ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Roman citizens from the city of Rome and on the period from the end of the Second Punic War to the end of Severan rule. The source material is unevenly distributed across this time frame. There is more literary evidence for the last fifty years of the Republic and the first century of the Principate, while the epigraphic evidence tends to be concentrated in the first centuries of the imperial period. It is therefore particularly interesting that they combine to prove a consistent and growing emphasis on ideals of conjugal and familial love from the late Republic and throughout the period studied. By the late Republic, there was a decline in the proportion of women who passed on marriage into the manus of the husband and thus into the inheritance network and legal membership of his kin group, which included her own children.
