When Augustine of Hippo wrote of his own father some twenty years after his death, he recalled him with something less than unqualified filial piety. Although always a “momma's boy,” the rhetor-turned-cleric's descriptions of his father were less than complimentary: he described Patricius as foul-tempered, uxorious, and spiritually weak. Indeed, his father's death merits hardly a comment in his autobiography; although his eventual conversion to Christianity did somewhat redeem him in his son's eyes. Augustine's was perhaps a unique opinion, insofar as he actually expressed such ambiguity, but the fact that for a good part of his minority, he grew up without a father was by no means unusual. As studies by Richard Saller, Brent Shaw, and several here in this volume have indicated, the phenomenon of fatherless households in ancient Rome was tied strongly to general marriage practices, resulting age differentiation in spouses, and of course mortality rates.

These trends did not significantly change in late antiquity. We have numerous examples of children growing up in households where the father was either deceased or simply absent for such extended periods of time that their children might as well have been fatherless. Nor did this appear to be a class or ethnically based situation. Theodosius II's minority was dominated and heavily regulated by his formidable elder sister, Pulcheria. The Ostrogothic king Theodoric's grandson and successor, Athalaric, grew up largely under the tutelage of his mother, Amalasuintha.