ABSTRACT
Under the influence of classical literary critics, social historians have increasingly come to appreciate the contribution of literary works to the construction of Roman categories and hierarchies of status and gender. It should be remembered, however, that literature and rhetoric constituted only two among the many spheres of symbolic discourse that contributed to this cultural system. The task of social historians is to explore the other, non-literary, spheres, both verbal and non-verbal, and to ask how they reinforced or stood in tension with the literature written by elite men. For insights into how social and gender categories were marked and ordered, the household is the crucial site to examine, because the power of the social and gender hierarchies must have depended on children being socialized to accept them as natural by their earliest experiences. Through an analysis of the ways in which freeborn women and slaves were differentiated or assimilated in habits of address, law, and ritual, I wish to highlight an important dimension of the hierarchy: that of honor, which is related to, but not identical with, that of power. While freeborn women and slaves were assimilated in some respects in their subordination, other forms of symbolic behavior sharply distinguished the honorless slave from the honorable matron in ways that should not be trivialized. The jurist Ulpian focused precisely on honor in his definition of the mater familias as a woman “who has not lived dishonorably (inhoneste)” {Digest 50.16.46.1).
