sehepunkte 26 (2026), Nr. 6

Gaia Gianni: All in the Family

In a valuable contribution to Roman family history, Gaia Gianni explores in her monograph the social relationships of three categories of individuals attested by sepulchral inscriptions. The categories are (a) collactanei, figures of differing status who as infants were breastfed by the same wetnurse; (b) tatae, men usually of servile origin whose job was to care for young children; and (c) delicia, slave children best, if imperfectly, understood as the 'favourites' of their usually privileged owners. In so doing her object is to affirm, in a revised dissertation written under the expert guidance of John Bodel, that Romans conceptualized the family as an entity incorporating non-biologically related members as well as blood relatives. Hence the "fictive kinship" of Gianni's title. Her analysis of the epitaphs concerned is meticulous, and while alert throughout to their intractability and partiality (in every sense), she urges the distinctive point that children themselves were the catalysts for promoting the enduring familial bonds she detects in her evidence. She supports her views of family structure with modern anthropological material to reveal comparably expansive familial constructs elsewhere.

The epitaphs that identify collactanei are relatively few in number (44). They concern men and women mostly of low status and fellow nurslings of variable rank. They are very elliptical, however, which means that the full social circumstances underlying them can scarcely ever be definitively recovered. As Gianni says, "Unfortunately, the limitations of the tombstone as a medium pose intrinsic difficulties to reconstruct the full context behind the composition and commissioning of an epitaph". (86) While therefore she is scrupulous to a fault in discussing the possibilities and makes inarguably clear the key element that the relationships of concern lasted over time, her conclusions, if wisely conservative, often tend to depend on conviction alone: "I believe that collactanei are proof that, if truly many Roman families were not multigenerational and were predominantly nuclear, they still relied on an extended network of individuals which came to be members of the family through care and repetition, rather than traditional familial ties". (91) Strictly speaking, such a statement is an expression of what is ultimately unknowable.

This is not to question at all the social prominence of the nutrix, a woman who was a fixture in the privileged Roman household. She could expect to be given resources sufficient to rear ancillae in her master's household, appeal to magistrates if expenses were owed to her, and might involve herself in proceedings to secure the manumission and support of a slave nursling (Dig. 24.1.28.1; 50.13.1.14; 41.7.8). Significantly in the present context, the nurse could also bring charges against a minor's suspect tutor or curator just as a blood relative might do: a mother, grandmother, or sister; and if she were a slave, she might have a 'family' of her own, with her owner eventually freeing and materially supporting her descendants (Dig. 26.10.1.7; 34.1.20 pr.; cf. 33.2.34.1). Circumstantial evidence of this kind might well enhance Gianni's case. And so too Apuleius's expectation that readers of his Metamorphoses would recognize the conventionality of multiple nursing the inscriptions disclose when his Byrrhena identifies herself as once the fellow nursling of Lucius's mother Salvia (Met. 2.3). The item fits well with Gianni's proposal that the "milk-kinship" (53) arising from shared breastmilk was all-important for the fictive familial bonds she envisages. Not to be forgotten moreover is the sorrowful nutrix who appears as a standard compositional element in scenes of mourning on the elaborate sarcophagi of prematurely deceased children.

Tata is a word rarely found elsewhere than on epitaphs, so the number of examples Gianni catalogues is surprisingly high (86). She knows that its meaning is contestable. Some think that it might, or can, mean 'father.' But I agree that in most cases it means the male minder of very young children and am less troubled than she in accepting that men were, and are, capable of meeting the demands of early childcare. (I question especially her bald statement, "it is undeniable that both childcare and homemaking are considered feminine tasks today" [147]: my emphasis.) The assumption that such demands must have been primarily women's work precludes appreciation of a particular culture's disposition, and misses to my mind what could be seen as a culturally specific, and logical, feature favouring men: a progression as a child advanced in years from the care of a male tata to the supervision of a male paedagogus. Despite Quintilian's jaundiced characterization of the latter as conceited and foolish (Inst. 1.1.5), the pedagogue played a consequential role in the child's overall socialization, and Quintilian allowed that he could be well educated. (The grammaticus Remmius Palaemon, once a pedagogue, will be recalled [Suet. Gramm. 23].) It might not be anomalous therefore to imagine that he regularly took over from a male age-specific predecessor.

More securely, Gianni stresses, and I agree, that tata is an affectionate term for the more formal nutritor or nutricius (cf. 147-150), a figure who in the long run could be richly rewarded for his services, acquiring property in land and slaves (Dig. 33.7.27 pr.). Yet 'affection' raises many questions about how to understand emotions in a culture far removed from our own; and in the case of slave tatae, no matter what the status of their charges, I think it crucial to keep in mind the instability that suffused the life of every slave, a commodity akin to an animal disposable at a moment's notice. Slave psychology is a much-neglected subject. But it surely needs to be included in investigation of bonds between childminders and children. And if the inscriptions at issue here illustrate, as they must, what can be called success stories-cases that is where mutual sentiment can be presumed to have arisen and endured-to ask how representative they are is again to highlight the difficulty of penetrating Roman social conventions in their totality. Gianni's individual discussions are again commendably scrupulous and never claim too much. But when a case such as the damaged CIL X 7564 is met, a text which seems to elide tata and its female counterpart mamma with the phrase parentes sancti, questions inevitably arise. Are the man and woman here warmly remembered birth parents, or does the latter phrase refer to long-term servile carers regarded rather as de facto quasi-parents? A possible solution might come from imagining how a Roman reader would respond to the story of Longus's Daphnis and Chloe, where Dryas and Lamon and their wives raise two foundlings as children of their own until the biological parents' identity is finally revealed as Daphnis and Chloe approach adulthood. The Latinate reader might easily have thought of the two couples here as nutritores, if not as tatae and mammae. But this is no more than an extravagant guess, and the inscription itself, not untypically, remains perplexing.

The texts attesting the presence in privileged Roman households of enslaved children kept as pet-like sources of display, entertainment, and pleasure, including sometimes sexual pleasure (as Gianni justifiably laments [189-190]), exceed those of the two previous categories combined (271). There is abundant literary material moreover to guide interpretation-except that as the account of Martial's 'Erotion' poems shows (165-174), for historical purposes literature can be as inconclusive as inscriptions and lead again essentially to proclamations of faith alone. "I believe" is a persistent phrase throughout. No one is likely to contest the view that "numerous individuals [...] enjoyed the company and affection of these enslaved children, who were sometimes elevated to a higher status in the household" (194). But that is a fairly modest result given the lengthy discussions of literary sources presented; and it comes at the cost of examining more of the many epitaphs available. Gianni's analyses continue to be remarkably circumspect, but they illustrate once again, and repeatedly, the uncertainties that riddle the epigraphic record (e.g. 162, 172, 173-174, 195-205 passim), and at times now she inclines to press the perceptible into conformity with her construct of the family, as if frustrated almost by the shortcomings of the material she knows so well: "it is not unsound to argue..." (175); "It is hard not to see...". (202) Her final assessment, however, is unassailable: "some delicia were commemorated by their parents, by couples who appear to have acted as surrogate parents, and by single male and female individuals who were most likely their masters and mistresses". (205) I note for proof perhaps of the affective resonance the word delicia and its cognates can convey the opening sentence of Suetonius's biography of Titus, the emperor ever remembered as the amor ac deliciae generis humani (Tit. 1).

In sum, what emerges from Gianni's book is confirmation that at all levels of Roman society individual boys and girls could be and were highly valued, even loved. This despite the unsettling practice of infant exposure and what I take to be widespread inurement to the bleak reality of massive child mortality. I doubt that children themselves were likely ever to have been active promoters of a fictive familial formation. But Gianni's view of the formation itself, dependent especially on servile surrogacy, is not as far as I can tell to be doubted. It could be said to derive in essence from the multiform meaning of the key word familia, a term always more conceptually comprehensible to Romans, I imagine, than to modern historians, and one that allows the personnel of Gianni's inscriptions understandably to be regarded, in some sense, as "all in the family." Gianni is generous moreover in acknowledging her predecessors' contributions to the recovery of Roman family history-the pioneering corps of Rawson, Dixon, Saller, Shaw, Treggiari is well represented in her bibliography-and this includes contributions of my own. Her vocabulary of quasi-parental surrogacy echoes that used in Discovering the Roman Family (1991), and her fictive family consists, I think, with the notion there advanced of an extensive, dynamic Roman family form (note also the "fictive families" of Apuleius and Antonine Rome [2012] ch. 5). However that may be, Gianni has admirably built on the foundations laid in the last generation, crucially by extending the range of relevant inscriptions available for investigation. She summarizes the material in her excellent appendices, which at once offer a means for further progress perhaps through prosopographical research, while her exemplary chapter on epigraphic methodology is of immediate benefit to tiro and veteran alike.

As Roman family history proceeds, however, I should hope that scholars will remember that history is a form of literate, if not literary, activity, and resist the current tendency in some quarters, as here, to sacrifice elementary rules of composition on an altar of political expedience. A caveat might also be appropriate, since for all the evidence of genuine affect between free and slave in Roman family life, the intimacy inferable never led to serious thoughts of extending freedom to all, of ending slavery outright; and when any intimation might surface of change for the better in relations between master and slave (42), there is always a reminder somewhere of its exceptionality. Cato's advice to dispose of the weak and the sick was long followed (Suet. Claud. 25.2).