Marriage

A common dictum states that "to love one's wife with one's emotions is adultery".

Monks and theologians argue heatedly over whether St. Joseph and the Virgin Mary ever consummated their marriage, and whether Jesus therefore had siblings given life in the usual way.

Marriage usually begins as a property arrangement, is in its middle mostly about raising children, and ends about love.

In the ecclesiastical Greek of the church, the most common term for marriage between partners of different sexes is "crowning", because the wearing of nuptial crown is the most dramatic symbolic act in marriage ceremonies.

Marriages are still described in sibling terms, which is to say with terms of equality between the husband (or brother) and the wife (or sister); it won't be for some centuries that terms of possession or domination will be applied to the husband and of subjection or possessedness to the wife. This metaphor of sibling relationship does not imply an absence of sexuality, although it can sometimes do so. It suggests that the relationship is not based primarily on sexual attraction, but on respect and prudent affection, comparable to sibling relationships; the sexual aspect of the union is to be kept in its proper place. Marriage, like all other relationships, is expected to be chaste in the sense of subordinating desire to responsibility. Husbands and wives are to treat each other with mutual respect and love, even if the husband enjoyed a certain privileged position in the structure of church and state.

## Roman and Greek marriage

The month of Γαμηλιών ("marriage month") corresponded roughly to late January and early February in the modern calendar.

Roman marriage was perceived as a family affair, not an individual decision based on personal attraction. The matter was one for family discussion, since it would have an impact on the family for generations to come. It would not be too gross an oversimplification to assert that making a profitable marriage was the chief business of the upper classes, since inheriting and marrying money were the sole legitimate ways to obtain wealth, apart from farming, land-holding, or government office. Roman brides were pelted with nuts, a custom also applied to newly purchased slaves.

There were special ceremonies to arrange the business transactions necessary to marriage: the ἐγγύη in Athenian society (from a word also used for such purely financial arrangements as setting bail or posting a surety), the sponsalia in Rome (from the word for "promise; contract; guarantee"), both corresponding roughly to formal betrothal (from a word for "pledge faith") in medieval Europe. In the eyes of most premodern jurists and families the marriage was contracted ~ and therefore valid and binding ~ from the time these financial and legal arrangements were concluded, and failure to proceed with the concluding ceremonies constituted a breach of contract rather than simply a personal loss.

Athenian men married around age thirty, woman at about half that age.

Marriage was the criterion for legal independence from parents for males. For women, who never achieved full independence, it was even more profound: marriage was the initiation rite into adulthood (something her husband had usually gone through in another context). She became adult by virtue of her marriage. A woman who never married would always be dependent, in many ways a child, whereas a married woman managed a household, and could even do so on her own if left a widow.

There were three ideals of Roman marriage:

* a single marriage to one husband (nota bene, not to one wife)
* wifely obedience
* the permanence of the marriage bond

Because of the first, even the third is primarily an issue for women (id est, there was no pressure against a male's divorcing his wife or remarrying after her death); matrimony made more of a difference in the life of a woman than in that of her husband.

Since marriage was by and large a property and dynastic arrangement, a man (but not a woman) might well have a wife for dynastic and economic reasons, plus a concubine and a number of slave women for sex (or love). He might even go to prostitutes on top of all this. This appears to have been a common pattern for prosperous Greek and Roman males, and was not considered or even promiscuous.

Women were not necessarily satisfied to have their husbands engaging in extramarital sex, but they have little recourse besides complaining: the husbands were violating no law, and not even doing something that would bring disgrace on themselves. Nor would a woman's male relatives likely intervene against a husband unless he brought another freeborn sexual partner into the house, who might constitute a rival to the wife.

Although most people hoped love would follow from marriage (nota bene, not occasion it), it was not conceptualized as romantic love in a modern sense but was more like friendly, parental, or sibling relationships. And if marriage was expected to fulfill sexual needs, this would not be because one chose a partner who matched precisely his or her sexual interest, but because the spouses were considerate of each other's desires, and voluntarily limited the arena of sexuality to marriage. Spouses who were actually "in love" with each other were thought extraordinary and odd before the later empire.

The same word, morigera ("dutiful; obliging") is used in Latin literature to describe both filial piety and wifely obedience.

A new form of marriage became common in the empire. Rather than being cum manu (the transfer of legal power over a woman), the new form was technically sine manu ("without authority"). The wife did not become the property of her husband, or even legally a part of his familia, but was conceptualized as an adult person in her own right or as an extension of her own family, now joined to the husband's (id est, as opposed to her becoming a member of his familia). Within the hiusehold (though certainly not outside it) there was a semblance of equality. Three of the most important consequences of this shift were

* the woman's consent (rather than simply her parents') was increasingly emphasized as necessary to valid marriage
* wives could sue their husbands for divorce
* the right of husbands to have sex with any members of the familia (or all social inferiors) was restricted in many households.

Nonetheless, sensible, mutually advantageous alliances were still the cultural ideal, even under the later empire as unions became more egalitarian and affective. Even in Ἀχιλλεὺς Τάτιος's intensely romantic novel *τὰ κατὰ Λευκίππην καὶ Kλειτoφῶντα* the protagonist's father arranges a sensible marriage for him to a homely woman with a fortune.

On the other hand, there is a considerable romantic literature from the same milieu in which spouses are depicted as ardent lovers, drawn to each other by beauty or character, uninterested in anyone else despite constant temptations and assaults on their virtue, and faithful to each other to the end of their lives. The idea that love might provoke a marriage is not new, but in most previous Greek and Latin literature its role had been much more one-sided: a male (human or divine) captivated by the beauty of a female took her as his bride. Although in most of the Hellenistic examples it is a theme of escapist fantasy, it is embedded in a deeply conventional literature, and clearly embodies a widespread wish that marriage could be based on love and choice, if not a reflection that it actually was. In Πλούταρχος's Ἐρωτικός, Πλούταρχος himself protests against a speaker's characterizing (opposite-sex) marriage as ἀνεραστον και ἄμοιρον φιλίας κοινωνίαν "loveless union devoid of friendship" but later in the same dialogue one of the advocates for love concedes that love makes marriage "stormy and chaotic" ~ as if most marriages would not be undertaken for love.

Tension between the two models of marriage is quite evident within most of the romance novels themselves. Although in this fiction love becomes te substance of the marriage, even in the most idealized literature it is rarely the occasion for it.