The discipline of history began nearly two and a half millennia ago with the study of war and politics. Little more than two and a half decades old, the subfield of family history is still struggling to agree on the right questions and the appropriate level of generalization. The family as a historical phenomenon can be both banal and symbolically charged. It can be banal in the sense that family life so thoroughly permeates our experience that a description of mothers, fathers and children may hold few surprises and little interest. Roman authors believed family formation and the organization of the household to be natural steps in social evolution, rather than a matter of culturally specific development susceptible to historical analysis (Cicero, Off. 1.54).

At the same time, as a nearly universal experience, family relations have been used as a politically charged barometer of moral and social wellbeing. This is true today, as sociologists attempt to measure the disintegration of the family and the popular media carry stories such as the Chicago Tribunes front-page series entitled “Killing our Children.” The moral preoccupation with the family can be found in ancient Rome as well. In accounts of the horrors of the civil wars of the last century before Christ, stories of the violation of family bonds were narrated to illustrate social breakdown, and stories of family loyalty were told in praise of individual virtue. When Augustus enforced a new regime on the Romans, his legislation to improve society focussed primarily on matters of family and household – marriage, child-bearing, and slavery.