Society, Houses and Customs

1. Overview

Romulan society is old, ranked and private. It is built on families, and families are gathered into houses. It prizes dignity, loyalty and self-control. It honours military service above almost every other kind. It is suspicious of strangers, contemptuous of the Remans who serve it, and watchful of its own members. And it keeps its secrets, from outsiders and from itself, as a matter of habit rather than policy.

Much of what follows comes from people who have lived among Romulans: liaison officers of the Dominion War, crews of the joint recovery initiative that began in 2377, and Romulans who have left the Empire. Their accounts agree on the broad picture and differ on the details. Customs vary between Romulus and the provinces, between great houses and humble families, and between generations. Where this article describes a custom, it describes what is most often reported, not a rule that every Romulan follows.

The physical and mental make-up that underlies all of this is covered in Romulan Biology and Mind. The language, names and forms of address are covered in Language, Names and Address.

2. Family and House

2.1 The family first

A Romulan’s first loyalty is to their family. Children are raised to understand that what they do reflects on their parents, their siblings and their line, and that a family’s standing is built slowly and lost quickly. Family members are expected to support one another in public whatever they say in private. A Romulan who speaks against their own family before outsiders has done something most Romulans find hard to forgive.

That loyalty runs both ways. A family is expected to protect its members, to find them positions, to settle their quarrels and to stand behind them in trouble. It also runs across time. Romulans speak of their ancestors as present members of the family, keep their names alive, and feel a duty to hand on to their children a standing at least as good as the one they received.

2.2 The houses

Above the family stands the house. A house is a group of related families sharing a name, a history and an interest, led by its eldest or most senior line. The great noble houses are old, wealthy and powerful, with estates on Romulus and in the core worlds, members in the Senate and the Fleet, and long memories of alliances and betrayals. Lesser houses gather around them as allies and clients. Most Romulans belong to a house of some kind, even if a modest one.

The Restored Senate that first sat in 2382 was rebuilt from the surviving noble houses and the provincial governors, and the houses are stronger in politics today than they were before 2379. See Government of the Empire.

Three houses appear often in Federation sources and illustrate the type:

• House Ieveth, an old house of the Hesthral Highlands on Romulus, known for a long line of senators and for marrying carefully.
• House Hrannal, a Fleet house: for generations its sons and daughters have served as officers, and several of its members have reached the rank of admiral.
• House Saevrin, a merchant house of the port city of Thelvesh, rich and well connected but held by the older houses to be a little beneath them.

Houses rise and fall. A house that backs the wrong side in a struggle can lose its estates, its offices and its members’ lives. Several houses did not survive the Silence of 2379 to 2382, and others rose to fill their places. Romulans remember these things, and an alliance between houses is often judged less by what it promises than by what the two houses did to each other three generations ago.

2.3 Marriage

Marriage among the noble houses is a matter for the house as well as the couple. Matches are made to join interests, settle old quarrels or bring a promising family into the house’s circle. Among ordinary families the house matters less and the couple more, but parents still expect a say. A marriage outside one’s class is possible but frowned on. A marriage to a non-Romulan is rare and, in most houses, a scandal.

3. Honour and Face

Romulans place great weight on dignity kept before others. Federation observers often call this “face”, and some Romulans who have learned Federation Standard have adopted the word, though their own term carries more weight than the English one. To keep face is to be seen as composed, capable and in control. To lose it is to be seen as weak, foolish, or exposed.

The idea that sums this up best for outsiders is what Federation sources render as the held face: the ideal of keeping one’s feelings behind an unmoving expression, revealing nothing that one has not chosen to reveal. Children are taught it early. Officers are judged by it. A Romulan who loses control in public, shouts, weeps or begs, has lost more than an argument.

Honour is related but not the same. A Romulan’s honour rests on keeping their word when given, protecting their family and house, serving the Empire well, and never being made a fool of. It does not rest on telling the truth. Deception of an enemy or a rival is not dishonourable to a Romulan. Being caught in it can be. That distinction matters a great deal to anyone who deals with Romulans, and it explains much of their conduct along the Neutral Zone: a provocation that cannot be proved is, by Romulan lights, a clean one.

Romulans also respect an enemy who shows the same qualities. Starfleet records from the first face-to-face encounter in 2266 record a Romulan commander who spoke of his Starfleet opponent with real respect before he destroyed his own ship rather than be taken. That pattern, respect for a worthy enemy alongside a refusal to give way, still runs through Romulan conduct today.

4. Class and Station

Romulan society is ranked, and Romulans know their place in it and everyone else’s. The broad layers, as Federation observers describe them, are these:

Movement between layers is possible but slow. The most reliable path upward is the Imperial Fleet, which has long promoted able officers from humble families, and which made itself the Empire’s most trusted institution during the Silence. The ministries offer a second path. Wealth alone does not make a house noble, as House Saevrin and others have learned.

5. The Military in Society

The Imperial Fleet is the most respected institution in the Empire. Service in it is seen as the highest form of duty, and a family with an officer in the Fleet holds that up with pride. Many noble houses send at least one child into the Fleet in each generation, and the great Fleet houses send most of them.

The Fleet’s standing rose further after 2379. In the years without a Senate, the Fleet held the Empire together by refusing to take sides among the rival houses and governors. Romulans of every class remember that, and the Fleet is trusted in a way the Senate is not. Fleet officers carry that respect home with them. In company, a Romulan officer usually outranks a civilian of the same family standing.

The Tal Shiar holds a different place. It is feared rather than honoured. Few Romulans would say a word against it in public, and few would admit to wishing a child joined it. Its losses at the Omarion Nebula in 2371 are not mourned in the way the Fleet’s war dead are. See The Imperial Fleet and The Tal Shiar.

6. Food and Drink

6.1 Romulan ale

The Romulan drink every Federation citizen has heard of is Romulan ale: blue, strong, and illegal in the Federation. It has been banned there since at least the 2280s, and the ban still stands. That has not stopped it from reaching Federation space. It is smuggled across borders, sold under the counter in ports outside Federation law, and kept in the private stores of officers who should know better. Its reputation in the Federation owes a good deal to being forbidden.

On Romulus it is an ordinary drink, though a good one. Romulans drink it at celebrations, at meals with guests, and to mark the end of hard work. Old ale from a known year is a gift between houses. It is strong enough that Romulans themselves treat it with some care, and visitors are warned.

6.2 Other food and drink

Romulan cooking is little known in the Federation, and much of what follows comes from the recovery crews of 2377 onward, who shared galleys with Romulan crews for years. The dishes they describe most often are these. Veshket is smoked river or sea fish, cut thin and eaten cold, a staple of the coasts and of Fleet rations. Kheva is a dense dark grain bread baked in rounds, eaten at most meals. Taelis is a spiced wine served warm in the cold months, gentler than ale and more often drunk by families than by soldiers.

Romulan meals are formal by Federation standards. Guests are seated by rank. A host pours the first cup for the most honoured guest, and that guest drinks first. A guest who refuses the first cup is understood to be refusing the host’s welcome, which is why Starfleet officers who have dined with Romulans are taught to accept it, even if they drink no more. Conversation at table avoids business until the meal is over.

7. The Arts

Romulans value the arts, though they share them with outsiders even less than they share their food. The forms Federation sources mention most are three.

Poetry is the most honoured. Long narrative poems tell the history of the Empire and of its great houses, and a well educated Romulan is expected to know passages by heart. Shorter poems are written for occasions: a marriage, a death, a promotion. They are often composed with deliberate double meanings, saying one thing to the hearer and another to the knowing.

Music is played at home and in public, often on stringed instruments, and is described as stately and restrained. The veil plays are a form of theatre in which every actor wears a mask or veil, so that the audience must read character only from voice, movement and words. Federation observers who have seen them have noted that the form suits a people who are taught from childhood to hide their faces, and who admire those who can read what is hidden.

8. Religion and Belief

The Empire has no state religion that the Federation knows of, and Romulans are not known to evangelise. Belief is a private and family matter. Most houses keep a shrine at home where the names of their ancestors are kept and honoured, and many Romulans speak of their dead as watching over the family. Whether that is a belief in a life after death, a tradition, or a way of speaking is not clear, and Romulans differ on it themselves.

The greatest public festival Federation sources mention is Founding Night, which marks the arrival of the first settlers on Romulus after their journey from Vulcan. It is kept with family meals, the reading of names, and, in the capital, public ceremony. Whether it falls on a fixed date in the Romulan calendar is not known.

Romulans also keep an older inheritance from Vulcan, though they do not like to say so. Some Romulan beliefs and stories are believed to share roots with Vulcan ones from before the time of Surak. Romulans who support reunification with Vulcan sometimes point to this. Most Romulans do not. See Dissidents, Splinters and Unification.

9. Secrecy in Daily Life

Secrecy is not a Tal Shiar invention. It is part of ordinary Romulan life, and the Tal Shiar grew out of a culture that already practised it. A Romulan learns young that what they say may be repeated, that a friend today may be a rival tomorrow, and that the safest thing to say in public is very little.

In practice this shapes daily life in many small ways. Romulans speak of politics only among people they trust, and often not even then. Families keep their own business private, even from their own house. Personal letters are written carefully. Neighbours do not ask each other questions. Informing on others to the authorities is known to happen, and everyone acts accordingly. Romulans who have lived in the Federation say that what struck them most was not its wealth or its freedom, but how loudly and openly its people talked.

The habit is reinforced by the state. The Tal Shiar watches the Empire’s own people as closely as it watches its enemies, and has done since long before 2371. The Restored Senate’s own fear of the security services, noted in Government of the Empire, is shared by the people it governs. See The Tal Shiar.

10. Outsiders

Romulans tend to view outsiders with suspicion, and they are open about it. The Federation is seen as powerful, naive, and dangerously persuasive: a power that spreads by drawing other peoples in, which Romulans find harder to guard against than a fleet. Vulcans are seen as estranged kin, respected in some ways and resented in others, and their logic as a kind of surrender. Klingons are seen as enemies, loud and violent, and the hatred is returned in full; the memory of Narendra III is fresh on both sides. See The Klingon Empire and Romulans and the Federation.

The Remans are seen differently again. To most Romulans they are not outsiders at all, but a lesser people meant to serve the Empire, part of it but never equal within it. The breakaway of T’Met and its entry into the Federation in 2392 struck many Romulans as an insult, not a loss. The Remans’ own history and position are covered in The Remans and T'Met.

A Romulan who comes to know an outsider well may become a loyal friend and a gracious host. Federation officers who served beside Romulans in the Dominion War and the recovery years have said so. But that friendship is personal, and it is given slowly. It does not change a Romulan’s view of the outsider’s people, and it is not a promise of anything when the two meet again on opposite sides of the Zone.

11. See Also

The Romulan Star Empire · Language, Names and Address · Romulan Biology and Mind · Romulus, Remus and the Core Worlds · Government of the Empire · The Imperial Fleet · The Tal Shiar · The Remans · Romulans and the Federation