Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

law and society 403
and society is thus a matter of particular significance in this specific area of
research and in this historical period.
Even before beginning to assess his information, the historian knows
very well that in most cases all he can do is to compare the legal texts with
a few literary documents or papyri; and that the results of such comparisons
are likely to offer a few tenuous confirmations, as many tenuous refutations
and one or two fresh doubts. On the one hand, the imperial
constitutions and religious prescriptions are, we suspect, proposing lists of
desiderata rather than statements that can be translated into actual collective
behaviour. On the other, the sources that really do talk about people
and individual experiences have the annoying habit of being few in
number, and those few not only refer almost exclusively to the upper
classes but are also very widely scattered over a large geographical area and
an extremely long time-span. As for the main Christian writers who tackle
the family from the ethical and theological points of view, their approach
is generally prescriptive. As with the legal sources, doubts are often raised,
for again there is no satisfactory way of measuring the distance between
the model and life itself. And so, while we may certainly agree that ‘it is
highly unlikely that the ascetic values so prominent in the apocryphal Acts
and other Christian literature are separable from wider moral developments
in society’, 38 we are singularly ill-equipped to translate this statement
into orders of magnitude – even very approximately.
Augustine’s work, however, is of exceptional interest. Alongside his
observations of a specifically doctrinal and theological cast, a large quantity
of data on contemporary family life may also be gleaned from informative
passages, allusions and oblique references. These unassuming, and apparently
banal, data are of great value to the social historian, because they show
the African family through the eyes of an exponent of the lower ranks of the
regional upper class. The family emerges as a complex of relationships gravitating
towards a central core, the nuclear group. The father – responsible for
order, concord and the administration of the property – exerted his strong
authority not only over the individual members of his domus (wife, children
and slaves), but also over a much wider, contiguous yet external, social space.
In the domus he would resort to corporal punishment, to the extent that the
whip practically became the symbol of his authority. Such paternal severity
– no matter how much it might have been offset by love and charity – tended
to isolate the father emotionally from the rest of the family and to strengthen
the affective bonds between mother and children or between siblings. 39
There was nothing new about any of these features, either singly or in
their various combinations. The behavioural, emotional and organizational
38 Cameron, Rheotoric of Empire 116.
39 Shaw (1987a); for family affectivity in the Roman west, see also ch. 15 (Wood), pp. 420,4 below.
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