Pater Familias, Mater Familias, and the Gendered Semantics of the Roman Household

F EW LATIN TERMS COME as heavily loaded with conceptual baggage as paterfamilias. In both scholarly and popular discourse, paterfamilias, defined as "head of household," evokes the patriarchal organization characteristic of the Roman family and of the wider society.' Debates over family values in contemporary popular discourse make shorthand (and clumsy) references to the "paterfamilias model" of the family or "the Roman code of Paterfamilias," as if everyone understands the content of that model.2 A survey of undergraduate syllabi and study guides on the internet shows that paterfamilias is often listed as a key term for understanding Roman society. At the other end of the scholarly spectrum, the Real-Encyclopddie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft includes a long entry on paterfamilias by E. Sachers, who asserts that in the reverence and obedience toward the paterfamilias "lay the characteristic foundation for the greatness of ancient Rome."3 A comprehensive survey of all uses of paterfamilias in classical texts, however, reveals a major disjunction between this modern understanding of the term (rooted in Roman law) and ancient usage. The following sections draw on the survey to generalize about where the term is used and where it is not, and present quotations from ancient texts to illustrate what the term connotes. I begin by illustrating the common modern understanding of pater familias as the severe patriarch whose power defined the Roman family. The next sections analyze the use of paterfamilias in legal texts and then nonlegal texts. The full word study shows that the term appears predominantly in legal texts and much less densely in literary texts. In both discourses, the most common meaning of pater familias is "estate owner" without reference tofamilial relations. The final section of this paper seeks to offer a gendered perspective on the meaning of paterfamilias by a parallel survey of uses of materfamilias in classical Latin prose. Sociolinguists