In the nineteenth century, as the discipline of anthropology developed, kinship was seen as a key to understanding the working of social systems. Pioneers of that field suggested that societies without highly evolved political and individual roles defined their social relations with respect to kinship. Those involved were legally trained in the Classical tradition; they could see in Roman law attempts at defining a wide range of familial relationships and obligations, and they saw Rome as an important evolutionary phase in a more sophisticated social setting, removed from the primitive. Even today kinship is seen as more important in simple societies, whereas complex societies have evolved away from it (Trautmann [1987] 180). The result has been that in modern studies of kinship there is still much recourse to terminology from Roman law, which had provided the seed bed for the analysis of family in terms of kin relationships. It also raises the question of whether kinship beyond the household did have a deep impact in the ancient world.

Family relationships in both Greece and Rome have been subjected to considerable scrutiny over the past forty years; today after much detailed investigation of male and female power in both contexts it appears that the two cultures were less alike than was first thought. Sarah Pomeroy, in her study of Families in Classical and Hellenistic Greece (1997), warns of the dangers of approaches which try to pin down a unified European identity and exaggerate similarities between communities which clearly developed separately and to some degree in isolation.