The Single Life In The Roman And Later Roman World Christian Laes by Christian Laes instant download after payment.

Using a variety of historical sources and methodological approaches,
this book presents the first large-scale study of single men and women
in the Roman world, from the Roman Republic to Late Antiquity,
and covering virtually all periods of the ancient Mediterranean.
It asks how singleness was defined and for what reasons people might
find themselves unmarried. While marriage was generally favoured by
philosophers and legislators, with the arguments against it largely
confined to genres like satire and comedy, the advent of Christianity
brought about a more complex range of thinking regarding its
desirability. Demographic, archaeological and socioeconomic perspectives
are considered, and in particular the relationship of singleness
to Roman household and family structures. The volume
concludes by introducing a number of comparative perspectives,
drawn from the early Islamic world and from other parts of Europe
down to and including the nineteenth century, in order to highlight
possibilities for the Roman world.