Marriage in Ancient Rome - Conventions of Roman Marriage

Conventions of Roman Marriage

The lives of elite Roman women were essentially determined by their marriages. We are best informed about families with both wealth and political standing, whose largely inherited money would follow both their sons and their daughters. In the earliest periods of Roman history, Manus Marriage meant that a married woman would be subjugated by her husband, but that custom had died out by the 1st century BCE, in favor of Free Marriage which did not grant a husband any rights over his wife or have any changing effect on a woman's status.

Elite young men would usually marry in their mid-twenties, after a year or more of military service and some initial experience attending cases and even pleading in the criminal or civil courts. Their brides, however, would be markedly younger women, between fifteen and twenty years of age. This was in part because the family felt no need to retain the daughter at home in order to give her a full education, and partly from fear that once into the flush of adolescence the girl might throw away her virginity or lose the reputation for chastity, which was a prerequisite for marriage. The higher the social position of the girl, the sooner betrothal tended to follow puberty, since marriage were arranged for political reasons. The actual marriage, however, was usually postponed until she was physically mature enough to carry a healthy pregnancy or survive the high risks of childbirth. The young wife would learn some of the complexities of running a large household by observing her mother, and her training would be supplemented by the slave staff of her new household.

The more prominent her family, the less it was likely that the girl would have much choice in the age, appearance or character of her first husband. Through high status marriages (even imperial ones), women were able to gain associative power from their husbands' prominent positions in society. Women who gained power in this way could even then legitimize the power positions of their sons (such as with Livia and Tiberius) as their symbolic status influenced Roman society.

While upper class girls married very young, there is evidence that lower class women – plebeians, freedwomen etc. – often married in their late teens or early twenties. Women were not seen as likely to marry after thirty. Marriage for them was not about economic or political gain, so it was not as urgent.

In a sense, the lives of all women in antiquity were defined around their expectation and achievement of marriage: first as young girls, then as wives and, if all went well, as mothers. In their later years, it was statistically probable that they would survive their husbands and live as widows. From day to day, on a larger scale, their obligations and opportunities depended on the man or men to whom they were married.