Plautus and the Sentimental Ideal of the Roman Family

In 1991 Suzanne Dixon published an article that suggested that, from the late Republic onwards, it is possible to detect a sentimental ideal of family life at Rome. She also argued that there is a significant paucity of affectionate terminology in Plautus' mid-republican works. My thesis looks for traces of a Roman sentimental ideal in Plautus' comedies. I analyse his plays, being careful to interpret them in the light of comic convention and paying attention to the varying forms of comic drama, and I search for sentimental themes related to wives and husbands, parents and children, the home, and slaves and outsiders. I consider the evidence and arguments used by Dixon and other historians and also look at modern examples of sentimentality (in literature and in other cultural material), using these as a tool to measure sentimentality in Plautus. My overall contention is that Plautus' metatheatrical plays deliberately explored and exploited the sentimental ideology of his original audience. In fact, some of the works’ humour depended upon the spectators' knowledge of the ideal and its claims upon their attention; Plautus wryly exposed the tensions that existed between the ideal and the realities of daily life. Plautus’ plays were successful and obviously communicated well with his contemporaries. I therefore conclude that sentimental ideology was well known in Rome prior to the late Republic – that it is an enduring concept, discernible in many cultures and eras

'n Ondersoek na die regsbeskerming van die vrou se huweliksverhouding tydens die klassieke Romeinse reg

Text in AfrikaansIn hierdie ondersoek is navorsing gedoen oor die Romeinse huweliksverhouding ten einde vas te stel of die klassieke Romeinse reg die Romeinse vrou se huweliksverhouding beskerm het indien dit deur haar man se wangedrag geskend is. Die navorsing het getoon dat, soos in die Suid-Afrikaanse reg, die Romeinse huweliksverhouding teen die klassieke tydperk 'n consortium omnis vitae met veral morele huwelikspligte was en dat die nie-nakoming van hierdie pligte op wangedrag en skending van die huweliksverhouding neergekom het. Daar is tot die gevolgtrekking gekom dat, soos in die moderne reg, ook die Romeinse man die huweliksverhouding kon skend deur wangedrag, beperkte vorme van seksuele wangedrag, iniuria en bigamie. Die klassieke Romeinse reg het egter nie aan die Romeinse vrou direkte regsbeskerming verleen by die man se skending van die huweliksverhouding deur wangedrag nie. Sy het egter wel indirekte regsbeskerming in die vorm van toevlugof afskrikmiddels (soos egskeiding en die dos) geniet.In this study research has been done on the Roman marital relationship in order to determine whether classical Roman law protected the Roman wife's marital relationship if it had been breached by her husband's misconduct. Research has shown that by the classical period, as in South African law, the Roman marital relationship was a consortium omnis vitae with primarily moral marital duties. Non-compliance with these duties amounted to misconduct and breach of the marital relationship. It was concluded that, as in modern law, the Roman husband too could be in breach of his marital relationship through misconduct, limited forms of sexual misconduct, iniuria and bigamy. However, classical Roman law did not grant the Roman wife any direct legal protection where her husband was in breach of the marital relationship because of misconduct. She nevertheless enjoyed indirect legal protection in the form of deterrents (such as divorce and the dos).LawLL.M

ARMING OR CHARMING: OBSEQUIUM AND DOMESTIC POLITICS IN ROMAN NORTH AFRICA

Scholarship to date has dealt mainly with the legal aspects of Roman marriage and its place within Roman society, most of which tends to focus on the disempowerment of women. This article, while not denying the disadvantages women suffered under these conditions, focusses on the mechanics by which women could achieve their aims within the boundaries of marriage and how the concept of obsequium could have been understood and implemented by both partners to the marriage contract

DISCIPLESHIP IS SLAVERY: Investigating the Slavery Metaphor in the Gospel of Mark

Slavery was ubiquitous in the ancient world and the metaphorical use of slaves and slavery was equally common. This is the case in the New Testament also where the use of slavery as a metaphor in the Pauline literature has been particularly well investigated. However, in the study of the gospels little attention has been paid to the metaphor of slavery and its role in creating a model for discipleship. This thesis will remedy this by considering both how such an investigation should be conducted and what the results would be in the Gospel of Mark. It will therefore pursue both a methodological and an exegetical course. Building on careful use of metaphor theory, not previously employed in investigating this metaphor, the thesis will utilise Conceptual Blending Theory to argue that the historical reality of slavery is vital to the understanding of the metaphor. It will therefore pay equal attention to both Roman and Jewish sources to understand the reality of slavery and the ideology at work in these representations, as well as the ways in which writers could use this to imagine slavery and apply it as a metaphor. In doing so, it will show that the physical abuse of slaves is an important element of slavery – in reality and in metaphor – which is sometimes underplayed in NT scholarship. On the basis of this investigation, the thesis will engage in close analysis of slavery texts in the Gospel of Mark, something not accomplished in this level of detail before. In reading the relevant sayings and parables in Mark, the study will show that they share a thematic unity in their narrative contexts in this gospel, along with sharing the ideological values of slave owners. They emphasise, in particular, the expected suffering of discipleship, drawing on the physical costs of being a slave. It will be argued that, by this means, the metaphor DISCIPLESHIP IS SLAVERY provided a conceptual framework for Mark’s disciple-readers to interpret their particular setting in their world, and their response to it

Death, disposal and the destitute : the burial of the urban poor in Italy in the late Republic and early Empire.

Recent studies of Roman funerary practices have demonstrated that these activities were a vital component of urban social and religious processes. These investigations have, however, largely privileged the importance of these activities to the upper levels of society. Attempts to examine the responses of the lower classes to death, and its consequent demands for disposal and commemoration, have focused on the activities of freedmen and slaves anxious to establish or maintain their social position. The free poor, living on the edge of subsistence, are often disregarded and believed to have been unceremoniously discarded within anonymous mass graves (puticuli) such as those discovered at Rome by Lanciani in the late nineteenth century. This thesis re-examines the archaeological and historical evidence for the funerary practices of the urban poor in Italy within their appropriate social, legal and religious context. The thesis attempts to demonstrate that the desire for commemoration and the need to provide legitimate burial were strong at all social levels and linked to several factors common to all social strata. Existing definitions of the poor are revealed to be inadequate and a more precise definition, formulated on the basis of economic resources, is proposed. The evidence for mass graves at Rome and the previously unquestioned conclusions of Lanciani are critically re-examined and shown to be both unreliable and heavily dependent on ambiguous textual references. Evidence for alternative forms of burial and memorialising activities in the cemeteries of Italy is examined and discussed. It is concluded that the poor did not, under normal circumstances, make use of mass graves. They responded to the same social, religious, legal and practical demands imposed by death as the rest of the urban community. This is reflected in both grave typology and the ways in which they were commemorated by living relatives. The physical manifestations of these practices are notably more modest than those of the elite but, significantly, the desire to properly bury and remember the dead was not absent

Law, rhetoric, and science: historical narratives in Roman law

Historical narratives have limited scholarly appreciation of the impact of rhetoric on the development of Roman law in the late Republican period. This thesis challenges these narratives and attempts to re-evaluate the role of rhetoric in Roman law

Fecunditas, Sterilitas, and the Politics of Reproduction at Rome

This dissertation is a cultural history of the role of human fertility – fecunditas – in Ancient Roman society c. 200 B.C. – A.D. 250. I ask how the Romans chose to understand human fertility, how they sought to preserve and encourage it, and how the absence of fertility affected their marriages, their families and their political careers. It is an investigation of the place of fertility in the Roman cultural consciousness. Using a wide range of sources – literary, epigraphic, papyrological, juridical, and numismatic – I argue that the Romans conceptualized fecunditas (fertility) not just as a generic female quality, but as one of the cardinal virtues that all married women were expected to embody. A woman’s fecunditas could be evaluated and judged according to how many children she bore, how often she became pregnant, and how many of her children survived into adulthood. Although fecunditas was constructed as a female responsibility, élite Roman men were able to take advantage of having a fertile wife. Official benefits, such as those accrued by law under the ius trium liberorum, the rights of three children, brought one level of honour. An élite man could also exploit the fecunditas of his wife to increase his own social capital. In return, women of proven fertility were thought to deserve conjugal loyalty from their husbands and ought not to be divorced. Infertility could lead to the dissolution of a marriage. Fecunditas was not a private matter, nor were the members of the imperial family, the domus Augusta, immune to its pressures. At all levels in Roman society there was a strong interest in the safeguarding of the fecunditas of Roman citizen women, for through them the strength of the Roman state was preserved. It is not wrong, I argue, to speak in terms of a sort of fecunditas project, an obsession with the numbers of Roman citizens and the importance of fertile women to bear more of them, which permeates Roman society from the beginning of the Republic into the third century A.D

The Roman world of work : social structures and the urban labour market of Roman Italy in the first three centuries AD

The urban labour market must have been substantial in early imperial Roman Italy, where the economy was thriving and urbanization rates were unprecedented. It could be argued that the existence of slavery precluded an actual labour market. The Roman World of Work argues, however, that the economic concepts of a labour market and labour market segmentation hold explanatory power for understanding labour in the cities of Roman Italy. It turns out that gender was more restricting for the position of an individual than legal status, or skill levels. The Roman labour market was segmented along these lines of sex, legal status and skill levels. Yet such factors were culturally determined: they were given meaning and filled in by family and non-familial relations. An individual labourer cannot therefore be viewed on his or her own, but should be understood in the context of the prevailing social structures. This was true for the freeborn, but also for the slave and freed components of the group. Family and non-familial collectives provided intersecting trust networks that were crucial to economic interaction in Roman society, where reliable information was scarce and economic insecurity loomed large.  NWOThe Unification of the Mediterranean World (400 BC - 400 AD