ABSTRACT
Our immediate family generally consists of mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters. When people go to college, many young women join a sorority (sisterhood) and many young men join a fraternity (brotherhood). Marriage and children follow. Roman home life centered on the father, or the pater familias. He would decide whether you would go to school, who and when you would marry, and all other important decisions that involved the entire family. That doesn’t mean the mater familias or mother was without influence. In fact, Roman history is filled with accounts of powerful women who constituted the real “power behind the throne.”
