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Testamentary Officia and the Mother's Identity in Ancient Roman Law

Mother breastfeeding a baby in the presence of the father. Detail from the sarcophagus of Marcus Cornelius Statius, who died as a young child. Marble, Roman artwork, ca. 150 AD. Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen
Mother breastfeeding a baby in the presence of the father. Detail from the sarcophagus of Marcus Cornelius Statius, who died as a young child. Marble, Roman artwork, ca. 150 AD. Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen

Testamentary Officia and the Mother’s Identity in Ancient Roman Law

Maria Elena Roccia

Iris: Journal of the Classical Association of Victoria, Volume 22 (2009)

Abstract

In ancient Roman law, the rights of a mother to bequeath her property to whomever she wished were limited. Although much has been written on the testamentary capacity of Roman women, and on the rights of Roman women with regards to their property in general, one as- pect that has received little attention is the how the status of mater (mother) affected those rights because of certain expectations of her pietas (family duty).



The object of the present study is a survey of the juridical sources and a discussion of the semantics of key Roman legal terms, in order to reconstruct the social motivations for, and consequences of, legal procedures regarding mothers of the elite classes and their wills. In fact, the introduction of the concept of pietas in the context of family law seems to have had a significant impact on the juridical construction of the mother’s identity, that is the whole set of rights and duties obtaining in the family relationship between a mother and her children ac- cording to ancient Roman law; specifically, the invention of certain testamentary officia pieta- tis (duties of pietas) that restrained a mother’s liberty in writing her will seems to have been motivated by a desire to impose obligations on women to conform with their social and legal status. In particular, I will take as a starting point the hypothesis advanced by S. Dixon1 about two components of pietas in matrem (duty towards the mother), which would have com- prised, beside the affective side, a utilitarian aspect (as self-interest), which was linked to the mother’s capacity to dispose of her property mortis causa, i.e. on the occasion of her death (as well as inter uiuos, i.e. among the living) and to her children’s economic expectations deriving therefrom.

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