Legal Stumbling-Blocks for Lower-Class Families in Rome

Abstract The nuclear family of parents and children is not an institution of Roman civil law. It exists before and beyond the law, in the realm of instinct, what the Romans called ius naturale, natural law. Natural law, said Ulpian (D. r. r. r. 3 ), was common to all living creatures, on land, in the sea, in the air. From it came the joining together of male and female, ‘which we call matrimonium’, and the procreation and rearing of children.