Disability and the Ancient Roman Familia

Abstract

“Disability and the Ancient Roman Familia” explores how and to what extent expectations and ideals associated with roles in the Roman household worked to exclude people on the basis of bodily and mental phenomena in the period extending from roughly 150 BCE to 250 CE. The primary motive of this work is to complicate existing presuppositions about disability in Rome and to provide a higher-resolution picture of what might have counted as disabling in marriage, slavery, childhood, and the role of the pater familias. Taking a cue from the field of disability studies, I emphasize the historical fluidity of disability as a social category. This research provides added insight into the values associated with idealized household relationships. Further, I make the case that the Romans conceived of a type of disability, a moral disability, that operated primarily (but not exclusively) in legal contexts. After a brief introduction, Chapter One illustrates that a construction of disability was operative in Roman marital relations, both in terms of partner selection and maintaining a iustum matrimonium or “legal marriage”. Examining marriage with a view to disabled histories encourages us to see the disabling character of marriage requirements and the possible role of dowry as an index of disability. Chapter Two excavates some aspects of the intersection of enslavement and disability. The concept of utilitas, of “usefulness,” provided a means for elite writers to inscribe their ideas of economic value onto enslaved bodies and, thereby, to construct disability in enslaved bodies. What “usefulness” really entailed is ill-defined, especially in the context of the luxury market, where Rome’s elite paid large sums of money for enslaved people characterized as other on the basis of their bodies and behaviour. In Chapter Three, after establishing the criteria for the normate child in the imagination of Roman medical, legal, and literary authors, both in terms of age stages and expectations about their bodies and behaviours, I explore disability in Roman childhood. I complicate the assumption that most Roman parents would not raise a disabled child – an assumption that both participates in and is produced by a “Roman mirage,” an image of Rome as a hyper-militarized, fighting fit, totalitarian state with no room for disabled people. I argue that drawing the line of who counted as a prodigy, who would be killed or violently excluded from the community, and who would be raised in a familia was not straightforward. Further, I argue that two of the most disabling conditions for a child growing up in Rome, especially for an elite Roman boy, would be anything that impacted speaking and walking in the manner his parents expected. This project concludes with an examination of the construction of the bonus pater familias, the “good male head of household.” In the Roman imagination, the bonus pater familias was a Roman man of a particular character, of a stable masculinity, who possessed reason (defined by his community) and who knew how to manage resources and the people dependent upon him in the household in a particular way. One figure excluded from the role of the pater familias is the prodigus, a figure that embodies a distinctly Roman category of moral disability.