- Title
- Adoption and heirship in Greece and Rome
- Creator
- Lindsay, Hugh
- Relation
- A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds p. 346-360
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781444390766.ch21
- Publisher
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2011
- Description
- In Greece and Rome the head of the family had special responsibility for ensuring continuity, which was considered necessary not just for prestige, although this was a major factor, but also so that there was a nominated person to take over responsibility for family cults (sacra) after his decease. Financial stability for the dependents of the deceased was also in this way protected. Thus the identity of the heir was important both for religious and practical reasons. No doubt the balance between these factors was managed differently in accordance with cultural and personal beliefs. Most straightforward was the situation where the deceased had married and produced children. In both cultures preference lay with male heirs and this generated some of the pressures in the inheritance systems. There has been debate since Victorian times over the extent to which both succession systems evolved from an assumed starting point where only natural descendants could be heirs. In Greece the turning point has been seen as the sixth-century BCE laws of Solon, which were thought to allow adoption for the first time, and at Rome the fifth-century Decemviral laws have a similar function. However, in both cases these are simply the earliest sources of written law within the culture, and may not have the role of innovation assigned to them even in antiquity. Similar evolutionary arguments have been applied to wills.
- Subject
- adoption; heirship; family law; Classical Greece; Ancient Rome
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1316585
- Identifier
- uon:23207
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781405187671
- Language
- eng
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