Marriage, the first linchpin of the Roman family, may seem, from a modern perspec­tive, surprisingly poorly developed and supported in Roman law.

By contrast, patria potestas (paternal power), the second linchpin, is forcefully constructed, so force­fully, in fact, that it is one of the most distinctive aspects of the Roman legal tradition.

Common to almost all legal systems is a recognition that, during their youth, children require close control by, if possible, their parents, who through social and legal norms have extensive powers to discipline their children and control their property; nor, in premodern legal systems, is it at all unusual for these powers to be concentrated chiefly in the father as representative of a traditional patriarchy But what is unusual about Roman law is that paternal dominance did not end when children attained maturity or adulthood.

The jurists recognize patriapotestas as a distinctive cultural marker, a determi­nant of national identity As Gaius observes: “This is a right peculiar to Roman citi­zens, since generally speaking no other people have such power over their children” (Inst. 1.55). In legal theory, at least, the right was not only lifelong but virtually un­limited; patresfamilias, as the wielders of patriapotestas, could decide whether those in their power lived or died, whether and whom they could marry and for how long, whether they could treat any property as their own (even though the pater al­ways remained the true owner), and so on.

In practice, however, patria potestas was limited in various ways. Perhaps most significantly, as Richard Saller and other historians have recently shown, high Roman mortality levels meant that most adults (past the age of twenty-five) were re­leased from patria potestas because they no longer had any living male antecedents.

More interesting for us is the gradual process whereby unconstrained patria potestas was undermined in Roman law. The process was not completed during the classical period, nor could it be, since the Romans were evidently determined to leave the familia in place as a more or less inviolable domain of the paters personal autonomy. Still, in reading the Cases that follow, stay alert to the tensions in juristic rulings and imperial decrees on patria potestas. Seen from this perspective, legal sources suggest a conflict between a cultural identity connected with an idealized past and broad social changes as Rome became a wealthy, powerful, and “world-em­bracing” empire. Tradition collided, at times forcefully, with individualism, in an exchange where the stakes could occasionally be high enough to require the inter­vention of the state. Public policy does make an occasionally dramatic entrance into the law of patria potestas in order to preserve a balance between these and other competing interests. The results of such interventions, however, are not uniformly or unambiguously successful.