INTRODUCTION

My contribution to this volume is concerned with the phenomenon of fatherlessness as it is attested in the papyri and ostraca of Roman Egypt. The kind of fatherlessness considered in this paper is not to be understood as the physical, or possibly even actual, absence of a father, such as would make one a child of a single-parent family or an orphan. Rather, it is a legal formality that figures in the documents from Egypt in the Roman period, a compulsory self-designation for any free individual who could not establish legitimate paternity and was thus forbidden from using the name of his or her father (a patronymic) for the purposes of legal self-identification. Such individuals are attested fairly frequently and the terms used to describe them are apatōr (literally, “without a father” or “fatherless”) and chrēmatizōn mētros (“officially described [by the name] of the mother”). Both are legal terms to mark a fatherless person, who must give his or her mother's name instead of the normal patronymic when officially declaring his or her identity. They are synonymous and have roughly the same chronological span, as we shall see, but they are not interchangeable: the former is the more common of the two, since it is used in all parts of Egypt, other than Oxyrhynchus, where the latter is used instead.