This does not mean they had no connection. The Roman concept of the household — the *familia* — encompassed far more than the biological family as understood in contemporary terms. A Roman household of any size and standing would have included enslaved persons, freed persons who maintained ties of obligation to the former enslaving household, clients, workers, and sometimes the children of relatives or associates. The *familia* was a legal, economic, and social institution in which biological kinship was one thread among many.
Historian Steven Tuck, commenting publicly on the 2024 findings, noted that Roman “family” included the whole household. This observation reframes what the DNA finding means: it does not demonstrate that the four individuals had no reason to be together, no bonds of loyalty or obligation or care that would explain their final proximity. It demonstrates that those bonds were not the bonds of biological parenthood or biological siblinghood.
The four people who died together under a collapsed staircase in the House of the Golden Bracelet may have been members of the same household in a fully Roman sense of that word — an economic and social unit held together by legal relationships, obligations, affections, and history that have left no genetic trace. The DNA result removes one narrative. It does not replace it with another.
—
## The Embracing Pair: Two Maidens Who Were Not Two Maidens
The study also analyzed a pair of individuals who had been found embracing — their bodies in close contact, pressed together in what appeared to be a final mutual act. This pair had attracted attention since their discovery in 1914, when they were found alongside seven other individuals. The interpretation that attached itself to them most durably was that they were sisters, or a mother and daughter.