The core of traditional Roman society was the family, and the word family (familia) in ancient Rome actually meant all those under the authority of a male head of household, including nonrelated slaves and servants. In poor families, this group might be very small, but among the wealthy, it could include hundreds of slaves and servants.

The male head of household was called the paterfamilias. Just as slave owners held power over their slaves, fathers held great power over their children, which technically lasted for their children’s whole lives. Initially this seems to have included power over life and death, but by the second century B.C.E., that had been limited by law and custom. Fathers continued to have the power to decide how family resources should be spent, however, and sons did not inherit until after their fathers had died.

In the early republic, legal authority over a woman generally passed from her father to her husband on marriage, but the Laws of the Twelve Tables allowed it to remain with her father even after marriage. That was advantageous to the father, and could also be to the woman, because her father might be willing to take her side in a dispute with her husband, and she could return to her birth family if there was quarreling or abuse. By the late republic, more and more marriages were of this type, and during the time of the empire (27 B.C.E. to 476 C.E.), almost all of them were.

To marry, both spouses had to be free Roman citizens. Marital agreements, especially among the well-to-do, were stipulated with contracts between the families involved. According to Roman law, marriage required a dowry, a payment of money, property, and/or goods that went from the bride’s family to the groom. If their owner allowed it, slaves could enter a marriage-like relationship called contubernium, which benefited their owner because any children produced from it would be his. People who were not slaves or citizens certainly lived together in marriage-like relationships, but these had no standing before the law and their children could not legally inherit.

Women could inherit and own property under Roman law, though they generally received a smaller portion of any family inheritance than their brothers did. A woman’s inheritance usually came as her dowry on marriage. In the earliest Roman marriage laws, men could divorce their wives without any grounds, and women could not divorce their husbands. By the second century B.C.E., however, these laws had changed, and both men and women could initiate divorce. By then, women had also gained greater control over their dowries and other family property, perhaps because Rome’s military conquests meant that many husbands were away for long periods of time and women needed some say over family finances.

Although marriages were arranged by families primarily for the handing down of property to legitimate children, the Romans, in something of a contradiction, viewed the model marriage as one in which husbands and wives were loyal to one another and shared interests and activities. The Romans praised women who were virtuous and loyal to their husbands and devoted to their children.

Traditionally minded Romans thought that mothers should nurse their own children and personally see to their welfare. Non-elite Roman women did nurse their own children, although wealthy women increasingly employed slaves as wet nurses and to help them with child rearing. Very young children were under their mother’s care, and most children learned the skills they needed from their own parents. For children from wealthier urban families, opportunities for formal education increased in the late republic. Boys and girls might be educated in their homes by tutors, who were often Greek slaves, and boys also might go to a school, paid for by their parents.

Most people in the expanding Roman Republic lived in the countryside. Farmers used oxen and donkeys to plow their fields, collecting the dung of the animals for fertilizer. Along with crops raised for local consumption and to pay their rents and taxes, many farmers raised crops to be sold. These included wheat, flax for making linen cloth, olives, and wine grapes.

Most Romans worked long days, and an influx of slaves from Rome’s wars and conquests provided additional labor for the fields, mines, and cities. To the Romans, slavery was a misfortune that befell some people, but it did not entail any racial theories. Slave boys and girls were occasionally formally apprenticed in trades such as leatherworking, weaving, or metalworking. Well-educated slaves served as tutors or accountants, ran schools, and designed and made artwork and buildings. For loyal slaves, the Romans always held out the possibility of freedom, and manumission, the freeing of individual slaves by their masters, was fairly common, especially for household slaves. Nonetheless, slaves rebelled from time to time, sometimes in large-scale revolts put down by Roman armies.

Membership in a family did not end with death; the spirits of the family’s ancestors were understood to remain with the family. They and other gods regarded as protectors of the household—collectively these were called the lares and penates—were represented by small statues that stood in a special cupboard or a niche in the wall. The statues were taken out at meals and given small bits of food, or food was thrown into the household’s hearth for them. The lares and penates represented the gods at family celebrations such as weddings, and families took the statues with them when they moved.