ABSTRACT
In ancient Rome, there was an expectation that its citizens (male and female) would marry and have children throughout their adult lives. It could be described as a duty associated with citizenship, in order that the state maintained a body of citizens that ultimately it could have called upon for its survival. On the other hand, parents and grandparents expected their successors to marry to establish the succession and survival of the family name in the future. More immediately, marriage could be seen as a process by which a family could extend its kin network to include others and to make connections that secured the support of persons beyond their immediate or existing network of relatives (Corbier 1991: 136). In the past the nature of these connections has often been viewed as a determining factor in the politics of the late Republic. However, this is not our concern here; what we wish to show is the potential of marriage as a process of kin extension and that the nature of kin extension varied according to the age of the bride and bridegroom at marriage. Our methodology for approaching this problem is to base our research primarily on the demographic life tables produced by Richard Saller (1994, see Appendix) and to combine these theoretical possibilities with a number of examples drawn from ancient sources. The latter, it has to be stated, are far from representative of all marriages. In particular, Pompey’s many marriages reported by Plutarch (Life of Pompey) are emblematic exempla for a second century AD audience, looking back to the disasters of the first century BC. Other examples that we utilise are necessarily drawn from the letters of Cicero. There is an inevitable reliance on these two sources of information in the discussion of marriage at Rome. This can be seen clearly from Susan Treggiari’s index of principal texts cited for her study of Roman Marriage (1991a: 547-8). After the legal sources, Cicero is the main author cited and discussed. Other studies of marriage follow this pattern, particularly in the discussion of kin extension – a social phenomenon not covered by Roman law, in that they necessarily rely on certain key examples from the Roman republic based on information from Cicero and Plutarch (e.g. Bradley 1991: 156-76). In short, our knowledge of Roman marriage as a social phenomenon is limited once we step beyond the legal framework. We recognise that our source
material influences the way in which we view marriage and this is why we place an emphasis on the need to utilise demographic simulation as a control on these emblemic examples of republican marriage practices.
