Family Imagery and Family Values in Roman Italy

Abstract

This chapter looks at family portrait groups on Republican and early imperial funerary commemoration that reflect the same set of attitudes toward family life and shows how the emerging urban middle class of Italy, former slaves in Rome, and citizens of mixed origins in Cisalpine Gaul in northern Italy, used family imagery to position themselves in the mainstream culture. Both sets of reliefs reflect the emergence of a social group, whether of freeborn or libertine origins, with middle to upper-middle means, which had no existing tradition of self-representation of its own. For freedmen in Republican Rome, the family was a particularly apt symbol of freedom, the social institution which best represented their rise in status, and a potent metaphor for their very particular personal achievements. Representations of family portraits offered a means of identification with Rome and its traditions while simultaneously articulating aspects of status and local identity.

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