ROMAN CITIZENSHIP, MARRIAGE, AND FAMILY NETWORKS MYLES LAVAN This is the author-final text of M. Lavan, ‘Roman citizenship, marriage, and family networks’, in M. Lavan and C. Ando (eds.), Roman and local citizenship in the long second century CE, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 103-39. Please cite the published version. Roman citizenship is usually conceived of as a source of privilege. But it could also be a burden, since it entailed a number of obligations that were exclusive to Roman citizens (henceforth “Romans”). 1 These arose particularly in matters of marriage and inheritance. One example is the requirement for a Roman will to be written in Latin, which must have posed challenges for many of the Greek-speaking Romans in the East of the empire, not to forget those in the West who spoke languages other than Latin. 2 A second example—the main subject of this chapter—is the strict regime governing the transmission of citizen status and property to the children of unions between Romans and non-Romans (“mixed unions”). Romans were never prevented from marrying peregrines, but Roman law restricted their capacity to transmit their citizen status to their children if they did so. It compounded this disadvantage by making it difficult for them to leave property to any peregrine children. These restrictive features of the Roman law of marriage, status, and inheritance have received growing attention in recent years, particularly from historians of the Greek East. 3 This chapter aims to advance on this literature in three respects. First, I try to do justice to the complexity of the legal issues, which are less straightforward than sometimes suggested. There were a number of exceptions and qualifications that allowed some Romans in mixed unions to transmit their status to their children. The existence of these potential loopholes means that the impact of the legal regime is ultimately an empirical question that can only be addressed through quantitative analysis of actual cases. I will show that inscriptions and papyri show not just that some Romans in mixed unions did indeed have non-Roman children but that the prejudicial treatment of mixed unions seems to have produced a pronounced tendency toward endogamy among Romans in mixed-status communities—at least, in the propertied classes. It is also essential to bear in mind the variety of juridical ecologies in which Romans lived. 4 The law here would have had different effects in Roman, Latin, and peregrine communities; in the latter two cases, its consequences would also have depended on the relative proportion of Romans and non-Romans, which varied widely from community to community. 1 I use “Romans” as a shorthand for “Roman citizens,” both for economy and to avoid confusion when I use “citizen” with regard to membership of one of the constituent communities of the empire (a muncipium, colonia, or other civitas). 2 See “Other Rituals and Practices of Citizenship” in the introduction to this volume. 3 See esp. Roberto 2009; Kirbihler 2012b; Ferrary 2014, 51–56; Pont 2016, 244; Besson 2017, 211– 215; Besson 2020, 305–313. 4 See “The Status of Communities in Roman Public Law” in the introduction to this volume.