FAMILY IN ANCIENT ROME

The most basic and time-honored Roman social unit was the family (familia, or "household"). Most Roman families appear to have been nuclear, consisting of father, mother, and their children and slaves (although some families may have been extended to include grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and/or in-laws). The head of the family was the paterfamilias (plural, patresfamilias), usually the oldest father present. By ancient tradition, he held power and authority known as patria potestas over all other members of the household, including of course any slaves or hired workers who lived with the family.
This power gave him the right to control all property earned or acquired by these dependents, to regulate and punish them, and even to decide whether a newborn infant should be reared or exposed (left outside to die). At least these were the powers that early custom and law allowed the paterfamilias. In actual practice, most family heads were not merciless tyrants and cases of fathers throwing their wives or children out or killing them were relatively rare and occurred mostly in Rome's earlier centuries.
Over time, new laws set certain restrictions on the patria potestas; in any case, calls from a father's relatives, friends, and peers for him to act reasonably tended to restrain him from unusually cruel behavior. According to custom, he was obliged to convene a council of relatives and friends when he was considering punishing his children severely, and in such cases he usually abided by the council's verdict.
By tradition, the materfamilias, the paterfamilias's wife or mother, was also subject to the absolute authority of the male head of household. Though Roman women were considered citizens, like women in other ancient societies they did not enjoy the same rights as male citizens. They could not vote or hold public office, for example (although they could become public priestesses).
In the early years of the Republic, Roman men treated their women largely as inferiors, mainly because men saw themselves as more intelligent and competent. As Cicero, writing in the more enlightened and less chauvinistic first century B.C., described it: "Our ancestors established the rule that all women, because of their weakness of intellect, should be under the power of guardians." (For Murena 12.27).
These guardians (tutelae) were always men, who controlled the property of their wives, mothers, and daughters and barred them from voting, holding public office, or initiating divorce proceedings. By Cicero's time, the lot of Roman women had improved considerably and continued to improve in the first two centuries of the Empire. Though they still had no political rights, many women gained the rights to inherit and control their own property, to file for divorce at will, and in most (though certainly not all) households became more men's partners than their servants.

The high degree of love and respect that at least some men came to feel for their wives is illustrated in a letter penned by Pliny the Younger to his wife, Calpurnia, while she was away: "It is incredible how I miss you; such is the tenderness of my affection for you, and so unaccustomed are we to a separation! I lie awake the greatest part of the night in conjuring up your image, and by day... my feet carry me of their own accord to your apartment, at those hours I used to visit you; but not finding you there, I return with as much sorrow and disappointment as an excluded lover." (Letters 7.5).
Upper-class Roman women, like Calpurnia (about whom we know the most, since the bulk of the surviving evidence is about them rather than poorer women), regularly attended parties and public functions with their husbands and enjoyed a degree of freedom unprecedented in the ancient world. A few women even ventured into roles and occupations usually filled only by men; cases of female doctors, writers, business owners, and even gladiators have been documented.
The children raised by the paterfamilias and materfamilias were usually born at home with the aid of a midwife (obstetrix) and one or more female relatives. The most common custom was for the mother to deliver the child while sitting in an upright position in a special birthing chair. After nine days had passed, a naming ceremony (lustratio) took place (assuming, of course, that the father had made the decision to rear the child). Wet nurses were then frequently employed, even among the poorer classes.
According to law, children belonged to the father, so mothers did not usually gain custody of them after a divorce. (Illegitimate children could and did take their mother's name, but they had no legal rights.) Roman children played with many kinds of toys familar to modern children, including dolls (and dollhouses with miniature furniture), tops, hoops, miniature wagons and chariots (the equivalent of today's toy cars and trucks), swings, seesaws, and marbles.

Free children often played with the children of the household slaves, and it was not uncommon for the paterfamilias and his wife to form close attachments to these young slaves, as well as to their parents. Long relationships involving mutual love and respect sometimes led to the manumission (freeing) of family slaves.

By Don Nardo in the book  "Ancient Rome" The Greenhaven Encyclopedia, Greenhaven Press,  San Diego, California, USA,2002, excerpts p.153-155. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.