Kate Cooper fulfils well the promise of her title and traces “the Roman household” through the first five or six centuries of this era to what can be identified as its fall. This is a lengthy story reflecting a long, slow process, and her book provides a detailed picture of the classical Roman household as many of its features persisted, even while many Christian writers were arguing for change.

This is a study of “the end of the Roman Empire” in the west from a social rather than political or military perspective, with a special emphasis on the effects it had on women. She argues that one cannot understand economic, political, and military matters as separated from religious or “private” life. Aristocratic women are the main focus, and the interests of the lay population are given attention as a counterbalance to those of clerics. One of the book's strengths is its detailed analysis of early Christian literature set in a wider social context.

Obscure and fragmentary literature is translated and discussed, and these sources help us to understand something of the ethos, values, and life-styles of the fourth and fifth centuries. A bonus here is the first full translation of Ad Gregoriam in palatio, an anonymous text from the late fifth or early sixth century written for the guidance of a married laywoman. It serves as evidence for one of Cooper's main arguments, that, despite the currency of ascetic literature, elite families did not have to choose between Christian values and the traditional Roman household. A chaste marriage (domus casta) was a fertile one, and a respectable alternative to virginity or celibacy. Cooper argues that later sources tended to “brush out” the balance that many elite families sought and achieved “between Christian ideas and the old Roman values of tradition, family, and property” (pp. 60–61). She attributes this to a filtering process within the monastic libraries, where monks of a later period were interested more in ascetics and martyrs, and less in discerning continuities in traditional ways than in finding early roots of medieval Christianity.

Cooper's discussions of the Roman matrona, or mistress of her household, reveal literate women with a clear sense of Roman tradition, considerable responsibilities, and a certain independence from their husbands. Chapter 4, on marriage, is particularly good on this. We see the strength of classical Roman law and its long duration. Roman women were subject to the potestas of their fathers, not of their husbands, and mortality rates were such that most women were free of any such potestas for much of their adult lives. The concept of a wife's dependence on her husband developed only slowly, and Cooper attributes its emergence only partly to Christian influences. Christianity did, however, build on it to eventually make marriage into an indissoluble bond. This had been Augustine's ideal in the fourth century, but only in the late fifth and sixth centuries did the concept gain force, and it was still later before serious efforts were made to enforce it. The shift away from father-child power relationships and toward those of husband and wife was paralleled by the ascetic movement, in which sons and daughters were encouraged to follow their own moral judgments, but their independence was tempered by a concept of obedience to an abbot or bishop. These are the changes in relationships that Cooper identifies as “the end of the Roman household.”