Europe: Ancient and Medieval
Roman family based on legal changes affecting the
familia. Her critique is effective, because she brings a
sophisticated understanding that the legal system did
not define or describe social realities but was an
institutional framework to be manipulated by individuals in order to achieve preferred outcomes.
The first chapter of the book analyzes the legal
procedure of emancipation by which a son or daughter
was freed from paternal power and thereby set outside
the familia. Past accounts of emancipation have often
assumed that this institutional breaking of familia-ties
was a result of the rupture of family ties and hence
evidence of the disintegration of the family unit.
Gardner demonstrates that the Romans in fact developed law to preserve the family bond between the
emancipated child and the natal family. So, for example, from the end of the republic the praetor recognized the claim of an emancipated child on the father's
estate alongside the claims of unemancipated children.
As Gardner points out (p. 109), the most commonly
attested motive for emancipation was not an emotional
schism between father and child but the desire to give
the child the independent property rights necessary to
accept an inheritance from outside the familia.
The theme is continued in the second chapter on
adoption, an institution that the Romans used for
creating lines of inheritance of property (not nurturing
honds to care for young children). Gardner effectively
shows that the "family" honds of affectionate devotion
(pietas) were continued even after the familia-tie was
severed.
The typical form of Roman marriage in the classical
era (sine manu) did not bring the wife into the familia
of her husband, leaving her without a familia-tie to her
own children. Chapter three describes the legal developments that recognized the mother-child bond in the
hierarchy of claims to inherit.
Gardner's full treatment of emancipation, adoption,
and the mother-child bond fills a signficant gap in the
scholarship on Roman family life. It is based on legal
sources, of which Gardner has a detailed and reliable
grasp. For example, she is always careful to notice the
intricate and sometimes quite different consequences
of these legal institutions for freeborn families and
ex-slave families.
Finally, two general observations. As Gardner forthrightly observes, historians have no good evidence for
the frequency of emancipation or adoption, and this
fact limits our understanding of the strategic use of
these legal institutions. The number of directly attested adoptions (p. 133) is, to my mind, surprisingly
small. Without knowing the frequency, we are poorly
equipped to understand why Roman elite families,
which were largely unable to perpetuate themselves in
the senate over several generations, did not make
more use of adoption to repair lines of descent.
Gardner effectively critiques the German legal approach to understanding the Roman family, but she
says little of the French cultural approach, which
resembles the German in the constructivist emphasis
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261
on the arbitrary, non-biological, legal definition of the
family. Gardner's argument about the interactive distinction between familia and family offers an implicit
critique of the French approach by demonstrating the
numerous ways in which Romans developed institutions to accommodate their sense of ties to those
"natural" or "blood relations" who were unrelated in
civil law. Gardner quotes Valerius Maximus's statement that "the bond of procreation is the tightest" (p.
38). The cultural constructivists could counter with the
argument that the Roman notion of "natural" or of
"procreation" is itself an arbitrary cultural construct.
This much is true, but it is also true that the Roman
notion of biological ties is rather close to our own
modern understanding and does not support some of
the more exotic interpretations of the Roman family.
RICHARD SALLER
University of Chicago
THOMAS A. J. MCGINN. Prostitution, Sexuality, and the
Law in Ancient Rome. New York: Oxford University
Press. 1998. Pp. xvi, 416. $55.00.
Prostitution in antient Rome is a topic which, until
recently, received remarkably little scholarly attention.
Thomas A. J. McGinn's erudite study of the legal rules
affecting female prostitution from 200 B.C.E. to 250
C.E. is therefore particularly welcome.
A shift of focus to the margins, as McGinn points
out, has characterized many recent studies in social
and cultural history, and his own work is often sensitive
to the insights such an approach can offer. McGinn is
generally alert to the symbolic significante of prostitution for the Romans. The extensive battery of legal
prescriptions that regulated the status of prostitutes
(along with the practitioners of other disgraceful professions such as acting and fighting in the arena)
enshrined them as a crucial point of reference in the
Roman social hierarchy. One of the strengths of this
book is its emphasis on the ambiguity of prostitution
for the Romans. Laws such as the Augustan prescriptions on marriage and adultery allocated prostitutes a
conspicuously lowly place in society. Prostitutes were
treated as despicable yet necessary, if legitimate marriage was to be protected. At the same time, prostitution was legitimized by the taxation system (at least
after Caligula). McGinn rightly emphasizes problems
with an "evolutionary hypothesis," arguing convincingly that Roman jurists and legislators did not develop a consistent "policy" toward prostitution. He
stresses instead the ad hoc responses of lawmakers to
divergent, sometimes contradictory trends in Roman
society.
McGinn's mastery of Roman legal scholarship is
most impressive. Occasionally his detailed exposition
of scholarly debate serves to obscure the main thrust of
his own argument; on the whole, though, he is a clear
guide through the sometimes rebarbative controversies
that tend to characterize modern studies of the Roman
jurists. Individual chapters offer some enlightening
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Reviews of Books
discussions of specific areas of the law. Chapter three,
for example, treats the Augustan marriage laws with
great clarity, while chapter five's discussion of the
Augustan adultery law is particularly helpful in its
treatment of the prescriptions governing husbands'
pimping of their wives, as well as the other strategies
by which the law assimilated adulteresses to prostitutes. As McGinn emphasizes, this law reflected and
reinforced the role of the prostitute as symbol of
sexual shame in Roman society. Later chapters examine, among other topics, the laws governing the taxation of prostitutes and those restricting the use of
slaves as prostitutes.
In his opening chapters, McGinn tackles the problematic question of defining the prostitute. For Roman
jurists, he suggests, the key issue was promiscuity,
rather than, as one might expect, payment. Subsequent
chapters seem to operate on the assumption that
Romans were generally in agreement over who was
and who was not a prostitute. Only the adulteress, a
figure given new prominence through the Augustan
legislation, threatened to blur this distinction, according to McGinn. Yet promiscuity is surely harder to
define than payment. How many lovers must a woman
have to count as a prostitute? There must have been
many women (and indeed men) who were seen as
prostitutes by some people but not by others. McGinn
does not tackle the issue of the high-class courtesan,
such as Cicero's contemporary Volumnia Cytheris, on
the grounds that Roman jurists make almost no reference to such people. Courtesans are treated with
admirable subtlety in James Davidson's recent study of
classical Athens, Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens (1997), which
suggests that the indefinability, the unpredictability of
the exchange between the courtesan and her "friend"
was a crucial part of her allure. When is a present a
payment? If the courtesan chooses her partners carefully, how can she count as "sexually indiscriminate,"
an important criterion in the juristic definition of
prostitution? Such issues are not taken account of by
McGinn.
As the introduction immediately makel clear (although the title does not) this study focuses on female
prostitution. In chapter two, McGinn does give a full
account of the legal disabilities affecting male prostitutes, but they receive little mention elsewhere in his
study. One might question how far it is possible to
make sense of Roman attitudes to female prostitutes
without giving serious consideration to attitudes toward their male counterparts. McGinn's treatment of
sexuality is largely restricted to (often perceptive)
discussions of female sexual honor, but these could
have been pushed much further. What, for instance,
does it say about Roman attitudes to female sexuality
that complaisant husbands are regularly identified as
effeminate? Surely McGinn is misguided when he
suggests that female prostitutes enjoyed, even if only
notionally, the same sexual freedom as Roman men.
Nevertheless, this is an impressive work that will long
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW remain the central reference point for anyone studying
Roman prostitution.
CATHARINE EDWARDS
University of Bristol
MARY STROLL. The Medieval Abbey of Farfa: Target of
Papal and Imperial Ambitions. (Brill's Studies in Intel-
lectual History, number 74.) New York: E. J. Bril!.
1997. Pp. xii, 298.
The Abbey of Farfa lies on the road to Rieti in the
mountains of central Italy about fifty miles northeast
of Rome. Charlemagne bestowed privileges and immunities on it, and Farfa became an imperial monastery.
Its link to the emperor determined a large part of its
history during the next four centuries.
Mary Stroll has written extensively about the ecclesiastical and secular politics of central Italy in the
eleventh and twelfth centuries. In this book, she
changes her focus but not her interests. Beginning with
a brief history of Farfa in the early Middle Ages, Stroll
traces the turbulent history of the abbey to its precipitous decline in the second half of the twelfth century.
She is particularly concerned to fit Farfa into the
controversies between the papacy and the empire in
the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. She argues
that Farfa remained loyal to the empire until the time
of Frederick Barbarossa and went into decline because
"without [imperial] immunities and liberties that provided its strength, it retreated from the world" (p.
276).
Much of the book is not, strictly speaking, a history
of Farfa, but an extended discussion of two events and
the documentary evidence arising from them: the 1059
electoral decree of Pope Nicholas II and a property
dispute between Farfa and the Ottaviani family in the
early twelfth century. Even cognoscenti may raise their
eyebrows over Stroll's decision to devote five chapters
to Nicholas's decree and may not remember the
connection between Farfa and the electoral decree.
Gregory of Catino, a monk at Farfa, included one
version (generally considered a forged, pro-imperial
text) in his Chronicon. Stroll presents a complicated
argument that this text, not the pro-papal version
included in Gratian's Decretum, is the original decree.
Her main evidence is based on the work of a sixteenthcentury monk from Farfa, Panvinius, and his dating of
the manuscript from which he took a version of the
decree to shortly after A.D. 1059. Stroll has great
confidence in Pavinius's paleographical skills; 1 am
dubious. At the end of her long analysis, she concludes
that the pro-imperial version of the decree "could well
have been the decree formulated by Nicholas II" (p.
208). But whether she is right or wrong about the
decree, and given the evidente we could speculate
forever, she undercuts the reasons for her long dense
argument about the decree at the end of the book
when she concludes that Farfa's preserving of the
decree "may have had little or nothing to do with its
politic(s)" (p. 275). If Farfa's version of the decree has
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