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The Roman women matrimony

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

Life as a grown up woman began very early for the ancient Roman girls. They had just little time to play with her dolls before they found themselves with a baby in their arms, and that only if they were lucky enough to survive childbearing. They married very soon. A girl could be married when she was twelve year old; probably, as it happens in many African civilizations, when she got her first menstruation. Of course at this moment the family got busy to find her a fiancé, because this was considered a family business.
In ancient Rome no girl was entitled to chose her husband. Her father or, if he had died, the “pater familias” then in charge (uncle, elder brother or anyway the eldest male in her family) decided whom the lucky man would be. Thus very often she was married to one of her father friends, a man much older than her, but some time, to make interesting political or economical connections between the families, she married with a boy slightly older.
Marriage for boys was usually admitted after their sixteenth year, probably when the young man shaved for the first time and, having put his first beard in a beautiful box, had offered it to the home altar of the Lares.
Some of these marriages went well: young people fell in love and lived happily ever after, and young women, impressed by the gravity and wisdom of their old husbands, spent their life admiring them. If then children came, the strength of their ties were reinforced and became evermore stable.
Evermore? Well not really evermore. At those times death was always hovering: puerperal fevers for the girls and wars, duels, fights killed quite a lot of young and not so young people. Often the young wife became a widow and time was not lost. The “pater familias” waited for the right interval of time to elapse after the dire event, because a girl couldn’t remarry before a certain time that had been fixed by Numa, and ten months should elapse before she could be handed to another bridegroom. Of course this was meant to ascertain that she was not pregnant and that the next husband wouldn’t be stuck with another man’s child. Immediately after this period – let’s call it mourning - she was considered free, and her father or the actual “pater familias” should find a convenient party with whom to marry her. It is true that everybody admired the broken hearted spouse who didn’t want to remarry and stood single, the “univira” as she was called, but in the everyday life widowed men or women didn’t remain single for a long time and very soon the surviving one remarried.
Of course as always the choice of the bridegroom was made by the “pater familias” and the girl was not consulted. For the boys it was different.: usually they could chose their future bride and, if in the meantime the death of a certain number of relatives had left them in charge, there could never be any discussion. Thus the Romans were married and for quite a long time those strict laws worked well.
Of course in the Roman family the wife was subservient to her husband and to his “pater familias”. With the religious marriage which involved the passage “in manus” she was transferred from her family to her husband’s one. As his wife she was kept in high consideration, and apart of this with the marriage she acquired a great freedom and a good social position. The wife was really her own house‘s queen and this even more if she produced male children who would assure the family progeny and on top of it she also was the only queen because monogamy was the fixed rule of the Roman laws. Among the ancient Romans the man took one and only one wife. One at a time at least.
However the Roman marriage was quite different from the Christian one because in Rome marriage was not considered indissoluble. There was no declaration as our “till death does us part”. For ancient Romans the marriage was valid only until both wife and husband wanted to stay married. When they changed their mind they parted.

Divorce-
Being this the situation it is easy to see that to divorce in Rome there was no need of priests or lawyers. The marriage was dissolved quickly and in the family. Of course husbands were not allowed to end a marriage for a sudden whim. Also if it is true that a man could always break his marriage without giving any reason, (a decision that could involve the payment of a fine and, of course, the giving back of the dowry), it was markedly uncommon that the matrimony could be broken for a bridegroom’s capricious fancy or because he had decided to find a better spouse. Also in this case when a man took such a resolution, he tried to hide himself under a screen of excuses and to find some valid reason to present to his fellow citizens and to his offended and indignant mate.
To sum it up he had to find something palatable to expose to a council formed by his family and his most closest friends, a council of relative and friends that was reunited to decide if he was or wasn’t right. If they decided that he had good reasons to break his marriage the knot was immediately undone and the two were free. That meant that also if a man took a wife for the “better and the worst” and also if for the Latin world she had to be “socia prosperis dubiisque rebus”, no man arrived to this extremity and at Rome the dance of marriages was always very lively.
Also women could divorce, but for them the reasons had to be very, but really very weighty. To begin with husbands’ adulteries were not considered a good reason to part. Philandering with one of the handsome slave girls or some very enticing slave boys was one of those things that women had to bear and smile. Before she could call her family and require their help, she had to be black and blue with her husband blows and thus have good proves of unbearable ill treatments At this moment, and only then, her “pater familias” could come in and, after having dissolved her marriage take her back home.. Also in this case it was quite easy to set the woman free and able to remarry.
In addition of all those divorce reasons there still was another menace threatening the married couples and this was the question of the uninterrupted cohabitation, that, for the Roman laws was necessary for not having the marriage declared as terminated. If this law had been literally observed many couples who did not want to be separated would have found themselves divorced. To break their union it was enough that the husband should leave Rome for a distant and far away place where he was sent to fight or to hold a high position and divorce was completed. After a while to solve this question a mean had to be found. This law had not been a problem until Rome was a little republic enclosed in tight limits, but now, that the Empire covered a great part of this world and a man could be sent in far away places and also for long periods, this law created a real menace for the families.
Among the other reasons there was the fact that the men sent to hold high positions in some of the more far away places of the Empire belonged to the high society of Rome and made part of the more powerful Roman families. To sum it up it were just these families to be in danger. Thus a law was made and established that those separation didn’t affect the unions, and that to maintain this situation it was enough to keep the kind of relationship that two spouses had to keep toward the society. That included the fact that the wife had to live in her husband house, keep his social position and held high and undiscussed her dignity.
However at the end of the republic divorce became more and more common. Men and women divorced frequently and for both of them the major or minor possibility to dissolve their marriages depended on the kind of union they had contracted.
In Rome there were three kind of marriages, all lawfully recognized and all of them had the right to ensure a lawful progeny. The first one, the “confarreatio” the religious one was very strict. With this ceremony the wife entered “in manus” and, just as if she had been born in it, she became an effective member of the family. Of course to dissolve this union was very difficult. Another ceremony called “disfarreatio” had to be celebrated and, for what we know, it was complex and unpleasant.. During this rite the woman, who, entering her husband’s home, had adopted his cults had to abjure them, and Fustel de Coulange, a French Historian and Academician if the XIX century, wrote that the formulas must have been “strange, hard, hateful and fearful”. After this before the spouse could return single there were other formalities to be satisfied . At those time this kind of marriage was exclusively practised by the sacerdotal caste, but not even by all of them and, as a matter of fact, when at the beginning of the II cent. A.D. Tiberius had to order a priest born by a couple tied by the “confarreatio” he found only three patricians who in Rome answered the requisite.
Another marriage was the one called “coemption”, an union similar to our modern civil marriage, a tie much easier to dissolve, Also this was a very ancient rite but little by little it was abandoned, and in Cicero time we only find the “coemptio fiduciae causae”.
Then there was the marriage “per usus” which had many similarity with our modern “cohabitation”, keeping in mind that if this cohabitation lasted more than an year it was automatically transformed in a real marriage and the wife could find herself “in manus”, which meant that all her patrimony passed to her husband’s family and she was left penniless. Anyway it was easy to avoid such a dire circumstance: it was enough for her to interrupt their cohabitation for just a few days (usually three) during which she stood in another house. This method was called the “trinoctii usurpatio”, and allowed to go on with the cohabitation without finding oneself married. Obviously for breaking this kind of union there was no need of a divorce or of a repudiation: it was enough to go away and never come back.