Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Family Law

state) was allowed to inflict those punishments. In family law, however, the Christian influence is somewhat clearer and more immediate. It is also true that “Christian” attitudes at the time were very much in flux. And in some instances, changes in law parallel or extend trends that had already come into being; but even then, Christianity pushed change further and faster. The most plausible cases of Christian influence are three. The penalties for the celibate established by the emperor Augustus were abolished by Constantine, the first Christian-influenced emperor. He also ended the tradition of free, unilateral divorce, outside of cases of grave fault. It should be noted, however, that after Constantine’s drastic change the rules shifted frequently between the two extremes over the next two centuries. Also, contrary to what one might have expected from Christian texts, divorce by mutual consent remained unchanged. Constantine also eliminated execution of children by their fathers, though this seems to have vanished in practice long before. In Chapter 15, we noted a shift in inheritance law from seeing the “fam ily” in terms of chains of fathers and sons to an emphasis on the nuclear family. This shift continued under the Christian emperors, but not for obviously religious reasons.

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