All in the Family: Childhood and Fictive Kinship in Roman Society

Gaia Gianni’s All in the Family explores how children shaped the development of pseudo-familial bonds, or fictive kinship, in Roman society during the early imperial period. Previous scholarship on the Roman family has primarily emphasized the patriarchal and nuclear structure of the Roman family, with children often represented as passive actors in a vacuum. Believing this to be an oversimplification of how the Roman family functioned, Gianni in her study focuses on the ways in which Roman families raised children and formed long-term relationships with individuals outside of the nuclear family, such as friends, neighbors, nurses, and caretakers, who gradually became full-fledged members of the family unit. Through a wide variety of literary works, legal documents, and funerary epitaphs for children set up by their families and caregivers, Gianni borrows from modern sociological and anthropological theories to argue that children acted as catalysts or connecting nodes in the creation of fictive kinship with individuals who were not part of the biologically determined family. In addition to illuminating the roles and experiences of these figures, All in the Family reveals how this social network was integrated into the family both in practice and in ideology, presenting a more complex view of the Roman family than the traditional nuclear structure.

Gaia Gianni is Assistant Professor of Classics at The Ohio State University.