The introductory chapter details what is gained by using the concept of social role when studying power relations in Late Antiquity and how it ties in well with ancient ideas about why people act in the way they do. It shows how Late Antique thought and practice conceptualized social hierarchies in moral terms and argues that precisely the expectation that social and moral hierarchies coincide injects the dynamism in social interactions that this book chronicles. It also underscores that society was conceived of as held together by justice and shows how this was intertwined with hierarchical conceptions of society and the cosmos.

This chapter explores the definition of the notion of ‘family’ from an EU law perspective. The chapter first acknowledges the variable geometry of the family, and the absence of a uniform category of ‘family’ in EU legal norms. The chapter then shows that, despite the fragmentation of sources and the modulation of family circles, the way in which the EU characterises a person as a ‘family member’ obeys a form of logic and expresses a certain rationality. Borrowing from the work of Morgan and his notion of ‘doing family’, the chapter demonstrates that in addition to the de jure family members, other persons are counted as family members on the basis of them ‘behaving’ like family members. Barbou des Places concludes that ‘family members’ is a defined category of EU law: it designates the groups of people who are assumed to perform – or asked to prove that they do perform – different functions like education, care, protection and socialisation. It is subsequently emphasised that these roles are central because they contribute to a broader ambition, namely, participating in the cohesion of the whole of European society.

This chapter discusses the contextualization of human traits in social roles. It begins by exploring how personality traits relate to social roles, then it extrapolates those findings related to virtues and discusses theory and research on social roles and virtue traits. The discussion of the social role contextualization is based on identity theory, which explains that social roles are repetitive patterns of action that are included in social structures and result in role identity formation in the individual. The chapter reiterates that up-to-date trait conceptualizations do not view them as simplistic behavioral tendencies that manifest in any social role. Instead, traits are currently understood as influenced by social role expectations. Practical wisdom plays a large part in the expression of virtues through social roles. Practical wisdom adds an element to virtue expression and social roles that is absent in personality research because some individuals see more opportunities for virtue trait expression within a role than others. It then clarifies this theoretical discussion with examples of common role and virtue enactments from the parenting, teaching, and healing roles. It concludes by discussing how a virtue perspective adds important elements (agency, aspiration, and practical wisdom) to the contextualization of traits.