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Ius Necandi: The Role of Pater Familias
In some of our classes, we broke off into groups in order to create a skit that would enact a iudicium domesticum, or a family assembly that had to convene to resolve a serious family matter.
The scenario for our skit was a son who had stolen a sum of money from a neighbor’s house – the students were to create a skit that would reflect each family member’s role in the decision of what to do to resolve the problem.
A lot of the skits seemed to deal with punishing the son with an execution from the pater familias. Obviously, this would have been chosen by our students as a way to heighten the drama, but the fact of the matter is although a pater familias had power of life and death (ius necandi) over his household members, it was not typically used.
Most of these cases were found in mythology, and as such the general feeling from the Romans was not one of apathy but instead they would have been abhorred by a father killing his children – no matter the situation. Patricide also was not typically accepted by the Romans.
There are practical reasons for this, too. As a married couple got older, their children would provide support for their lifestyle – killing their children meant damaging their own future prospects as well. There was also the concept of pietas, which guided a pater familias in running his household. Pietas is a social force that compels good Romans to do what is best for the group – it is the notion of one’s duty, to look beyond the self and do what is good for the common good. A Roman pater familias wanted his family to thrive and grow, much like small business owners dream of creating a corporate empire themselves that would transcend generations.
For this very reason, there was little incentive for a pater familias to execute his children. In fact, it was pretty much the opposite for the Romans who actually leaned more towards spoiling their children, which we see in Cicero and his letters to his own son. Cicero was always worrying about Marcus junior’s education and whether or not Cicero himself raised him right. This was steered by his pietas, that Roman social force that propelled a strong familial connection among its citizens. This, naturally, made sons less likely to do the kinds of things that would drive a father to kill him in the first place.
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