The Family in Roman Egypt A Comparative Approach to Intergenerational Solidarity and Conflict

This study captures the dynamics of the everyday family life of the common people in Roman Egypt, a social strata that constituted the vast majority of any pre-modern society but rarely figures in ancient sources or in modern scholarship. The documentary papyri and, above all, the private letters and the census returns provide us with a wealth of information on these people not available for any other region of the ancient Mediterranean. The book discusses such things as family composition and household size, and the differences between urban and rural families, exploring what can be ascribed to cultural patterns, economic considerations and/or individual preferences by setting the family in Roman Egypt into context with other pre-modern societies where families adopted such strategies to deal with similar exigencies of their daily lives.

Preface; 1. Intergenerational solidarity and family support networks in cross-cultural perspective; 2. Household structures, marriage patterns and inheritance strategies; 3. Balancing benefits and obligations - parents and children over the life course; 4. Widowhood, remarriage and residence patterns; 5. Growing old in the household; 6. The patriarchal household and the incoming daughter-in-law; 7. Childless old age - the worst of all fates?; 8. Conclusions.

Sabine R. Huebner is Privatdozentin of Ancient History at Freie Universität Berlin. She has published on the social and religious history of the Greek and Roman Mediterranean. Her previous work includes a monograph, Der Klerus in der Gesellschaft des spätantiken Kleinasiens (2005), a co-edited volume, Growing up Fatherless in Antiquity (with David Ratzan, 2009), and a forthcoming study on The Family in the Mediterranean from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century. She is also one of the general editors of the Encyclopedia of Ancient History (2012) with over 5000 articles in 12 volumes.