Mediterranean Families in Antiquity

Households, Extended Families, and Domestic Space

Sabine R. Huebner, Geoffrey Nathan, Sabine R. Huebner, Geoffrey Nathan

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119143727
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This comprehensive study of families in the Mediterranean world spans the Bronze Age through Late Antiquity, and looks at families and households in various ancient societies inhabiting the regions around the Mediterranean Sea in an attempt to break down artificial boundaries between academic disciplines.

Part I
Introduction

1
A Mediterranean Family? A Comparative Approach to the Ancient World

Sabine R. Huebner

University of Basel

The Family in the Mediterranean in Modern Times

In this volume we have brought together a group of scholars working on different periods and regions of the Mediterranean to study the family from the earliest historical periods of the Mediterranean to early medieval times spanning a time range from the second millennium BCE to the sixth century CE. This volume also offers an outlook on the family in later periods of the Mediterranean, which helps us to put our findings into perspective with better documented periods.

The family should be understood here as an evolving process, also called the family life cycle, comprising marriage, childbirth, death, and divorce. On the basis of the family and household we can study the organization of domestic space, gender relations, social representation, and small-scale economic activities along a continuum of the centuries and millennia. A house in this volume is defined as the physical building, while a household defines a group of individuals sharing a common dwelling, usually family members and their servants and/or lodgers. In a comparative approach taking into consideration the material, visual, and textual evidence for answering questions of cultural influence and social change, a study of houses and households as the core units of society we hope will eventually enhance considerably our knowledge of social organization in the ancient Mediterranean at large.

It is our view that the Greek and Roman worlds as pre-industrial societies were not fundamentally different from societies in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean, and we firmly believe that further comparative work on the Mediterranean family therefore would prove itself extremely fruitful in mending the academic fragmentation of a subject split between so many different disciplines. The study of the family life cycle and household formation patterns in cross-cultural comparative perspective has received surprisingly little attention by ancient historians interested in the family so far.

While a comparative approach is still unusual for traditional family studies of Greek and Roman antiquity, it is intrinsic to the study of the family in Mediterranean communities of later periods. Studies of more recent years have increasingly stressed the region’s variety and variability, testing and challenging the notions of geographical, historical, and cultural unity introduced by the founding fathers of Mediterranean anthropology. The French historian Fernand Braudel was one of the first who set out this concept of the Mediterranean world (Braudel 1949). Braudel thought he had discovered “an ancient substratum” in Mediterranean life that had remained unchanged since antiquity. His stress was therefore on continuity over the ages, on the one hand, and a certain homogeneity of the people around it, on the other. Seven years before the English translation of Braudel’s Méditerranée appeared, another pioneering scholar of the Mediterranean based in Oxford, the anthropologist J. G. Peristiany, published parts of the proceedings of a conference under the title Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (Peristiany 1965). Like Braudel, Peristiany’s writings fostered the perception of unity, proposing the concept of “Mediterranean modes of thought” central to the people around the Mediterranean Sea, such as the unifying ideas about “honor” and “shame” (cf. Peristiany 1976; Gilmore 1987).

The collection of essays Mediterranean Countrymen, edited by Pitt-Rivers in 1963, was one of the first in the field comparing social structures of rural communities in Spain, Egypt, Algeria, Greece, Corsica, Morocco, Lebanon, Turkey, and France. The contributions to this volume aimed to show that it was the geomorphological and climatic characteristics held in common by the Mediterranean regions, called “timeless” factors, that represented the source of Mediterranean unity. A similar climate with dry summers and torrential rainfall in winters, a mountainous rugged hinterland, the cultivation of olives, figs, vines, and wheat, transhumant pastoralism of goats and sheep, and the comparatively high degree of urbanization, with peasants residing in towns rather than in hamlets on their land, hypothetically favored a certain homogeneity of the region’s people. Pitt-Rivers’s aim in Mediterranean Countrymen was to “discover continuities which run counter to the varying political hegemonies, observing the exigencies of the ecology or the entrenched conservatism of the local settlement” (Pitt-Rivers 1963: 9–10) continuities that had been little affected by changing rulers or religious systems or borders of modern nation states.

Over the past few decades, however, a growing consensus in the scholarly community has rejected Braudel’s, Peristiany’s, and Pitt-River’s view of the Mediterranean as a culturally homogeneous zone as an adequate model for studying the Mediterranean area in its historical and cultural context (e.g., Davis 1977; Gilmore 1982; Goitein 1983; Albera, Blok, and Bromberger 2001; Constable 2003; Harris 2005a). Horden and Purcell (2000) have been among the most recent to criticize Braudel’s romanticizing characterization of timeless Mediterranean life, while nonetheless trying to find some unifying concepts that distinguish the Mediterranean from other regions and unite the societies inhabiting its shores. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, published in 2000, focuses on the time before that studied by Braudel, namely antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Horden and Purcell advance as unifying criteria the region’s relatively easy seaborne communications and its fragmented topography of microregions (cf. for the manifold reactions to this volume Harris 2005b; Horden, and Purcell 2006; Purcell 2014). Did the climate, the region’s distinct topography, and the modes of production provide the people around the sea with the same preconditions so that they produced the same responses? Was it the long history of commerce and conquests that made interactions inescapable over the millennia? Did the easy exchange of goods over the millennia lead to similar artistic styles and forms of expression?

In the same vein we might ask, interested as we are in the history of the family, whether similar topographic conditions and the continuous exchange of ideas have also produced similar concepts of marriage, attitudes to children, or intergenerational solidarity. Surprisingly, however, Horden and Purcell have nothing to say about the “family,” even though the family was, according to Peristiany’s later works, one of the central concepts of “Mediterranean modes of thought.” Horden and Purcell are interested in ecological and economic matters – they note the impact of environmental factors on Mediterranean societies with regard to trade patterns and economic diversity – but they do not consider them for their impact on the family. In their review of Horden and Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea, Elizabeth and James Fentress therefore rightly ask: “How can the authors discuss the anthropology of the Mediterranean without kinship, marriage, inheritance or social structure? It is like Mediterranean archaeology without pots or buildings” (Fentress, and Fentress 2001).

The classic Cambridge household classification system, developed by Laslett in the 1970s and improved and modified by later scholars, distinguishes between at least five different types of households (cf. Laslett, and Wall 1972; see also: Laslett 1983): first, solitary households consisting of just one individual; second, no-family households in which we do not find any conjugal or parental bounds between its residents (in historic times these were usually unmarried siblings residing together; contemporarily these will be flat shares); third, simple or nuclear family households in which a conjugal couple resides with or without their children; single-parent families also count as nuclear family households; fourth, nuclear families extended by an elderly parent residing with them; fifth, so-called multiple family households in which we find more than one conjugal couple, often the parent generation and a married son with his family. Daughters usually moved out and joined their husbands’ parents’ households. In agricultural societies across cultures and historical periods we always find a high percentage of intergenerational co-residence because the requirements of farming the land provided the young and the old with numerous incentives to live together.

A special subtype of multiple-family households was the frérèche, where...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword and Acknowledgments
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: The Greek and Hellenistic World
• Part III: The Roman World
• Part IV: Late Antiquity
• Part V: Outlook in Later Period of the Mediterranean
• Part VI: Conclusion
• Index
• End User License Agreement