Marriage, a History (15 page)

Athens’s debilitating wars with Sparta from 431 to 404 B.C., the Peloponnesian Wars, brought its glory age to a close. However, Athenian philosophy, literature, and political theory survived to influence the Western civic tradition, passed down to us primarily through Rome.

Rome too started as a city-state. When it became a republic at the end of the sixth century B.C., it controlled an area of just five hundred square miles. By 265 B.C. Roman rule extended to all but the northern tip of the Italian peninsula, an area of fifty thousand square miles. Two hundred years later Rome’s territory included all of what is now Greece, Spain, France, and Germany, along with sizable portions of England, Asia Minor, and North Africa.

For much of their history, the Romans were able to push marital and family intrigues from the center of the political stage. Rome never curbed the political influence of aristocrats as fully as did fifth-century Athens, but the Roman state pioneered several political practices that discouraged aristocrats from destructively competing for outright rule.

For more than four hundred years, from 509 to 31 B.C., Rome was a republic. It had a powerful senate composed of aristocrats. There was also a centuriate assembly, in which successful military leaders and wealthy citizens were represented, and in 471 B.C., a council of plebs, or commoners, was established. These political institutions produced a government in which aristocratic landowners wielded immense political and economic power but seldom tried to establish themselves as rulers outside formal political channels.

Furthermore, Rome had a highly effective and disciplined army and an extensive empire that required professional administrators. These, along with such massive public works projects as road and bridge building and a systematic code of laws, gave precedence to the central government over local notables. The great landowning families could not compete for ultimate power until the second century B.C., when the destruction of small farms and the overextension of the army so destabilized the Roman state that aristocrats and military upstarts could again seize the day.

Although in Rome there was greater political inequality among free men than in Athens, Roman women had greater freedom than their Athenian counterparts. There were several reasons for this. For one thing, the continued prominence of the aristocracy fostered the comparative freedom of upper-class Roman daughters and wives. In addition, the extended absence of men in prolonged service in foreign campaigns gave Roman wives in property-holding families a chance to manage their own affairs for years at a time, amassing their own wealth and even gaining political influence.
⁷

In Rome, as in all states of the ancient world, marriage and inheritance were the main methods of conveying and administering private property. As in Greece and other agricultural societies, where childlessness was reason enough for a man to divorce his wife, the Romans believed that a central purpose of marriage was to produce legitimate children. For upper-class Romans, marriage determined which children would inherit the family property and name. It also created close links between families and occasionally between men who successively married the same woman.
⁸

Today too, many people believe that procreation should be the main purpose of marriage. But they would be shocked by the Roman version of this idea. Romans believed that children were brought into the world for the sake of the family and were allowed to live only with the father’s permission. When the Romans talked about “raising” a child, for example, they meant something different from us. Traditionally a Roman father picked up a newborn to signal his consent that the child live as a member of the family. If he did not, the child was left to die of exposure or to be adopted by someone else.

A letter that one husband sent his pregnant wife in Roman-ruled Egypt illustrates the prevailing consensus that it was fine to let inconvenient children die. After offering his “heartiest greetings” to his family and telling his wife not to worry if he came home from Alexandria later than those he was traveling with, the husband writes: “I beg and beseech you to take care of the little child, and as soon as we receive wages I will send them to you. If—good luck to you!—you bear offspring, if it is a male, let it live; if it is a female, expose it.” Right after this casual sentence of death, he adds that a mutual friend had passed on his wife’s message to remember her on his journeys, and he fondly responds: “How can I forget you? I beg you not to worry.”
⁹

Rome was, at least in its early history, a patriarchal society in the literal sense. Power lay with the oldest male in the household. Sons as well as daughters remained under their father’s power until he died. So did
their
sons and daughters. A man gained the rights of a father only after his own father died. The word
familia
encompassed everyone under the patriarch’s authority or attached to his household. It even included slaves and freedmen who bore the family names of their former owner.
¹⁰

This patriarchal definition of the family had the curious effect of excluding the head of the household, the paterfamilias, from membership in the family. Men were not
in
families; they ruled
over
them. This conception, which was adopted by the Christian families of Western Europe, helps explain why for so many centuries family advice manuals were addressed to wives rather than husbands. Husbands, it was long thought, didn’t need to know how to behave in families. They simply needed to know how to make their families behave.

Despite these strict patriarchal principles, the Romans were casual about what made for a legal marriage. There were a few rules. Roman citizens had to get special permission to marry foreigners or Latins (those living in territories around Rome but not incorporated under its rule), and they could not marry slaves or prostitutes. At one point senators were prohibited from marrying women of low social origins. In addition, a union entered into without the consent of an individual’s father was not valid.

Aside from these rules, the Roman state did not get involved in ratifying marriage or divorce. No special formality was needed to legalize marriage between partners who were not prohibited from marrying. There was no wedding license, and the modern distinction between cohabitation and marriage was unknown.

Rome did recognize a distinction between marriage and concubinage, in which a man kept a female slave or freed woman as a mistress. It also recognized a difference between marriage and cohabitation with a woman close in social rank. The difference, however, was entirely a question of intent. Roman jurists believed marriage was defined by a “marital attitude” on the part of the couple. The educator Quintilian (A.D. 35-95) summed up the traditional legal principle: “There is no obstacle to a marriage being valid by reason of the will of those who come together, even though a contract has not been ratified.” Conversely, he noted, “it is useless to seal a contract if it turns out that the will to marriage did not exist.”
¹¹

Divorce was also based on people’s subjective intentions. A simple statement of intent to divorce was so commonly taken as immediately ending a marriage that a legal commentator from the third century A.D. warned: “It is not a true or actual divorce unless the purpose is to establish a perpetual separation. . . . [H]ence where repudiation takes place in the heat of anger and the wife returns in a short time, she is not held to have been divorced.”
¹²
That this point had to be made explicit shows how readily the community accepted self-divorce.

There is some evidence that originally only men had the right to divorce, as was the case in many ancient states of the Middle East, but by the late republic, divorce in Rome could be initiated by either partner, who would then formally notify the other. In the reign of Augustus, the founder of the Roman Empire (27 B.C. to A.D. 14), the rules on unilateral divorce were tightened to require seven witnesses. But not until four centuries later (A.D. 449) did the law require a formal statement of repudiation beyond simple notification by the departing spouse.

We don’t know how prevalent divorce was in other layers of Roman society, but in the upper levels it was common. At the end of the first century B.C., an upper-class Roman lamented in the funeral speech he composed for his wife: “Marriages as long as ours are rare, ended by death, not broken by divorce. For we were fortunate enough to be together for forty years without quarrel.”
¹³

The Christian emperors of the later empire attempted, without much success, to limit unilateral divorce. Even they, unlike later Christian authorities, said wife beating was a valid reason for a wife to repudiate her husband. The casual attitude toward divorce throughout most of Roman history is reflected in the story Plutarch tells about a Roman whose friend reproached him for divorcing a wife who was fertile, discreet, industrious, and faithful. The man’s response, which Plutarch quoted approvingly, was that a sandal might look beautiful to an observer, but that only the wearer could tell if it pinched.
¹⁴

If a divorce was the wife’s fault, especially if she had engaged in sexual misconduct, the husband could retain part of her dowry as a penalty. Since children remained under the control of their father after a divorce, he could also keep a portion of the original dowry for child support. But the Romans also had no-fault divorce. In addition, they anticipated but rejected arrangements similar to the covenant marriages that have been adopted in several contemporary American states, in which spouses vow in advance never to exercise the no-fault divorce option. In A.D. 223, the emperor Alexander Severus decreed: “It was decided of old that marriages should be free. Hence it is settled that an agreement not to divorce is not valid and neither is a promise to pay a penalty on divorce.”
¹⁵

More than three centuries after Severus’s ruling, the Christian emperor Justinian tried to make the validity of marriage dependent on state approval, requiring a special license. Justinian ruled that customary law, which said that intent was the only thing needed to make a marriage legal, should apply only to people with little wealth to pass on to their heirs. The custom was so deep-rooted, however, that Justinian later relaxed the decree. He also reinstituted the older rule that if a man had been married by intent alone and had had children and then contracted a formal marriage with another woman and produced more children, the children of the first marriage had equal inheritance rights with the children of the second.
¹⁶

In early Rome, as in Athens, control over a woman passed from her father to her husband upon marriage. The man gained control of all possessions his wife brought with her, but she in turn gained full rights in his kin group as though she were a blood relative. Most marriages in early Rome placed a woman under the “hand”—
manus
—of her husband. But another sort of marriage—without, or
sin, manus
—wherein the woman remained under her father’s control after marriage, was also possible. Marriage
sin manus
did not necessarily mean that a woman had more freedom, since her father could intervene to assert his will. But paternal supervision tended to be looser, and a father was likely to die earlier than a husband, meaning that many women gained legal autonomy in the middle years of their marriage.

The spread of marriage
sin manus
probably had more to do with family interests than with women’s needs. Some scholars suggest that an offer of marriage
sin manus
allowed a father to give a smaller dowry, because the receiving family did not have to make the bride a coheir to their property. In addition, for wealthy aristocratic families, a daughter’s marriage
sin manus
meant the husband’s family would not get the daughter’s inheritance because a woman’s father or brother would inherit her property if she died intestate.
¹⁷

As early as 230 B.C., dowries given to husbands had replaced bridewealth paid to the brides’ families as the prevailing financial arrangement in Roman weddings. For the life of the marriage the husband controlled the dowry, but he had to return it in the event of divorce, unless the woman had been blatantly promiscuous. As a result, when an upper-class Roman couple separated, it was often the husband who suffered the greater financial loss.
¹⁸

Men in the upper classes usually married in their late twenties or early thirties, while women generally married in their teens. Despite the big age difference in most married couples and the strong patriarchal bent of Roman families, Roman men tended to be more companionable with their wives and more affectionate with their daughters than Greek men were. Many loving letters between Roman husbands and wives have survived to this day, and the custom of husbands and wives socializing together was widespread. Cornelius Nepos, a historian of the first century B.C., described to his Roman audience how different the customs were in Greece: “They consider that many of the customs we think are appropriate are in bad taste. No Roman would hesitate to take his wife to a dinner party, or to allow the mother of his family to occupy the first rooms in his house and to walk about in public. The custom in Greece is completely different. A woman cannot appear at a party unless it is among her relatives; she can only sit in the interior of the house, which is called the women’s quarters (
gynaeceum
); this no male can enter unless he is a close relation.”
¹⁹

Still, the emphasis on marital harmony and love in Rome was nothing like the mutuality that most modern people expect in marriage. The sexual double standard was so completely accepted by Romans that the educator Quintilian used the notion of a sexual single standard as the perfect illustration of an illogical proposition: “If a relationship between a mistress and a male slave is disgraceful, then one between a master and a female slave is disgraceful.” This statement sounds reasonable to contemporary ears, along the line of what’s sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander. But to Quintilian the parallel was ridiculous, and he had no doubt his audience would agree. To suggest that men should be bound by the same moral conventions as women, he argued, was as illogical as to conclude that human morality should be the same as animal morality.
²⁰