hopkins challenged this model fundamentally, and argued: it looks as though, in the period from which such evidence survives (i.e. aft er about 200 BC), the Roman and Italian family was a small, short-lived social unit. It also seems as though broader kinship units, such as clans or clan segments (gentes), at least from this period onwards, played an unimportant role in burials. 3 While Hopkins' conclusions were primarily based on insuffi cient awareness of the evidence, a year later Richard Saller and Brent Shaw reached similar conclusions through a statistical approach to 12,000-13,000 tomb stones from various parts of the Roman empire. Th ey counted each attested type of relationship between commemorator and commemorated, and then classifi ed and added them up as either nuclear family (i.e. parents with their children) or extended relationships. 4 For the city of Rome, this resulted in 72 per cent nuclear relationships in the senatorial class, 77 per cent in the fi rst 1 On the ancient terminology for types of families and kinship relations, see Corbier, 'Constructing kinship'. On Smith's criticism of modern concepts of the gens (in Clan), see my comments below. 2 E.g. Saller, 'Introduction Part 1' , 24; Saller, 'Heirship' , esp. 33. See most recently Galen, Women. 3 Hopkins, Death , 206. He goes on to argue in Chapter 2 that 'they were similarly unimportant in politics'. 4 Types of relationships included spouse to spouse, parent to child, child to parent and sibling to sibling (all classifi ed as 'nuclear'), extended family (e.g. grandparents, grandchildren, nephews, nieces, etc.), heirs, amici (incl. conservi and conliberti), patron, master, freedperson and slave (all classifi ed as 'extended').