The family in classical antiquity

Within the ancient Greek city-states, four levels of kin grouping could be distinguished: the phratry (phratra), the aristocratic clan (genos), the kindred (anchisteis), and the household (oikos). The phratries were large tribal subdivisions consisting of households or families claiming a common kin relation. At the apex of each phratry were aristocratic clans that had certain hereditary rights, such as the right to hold priestly offices. Both the phratries and the clans were recruited patrilineally (through the father).

The kindreds, on the other hand, consisted of a set of relatives from each side of the family, extending at least to the second cousins of any given individual. A person's kindred was important, as this was the unit within which inheritance could be claimed, but the significance of the kindred varied from city-state to city-state and through history. For example, during the 5th and 4th centuries BC such ties of kinship were less important in urban Athens than elsewhere, because of increasing urbanization and the large number of noncitizens in the population. Since in theory only citizens could contract legal marriages and produce legitimate children, the large number of common-law marriages between citizens and noncitizens (and attempts to pass off the offspring as legitimate) led, in classical Athens, to the dissolution of kindred ties that had previously been close.

The organization of the household also varied from place to place and through history. From the time of the Homeric poems (before 700 BC) it seems that the primary unit of residence and domestic economy was the nuclear family (husband, wife, and children). However, a belief in earlier extended-family organization is implied in the Iliad and Odyssey by the archaic kinship terms employed for relatives of a king and by descriptions of such large extended families as those of Zeus on Mount Olympus and of Priam, king of Troy. In the Homeric world the household was the seat of a person's prestige and a political unit through which alliances were made and struggles for dominance played out.

As political institutions developed and replaced the household as the seat of power and intrigue, the household became a more private place. The development of the city-states, and especially of Athens, tended to separate public and private life in a way that had not been common before. Public life in the Athenian democracy was characterized by equality among fellow citizens but, at the same time, by an impersonal and competitive attitude toward one another as well as toward noncitizens. Private life (within the household) was characterized by hierarchy, intimacy, and support. The household was hierarchical in that it was headed by a man who held authority over his wife and children and his servants. The ancient Greek household was the key unit of economic relations, too—as is implied in the modern English word economics, from the Greek oikonomia, meaning “household management.”

The English word family is derived from the Latin word familia, meaning “household,” and ultimately from the Latin famulus, “servant.” As it was among the Greeks, the household among the Romans was a significant economic unit within a system of wider kinship ties. The patrilineal kin group or clan among the Romans was termed the gens (plural, gentes). For the aristocratic Roman, this level was more important than was the phratry or clan among the Greek aristocracy, and together the gens and the household were primary focal points of life in ancient Roman society.

The Roman gens comprised a group of kinsmen who bore a common gens name, inherited in the male line by both males and females. In the earliest times, each gens had one or more recognized chiefs. The gentes themselves were grouped into larger units, each known as a curia (roughly equivalent to the Greek phratry), and, above that level, into “tribes,” though the significance of these units declined after the formation of the Roman republic in 509 BC. According to custom, each gens shared common property, which included a burial ground and other lands. Property was inherited within the gens, and gens members could call upon one another for help in defending their individual property and for the redress of injuries. It was also forbidden for people to marry within their own gens. Although in theory the gens was patrilineal, under certain conditions and with the consent of the gens as a whole, outsiders, such as kinsmen related other than through the male line, could be adopted into the gens.

Whereas the gens as a corporate group was important, especially in the early days of the Roman state (later being important only for aristocrats), descent in the male line was recognized as a significant legal principle by both commoners and aristocrats throughout Roman history. The Romans distinguished two kinds of blood relatives: agnates and cognates. An agnate (Latin agnatus) was a relative related through the male line, including one's father's father, father's brothers and sisters, father, brothers, sisters, children (of a man but not of a woman), brothers' children, sons' children, and some more distant relatives. A cognate (cognatus) was any other blood relative. Even Romans who did not belong to an aristocratic gens distinguished their cognates from their agnates. Agnates were reckoned to be “closer,” because private property was inherited by them and marriage was forbidden between them.

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