This book aims to outline and explain the ‘social and political impact of adoption in the Roman world’ (ix) and is largely successful in its endeavour. From social and political perspectives, Lindsay sketches a pattern of use of the Roman legal tools of adoptio and adrogatio to secure continuity of name and property in the Roman familia; this pattern systematically developed over time into a means of ensuring succession in the imperial family. Though some of the material and argument will be familiar, particularly to scholars of Roman legal history, their treatment within the context of a social history of Roman family life is the book's primary contribution. Three introductory chapters cover cross-cultural perspectives on kinship and adoption in Greece, Rome and other societies, after which the remaining thirteen chapters focus on the practicalities of various forms of adoption, their political uses, and their social impact (including testamentary adoptions, adrogatio and adoptio, inheritance, the status of women, freedmen and minors, and patria potestas). The final four chapters present case-studies illustrating the political rationale behind adoptions in some well-known cases from the Republic through to the early Empire.

The central chapters in particular offer some insightful discussion of ways in which adoption acted, and was actively utilized, to re-shape the Roman familia. For instance, an overview of procedural detail illustrates the part played by patria potestas in assisting adopted children's inclusion in their adoptive families, giving them financial and social status on a par with those of the adoptive family's biological children (ch. 4). This, L. explains, indicates a Roman anxiety for the continuity of the family's nomen and pecunia — a concern which is further illustrated by the prevalence of a legal provision for grandfathers to set up adoptions on behalf of their sons, and a preference for cognati as adopters in order to keep wealth in the original family. Roman concerns for the continuity of the family's religious rites are also illustrated well by L.'s discussion of adrogatio (public adoption of one who is sui iuris) and the risk it posed of eliminating the nomen and sacra of one family in order to perpetuate those of another.

L. goes on to argue that testamentary adoptions, which involved the changing of the adopted person's tribe and filiations to those of the testator, were not (as Olli Salomies has previously claimed in Adoptive and Polyonomous Nomenclature in the Roman Empire (1992)) equivalent to full adoptions (chs 5 and 6); this is nothing new, but L. backs up the argument with an overview of the evidence for nomenclature after adoption, and demonstrates clearly the problems in associating changes in name with full adoptions. The function of adoption in the context of particular elements of Roman marriage and family life — for example, manus and sine manu marriages, emancipation of sons — is highlighted in terms of these concerns for continuity (ch. 7).

Adoption, L. argues, opened up a range of options for succession in terms of either bringing ‘outsiders’ into a family, or giving existing family members new legal rights and obligations (chs 10, 11 and 12). It is on this point that the discussion might have benefited from some consideration of the book's opening comments on cross-cultural perspectives from India, China, Japan and other societies. The introductory chapters trace a broad range of social responses to adoption and its effect on kinship networks across cultures, but these changes in the Roman context are then considered in a rather sideways manner. For instance, L. might have delved deeper into some of the nurturing aspects of adoption in Roman society: why was such significance attached to the age difference between adopter and adoptee? What relationships were permitted between adopted children and their biological families? And how did adoption function in the socialization, or indeed social mobility, of adopted children? The book might have answered these questions with a greater degree of cogency than is achieved, had it followed a clearer methodological approach, incorporating the cross-cultural perspective more forcefully into the study. Furthermore, whilst L.'s opening discussion makes good use of an important anthropological model of the purpose of adoption (J. Goody, ‘Adoption in cross-cultural perspective’, CSSH 11 (1976), 55–78), this has the effect of restricting any potential cross-cultural perspective to the adoption of children (or minors) and not of adults.

As has been hinted at elsewhere, this book would best be read alongside Jane Gardner's Family and Familia in Roman Law and Life (1998) (see Frier's review of L., BMCR 2010.07.21). Gardner already covers in greater detail many of the issues addressed by L., particularly adrogatio and the influence of testamentary adoptions on nomenclature, with a closer, and more critical, eye on the legal sources. Christiane Kunst's Römische Adoption. Zur Strategie einer Familienorganisation (2005) would also offer readers a valuable companion to L. in the study of the social impact of Roman adoptions.

Overall, this book would certainly offer students of Roman social history a valuable starting point for clear and documented discussion of Roman adoption practices and procedures. L. presents an interesting avenue for further exploration of the impact of adoption on shaping the dynamics of the Roman familia, and the political uses of it for precisely this purpose. In particular, the cross-cultural perspective on kinship and social and legal responses to adoption, whether of existing family members or ‘outsiders’, presents an area of the study of the Roman family that warrants further research.