Choice Review
This collection closely resembles The Family in Ancient Rome: New Perspectives (CH, Jun'86), also edited by Beryl Rawson (Australian National University). Because of the evident social bias of most surviving sources, the "Roman family" of Rawson's volume is, in the main, an upper-class family; save for one chapter on the children of ex-slaves, lower-class households are almost lost from view. The other essays concentrate on familiar aspects of upper-class family life: the somewhat attenuated character of Roman marriage, the problematic relationship between Roman parents (especially fathers) and their children, and the structure of households. The essays are of uniformly high quality, but the subject matter just now an extremely popular one already yields diminishing returns. Significantly new approaches or interpretations are not in evidence, and little effort is made to break down constrictions that the sources impose. Still, the collection will be quite useful to all students of Roman social history or comparative family history at the upper-division undergraduate level and above. Latin phrases are regularly translated or glossed.-B. W. Frier, University of Michigan