Explanation: Emperor Augustus, in order to provide a more ‘robust’ growth rate of the citizen population, restricted single citizens, male and female, of marriageable age from receiving any inheritances which might otherwise be left to them. Much like modern pro-natalist policies, its effect was… limited, at best. It’s hard to force people who don’t want to have kids to have them.
But Augustus had come down quite firmly on the side of Italian nativism during his rise to power, up to and including casting out the Romanized Gauls Julius Caesar had put into the Senate, and couldn’t countenance broadening the citizen body to furriners - so yelling at young folk to have kids it was!
Funny enough, many of the people he most wanted to procreate were the wealthy elites, who were already living the good life, and would’ve had a household of slaves to take care of anything they could possibly need. Large families still simply were not appealing to most of them.
Better-off people tend to have fewer children in the present day, but I recall reading that this was generally not true untill the recent past. I wonder if I’m misinformed or if the trend is real but Romans of that time were an exception. (Or maybe they weren’t an exception and Octavian was just stirring up a moral panic, perhaps deliberately.)
There’s definite, if limited, evidence that Roman elite families of the Principate (ie what most people think of when they think ‘Roman Empire’) very often were small, even accounting for infant mortality - the ius trium also passed by Augustus only demanded three children to be born, not to survive to any age - and yet wealthy Roman citizens and couples constantly petitioned to get it for other reasons, because they didn’t want to pop out three kids.
When people have lots of kids, it’s either for reasons of resources (need labor on the farm), cultural values (God hates it when you pull out), or for lack of other options (if we don’t reproduce, the tribe will die out!). Romans, and especially Roman elites, didn’t have either of those problems - more kids would be a drain on resources, while population was not an actual concern to anyone except a handful of busybodies like Augustus. Rome was massive, the population wasn’t going to die off, and ‘new men’ from the lower (or at least middle) classes were always moving up to the big leagues due to how Roman society was structured. And if you really needed an heir but wasted your kid-making years, adoption was very widely accepted in Rome. So there wasn’t a whole lot of incentive for Roman elites during the height of the Empire to have a lot of kids.
There were still Roman elites who did have, or try to have, large families. Emperor Marcus Aurelius, for example, had thirteen kids, of whom only five survived him. He was certainly trying to provide an heir for the dynasty!
By contrast, the earlier Emperor Vespasian, more typically of his class, had only three kids (two sons and a daughter), all of whom survived him - but Vespasian’s babymaking days were over by the time he realized he was going to be Emperor, while Aurelius was always aware that having an heir could mean the difference between peace and war upon his death.
It’s wild that Marcus Aurelius had so many kids in part to help the empire when he was the last of the five good emperors who were all adopted into the family. I’ve always thought that they were the good emperors because they actually were selected for the job. I don’t know if there is scholarship to back that up or just an assumption I’ve made. But it seems like the empire would have been better served by adopting someone with talent.
I would definitely say that they were good Emperors largely because they were adopted for the job, and Emperor Hadrian explicitly acknowledged the meritocratic implications, but the core reason why the adoptions happened were because the Emperors doing the adopting were childless gay guys (or, in Antoninus Pius’s case, a widower who only had daughters left).
“I, my friends, have not been permitted by nature to have a son, but you have made it possible by legal enactment. Now there is this difference between the two methods — that a begotten son turns out to be whatever sort of person Heaven pleases, whereas one that is adopted a man takes to himself as the result of a deliberate selection. 3 Thus by the process of nature a maimed and witless child is often given to a parent, but by process of selection one of sound body and sound mind is certain to be chosen. For this reason I formerly selected Lucius before all others — a person such as I could never have expected a child of my own to become. 4 But since Heaven has bereft us of them, I have found as emperor for you in his place the man whom I now give you, one who is noble, mild, tractable, prudent, neither young enough to do anything reckless nor old enough to neglect aught, one who has been brought up according to the laws and one who has exercised authority in accordance with our traditions, so that he is not ignorant of any matters pertaining to the imperial office, but could handle them all effectively. 5 I refer to our Antoninus here. Although I know him to be the least inclined of men to become involved in affairs and to be far from desiring any such power still I do not think that he will deliberately disregard either me or you, but will accept the office even against his will.”
Hadrian on adoption, as quoted by Cassius Dio
Emperor Septimius Severus, the successor of the civil war after Aurelius’s dipshit son Commodus was overthrown, reportedly mocked Aurelius (in private, after Aurelius and Commodus were dead) for not killing Commodus in the metaphorical cradle for being a dipshit and saving the Empire at the expense of his nitwit son.
Of course, Severus had two nitwit sons that he didn’t ice and passed the Empire on to, so he was hypocritical as fuck, but the notion was there.
Explanation: Emperor Augustus, in order to provide a more ‘robust’ growth rate of the citizen population, restricted single citizens, male and female, of marriageable age from receiving any inheritances which might otherwise be left to them. Much like modern pro-natalist policies, its effect was… limited, at best. It’s hard to force people who don’t want to have kids to have them.
But Augustus had come down quite firmly on the side of Italian nativism during his rise to power, up to and including casting out the Romanized Gauls Julius Caesar had put into the Senate, and couldn’t countenance broadening the citizen body to furriners - so yelling at young folk to have kids it was!
Improve material conditions of parenthood?
Funny enough, many of the people he most wanted to procreate were the wealthy elites, who were already living the good life, and would’ve had a household of slaves to take care of anything they could possibly need. Large families still simply were not appealing to most of them.
Better-off people tend to have fewer children in the present day, but I recall reading that this was generally not true untill the recent past. I wonder if I’m misinformed or if the trend is real but Romans of that time were an exception. (Or maybe they weren’t an exception and Octavian was just stirring up a moral panic, perhaps deliberately.)
There’s definite, if limited, evidence that Roman elite families of the Principate (ie what most people think of when they think ‘Roman Empire’) very often were small, even accounting for infant mortality - the ius trium also passed by Augustus only demanded three children to be born, not to survive to any age - and yet wealthy Roman citizens and couples constantly petitioned to get it for other reasons, because they didn’t want to pop out three kids.
When people have lots of kids, it’s either for reasons of resources (need labor on the farm), cultural values (God hates it when you pull out), or for lack of other options (if we don’t reproduce, the tribe will die out!). Romans, and especially Roman elites, didn’t have either of those problems - more kids would be a drain on resources, while population was not an actual concern to anyone except a handful of busybodies like Augustus. Rome was massive, the population wasn’t going to die off, and ‘new men’ from the lower (or at least middle) classes were always moving up to the big leagues due to how Roman society was structured. And if you really needed an heir but wasted your kid-making years, adoption was very widely accepted in Rome. So there wasn’t a whole lot of incentive for Roman elites during the height of the Empire to have a lot of kids.
There were still Roman elites who did have, or try to have, large families. Emperor Marcus Aurelius, for example, had thirteen kids, of whom only five survived him. He was certainly trying to provide an heir for the dynasty!
By contrast, the earlier Emperor Vespasian, more typically of his class, had only three kids (two sons and a daughter), all of whom survived him - but Vespasian’s babymaking days were over by the time he realized he was going to be Emperor, while Aurelius was always aware that having an heir could mean the difference between peace and war upon his death.
It’s wild that Marcus Aurelius had so many kids in part to help the empire when he was the last of the five good emperors who were all adopted into the family. I’ve always thought that they were the good emperors because they actually were selected for the job. I don’t know if there is scholarship to back that up or just an assumption I’ve made. But it seems like the empire would have been better served by adopting someone with talent.
I would definitely say that they were good Emperors largely because they were adopted for the job, and Emperor Hadrian explicitly acknowledged the meritocratic implications, but the core reason why the adoptions happened were because the Emperors doing the adopting were childless gay guys (or, in Antoninus Pius’s case, a widower who only had daughters left).
Emperor Septimius Severus, the successor of the civil war after Aurelius’s dipshit son Commodus was overthrown, reportedly mocked Aurelius (in private, after Aurelius and Commodus were dead) for not killing Commodus in the metaphorical cradle for being a dipshit and saving the Empire at the expense of his nitwit son.
Of course, Severus had two nitwit sons that he didn’t ice and passed the Empire on to, so he was hypocritical as fuck, but the notion was there.