Throughout Hieradoumia, we find many hundreds of instances of people commemorating and being commemorated by their foster-children (threptoi), foster-parents (threpsantes), and foster-siblings (syntrophoi). The ‘rearing’ of non-natal children was so ubiquitous in Roman Hieradoumia that fosterage appears to have been a standard familial strategy for circulating children temporarily or permanently between households, rather than necessarily a response to orphanhood or extreme familial dysfunction. Foster-children could be of either higher or lower social status than their foster-parents; in a few cases, there is reason to think that children were reared by close relatives (particularly the natal parents’ siblings). It is argued that one of the social functions of fosterage was to cement ties or alliances between family groups; the word synteknos may be a technical term for the relationship between natal parent and foster-parent. Sentimental relations between foster-kin were often very close, and we often find foster-kin assimilated to natal kin.

This chapter is concerned with divine mediation and resolution of interpersonal disputes in Roman Hieradoumia. Secular disputes could be submitted to divine jurisdiction by the performance of one or other of two rituals, the setting up of a sceptre and/or the deposition of a pittakion in the sanctuary. Several different categories of low-level dispute are discussed: disagreements over the ownership of livestock; theft of other people’s money or belongings; the non-repayment of loans of money or goods; and disputes between family members, which could be extraordinarily acrimonious. Familial disputes fall into various predictable patterns, reflecting the underlying fault lines within the Hieradoumian kinship system which arise from the ambiguous status of older women within the Hieradoumian village household.

This chapter addresses those social ties beyond the kin-group which seem – to judge from commemorative practices – to have been of most importance for the inhabitants of Roman Hieradoumia. Fellow members of small-scale local cult-associations (phratrai, symbiōseis, speirai, doumoi) are very prominent in funerary commemoration, as are religious officials, neighbours, friends, and (for unfree persons) groups of fellow slaves. At Saittai, men are often commemorated by trade guilds and professional associations, probably reflecting the existence of guild-based burial-clubs; there is some reason to think that these trade guilds were unusually prominent in the civic organization of the polis of Saittai. Finally, civic communities fairly often participate in the commemoration of deceased members of the civic elite; such men and women’s tombstones can include lengthy extracts from post mortem honorific decrees which systematically conflate the deceased’s public and private virtues.

Hieradoumian tombstones – very unusually for Greek-language epitaphs – typically give the precise date of death in the format year, month, and day, and age at death is also very often specified. As a result, we have a large body of data for analyzing demographic patterns in the region. This chapter analyzes Hieradoumian patterns of seasonal mortality, broken down by sex and age. The results show both similarities and differences with other comparable datasets from other parts of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean. Infants and young children are heavily under-represented in the funerary record, as are (to a lesser extent) women. Since votive inscriptions are also often precisely dated, it is likewise possible to gain some sense of dominant seasonal patterns of religious activity in Roman Hieradoumia. The large number of dated epitaphs from the second-century AD allows us to trace the impact of the Antonine Plague in western Asia Minor; the chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the pathogens which may have shaped ‘normal’ seasonal mortality patterns in the region.

This chapter introduces the two inscribed monument types which were characteristic of Roman Hieradoumia: the familial epitaph and the propitiation-stēlē. Both categories of monument tend to be dated by year, month, and day, which allows us to map the development of the epigraphic habit in the region with unusual precision. Hieradoumian tombstones generally take the form of pedimental marble stēlai, often bearing a depiction of a wreath, either incised or in relief. The associated funerary inscriptions have a highly stereotyped structure, in which the deceased is ‘honoured’ by a smaller or larger group of family members, whose relation to the deceased is very precisely defined. These funerary monuments have several formal similarities to the propitiation-stēlai erected in many Hieradoumian rural sanctuaries, which narrate individual transgressions, divine punishments, and acts of propitiation. Taken together, these two categories of ‘commemorative’ monument provide a vivid picture of the moral universe of rural Hieradoumia in the first three centuries AD.

Hieradoumian epitaphs very often include lengthy lists of family members as co-commemorators of the deceased. As a result, the kinship terminology of Roman Hieradoumia is known to us in extraordinary detail. This chapter offers a full analysis of the region’s kinship terminological system, which turns out to have been richer and more complex than any other known from the Greco-Roman world. Matrilineal and patrilineal kin were clearly distinguished, as were different categories of affines. Although Hieradoumian kinship terminology shows close analogies with that employed in the Homeric epics, this was certainly not a matter of artificial archaizing, as is shown by the distinctive morphology and semantic range of certain Hieradoumian kinship terms (hykeros, ianatēr, kambdios). This terminological complexity is fundamental for our understanding of Hieradoumian social structure, which – or so it is argued here – was essentially kin-ordered.

This chapter reconstructs the typical physical form of the rural sanctuaries of Roman Hieradoumia, as well as their landholdings and distinctive labour regimes. The exiguous evidence from excavations and surveys is set alongside a lengthy inscription from a sanctuary of Apollo Kisauloddenos that describes the sacred buildings and their associated furniture. The mechanisms by which these sanctuaries accumulated their large landholdings are discussed, with a focus on the evidence for semi-compulsory ‘tithes’ on secular land-transactions. Sacred woodlands and groves were a standard feature of sanctuaries’ landholdings, and poaching from these woodlands was very widespread. Although these sanctuaries had a small permanent staff of sacred officials, much of the rural labour on their estates was provided through the Hieradoumian institution of ‘sacred slavery’, under which villagers were expected to offer their labour as hierodouloi for a fixed term of service. Low-level resistance to this compulsory labour service was endemic, illustrating the structural tensions that existed between Hieradoumian villagers and the powerful sanctuaries of the region.