The role of modern fathers has received a great deal of attention in the last couple of decades from multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary perspectives, and the same is true for ancient fathers, with particular attention paid to his relationship to, and power over, his family. Yet, while the former usually treat the absence of the father as an important, sometimes even pivotal, aspect in understanding the social dynamics of the modern family, the latter almost never address his absence. This gap in the scholarship is made all the more glaring by the fact that the problem of children growing up fatherless was far more acute in antiquity than in modern societies: In fact, one of the most startling demographic facts to have been established about the ancient world in the past decade is that approximately one-third of all children in every social and economic strata all over the ancient Mediterranean would have lost their fathers before they reached the age of 15. These findings challenge the assumption that growing up fatherless is a modern phenomenon, a product of growing individuation in Western societies in recent decades. In fact, the rate of children raised by single mothers, by relatives or stepparents was much higher in antiquity than today.

We believe that it is high time that the consequences of these demographic findings be explored with respect to social realities of daily life, e.g., family formation, household structure, surrogate fathers, and the emotional, economic and social consequences for the individual who suffered the early loss of his or her father. This volume is therefore devoted to investigating the individual, social, economical consequences of a father`s absence and the coping strategies employed to alleviate the effects of fatherlessness.