Hadrian

Hadrian appears briefly in Simone de Beauvoir’s account of Roman women’s changing legal position. His legislation is cited for a defined inheritance provision: a mother with three children could succeed to an inheritance from a deceased child when no other heirs existed. The example belongs to a broader discussion of how Roman law sometimes recognized women’s claims within the family while leaving their status subject to male authority and state control.

The Inheritance Provision

In the account, a Senate decree issued under Hadrian entitled a mother of three to an ab intestat succession right in the specified case: her child had died without heirs. The rule made motherhood relevant to a woman’s legal claim over family property, but the evidence describes a limited entitlement, not a general transfer of independent power to women.

Roman Family Law and Women’s Status

The provision forms part of a gradual change in Roman law as state authority grew and earlier powers held by fathers, husbands, guardians, and marital arrangements were contested or restricted. Women had been subject to guardianship and could face competing claims from their paternal and conjugal families. Over time, legal changes afforded women some means of navigating those claims, including changes involving property, guardianship, and family succession.

The book presents these developments as neither a simple story of emancipation nor proof that formal rights determined women’s lived circumstances. A woman’s concrete position depended in part on her economic role and the family structures governing her. Later legislation under Marcus Aurelius is described as extending inheritance rights further: from 178 onward, children became their mother’s heirs in preference to her male relatives, and daughters inherited like their brothers.

Significance of the Reference

Hadrian’s name anchors one particular legal measure in a wider historical argument: women’s status changed through institutions shaped by family interests and public authority, and a specific legal gain did not itself end their subordination. The reference is brief and gives no account of Hadrian’s personal motives or of how often the entitlement was used; its significance lies in the concrete example of a mother’s conditional inheritance right within a legal system whose treatment of women continued to evolve.