Family in Roman Anatolia

In the valley of the river anciently called Hermos, which runs down to the Aegean Sea, the people of Roman times had two unusual habits. The first was putting up memorial stones to record their punishments by the gods:

Elsewhere people tended to thank the local gods for cures and miracles, but here there was a pronounced tendency to celbrate their vengeance. A repentant sinner – someone who had stolen a pig, perhaps, or poisoned a troublesome family member – would commission a record of the crime to be carved in stone, along with a sad story about he or she had been punished. . . . The stories recorded are often catastrophic, involving calamities such as the loss of livelihood the death of a spouse or child.

It seems that after consulting oracles, the sinner discovered that some past transgression had led to his or her current woes, and put up a stone commemorating the journey from crime through punishment to understanding.

Which is quite cool in itself. But as Peter Thonemann showed in a recent book, The Lives of Ancient Villages, reviewed in the May 19 TLS, these stories may reveal much more: local politics, attitudes towards the encroachment of Roman law, and in particular the structure of families. 

The second interesting local habit involved the inscriptions on their tombstones, which often listed the names and relationships of all the family members who took part in the funeral. Putting these two sources together, Thonemann was able to learn a great deal about family structure:

Perhaps unsurprisingly in the light of high mortality rates, blended families from remarriage feature prominently. . . . The stones frequently celebrate the affection that developed between stepchildren and their newly acquired step-parents or siblings. More surprising is the ubiquity of foster parenting. Whereas in modern Britain fostering is undertaken sparingly, in response to situations of crisis, here somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of families included at least one foster child. Mortality certainly played a role, in that neighbors or relatives naturally took in the children of parents who died. But in other cases at least one biological parent was still living and in the picture as a valued relative.

In a society where the poor sometimes sold their children into slavery, fostering often had an economic motivation, and Thonemann finds evidence that foster parents tended to have higher status than the biological parents of the children they took in. Indeed, acquiring numerous foster children seems to have allowed the prosperous to display both wealth and virtue. Some were celebrated as superparents, such as the man who counted thirty-eight foster children alongside his biological son and two daughters.

John Boswell long ago showed something similar about peasants in eighth-century Frankia, that the wealthier families often had extra children they seem to have taken in from their poorer neighbors, so this may have been a widespread pattern across Europe.