Pater familias
[3] He held legal privilege over the property of the familia, and varying levels of authority over his dependents: these included his wife and children, certain other relatives through blood or adoption, clients, freedmen and slaves.
Lex Julia maritandis ordinibus compelled marriage upon men and women within specified age ranges and remarriage on the divorced and bereaved within certain time limits.
The principate shows a clear trend towards the erosion of individual patria potestas and the increasing intrusion of the state into the juridical and executive independence of the familia under its pater.
Genius has been interpreted as the essential, heritable spirit (or divine essence, or soul) and generative power that suffused the gens and each of its members.
As the singular, lawful head of a family derived from a gens, the pater familias embodied and expressed its genius through his pious fulfillment of ancestral obligations.
[12] By the Late Republic, manus marriage had become rare, and a woman legally remained part of her birth family, under the hand of their pater familias.
The survival of congenitally disabled adults, conspicuously evidenced among the elite by the partially-lame Emperor Claudius, demonstrates that personal choice was exercised in the matter.
The pater familias had the power to sell his children into slavery; Roman law provided, however, that if a child had been sold as a slave three times, he was no longer subject to patria potestas.
The power over life and death was abolished, the right of punishment was moderated and the sale of children was restricted to cases of extreme necessity.
However, in Roman law, this was considered a distinct dimension of the pater familias’ authority from their capacity to hold dominion over enslaved persons.
By the second century, A.D., the distinction between family members and enslaved persons residing in the same household had lessened, even as the patria potestas also weakened over time.
[23] Roman legal sources often recognized enslaved people as part of the instrumenta (roughly translated as “equipment”) of the household to highlight the service they provided the pater familias.
[5]: 187 Outside of the Roman context, various slavery regimes in world history have adopted the concept of pater familias to structure the legal, cultural, and social relationships between slaveowners and enslaved people.
[24] As a consequence of this, patres familias maintained honor and status within their communities by fulfilling both the material and spiritual needs of all members of the household, including enslaved persons.
When they reneged on these obligations, the law code considered them to forfeit their right to ownership of their enslaved, leading in some cases to disputes between paternal heads of household over the status of enslaved persons whom they each claimed to have “raised.”[25] In the context of plantation slavery in the antebellum U.S. South, slaveowning planters developed a rhetorical defense of slavery as a benevolent, paternalistic institution based on the ancient Roman model of the pater familias.
[26] Some planters employed the concept as a legal protectionary measure, instructing renters to whom they “hired out” their enslaved laborers to “treat” them “as good pater familias,” in an effort to stymie abusive practices.
[27] Others used the concept to rationalize planter rule, claiming themselves sovereigns of their households who provided for all constituent members, and demanding their loyalty and labor in return.
[28] Drawing on the Roman precedent in this way, these planters claimed that their enslaved laborers were their “dependents,” who ultimately benefitted from the paternalistic ordering of the household.
Southern newspapers and print media repeatedly promoted this idea in order to square the intrinsic brutality that defined the institution of slavery with the democratic ideals the nation was supposedly founded on, often developing this paternalistic ideology to irrational heights and ignoring the contradictions that it masked.
[29][30][31] This paternalistic ideology persisted after the legal abolition of slavery, as white employers and political leaders in the South attempted to maintain a hierarchical socioeconomic class status over formerly enslaved persons, as well as women and poor laborers, whom they viewed as “dependents,” thereby expanding the Roman household model of pater familias to the level of broader society.
[32][33] The patriarchal mode of slavery that Southern U.S. and Caribbean slaveowners attempted to establish often clashed with the familial structures enslaved people themselves constructed.
