ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the mother's role in her son's transition to manhood. Certain recurrent elements emerge from the study of the Roman mother and the older son. As an upper-class Roman son grew into adolescence, then adulthood, he passed in effect from the world of common childish experience into a more emphatically masculine domain. The Roman mother, aristocratic or otherwise, was expected to worry over her son and to urge him on to proper achievements. He was expected to defer to her wishes within recognised limits. Aristocratic career patterns made it probable that mothers would invest their own ambitions for political power in their sons, which could in itself have proved a source of friction or frustration, but if both learned to moderate their expectations and curb their impatience, the son's ambitions could become a source of continuing mutual satisfaction, since his achievements reflected favourably on his mother.
