Book Review: Kinuko Hasegawa, The Familia Urbana during the Early Empire. A Study of Columbaria Inscriptions. BAR International Series 1440 (original) (raw)

Traces of the Unfamiliar: epigraphic evidence for extended families on the margins in Roman Italy

2016

Scholarship of the family in the ancient world embraces a group of people related by blood, marriage, law or custom: the nuclear family (a father, a mother, and their sons and daughters) or the extended family (kinship or tribal groups). Within the ambit of the latter category, careful study of the surviving epigraphic corpora of Roman Italy reveals certain groups of people who live together, groups that are similar to that extended group related by blood, marriage, law, or custom, but which have not often been directly acknowledged in the literature of ancient family studies. This under-examined category of extended family may be situated in relation to the etymological root of the Latin term familia, namely famulus/a (male/female slave); in other words, servile and freed groups living and working together within marked boundaries of industry, duty, companionship and affection. Inscriptions in civic, residential and occupational spaces identify the groups which display these relationships: fire-fighters in Ostia and the Roman capital; apprentices to service in the Palatine palace; and, of course, the servile familia within the households of republican and imperial Rome. This chapter will adduce a range of formal and informal epigraphic testimony to explore the extent to which various social groups in ancient Rome understood themselves in relation to the traditional markers of the extended family – legal formulations; kinship structures; marriage, divorce and children; and affective relations.

Buried in collectivity: the social context of the early Imperial Roman columbaria

This thesis seeks to examine the context of the Roman columbarium tomb in connection to what is known about the plebs media, the alleged occupants. These inhabitants of Rome participated on a large scale in collegia, associations formed by the inferior men in society. The generalisations are mostly based on traditional literature and epigraphic sources. Here, the inconsistencies in the source material make us poorly understand who exactly occupied these tomb chambers, why they lie here and why together. Although it was never legally recorded, it is likely that the presence of such large collective tombs of modest inhabitants was simply socially unheard of, as social laws are sometimes equally bounded within humanity. For that reason, the collective tombs were placed out of sight and were socially banished underground and towards the back of the aboveground cemetery, only accessible by a smaller diverticolo. In the conclusion of this thesis the hypothesis of the utilisation of one tomb by one collegium is dismissed, for no tangible evidence of this phenomenon is known. Collegia may have had collective tombs in other towns, but in the city of Rome it seems the collegiati were incorporated in the columbaria as members of the same social class.