This book has taken shape gradually over the past decade, prompted initially by a sense that too little research had been done on the subject of the Roman family. Since the early 1980s a stream of valuable books and articles has appeared, many of them designed to bring the neglected people of the Roman empire, women and children, into the historical narrative. I have only a little to add to those works. Instead, I wish to return to the figure represented by (male) Roman authors as the center of the family and household, the paterfamilias, so familiar in his severe authority. The familiarity has bred neglect or the repetition of stereotypes. There is more to be said about Roman patriarchy, in my view, in order to appreciate the complexities of daily experience in the Roman household and to understand the nuances of paternal authority in Roman ideology.

Some of the basic themes of the following chapters have been presented in my articles, but none of the chapters is a reprint of those articles. I have substantially rewritten to take account of criticisms, to reformulate arguments, and to add new materials. Perhaps the most substantial change in my thinking from the earliest articles is an increased awareness of the need to distinguish between the normative order of Roman culture and the diffuse experiences and individual choices of daily social life. Failure to pursue that distinction, it seems to me, has left Roman historians arguing at crosspurposes about issues such as the “nuclear family,” which was at once central to the normative order and in practice often disrupted by death or divorce.