Articles

Domestic Partnership, Brotherhood, and Queer Family-Making: The use of societas omnium bonorum in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses 10,13–16 and Petronius’s Satyrica

Authors

  • Christopher Cochran

Abstract

In Apuleius’s Metamorphoses 10,13–16, two brothers live together and share a joint culinary business described as a societas (“partnership”). The men who form a ‘ménage à trois’ in Petronius’s Satyrica call each other frater (“brother”) and describe their shared economic activity in the language of societas. Both groups of men form queer families which are conceptualized as brotherhoods and organized as legal partnerships. In Roman law, societas is associated with fraternitas through its origin in the older consortium ercto non cito, a partnership of co-heirs (Gai. Inst. 3,154a). The chosen brotherhood of societas provides a framework for queer family-making.

Author Biography

Christopher Cochran

Christopher Cochran is an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is currently finishing revisions of his first monograph, Freed into Slavery: The Law of Enslavement and the Return Narrative in the Ancient Novel. His research interests in Greek and Roman fiction include especially their intersections with Roman law and with queer reception, among other topics. Beyond the ancient novel, he also works on applying modern second language acquisition research to the teaching of classical languages. He regularly leads professional development programming on SLA-informed methods for teaching Latin and ancient Greek, and he is the director of the Conventiculum Bostoniense, UMass Boston's immersive spoken Latin summer program.

Published

2026-09-16

Issue

2026: AN 21, preliminary version

Section

Articles
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