Adoption in ancient Rome

Relief depicting imperial succession through adoption: Hadrian (right) adopted Antoninus Pius (center left), who in turn adopted the 17-year-old Marcus Aurelius (left) and the 8-year-old Lucius Verus; the head over Hadrian’s left shoulder may represent the guardian genius of Aelius Verus, Lucius's late father

Adoption in ancient Rome was primarily a legal procedure for transferring paternal power (potestas) to ensure succession in the male line within Roman patriarchal society. The Latin word adoptio refers broadly to "adoption", which was of two kinds: the transferral of potestas over a free person from one head of household to another; and adrogatio, when the adoptee had been acting sui iuris as a legal adult but assumed the status of unemancipated son for purposes of inheritance. Adoptio was a longstanding part of Roman family law pertaining to paternal responsibilities such as perpetuating the value of the family estate and ancestral rites (sacra), which were concerns of the Roman property-owning classes and cultural elite. Because adoption law developed to support the particular institutions of Roman society, adrogatio could take place only in the city of Rome until the reign of Diocletian in the late third century. During the Principate, adoption became a way to ensure imperial succession.

In contrast to modern adoption, Roman adoptio was neither designed nor intended to build emotionally satisfying families and support childrearing. Among all social classes, childless couples or those who wanted to expand the size of their families instead might foster children. Evidence is meager for the adoptio of young children for purposes other than securing a male heir, and probably would have been employed mostly by former slaves legitimating the status of their own children born into slavery. Roman women could own, inherit, and control property as citizens, and therefore could exercise prerogatives of the paterfamilias pertaining to ownership and inheritance, but adoption was largely a male-gendered practice.

Overview

A family genius depicted as a paterfamilias (1st century)

Adoption was carried out by the male who was head of his house, the paterfamilias, and his adopting did not make his wife a mother. Nor was marriage required; an adult bachelor could adopt in order to pass along his family name and potestas. One common pattern in Roman adoption was for a woman's childless brother to adopt her son.

The adoptee acquired the social rank of the adoptive family, with some exceptions. Most often adoption would have been a lateral move or a modest boost to the adoptee's standing and wealth, but a freedman could also be adopted. A slave might even be simultaneously manumitted and adopted by his former master, who became both his patron (patronus) and his "father". In the early Republic, a freedman through adoption gained the same status as the freeborn citizen who freed him. Publius Clodius Pulcher famously subverted the usual course of "adopting up", surrendering his patrician status and becoming a nominal plebeian in order to qualify for the office of tribune.

Adoption was a contract between the two families. The adopted child took the family name as his own. Along with this, the child kept his/her original name through the form of cognomen or essentially a nickname. The adopted child also maintained previous family connections and often leveraged this politically. Due to the power disparity that normally existed between the families involved in adoption, a fee was often given to the lower family to help with replacing (in most cases) the first-born son. Another case similar to adoption was the fostering of children; this effectively took place when a paterfamilias transferred his power to another man to be left in their care.

Adrogatio

Adrogation occurred where the person adopted was free, and consented to be adopted by another. It was done at the assembly of the people while the commonwealth subsisted, and later by a rescript of the emperors. The Roman practice of adrogation required the adrogator to be at least 60 years old, for otherwise it was expected that they be procreating rather than adopting. Exception was made for the infertile and those who wished to adopt within the family. This is contrasted with arrogation, in which one claims another for oneself without the right.

Augustus, the first emperor and perhaps Rome's most famous adoptee

Testamentary adoption

See also: Inheritance law in ancient Rome

Although adoptio was a practice aimed at furthering the succession of male privileges, both men and women could in effect "adopt" by passing along their property in a will with the condition that the heir carry on the family name (condicio nominis ferendi). Technically, this was not adoption but the "institution of an heir." Octavian, the future Augustus, was adopted in this way by his maternal great-uncle Julius Caesar.

Legitimation

Slaves lacked personhood under Roman law and therefore could neither contract a valid marriage nor institute an heir by means of a will. However, a quasi-marital union called contubernium was available to heterosexual slave couples with the owner's approval, and this union expressed an intent to marry if both parties gained the right to marriage upon manumission. Because a male slave did not possess the standing to assert patriarchal potestas, the child of an enslaved father was spurius, one whose father could not be legally identified as such—that is, illegitimate. The child's status was determined by the mother's. If a woman was manumitted before her partner and conceived a child with him after that, the child was not only freeborn but was born sui iuris, emancipated from the potestas of an adult male. If the father was later manumitted through a procedure that granted him full citizenship, he could legitimate his child through adrogatio. Retroactive legitimation upon marriage does not seem to have been automatic until late antiquity, under Justinian.

Imperial succession

Many Roman emperors came to power through adoption, either because their predecessors had no natural sons, or simply to ensure a smooth transition for the most capable candidate.

The Julio-Claudian dynasty

Julio Claudian Family Tree

Augustus, as he was known after he became the first Roman emperor, was adopted into the gens Julia in the will of his great uncle, Julius Caesar. He inherited Caesar's money, name, and auctoritas.

As Augustus's central role in the Principate solidified, it became increasingly important for him to designate an heir. He first adopted his daughter Julia's three sons by Marcus Agrippa, renaming them Gaius Caesar, Lucius Caesar, and Agrippa Caesar. After the former two died young and the latter was exiled, Augustus adopted his stepson, Tiberius Claudius Nero, on the condition that he adopt his own nephew, Germanicus (who was also Augustus's great nephew by blood). Tiberius succeeded Augustus, and after Tiberius's death, Germanicus's son Caligula became emperor.

Claudius adopted his stepson Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, who changed his name to Nero Claudius Caesar and succeeded Claudius as the emperor, Nero.

The adoptive emperors

Denarius issued under Hadrian; the reverse shows him joining hands with Trajan with the legend ADOPTIO

The Nerva-Antonine dynasty was also united by a series of adoptions. Nerva adopted the popular military leader Trajan. Trajan in turn took Publius Aelius Hadrianus as his protégé and, although the legitimacy of the process is debatable, Hadrian claimed to have been adopted and took the name Caesar Traianus Hadrianus when he became emperor.

Hadrian adopted Lucius Ceionius Commodus, who changed his name to Lucius Aelius Caesar but predeceased Hadrian. Hadrian then adopted Titus Aurelius Fulvus Boionius Arrius Antoninus, on condition that Antoninus in turn adopt both the natural son of the late Lucius Aelius and a promising young nephew of his wife. They ruled as Antoninus Pius, Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius respectively.

Niccolò Machiavelli described them as The Five Good Emperors and attributed their success to having been chosen for the role:

From the study of this history we may also learn how a good government is to be established; for while all the emperors who succeeded to the throne by birth, except Titus, were bad, all were good who succeeded by adoption, as in the case of the five from Nerva to Marcus. But as soon as the empire fell once more to the heirs by birth, its ruin recommenced.

This run of adoptive emperors came to an end when Marcus Aurelius named his biological son, Commodus, as his heir.

Adoption never became the official method of designating a successor, in part because Roman identity was based on citizenship with a visceral rejection of hereditary kingship. During the Principate, so called from Augustus's styling of himself as princeps (first among equals, in the manner of the princeps senatus), emperors consolidated their power by making use of the institutions of Republican Rome rather than overthrowing them outright. Augustus's early intentions seem to have been to apprentice and promote a successor on the basis of merit, but his longevity instead created an apparatus of centralized power from which his status as a private citizen could no longer be extricated. His fashioning of himself as "father of his country" enabled the transferral of his power over the Roman people in the same way that a paterfamilias of a family estate was bound to transfer his potestas whether or not the available successor was fully meritorious. A major transition in the means of imperial succession marks the periodization of Roman Imperial history into the Dominate, when Diocletian replaced adoption with the consortium imperii, designation of an heir by appointing him partner in imperium.

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