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CLOSE-KIN MARRIAGE IN ROMAN ANATOLIA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2017

Peter Thonemann
Peter Thonemann*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
*
*[email protected].
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Abstract

Many societies have a normative preference for close-kin marriage of one or another variety. Whether this was true of any part of the Roman world has been hotly debated in recent decades. Earlier scholarship suggests that marriage between close kin may have been considerably more common in some parts of the Roman world (e.g. Egypt) than in others (e.g. the Latin West). This paper assembles the evidence for close-kin marriage throughout the Asia Minor peninsula during the Roman Imperial period, and concludes that close-kin marriage – particularly in the form of FBD (father's brother's daughter) first-cousin marriage – may have been unusually common and/or normatively desirable in Lykia and neighbouring regions.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Cambridge Classical Journal , Volume 63 , December 2017 , pp. 143 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2017. Published by Cambridge University Press 

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Footnotes

This paper was conceived at Lamledra, presented to seminar audiences in Cambridge and New York (Columbia), and much improved by two anonymous CCJ referees. My thanks to all.

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