This chapter focuses on the interactions of the Roman aristocracy – the members of the senatorial and equestrian orders – with the court, taking as its theme the interplay between routine and disruption. The scale of these interactions fluctuated over time, as did the methods by which emperors signalled their favour for particular aristocrats, thereby creating an (unstable) hierarchy of aristocrats at court. The amici principis (‘friends of the emperor’) formed their own subgroup, with an internal hierarchy; the emperor’s relationship with them was shaped by cultural expectations about amicitia. Some aristocrats were important advisers to the emperor, so the chapter examines advisers and the role of advisory councils (consilia). The chapter reflects on whether the relationship between the emperor and aristocratic courtiers should be characterized as one of ‘domestication’, arguing for an often-volatile situation in which attempts by emperors to control aristocrats (and vice versa) were ad hoc and short-lived.

In late medieval and Renaissance Italian societies, family was conceived as a quasi-corporate entity, continuing across generations. But in law ownership was conceived as an attribute of individuals, and generally of only one person in a household, the paterfamilias. Legal experts worked to accommodate legal notions to the realities of family life, which were close to what anthropologists have come to term an economy of sharing (with multiple and overlapping rights). Law thus came to provide instruments that helped perpetuate families or terminate them. It fell to the paterfamilias to manage property and use legal instruments to do so in order that the patrimony, substantia, could be transmitted to the next generation.