For decades now, ancient history has shared in this surge of interest and a good deal has been written about Roman marriage.6 However, the consequences of the disappearance of
manus for Roman family life and Roman society as a whole have received less attention. The
main problem is that it has not yet been determined when this shift from so-called cum manu to sine manu marriage happened, which makes it hard to establish the effects of this change on Roman society and to connect it to remarks in our sources. There are basically two strands of interpretation: some scholars have argued that marriage sine manu was already possible from the fifth century BC onwards, while others have argued that it took place in a more limited period of a few centuries during the late Republic and the early Empire.7
In this chapter it will be argued that for an analysis of this change, it is useful to start from the assumption that for society as a whole it is more relevant to determine when the bulk of the Roman citizens started to use different marriage arrangements than to look for the start or the end of this development. In other words, one should look for some sort of transition period when the effect of change was most keenly felt in Roman society. If the interpretation that Roman female citizens derived bargaining power from their position within the familia holds, then we should expect to see that the shift in itself will have had an effect on the position of female citizens within Roman society. For example, we may expect to find some forms of confusion caused by the existence of two different types of marriage side by side for some length of time. We may also expect to find a gradual strengthening of the position of women in Roman society when more and more women become sui iuris.
These expectations are all based on the assumption that the change between two different types of marriage arrangement was rather abrupt and that that women did indeed increase their bargaining power through a change of position within the familia. Absence of confusion or change in the social position could indicate that either the relevance of their position within the familia was limited or that the shift from one type of marriage to the other was a slow and gradual process, with plenty of time to adapt to new circumstances.
It is also relevant to look for some kind of hierarchisation between the two types of marriage. A strong bias in favour of one type of marriage would suggest that Roman society had sufficient time to make a differentiation between the two types of marriage. Therefore, it would be an indication that cum manu and sine manu marriage existed for a long time side by
6 Until the 1970s, the study of Roman marriage was mostly limited to its relation to Roman law, for example: Corbett (1930), Watson (1967) 11-76, Kaser (1971) 71-82, 310-340. In the last decades interesting works have been written on the combination of marriage and social reality in Roman times: Gardner (1986) 31-116, Treggiari (1991) 15-36, Gardner (1998), Evans Grubbs (2002). Cf. Dixon (2011).
7 For example, Corbett (1930) 87-91, Treggiari (1991) 33-34, idem (1996) 896-898, Crook (1994) 537 (gradual change from fifth century BC onwards), Dixon (2011) 251 (between second century and the time of Cicero), Evans Grubbs (2002) 21 (‘mostly disappeared by the time of Augustus’), Looper-Friedman (1987) 281 (late Republic – early Empire), Watson (1967) 25 (sine manu common at the beginning of the second century BC). In other general works the subject of the timing of this change is hardly touched upon at all (Sanchez-Moreno Ellart (2013) 4319-4320, Hornblower and Spawforth (1998) 446-447.
side within Roman society.8 Furthermore, we would also expect to find changing opinions on
marriage and womanly behaviour.
Finally, we should expect that some Roman citizens experimented with the new possibilities which sprang from different marriage arrangements which could give them more room for bargaining and more legal independence. We may think of women initiating divorce or making use of their own property, which was something that a woman in the manus of her husband could not do. While the social change that triggered the shift in marriage can only be determined when we know when the shift happened, popular opinions and the extraordinary behaviour of citizens may have left traces in our sources. If we can find these traces, then we will have an indication of when the Roman marriage pattern is likely to have changed.
As mentioned before, opinions are divided on the question of whether both types of marriage arrangement already existed in the fifth century BC or whether marriage without
manus was a more recent development, which overtook marriage with manus during the late
Republic and the early Empire. Therefore, for this case study not only sources from 200 BC to AD 50 are taken into account, but also the relevant sources on the change in Roman marriage and marital behaviour from the fifth century BC onwards up to and including the time of Augustus. Special attention will be given to signs of confusion caused by two types of marriage existing side by side, hierarchisation between those types of marriage, and indications of changing opinions and experimentation. The argument is chronologically ordered so as to take a closer look at sources which give an indication of the role of sine manu marriage in the early Republic, the third and second centuries BC, the first century BC, and the Augustan period, specifically with respect to the Augustan marriage laws.
8 An example of hierarchisation as a way of distinguishing between two types of marriage is the situation in southern China. Until recently, in southern China both virilocal and uxorilocal marriages existed (types of marriage in which the married couple live in the household of the parents of the groom or the bride and become part of their respective family lines). Virilocal marriage was the preferred way of marrying, while the uxorilocal marriage was seen as inferior and was only used in certain circumstances: Chuang and Wolf (2005) 280-283.