Defining love and duty in Roman Egypt: A relational approach to the negotiation of affection and obligation in ancient families

This project examines a variety of documentary evidence preserved on papyrus in order to discern the nature of family obligations and negotiations for mutual support in Roman Egypt (ca. 30 BC – 4 th c. AD). Modern scholarship on ancient families has largely focused on literary, juristic and epigraphic evidence in order to understand ancient household structures, norms of piety and family dislocations. Papyrologists have also contributed to this work for some time through studies of family archives, demographic analysis of census returns and, more recently, through a number of social historical studies. My work aligns with theirs since I am seeking to trace the nature of ancient familial duties and claims of affection. To accomplish this goal, I employ a modified version of the life course framework to organize contracts, letters, court protocols, petitions and official applications into a series of moments common to the experience of many ancient families. I examine this evidence using a relational approach, a style of analysis crafted to trace human agency and how it is shaped through interactions with social institutions such as, in this context, the Roman military, liturgical system, professional guilds, temples and legal traditions. I focus on how these institutions interacted with demographic patterns and personal mobility in order to investiage how a variety of families negotiated problems of reputation and authority differently. I argue that urban propertied families generally had larger and more varied arrays of action available to them due to their lack of clarity regarding mutual obligations, and that links between propertied families and others of lower social position tended to complicate the latter\u27s relationships and to threaten their social standing. By contrast, rural and professional families enjoyed less extensive arrays of action due to fewer outside disruptions to their mutual obligations, which was largely a function of their lower mobility and thicker kinship networks. Traditional priestly families are least visible in papyri, although analysis suggests that their arrays of action were smaller than those of other rural and professional families due to their dependence on exemptions from taxation and liturgies as well as on Roman temple subventions