Although marriage is often contracted involuntarily and secular constraints run through married life, it would be biased to generalize Roman marriage as a union of interests that have nothing to do with love under a contractual relationship. Adfectioconiugalis (love in marriage) was also an important theme in Roman marriage and family life. In the traditional Roman conception, excessive affection between husband and wife was not worth saying, especially for Roman men.
While having stable family ties is boastful of, private life should not permeate the public sphere, which could expose them to political stigmatization. Plutarch had criticized Pompey for throwing aside the provinces and armies while accompanying his fourth wife, Julia, around Rome precisely because they loved them so much that they couldn't separate.
In a harmonious marriage, husband and wife should maintain a moderate and stable relationship, marital love should be restrained and rational, love should be reflected in the couple's common management of life and love when raising children, and excessive passionate love is criticized.
In the late Roman Empire, this concept did not undergo a fundamental transformation in secular society. In the discussion of marital love, although Christianity agrees that husband and wife should have spiritual love, it also does not advocate too strong love, which is similar to the Roman tradition, so this implicit love has also been recognized by Christian scholars.
Jerome repeatedly quoted a quote from the Sentencesof Sextus, a collection of Greek Pythagorean proverbs popular among Roman Christians: "A man who loves his wife too much is himself an adulterer" to express his view of love, that is, to love one's partner with reason rather than passion, because blind love because passion is shameful.
As mentioned above, few Roman literary works are direct due to the restraint of love among various social groups in Rome, but in the epitaph that better reflects private life, some husbands or wives who wrote the inscription did not hesitate to express their love for the person in love, which can provide a glimpse of the close emotional connection between husband and wife in Roman marriage. And with the development of school education and female family education in the late empire, the Romans were more and more skillful in using literary expressions to explain love.
At the beginning of the century, a man named Rufinus died in a foreign country, and his wife spent a lot of time and money bringing his body back to Rome from the distant port of Alexandria for burial, and recorded it on the epitaph in the style of Roman classical poetry, as an expression of her deep love for her husband and her grief for his loss. Against the backdrop of Rome's high mortality rate and early marriage per capita, some couples had to face the fate of their loved one before they died, so some people also expressed their faithful love by vowing that they would never marry after the unfortunate death of their significant other.
Some Romans also wrote about the joys of conjugal life in their daily life after marriage. If you go to the bath together, enjoy bathing to the fullest. It can be seen that in addition to managing the family and raising children, love between men and women is still an important part of Roman married life.
Another theme that examines married life in Rome is the wedding ceremony. In the overall atmosphere of god-reverence in ancient Roman society, the family was the most basic religious community in society, and the family god sacrifice originated in the Roman polytheistic tradition cleverly integrated religious worship into the patriarchal system, and marriage was an important channel for absorbing new members into the religious community under the name of the family.
This is also the reason why cumbersome wedding ceremonies have long been popular among the Roman aristocracy, which values family inheritance.
However, the wedding form in Roman society was gradually simplified after the entry into the imperial period, and wedding ceremonies mixed with traditional religious rituals such as food and dinner marriages disappeared within the empire, requiring only both parties to show their intention to marry and complete the necessary registration procedures. On the one hand, this is due to the changes brought about by the development of marriage and ownership in Rome, on the other hand, the influence of the convergence of cultural practices from different regions has also diluted the traditional customs of Roman marriage, and local communities far from the center of the empire have no intention of integrating into the religious traditions of traditional Roman society.
The impact of religious changes on wedding ceremonies appeared later. It was not until centuries later that Christian weddings gradually appeared in marriages in the late Roman Empire. This includes a series of processes such as wearing yarns and holding hands, and the priest also blesses the newlyweds as witnesses and ceremonial witnesses to the wedding, and according to the Christian Paulinus, Roman Christians also began to use the church as the main venue for wedding ceremonies.
Similar to marriage ceremonies, the marriage life of the Romans was always accompanied by some form of religious activity. During the period when Roman polytheism was still prevalent, traditional rituals around the daily life of the family gave the Romans a deeper sense of belonging within the family, and for women after marriage, especially in elite families, they were able to hold priestesses or other high positions in religious institutions, such as magistrae (magistrae), which was a civic occupation that few Roman women were allowed to hold.
These religious offices are comparable to being "model wives", not only giving women a higher prestige in society, but also making wives more respected by their husbands or other family members. Due to the Roman tradition of family deity, religious belief not only became the spiritual sustenance of the Romans, but also played the role of uniting family members in the family.
Because religion and social life are inextricably linked, even if polytheism did not lag behind within the Roman Empire, the intrinsic relationship between religion and family did not disappear, but opened the door for Christian interference in married life. As Christianity replaced the traditional Roman religion in social life, going to churches to listen to priests preach and regular worship services became a common habit in some Christian families.
At the same time, Christianity also intends to promote the spread of religion among Roman families, and the diocese governed by region undoubtedly contribute to the development of these small religious groups, making it possible for husband and wife to influence and convert to religion. In Christian households, the husband or wife is more responsible for writing the eulogy.
There are also more expressions that can indicate the Christian identity of the person who erected the monument or the owner of the tomb, such as the tendency of Christians to oversimplify when describing the kinship of the deceased, retaining only the necessary nuclear family ties, and attaching the iconic "May he rest in peace" at the end.
In the long history of the Roman Empire for centuries, long-term wars and frequent power transfers destroyed the original political order, and in the later period of the empire, power was gradually concentrated in the emperor personally, religion and law became tools for rulers to consolidate their power, and the transfer of citizenship in various local provinces enhanced the integration between regions and peoples of the Roman Empire. In this historical context, the married life of the Romans is also subtly changing.
Religion is a part of Roman married life, and the tradition of family sacrifice makes Roman marriage and family an important carrier of religious activities. With the development of Roman Christianity, the influence of religion on social life also spread to the field of marriage, thanks to the emperor's policy support for Christianity and the theoretical system that Christianity had brewed and developed since its inception. The weakening of traditional polytheism within the empire also created opportunities for new religions to integrate into the institution of marriage.
Christian wedding ceremonies and religious services have gradually begun to integrate into the married life of ordinary families. However, the influence of Christianity on marriage is mainly reflected in the superficial form, in which even Christians have difficulty following Christian marriage theory, and stubborn traditional ideas still dominate secular marriage life. The Christian system of marriage not only had little impact on the social concept of marriage, but also gradually Romanized under the impact of the Roman tradition.
Roman law played an important role in a law-respecting Roman society, and the revision of Roman law in the late Empire reflected changes in the field of married life. Rome's remarriage and divorce rates continued the trend that had been increasing since the empire. Restrictions on interclass marriage have been further weakened, and with the development of schooling and changes in the selection criteria of officials, prominent families are important in the selection of marriage partners, but personal talents and potential can also be important advantages for men in the marriage market. The status of women in marriage has improved, and they have become more free in the use of marital property.
However, unlike the legislative logic of classical law, with the goal of incorporating married life into the management of the state, the Roman marriage law of the late empire incorporated more into the subjective intentions of the ruler himself, and since the time of Constantine, the law has been constantly added and deleted, and even the emperor's moral concept will affect the strength of marriage restrictions. However, the emperor still took into account the secular concept of marriage and local customs when legislating, and often compromised with the strong demands of Roman citizens, so that married life in the late empire was still mainly defined by conservative social order rather than the mandatory constraints of marriage law.
Marriage is the bond that holds the family together. Especially in the late imperial society, the nuclear family constructed by marriage replaced the large family and became the dominant family model within the empire, and the national policy was also tilted in the direction of protecting the rights and interests of nuclear family members. The emotional connection in marriage is getting stronger.
Children are not only the property of the parents, but also regarded as the crystallization of marital love, and are cared for by family members, and the power of the father to kill and seize his children in the past was increasingly restricted by the law and public opinion in the late empire, and the property rights of children and mothers were better protected.
However, patriarchy still plays a powerful role in married life, and the engulfment of family will makes unmarried women have no freedom not to marry, and their own marriage intentions are not valued. Under the shackles of morality defined by a patriarchal society, the husband is the center of married life and is responsible for assuming civil duties outside, while it is a woman's obligation to run the family and have children, and the character in line with traditional values such as obedience and conservatism is still a symbol of the virtue of the wife, and the whole society is full of suspicion of women's moral standards. Therefore, when the wife's words and deeds do not meet the expectations of her husband, he can even unilaterally dissolve the marriage on the grounds of personality problems.
To sum up, in the late Roman Empire, although with social development and political changes, married Romans would form families more independent of the original family, but Roman traditional values still deeply influenced married life.
Especially for women who lack the channel of class rise, women who lack family protection are not only difficult to enjoy the benefits brought by the progress of the social system, but also do not get the respect of their husbands in family life, and their low status will also become concubines under informal marriages, and aristocratic women in marriage are always under the control of their husbands and families, and society is more tolerant of men's pursuit of sexual freedom in marriage, and it is difficult to achieve equality in partnership, which reflects the profound traces of patriarchy on the entire society.
Bibliography:
1. Bo Jieping, "On the Contradictions in Christian Marriage Thought in the Middle Ages," World History, No. 5, 1999.
2. Lan Qiguang: "An Exploration of the Marriage System in Ancient Rome", Journal of Social Sciences, Hunan Normal University, No. 5, 2005.