Richard P. Saller – författare

How have family relations been regulated through the ages by state institutions and laws? What impact did the advent of Christianity have on marriage? Were parents in the past less emotionally attached to their children? What changes have taken place in legal attitudes and practices toward adultery and “homicides of honor”? How has the position of women in the household altered over the millennia?  In this book distinguished contributors offer historical and anthropological perspectives on the Western family, focusing on family life in Italy from the Roman Empire to the present. Using methods that range from symbolic to quantitative analysis, the authors discuss a wide variety of topics, including matchmaking, marriage, divorce, inheritance, patterns of household organization, child-rearing practices, cultural and legal meanings of death, sexual mores, celibacy (banned in ancient Rome), adoption, and property rights. Through its unique combination of chronological sweep and geographical focus, the book is able to shed new light on central questions of continuity, change, and causation in family history.

The figure of the Roman father has traditionally provided the pattern of patriarchy in European thought. This book shows how the social realities and cultural representations diverged from this paradigm. Demographic analysis and computer simulation demonstrate that before adulthood most Romans lost their fathers by death. Close reading of Latin texts reveals Roman fathers as devoted and loving and not harsh exploitative masters of slaves. The demographic and cultural contexts deepen our understanding of how the patrimony was transmitted.

The figure of the Roman father has traditionally provided the pattern of patriarchy in European thought. This book shows how the social realities and cultural representations diverged from this paradigm. Demographic analysis and computer simulation demonstrate that before adulthood most Romans lost their fathers by death. Close reading of Latin texts reveals Roman fathers as devoted and loving and not harsh exploitative masters of slaves. The demographic and cultural contexts deepen our understanding of how the patrimony was transmitted.

In this, the first comprehensive one-volume survey of the economies of classical antiquity, twenty-eight chapters summarise the current state of scholarship in their specialised fields and sketch new directions for research. The approach taken is both thematic, with chapters on the underlying determinants of economic performance, and chronological, with coverage of the whole of the Greek and Roman worlds extending from the Aegean Bronze Age to Late Antiquity. The contributors move beyond the substantivist-formalist debates that dominated twentieth-century scholarship and display a new interest in economic growth in antiquity. New methods for measuring economic development are explored, often combining textual and archaeological data that have previously been treated separately. Fully accessible to non-specialist, the volume represents a major advance in our understanding of the economic expansion that made the civilisation of the classical Mediterranean world possible.

Personal patronage was an accepted element in the functioning of Roman society. It is usually considered to be a particularly Republican phenomenon, which declined as other mechanisms developed with the growth of the imperial bureaucracy. Dr Saller's book, the first major study of patronage in the early Empire, shows that the patron-client relationship continued on much the same basis into the third century AD. Drawing on literary and epigraphic sources, he examines the language and ideology of the patron-client exchange, and then investigates how the exchange functioned in the political, economic and social life of the Roman world from the imperial court to the subjects in the provinces. A case study of North Africa illustrates the importance of patronage relationships in a province which produced many members of the new bureaucracy and also eventually an emperor, with consequences for the range of patronage bonds.