Marriage, a History (16 page)

The Roman Republic bequeathed to the West a system of civil laws, public works, and bureaucratic administrative principles that eventually provided an alternative to the personal rule of royal dynasties. But in its own later years the republic experienced a resurgence of personal intrigue and violent fights over political power. Four years after defeating Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C., Octavian transformed the republic into an empire and ruled as the Emperor Augustus, “the revered one.” During the Empire, marital maneuvering and dynastic politics again dominated the process of succession to power.

Octavian’s own first marriage was politically inspired and lasted just two years. He divorced his first wife, who had just given birth to their daughter, Julia, in order to marry Livia, who was married to someone else at the time and was pregnant with her husband’s child. Her husband, Claudius Nero, a sophisticated and self-interested Roman, agreed to the divorce and even attended the wedding banquet.
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Both men gained from this marital reshuffling. Claudius Nero was a member of a powerful aristocratic family but had been a supporter of Mark Antony against Octavian /Augustus, and needed to get back into the new emperor’s good graces. For Augustus, Livia’s family ties were more useful than those of his first wife, and Livia brought with her the children of her previous marriage, establishing strong bonds of interest between Augustus and the kin of Claudius Nero, who were delighted that their grandchildren had become potential heirs to the throne.

When the marriage between Livia and Augustus produced no children, these hopes paid off. Augustus appointed Livia’s son Tiberius as his successor, then ordered Tiberius to divorce
his
pregnant wife and marry the emperor’s daughter Julia. Unlike his biological father, Tiberius complied reluctantly. The historian Suetonius reported that Tiberius pined for his former wife even after he had regretfully divorced her. “The only time he chanced to see her, he followed her with such an intent and tearful gaze that care was taken that she should never again come before his eyes.”
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Despite his heartache, Tiberius did what was required to succeed Augustus as emperor.

Having gone to great lengths to rearrange his family connections to his personal satisfaction, Augustus became a fervent public supporter of family stability and female virtue. Like many contemporary boosters of the sanctity of marriage, he did not let his own divorce and many sexual liaisons inhibit him from trying to impose marital virtue and “family values” on others. In fact, Augustus embarked upon one of the earliest promarriage campaigns in the historical record.

The family values campaign Augustus launched was in part an effort to boost the birthrate. The emperor decreed that Romans were expected to be married by a certain age, and if they were not or if they failed to remarry after divorce or bereavement, they were penalized. An unmarried person could not receive an inheritance or legacy from anyone other than a close relative. Individuals who were married but childless had to forfeit half of any such bequests. Applicants for political office received preference if they were married and a higher preference if they had children.
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Augustus also decreed that a freeborn woman with three children was exempted from the law that kept a woman under the lifelong guardianship of her husband or father. A freed female slave who was still under the guardianship of her former owner could escape that control once she bore four children.

Despite his pro-marriage program, Augustus did not try to restrict divorce. In fact, divorce was made compulsory if a woman committed adultery, which became a criminal offense punishable by banishment. Once adultery became an offense to be punished by the state rather than by the woman’s husband and her male relatives, a husband could no longer turn a blind eye to his wife’s behavior if he was so inclined. A husband who did not divorce an adulterous wife could be charged with pandering. If a husband divorced an adulterous wife but did not prosecute her within sixty days, an outsider could pursue the case. A woman convicted of adultery lost half her dowry and a third of any other property she owned and was banished to an island and forbidden to marry again.
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Emperor Augustus’s profamily legislation was accompanied by a wave of manufactured nostalgia for the supposed virtues of earlier times, when women were not allowed to drink wine and, according to the satirist Juvenal, wives were too tired from working at their looms to engage in adultery.

The pro-family legal measures and propaganda campaigns had little impact on Roman morality and behavior. Laws promoting the birthrate did encourage young men interested in senate positions to marry and have children a bit earlier, to take advantage of the seniority this conferred. But contemporaries complained that most wives still limited the number of children they bore, whether through crude forms of birth control or by abandoning infants. The morality laws also had unintended consequences. Stiff penalties imposed on upper-class women for violating sexual edicts encouraged some of them to register as prostitutes in order to escape the punishment meted out to respectable matrons for having affairs!
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But the rhetoric of family values remained a central theme under Augustus, and he put forward his own wife Livia and his sister Octavia (who, you will recall, had been married to Mark Antony) as paragons of female virtue. Their likenesses were placed on coins, and their statues displayed in temples and public buildings. Octavia was especially popular, pitied as a deserted wife and widely admired for her willingness to raise Antony’s children by his first wife and by Cleopatra. That the family values emperor had murdered Antony’s oldest son by his first wife and Caesar’s son by Cleopatra went unmentioned.

Julia, the emperor’s daughter by his first wife, however, posed a serious public relations problem. One reason Tiberius had been loath to leave his wife for Julia was that she already had a scandalous reputation from her previous marriage. Tradition says that when she was asked why all five of her children resembled her husband, despite her many extramarital affairs, Julia merrily replied, “I never take on a passenger until the cargo-hold is full.”
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Julia’s marriage to Tiberius did not interfere with her infidelities, which became so blatant that Augustus not only agreed to the couple’s separation but disciplined his daughter publicly. Seneca reports that the emperor wrote to the senate in 2 B.C. “Adulterers were admitted to [Julia’s] house in flocks; the whole state was overrun by her nocturnal debaucheries.”
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Augustus exiled four young aristocrats who had been Julia’s lovers, ordered a fifth to commit suicide, and banished Julia to an island, where she was ordered to avoid both men and wine. Six years later he exiled his granddaughter for the same offense.

The empire established by Augustus enjoyed almost two centuries of stability. But by the third century overextension of the army, agricultural problems, urban decline, barbarian invasions, and increasing social unrest had led to a collapse of orderly political succession. Military leaders usurped the throne and in turn were displaced by other leaders with stronger armies or more mercenaries. Between A.D. 235 and 284 there were twenty-six emperors, only one of whom escaped violent death.

Like Athens, however, Rome left behind a model for organizing political life, military campaigns, and the administration of justice in ways that did not allow powerful aristocrats to manipulate marriage ties and personal loyalties to gain power. It introduced mechanisms for organizing military affairs, tax collection, and legal rights that didn’t depend on marital alliances, blood descent, or local allegiances. In its period of decline, the Roman state came to terms with Christianity, a synthesis that evolved into the Catholic Church, which, as both an institution and an ideology, profoundly changed the history of marital politics in the West.

Christianity, which began as a movement within Judaism, was one of many popular religions and mystery cults that flourished in the waning days of the Roman Republic. What distinguished early Christianity from Judaism in its approach to marriage and family was the belief that the kingdom of God was close at hand, and people must therefore break with worldly ties to prepare for the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom. In subsequent centuries this aspect was played down, but early Christianity was hostile to marital and kinship obligations to a degree unimaginable to any previous reformers aside from Plato. Jesus insisted that marriage and kin ties took second place to the urgent need to prepare people for the coming kingdom of God. “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). When a new disciple asked if he could slip away to attend his father’s funeral, Jesus told him to stay and “let the dead bury their own dead” (Matthew 8:22).

Many early Christians believed that marriage undermined the rigorous self-control needed to achieve spiritual salvation. “He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife. . . . The unmarried woman careth for the things of the lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit: but she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband” (1 Corinthians 7:32-34).

Christian attitudes toward marriage and sexuality stood in sharp contrast with those of most ancient religions. To Hindus in India, marrying was a holy act, and a celibate or unmarried person was considered impious, or at least incomplete, and was ineligible to participate in some religious ceremonies. The Old Testament and later Jewish teachings called marriage God’s commandment and celebrated sexuality within marriage. The Talmud said that scholars of the Torah should marry before embarking on their studies, “for one who is not married will be possessed the day long with sexual thoughts.”
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The founders of Christianity agreed with Jewish scholars that it was better to marry than to be preoccupied with lust. But their acceptance of marriage was much less enthusiastic. “It is better,” Paul grudgingly conceded, “to marry than to burn” (1 Corinthians 7:9). Pope Gregory the Great explained early in the sixth century that although marriage was not sinful, “conjugal union cannot take place without carnal pleasure, and such pleasure cannot under any circumstances be without blame.”
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Although Christianity was deeply ambivalent about marriage, it also had a stringent prohibition against divorce. Jesus declared that Moses’s acceptance of divorce, which was integrated into Jewish marriage laws, had been a concession to people’s weakness and stubbornness. God’s true intention, Jesus said, was that husband and wife should become one flesh. “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Mark 10:9). Unlike most other world religions, Christianity applied this injunction against divorce equally to men and women.

Early Christianity’s condemnation of divorce and polygamy was unequivocal. In practice, however, during the first thousand years of its existence the Christian church was flexible about allowing divorce. For a long time it even waffled in its support for monogamy. The conflict between theory and practice added a new wrinkle to political marriage struggles as the church’s power and influence grew in the waning days of the Roman Empire.

One of the great appeals of Christianity to the polyglot population of the Roman Empire was that it was a religion that did not limit its message to one ethnic group or to the supposed descendants of a mythical common ancestor. The church offered membership and brotherhood to all, and it had special appeal to the lower classes and slaves with its insistence that humility, charity, and spirituality were superior to worldly wealth and power.

In its early years Christianity faced little official opposition and spread quickly along Rome’s trade routes and military roads. But as its appeal grew, some Roman rulers worried that the Christians’ refusal to participate in the worship of state gods was subversive, and in the third century several emperors tried to quash the new religion through violent persecution of its adherents. In the fourth century, however, such repression receded, and in 313 the emperor Constantine issued an edict of tolerance for Christianity. Under the reign of the emperor Theodosius, Christianity became the empire’s official religion, and church officials began to act as tax collectors, record keepers, and legal representatives of the state as well as spiritual leaders of the people.

Over the next two centuries the Christian church expanded its geographical reach and took on more quasi-governmental functions. Meanwhile the bishop of Rome gained authority over his fellow bishops in the provinces and came to be known as the pope (from the Latin word
papa,
or father). When the Roman Empire fragmented and collapsed, the pope headed one of the few institutions still able to raise money, administer law, preserve records, teach literacy, conduct international diplomacy, and claim overarching moral authority.

As the empire broke up, and local aristocracies struggled to control the fledgling kingdoms that emerged in its place, the church’s administrative and ideological resources grew indispensable, as did the pope’s sanctification of a king’s authority. Would-be rulers maneuvered relentlessly to get the pope’s stamp of approval, and many popes maneuvered right back.

Early Christianity had been indifferent, even hostile, to the things of this world and had elevated celibacy over marriage. But the church’s evolving political role and economic power were to embroil it deeply in the politics of marriage, divorce, and family life in the new kingdoms of Western Europe.