ABSTRACT
The exercise of greater influence in their marital relations must have been of no small importance to those Christian wives who did have children. Because of their position in Roman law, as essentially outside their husband’s family, constituting in some sort their own individual family unit; and because of the comprehensive nature of patria potestas, Roman women were at a considerable legal disadvantage in their relations with their children. Jane Gardner has rightly pointed out that where patria potestas included custody of and disciplinary powers over the child concerned, ownership of the child’s property and ultimate right of decision on education, marriage and domicile of the child, and where in the case of disagreements between the parents concerning the child’s welfare the mother’s wishes carried no legal weight, the extent of the mother’s influence on the child was decided by her relationship with her husband.1 In this respect, then, Christian wives were beginning to have some advantage over their pagan counterparts. It is now necessary to examine to what extent they used their increasing centrality in the specifically Christian perception of the family to influence their children according to the lights of their beliefs; and in what respects their relations with their children differed from those of their pagan counterparts of a century or two earlier-and what trends in maternal thinking we can see that are specifically Christian in origin.
