Video Transcript: Marriage and Family

Now we're going to take a look at the whole question of marriage and family how people  really live as far as we know. And you will know, here and in some other ones other segments  that we're using a lot of Latin terms, and we're talking about Rome and. Well, as I think I've  explained before, but I'll say it again, these people are living in the Roman world, whether  they're living actually at Rome, which some of them were, but or all over the empire in cities  of the Eastern Mediterranean. They're, they're living in a world that is dominated by Rome,  and by Roman customs and Roman law. So that's, that's why we're doing this. And also, to be  honest, there's more known today about Rome, at this period than about the many of the  subcultures and there were subcultures. And it's an important thing also to say, is that not  everybody thought of themselves as Roman, certainly not everybody's Roman citizen. But it's  the dominant culture. And if you understand that, if you do some analysis, even of your own  situation, where you are, you can identify what is the dominant culture, what is what is sort of the, the the public expectation, while at the same time, there are all kinds of other  subcultures that are going on. Okay. So, we, we go into marriage and family and family is the  most common social and biblical metaphor. We use family all the time, family values, family  life, the family of nations, you can think of all of the expressions that we use to in which we  use family to say something. And in the Bible as well, it's, it's some, it's an image, because it's such a present social reality for everybody, everybody comes from some family somehow,  and is embedded in some kind of a social group, which either is or simulates a family. So it is  a really root image, the the picture that you have there, we're going to, you're going to see  pieces of it again, and again. This is a funerary monument from Ravenna. And, but it's, it's,  it's in from the Roman period, first century, very, very Roman, in everything that it represents. And there are inscriptions on it, which we'll we'll talk about later. But you see that at the top,  there's, there's this grandma, there's an older woman at the top, and then a couple with a  small child, girl, and then two seemingly unrelated, young men, and a boy at the bottom. And  each of them has a history that is given in the inscriptions, but we'll come back to that. So  some meanings of family. I don't know what your first connotation is, when you hear the word  family, it will depend very much on your culture. In this world, in the world of the New  Testament, and of early Rome, there are three major ways in which that word is used. The first is what we would call vertical, that is your ancestry, your family tree, your grandparents and  great grandparents and ancestors, and children and grandchildren, the line of family as it  goes through history. That's certainly one of the meanings. A second meaning is everyone  who is related to each other by blood or marriage, horizontally, everybody who's in existence  today and relating with each other, the people who come together when you have a family  reunion. And the third meaning here is the residents of a house whether they are related or  not related. It has this is more the connotation of property of everyone who is under the  authority of the of the under the potestas. Remember, we talked about that? The authority of  the head of the family, the head of the household, that is also in Latin, the most common  word is familia and, and that can be deceptive because we assume that means the same  thing we mean by family and it doesn't necessarily it's in. In Greek, there are two words oikos  and oikia and oikia more likely tends in the property direction rather than the people but in  Not always, it can be very fluid. Now, what these terms do not usually refer to is what is, at  least in the West. Today, the most common understanding of family, which is the nuclear  family, father, mother and children. It does not refer to that, and one of the Latin jurist,  scholars of the law actually said, we don't have a word for that. We don't have a word for the  unit of father and mother and children. Because everything is more extended all of the ideas,  it take in more people than that. So we have to be careful about that when we when we think  about it. Now, I don't know it depends on where you live, and what your cultural experience is what you think marriage is. And in this culture that we're talking about, most often, and this  this is also from an approach of anthropology, marriage is not a romantic union between two  people. Marriage is a contract between two families, for the sake of offspring of the next  generation, and for the transfer of property. So it's, it's a relationship of convenience for the  families, for the two families. It is the two families who come together who make these  arrangements. In the best of circumstances, the bride and groom will consent to it.  Sometimes, they didn't have much ability to consent, particularly when you were talking 

about a girl married off very early. And before she really could, could consent could could  have enough sense of herself to consent. You, you know, if you do any reading in the  European modern Europe, and its royal families, you find the same thing you find children  who are betrothed to each other when they're like three years old, you know, and why it's  because these are advantageous relationships for their parents. So, marriage has many  different meanings in different cultures. And and you see, maybe today, we well definitely  today, we think that arranged marriages are not a good idea that, that young people should  have the freedom to choose whom they're going to spend the rest of their lives with. But if  you're in a context in which marriage is understood as this this arrangement between two  families, arranged marriages, are they make sense within that context, not always for the  benefit of the the young people who are married, unfortunately. But you have to think of  marriage in this way. And should then a romantic, a loving union develop so much the better.  And it often did, maybe, for the majority of times, we just don't know. But it was not  something that was necessary as a prerequisite for marriage. At the bottom of the screen,  there you see marriage cum manu and sine manu and let me explain this. Manus is also a  legal term Roman law term. That means the transfer of the bride into the groom's familia. This means she is legally no longer a member of her own family. She is now a member of her  groom's family, which means she cannot inherit from her own family. And she cannot  bequeath property to her own family. So it's a legal separation. Roman marriage was done  this way for a number of centuries. But this was going out of style and right before the New  Testament period. And instead, what what developed was what we call marriage a sine manu. And the interesting thing is that that's a modern adaptation. Cum manu is the ancient term,  but sine manu without manus is really a modern adaptation. We don't have any ancient texts  that talk that way. But what this meant was a marriage closer to something like what we're  familiar with. That is the bride remains a member of her own familia. And the it's a question of inheritance back and forth, the the older way went out of fashion, we think, because precisely because of the difficulty of the bride's family losing its property, they, the bride would bring  property into the marriage, and it would be lost to her own family. And so they began to that  grew out of style, and they began to change it. So that wives remained members of their own  familia, legally. Now, what's the problem that this created was in the marriage itself, that now  you have two entities owning property, and trying to work that out together. And so when you had considerable property involved, they have to make a careful separation. And in the case  of divorce, which was fairly common, they had to be able to know from the beginning sort of  like what in the, in the US now I think we call a prenuptial agreement, an arrangement in  which in the case of divorce, it's clear which property goes where, because it's as many I'm  sure of you know, in the case of divorce, it can be very messy, to try to separate property. So,  so that was the problem, then that was created when they change that, however, that the  marriage sine manu the marriage in which the bride remained a member of her own family,  was actually a step forward for women, because the the women then retained their rights to  their property, the right to administer the property, when in the old ways cum manu the bride  brings the property into the marriage, it actually becomes her husband's property. So now,  women, married women can can control their own property, it's belongs to their familia, you  know, all of it belongs to the familia, but they have better control over it. Something on agent  marriage, the picture you see here is a painting from a tomb in Pompeii, in which someone  must have been very proud of their family silver, and painted, it painted a picture of it on the  wall of the tomb, so you get some sense of what the best silver tableware looked like. So age  at marriage, we know something about this, and how do we know mostly from epitaph mostly  from funerary memorials. When When girls died, and of course, I haven't said anything about  life expectancy, many, many children died. And young people died. And, and when a girl died  before marriage, she's commemorated by her parents. When a girl dies after marriage is  commemorated by her husband, this is the usual thing. And so that's how you can tell who's  married and who isn't married. And a general pattern is that boys entered into their first  marriage in their mid 20s, mid to late 20s. And girls in their late teens, sometimes middle  teens, depending again on the social status in in wealthier families, girls tend to be married  earlier, because precisely because those are family arrangements that are going to benefit 

the family. And so let's get her married. Whereas in poorer families, to the extent that we  have the information, the girl tended to be older, probably because the family needed her  labor until it was time for marriage. So this is first marriage. So girls, a bit sometimes quite a  bit almost, sometimes as much as 10 years younger than their husbands, which sets up the  dynamic of course of an older, more experienced man marrying a younger, less experienced  girl and it fits quite well into a pattern of subordination of women, of wives. even though there is there's a lot of household literature. We'll talk about that a little bit later. That suggests that that even at an early age, when when a girl enters into marriage, she's expected to know how to how to manage a household, which includes managing slaves, the household slaves, if  they're people of a sufficient wealth to have that. So yeah, it's an interesting dynamic. And  we'll talk about more about that another time. Divorce, divorce was commonly practiced. And  it often it was, again, the families that would want to initiate the divorce among politically  placed people, I guess it happened more often, I think, I would say it happens more often, for  political reasons. That is, this wife no longer is going to hurt her family connections are no  longer going to get me appointed, where I want to be appointed. And so I'm going to divorce  her and marry another woman from another family whose family connections are better for  me. I mean, that kind of thing happened among more ordinary people. Divorce would not be  perhaps for those reasons, but for other reasons of in compatibility, whatever, infidelity. And  in the case of divorce, as I said, it's the the later kind of a marriage arrangement was much  easier in terms of transferring property. Now, this is all Roman practice. And as I said, that  sets the tone. One of the things we really don't know is among, for example, Jews, Jewish  couples, who are not Roman citizens, would they have followed these customs or not? And,  and we simply don't know. We just don't have enough evidence to know. So all we can do is  say that the the predominant model was this and that the evidence we have is for people who are living this way in their marriage. And, and I should say, also, with divorce, that remarriage was quite common. And in the political at the political level, there's almost no divorce without  remarriage. The point is the remarriage, the point is, the more advantageous marriage and  so, but with other people, we do know and do some ca in some cases of Jewish people to  divorce for incompatibility, very variety of reasons, without necessarily remarrying and a  divorced woman would return to her own family. Children, whereas today, at least in most  western customs, in the case of divorce, children are more likely to go with the mother. In this  case, no, they went with the Father, because they are part of his familia, his potesta. And so a woman who was divorced was most likely to lose custody of her children. And these are all  some of the, the realities of marriage and divorce. But marriage is, of course of a universal,  almost a universal cultural custom, but very differently understood in different ways in  different times in places