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Originally Posted by
Maciamo
This is my first article this year. I have summarised all the fascinating and intriguing factoids I could find about the ancient Romans in the 9 books I have read on the subject over the last year. The page also serve as a general overview on Roman lifestyle and culture. I hope you like it.
Interesting facts about the ancient Romans
I haven't completely finished. I will add a few more paragraphs in the coming days.
Feel free to comment and add suggestions. I am sure there are plenty of other titillating info I forgot or didn't know about.
I've always been interested in the different forms of marriage in ancient Rome.
Wiki does a good job of summarizing them.
"Early Roman law recognised three kinds of marriage: confarreatio, symbolized by the sharing of spelt bread (panis farreus);[15]coemptio, "by purchase"; and by usus (habitual cohabitation). Patricians always married by confarreatio, while plebeians married by coemptio or usus: in the latter, a woman could avoid her husband's legal control simply by being absent from their shared home for three consecutive nights, once a year. Among elite families of the early Republic, manus marriage was the norm;[16] the bride passed from the manus ("hand") of her father to the manus of her husband, remaining under one or another form of male potestas (power).[17]Manus marriage was an institutionally unequal relationship. By the time of Julius Caesar, it was largely abandoned in favour of "free" marriage;[18] when a wife moved into her husband's home, she remained under her father's lawful authority; but she did not conduct her daily life under his direct scrutiny.[19] and her husband had no legal power over her.[20] This was one of the factors in the independence Roman women enjoyed, relative to those of many other ancient cultures and up to the modern period:[21] Free marriage usually involved two citizens of equal or near-equal status, or a citizen and a person who held Latin rights. In the later Imperial period and with official permission, soldier-citizens and non-citizens could marry. So total was the law's separation of property that gifts between spouses were recognised as conditional loans; if a couple divorced or even lived apart, the giver could reclaim the gift.[22]"
"A confarreatio wedding ceremony was a rare event, reserved for the highest echelons of Rome's elite. The Flamen Dialis and Pontifex Maximus presided, with ten witnesses present, and the bride and bridegroom shared a cake of spelt (in Latin far or panis farreus), hence the rite's name.[29] A more typical upper-middle class wedding in the classical period was less prestigious than a confarreatio, but could be equally lavish. It would have been carefully planned. Sometimes the bride and groom exchanged gifts before the wedding.[3]"
This is a funny one:
"Ancient physicians believed that a woman was liable to get very sick if she was deprived of sexual activityand it could even lead to a woman getting ‘'hysteric uterine constriction.’'[49] There was even legislation passed during the rule of Augustus that required widows and widowers to remarry to be able to fully inherit from people outside of their immediate family.[49]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_ancient_Rome
Non si fa il proprio dovere perchè qualcuno ci dica grazie, lo si fa per principio, per se stessi, per la propria dignità. Oriana Fallaci
Interesting facts about the ancient Romans
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