Growing up fatherless in antiquity: the demographic background
Walter Scheidel (Stanford University)
Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, June (2006)
Abstract
The severe mortality regime of the ancient world caused many minors to lose their fathers. In classical Athens, men attained legal maturity at the age of eighteen while women commonly got married in their mid-teens and passed under the control of their husbands.1 In Roman society, males entered legal adulthood at the age of fourteen and and assumed unqualified competence at twenty-five. Women were considered mature at twelve and often appear to have begun marrying in their late teens. In Roman Egypt, men started paying poll tax at fourteen and the majority of women found husbands in their mid-to late teens. Under these circumstances, the loss of fathers during the first 15 to 20 years of life mattered most and merits our attention here. The average scale of loss was a function both of the overall age structure of the population and of male marriage practices. With the help of a computer simulation of the Roman kinship universe, Richard Saller established the basic parameters. In his own words, this exercise ‘generates a model population by simulating the basic events of birth, death and marriage, month by month, in accordance with the age-specific probabilities of those events as established by the demographic parameters’.
Saller devised three different scenarios to capture the probable range of life experiences in Roman society. The default model, labeled ‘Ordinary’, aims to represent the general population by positing a mean age of first marriage of twenty years for women and thirty years for men, and an age structure consistent with a standard model life table based on a mean female life expectancy at birth of 25 years. The other two (‘Senatorial’) options envision marriage at younger ages as documented for elite circles, with means of 15 years for women and 25 years for men, and a mean life expectancy at birth of either 25 or 32.5 years, to allow for the (arguably remote) possibility of significantly lower elite mortality.
Walter Scheidel (Stanford University)
Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, June (2006)
Abstract
The severe mortality regime of the ancient world caused many minors to lose their fathers. In classical Athens, men attained legal maturity at the age of eighteen while women commonly got married in their mid-teens and passed under the control of their husbands.1 In Roman society, males entered legal adulthood at the age of fourteen and and assumed unqualified competence at twenty-five. Women were considered mature at twelve and often appear to have begun marrying in their late teens. In Roman Egypt, men started paying poll tax at fourteen and the majority of women found husbands in their mid-to late teens. Under these circumstances, the loss of fathers during the first 15 to 20 years of life mattered most and merits our attention here. The average scale of loss was a function both of the overall age structure of the population and of male marriage practices. With the help of a computer simulation of the Roman kinship universe, Richard Saller established the basic parameters. In his own words, this exercise ‘generates a model population by simulating the basic events of birth, death and marriage, month by month, in accordance with the age-specific probabilities of those events as established by the demographic parameters’.
Saller devised three different scenarios to capture the probable range of life experiences in Roman society. The default model, labeled ‘Ordinary’, aims to represent the general population by positing a mean age of first marriage of twenty years for women and thirty years for men, and an age structure consistent with a standard model life table based on a mean female life expectancy at birth of 25 years. The other two (‘Senatorial’) options envision marriage at younger ages as documented for elite circles, with means of 15 years for women and 25 years for men, and a mean life expectancy at birth of either 25 or 32.5 years, to allow for the (arguably remote) possibility of significantly lower elite mortality.
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