The Family in Roman Egypt: A Comparative Approach to Intergenerational Solidarity and Conflict [Paperback]

This book examines the role of the family in the Roman province of Egypt drawing on a wide range of sources.This is a book for students and scholars of ancient social history, but also historians of other periods interested in the history of the family, capturing the dynamics of everyday family life of the common people and making a substantial contribution to understanding Roman provincial society.This is a book for students and scholars of ancient social history, but also historians of other periods interested in the history of the family, capturing the dynamics of everyday family life of the common people and making a substantial contribution to understanding Roman provincial society.This study captures the dynamics of the everyday family life of the common people in Roman Egypt, a social strata that constituted the vast majority of any pre-modern society but rarely figures in ancient sources or in modern scholarship. The documentary papyri and, above all, the private letters and the census returns provide us with a wealth of information on these people not available for any other region of the ancient Mediterranean. The book discusses such things as family composition and household size and the differences between urban and rural families, exploring what can be ascribed to cultural patterns, economic considerations and/or individual preferences by setting the family in Roman Egypt into context with other pre-modern societies where families adopted such strategies to deal with similar exigencies of their daily lives.Preface; 1. Intergenerational solidarity and family support networks in cross-cultural perspective; 2. Household structures, marriage patterns and inheritance strategies; 3. Balancing benefits and obligations - parents and children over the life course; 4. Widowhood, remarriage and residence patterns; 5. Growing old in the household; 6. The patriarchal household and the incoming daughter-in-law; 7. Childless old age - the worst of all fates?; 8. ConcllÃ"