Members of the Familia. A familia included everyone who lived in the same household. The oldest male in the house was known as the paterfamilias. The paterfamilias had ultimate authority over the whole familia. Likewise, the oldest woman in the house was the materfamilias. Unlike the paterfamilias, the authority of the materfamilias was not legal; rather, she held a position of respect and was able to exercise the authority that this respect gave her. A husband and a wife (vir and uxor respectively, or coniunx, a word like "spouse") were not the paterfamilias or materfamilias, if they lived with the husband's parents. Children, liberi ("the free ones"), were members of the familia, but only of their father's gens ("family"). Likewise, a wife remained a member of her gens even after her marriage, unless she married with manus, a...