A Cultural History of Marriage in Antiquity

Karen Klaiber Hersch

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350355583
• eBook ISBN: 9781350179646
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Marriage, across cultures, is often defined as a union between consenting adults that lasts for the life of the partners. But is marriage a blessing, or curse? Does marriage represent the union of two hearts, or was it a necessary evil? Did matrimony bring a person a helpmeet for life, or was it a societally approved state entered into to improve one's social standing and produce legitimate heirs? The authors of this volume show that the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean were divided on all of these questions, and reveal ancient Greek and Roman opinions on marriage that were as varied and complex as they are today. Readers will discover in this book that ancients juggled multiple ideas that to the modern eye may appear to be contradictory. Thus, for example, Greek and Roman wives were expected to come to their grooms spotless virgins, while Greek and Roman husbands could enjoy multiple partnerships outside the marital union. Guided by our experts, we take an extensive journey through time and space, encountering evidence from such sources as diverse as Hammurabic law codes, Egyptian papyri, Greek epic and tragedy, Roman inscriptions and writings on the lives of early Christians. Applying innovative approaches and diverse methodologies, the authors of this volume reveal the tension and reconciliation between representations of marriage in antiquity and its lived reality. A Cultural History of Marriage in Antiquity presents an overview of the period with essays on Courtship and Ritual; Religion, State and Law; Kinship and Social Networks; the Family Economy; Love and Sex; the Breaking of Vows; and Representations of Marriage.

CHAPTER ONE

Courtship and Ritual

KATHERINE WASDIN

Greco-Roman wedding rituals served many purposes, such as uniting families, marking the bride’s transition from daughter to wife, and inaugurating a marriage that would hopefully result in heirs. This chapter will explain the wedding ritual and the preliminary arrangements for marriage in the Greco-Roman world, such as the selection of partners and betrothal.¹ Evidence for these social customs comes from a variety of sources. Lexicographers, both Greek and Roman, provide much of our information about precise terminology and ritual details, while literary works such as wedding songs, plays, and novels demonstrate the assumed emotional and social resonances of the wedding rite.² Legal and epigraphic sources offer other glimpses of daily life. Visual evidence allows us to observe the central characters of the ritual, including their garments and physical gestures.³ Greeks and Romans shared similar traditions, particularly in the selection of partners, and I will discuss both cultures together in the section on preliminaries to the wedding. We will then observe two stereotypical weddings, one in classical Athens and one in Rome, to witness how the wedding commemorates the start of the marriage with elements of romance and fertility. I will show that the courting or persuasion of the bride was generally understood as part of the wedding. Finally, the chapter will close by mentioning other ways that marriages could begin. As a public event that marked a private union, the wedding ritual was central to the foundation of communities and to the personal lives of its participants.

CHOOSING A PARTNER AND MAKING AN ENGAGEMENT

Leucippe and Clitophon, a second-century CE Greek novel by Achilles Tatius, demonstrates some potential considerations for selection of a spouse.⁴ Although dating from the Second Sophistic period when the Greek world was controlled by Rome, the novel’s characters maintain standards of elite marriage established much earlier. The protagonist, Clitophon, was first engaged by his father to his half-sister, with whom he shared a father but not a mother. This engagement was presumably made with his agreement but was designed to preserve the family’s wealth, not to validate the sexual or romantic desires of the bride or groom. Such pragmatic motivations and parental influence were the most common factors for forming unions in the ancient world.⁵ Despite these careful plans, Clitophon falls in love with his cousin Leucippe and they elope after being caught in flagrante delicto by her mother. His passion for a cousin, instead of an unrelated stranger, results in part from the relative sequestration of elite women in ancient Greece, especially Athens.⁶ After Leucippe is captured by bandits and presumed dead, Clitophon agrees to marry Melite, a rich widow who is desperately in love with him. As a widow, Melite has greater freedom in choosing her next husband. In the end, both Melite’s missing first husband and Leucippe reappear, and Clitophon wins Leucippe’s hand in marriage from her father after proving that they remained physically chaste during their travels. Clitophon thus makes a legitimate and endogamous marriage with parental support, despite brief detours through other types of engagement.

A normative first marriage, particularly among the elite classes for whom we have the most ample evidence, would be based on family connections, finances, and social status as well as more intangible factors such as physical attraction and the personality of potential partners. It was assumed that all citizen women would marry, and few women remained single throughout their lives before the rise of Christianity.⁷ Men, on the other hand, could choose whether or not to marry, but most did so.⁸ Partners did not often select each other but followed the guidance of their elders and sometimes professional matchmakers.⁹ A potential groom would seek out the father of the bride rather than the bride herself. Romantic love may have played a role in some unions, but such an idealized romanticism is expressed only in certain generic contexts, particularly comedy and the novel, such as that of Achilles Tatius discussed above.¹⁰ Brides ideally agreed or acquiesced to the wishes of their fathers, and women marrying for the first time were seldom allowed much say in the choice of groom.¹¹ Grooms might also marry brides chosen by their fathers, as in the union arranged for Clitophon by his father. Roman men whose fathers were alive still fell under their legal control, and some jurists debated how much agency they could have in their own marriages.¹²

Since the primary purpose of marriage was the production of legitimate citizen heirs, typically to continue the father’s lineage, it was paramount that the partners have appropriate citizenship status.¹³ In Athens, at least after the marriage legislation of Pericles in 451/450 BCE, only fathers and mothers from citizen families could produce citizen offspring; previously only citizen fathers were required.¹⁴ In Rome, intermarriage between inhabitants of Rome and those of other cities (the right of conubium) was permitted in an increasingly wide range. Indeed, the foundational myths of Roman marriage are cases of intermarriage with other communities.¹⁵ By the time of Caracalla in 212 CE, all free persons in the Roman Empire were legally citizens. The same rights were not extended to unfree populations. Slaves were not permitted to marry and produce heirs but in Rome could enter into partnerships that were otherwise equivalent to marriage, called contubernium, often at the discretion of their owners.¹⁶

For a parent or guardian, socioeconomic class was an essential consideration in the choice of their child’s future spouse, and marriages were normally made between families of a similar income. In fact, humorous texts throughout antiquity mock men who marry into families wealthier than their own as being unavoidably subservient to their elite wives. A character in Menander (fr. 802 K-A) says that the husband of a rich wife “gives himself in marriage instead of taking her,” thus reversing the ideal gender hierarchy.¹⁷ Respect for differences in social status could be legally mandated. Thus the Roman emperor Augustus placed restrictions on marriage between people of unequal status in the Lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus of 18 BCE.¹⁸ According to this law, those of the senatorial class could not marry freedpersons or those involved in disreputable professions, and freeborn people could not marry adulterers or those connected to prostitution. In the sixth century CE, long after Christianity became the official state religion, these provisions were reversed, allowing for marriages between any partners.¹⁹

Brides were often much younger than their grooms, although the gap could be larger or smaller and even reversed in some rare situations.²⁰ Greek girls were married fairly close to the onset of menstruation, around fourteen to eighteen years old, but men more often married after maturity and once they had completed all coming-of-age rituals, around the age of thirty.²¹ In Rome, marriage occurred generally when women were in their late teens, although perhaps earlier for elite women and men.²² The minimum age for legal marriage was twelve for women and fourteen for men. Early age at first marriage was a way to guarantee the bride’s chastity, not necessarily to ensure that she maximized her childbearing years. In fact, some writers recommend that families wait until the bride was several years past menarche before marriage and pregnancy, since childbirth was understood to be risky for younger women.²³

Finally, the partners could not be too closely related. Incest norms differed in various ancient communities. Marriage between cousins or half-siblings was permitted in most Greek communities, as we saw above in the tale of Clitophon and Leucippe, although full siblings could not marry.²⁴ Some such endogamic unions were mandatory, as in the case of the Athenian epiklerate.²⁵ An epikleros was ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Contributors
• General Editor’S Preface Joanne M. Ferraro
• Introduction
• 1 Courtship and Ritual
• 2 Religion: The Gods and Rituals of Greek and Roman Weddings
• 3 State and Law
• 4 The Ties That Bind
• 5 The Family Economy: Consent and Consensuality in Ancient Greek and Roman Marriage
• 6 Love, Sex, and Sexuality: Marriage: The Myth of Intimate Strangers
• 7 Breaking Vows
• 8 Representation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright