The vagaries of high mortality in the Roman world resulted in weak links, to be taken into account by any Roman planning the perpetuation of his family name and the transmission of his patrimony. There was uncertainty whether he would have children and whether any of them would live long enough to inherit his fortune and status. If not the institution of adoption was available to repair the deficiency, though it was not regularly used. When children did survive their father, the transmission of the estate was not necessarily unproblematic. The prospect of one or more heirs being underage required the testator to reckon with a significant problem: how to protect his child-heir and patrimony from a greedy world.

The solution lay largely in the Roman institutions of guardianship, tutela impuberum and cura minomm, which have received little attention in social histories of Rome. Guardianship of women, tutela mulieris, has attracted more interest than tutela impuberum, even though the former came to have little force in the classical era, while the latter gained in strength and legal rigor. Moreover, the forty-year-old man still subject to patria potestas looms larger in many classicists' image of the Roman family than the twelve-yearold fatherless child, even though the latter was fivefold more common in Roman society. Some historians who have commented on the subject of fatherless children have treated the phenomenon as a result of special crises, in particular bloody wars. Yet, though wars certainly exacerbated the problems, fatherless children have been a pervasive and perennial issue in all societies before the demographic transition to modern mortality and birth rates.