Recent work on the Roman family has continued to expand its parameters beyond the ‘nuclear’ family form, usually defined through blood, marriage or legal adoption. Scholars have questioned assumptions about the centrality of blood kinship in Roman familial relationships by examining aspects such as homosociality, same-sex relations, friendship, business partners, singledom and single-parent families. All in the Family joins this rising chorus and represents an innovative contribution to the study of Roman families, as well as Roman social history more generally. G., in what is a conversion of her doctoral dissertation, draws on primarily epigraphic and literary texts to propose that children were central to the creation of expansive, non-nuclear Roman families, since they worked ‘as connecting nodes between the nuclear family and an otherwise unrelated person’ (p. 3). Drawing on a rich reservoir of comparative anthropological theory and research, G. demonstrates how the bond Roman children developed with many different types of people outside of their blood kin circle not only created bonds of fictive kinship with these individuals but also had an impact on their blood relatives. Children could draw their parents, siblings and other biological kin into a broader familial network held together by the fictive kinship forged during early childhood. She offers three examples of fictive kinship to foreground this argument, focusing on the bonds created between children nursed on the same woman’s breastmilk, or ‘milk mates’ (collactanei); those between male child-minders (tatae) and their wards; and finally, between enslavers and enslaved children kept for entertainment and sexual purposes (delicia).
The case of collactanei (Chapter 3) offers the clearest example of fictive kinship occurring due to the circumstances of early childhood. G.’s analysis elucidates how little ambiguity exists as to the nature of the bonds forged through allomaternal feeding. Yet her assessment of the commonality and social status of the practice could be questioned, given the very small sample of surviving inscriptions (28 from Rome, 16 outside of Rome). Such a paltry number of attestations, in my view, cannot be explained away by the costs of epitaphic commemoration (p. 86), since even among our epitaphic corpus (upwards of 35,000 for the city of Rome; over 170,000 for the entire empire), the total is less than 50 examples across the entire empire for the first to third centuries ce. We cannot, therefore, assert that ‘allomaternal feeding was surely widespread’ (p. 93) and that non-elite families also likely practised it (pp. 76–80). Even if we admit that a modest number of collactanei were never commemorated in a durable medium, or other relationships and identity markers were more important in commemorative discourse, the examples that G. has at her disposal suggest that this practice occurred far more often among affluent, freeborn members of the professional classes and local elites, such as the decurion Constantius and his milk mate, Procula (pp. 75, 78).
While the fictive kinship forged by milk, rather than blood, is rather straightforward, G.’s argument encounters some ambiguities when dealing with the meaning of tata (Chapter 4), which has frequently been taken to mean father or grandfather, not male child-minder, as she claims. G. lucidly demonstrates that a large number of attested tatae, based on the nomenclature and familial relationships detailed on their epitaphs, are most certainly not biologically related to the children they cared for. Yet not all instances are so clear-cut (as she concedes at p. 110). We should remain open to the capaciousness of this term and its slippery application to male blood relatives, especially grandfathers. On the latter point, G. points to the demographic profile of the Roman population as proof that grandfathers rarely survived to an age which could have seen them commemorated as tatae by their grandchildren. However, the rather small number of epitaphs (under 100, empire-wide) documenting all tatae would seem to align with this demographic rarity. Regardless of this interpretative issue, G. successfully shows how male childminding was in fact a familial phenomenon and that we should re-evaluate the role of men in childrearing and gender roles in the Roman family.
The final chapter (5) on delicia – a hefty 54 pages – offers one of the most comprehensive treatments of this social group to date. Yet, as deftly as G. handles the sprawling literary and epigraphic evidence for delicia, her handling of the ethical and historical framing of this problematic group is underdeveloped. While she rightly asserts the importance of recognising and writing about the abhorrent sexual abuse to which many a delicium was subjected and how this continues today, her choice of terminology and framing for this group leaves something to be desired. At the most fundamental level, G. does not adopt one consistent English term to translate delicium/delicia, instead frequently rendering it simply as ‘children’, sometimes as ‘slaves’, or as ‘enslaved children’ and ‘enslaved youth’, while also oscillating between ‘enslaver’ and ‘master’/’mistress’ seemingly at random. This inconsistency is symptomatic of her argument, which prioritises the age-based and sexualised element of delicia-as-children as the basis of their fictive kinship bonds with their enslavers, rather than the bond(age) of slavery itself.
Slavery as the defining circumstance for the existence of delicia does not receive the extended treatment it deserves (see incidentally, pp. 157, 170, 178), even as it forms the matrix of domination which allowed this type of fictive kinship to arise and should be understood in a very different manner than the (primarily freeborn, childrearing) bonds between collactanei or between a tata and the child he minded. Here G. might have engaged with the recent scholarship of S. Levin-Richardson, S. Beckmann and A. Richlin (absent from the bibliography), which has dealt with these ethical issues in sensitive and searching ways. Indeed, the overlap between delicia and pet animals (pp. 191–2, 205–7) should have prompted some consideration of whether delicia–enslaver relationships even have a place within our understanding of ‘fictive kinship’ or if they occupy another social order entirely. Moreover, G.’s decision to focus solely on the term delicia has likely excluded many instances of enslaved children who were forced to play that role, but were instead commemorated primarily through their enslaved designations (verna, servus). The portrait bust of Martial, the eight-year-old verna dulcissimus of Tiberius Claudius Vitalis, now at the Getty Villa (inv. 85.AA.352) comes to mind.
For a book that takes epigraphic material as its core archive, G.’s decision to devote a whole chapter (2) to methods of reading and interpreting inscriptions for Roman social history is commendable. Her treatment is generally sound – and it would serve many an undergraduate class well – when read with some caveats. The first is that G. is not concerned with the visual elements of epigraphy (e.g. ordinatio) or the art which attends or frames it (e.g. fig. 1 has a family tomb relief). The book contains a total of six figures, with photos provided when visual elements are not discussed (e.g. figs 1–5), whereas the art surrounding other inscriptions is described without an attendant photo (p. 140, CIL 6.12133). In one instance a tomb is described as ‘an expensive one, given its size’ (p. 108), but no dimensions or plan are provided, nor is an archaeological report cited. Technical lapses in the book also occur in the treatment of the epigraphic texts themselves, from partially translated inscriptions (p. 119, CIL 8.24734 is missing two lines) to confused readings (p. 117: Narcissus the tata is the commemorator, not the parents).
Despite these shortcomings, G.’s argument is refreshing and well substantiated by close readings of many inscriptions, as well as legal and literary texts which provide necessary historical contextualisation. However, given G.’s methodological framing and overinterpretation of the meagre epigraphic evidence, we might question how far we can take these examples of fictive kinship as being representative of broader Roman social phenomena.
