The Fall of the Roman Household (review)

The theme of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, after a long eclipse, recently has returned to the forefront in the study of late antiquity.¹ In her new book, however, Cooper does not take sides with the partisans of the decline view. Her title seems to be a reference to Gibbon's theory that the fall of the Roman Empire was due in large part to Christianity and to the ascetic ideal that ruined the Roman household—the predilection of Roman youth for "the penance of the monastic life."² Cooper challenges this view, which, curiously, has not been fully revisited until now. Her book is about the late Roman household in the western, Latin-speaking part of the Empire, from the reign of Honorius (395–425) to that of Theodoric the Great (493–526), a crucial period of change that saw emerging independent kingdoms replace the Roman Empire as the administrative unit of the western territories.

Her main documents are little-known texts—Latin conduct manuals and letters written in the fifth and sixth century. Although the names of the authors and addressees cannot be established in most cases, Cooper finds enough textual clues to date the documents and to identify their authors as clerics (by their pastoral concerns) and their audience as aristocratic laypersons, especially women. An English translation of one of these texts, the Ad Gregoriam in palatio, is included as an appendix.

In the ideal Christian household that these texts promote, wives are depicted as mistresses of slaves with all of the attendant obligations. With hindsight gained from the historiography of nineteenth-century plantation mistresses, which showed that the image of the helpless mistress served to de-emphasize mastery, Cooper suggests that the concern for moral responsibility toward slaves expressed in these texts promoted a senatorial, paternalistic model of the household, based on slave labor, as opposed to one based on the wage labor that characterized the households of absentee landowners.

The major transformations described by Cooper, however, pertain to marriage and the status of wives. In the context of the political instability of the period, men tended to marry down in order to escape the patronage of powerful fathers-in-law. In this context, Cooper gained hindsight from ethnographical literature about the relationship of young men to the traditions of elders within changing social structures. She argues that this trend during the Roman Empire made wives more dependent on their husbands. The writers of conduct manuals for married Christians made clear that wives were under the authority of their husbands, not their fathers, as was the case in traditional Roman marriage, but that the Christian ban of divorce tended toward their protection. The "Christianization" of marriage was more than an invention of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Cooper's Fall of the Roman Household is a challenging book that offers much new material and innovative approaches to the scholarship of late antiquity and other historical periods.