their women as we hear of the Etruscans, Lydians, and other ancient matrilinear peoples, and of numerous modern ones also if they have patrilinear neighbours, viz. that they are extremely loose and unchaste, regard prostitution as a quite legitimate occupation, and the like? So far as ancient tradition touches this matter at all it is quite the other way, plebeian women being represented as very jealous of their honour and as being good and faithful wives.
(2) It is further urged that the various forms of marriage at Rome may be divided into two classes, those in which the woman severs her connection with her own family and passes into the guardianship (manus) of her husband, and those in which she does not.[1] Is not the latter strongly reminiscent of matrilinear marriages, in which the wife never belongs to her husband's family at all?
The answer is, I think, decidedly in the negative. The normal marriage did involve manus, and the most characteristic form which did not was hardly a regular marriage at all; it consisted in cohabitation (usus), broken by the woman leaving the man's house for a minimum period of three nights in the year. This is clearly no early form, and we have no idea when it grew up. I would suggest that it was found convenient for a time among the mixed population of Rome, since it enabled people who had no deities in common to marry if they chose. It is clearly not patrician, but at the same time there is nothing matrilinear about it. What we fail to find any clear trace of is a marriage in which the wife did not go to her husband's
- ↑ See Rossbach, Röm: Ehe; Marquardt, Privatleben, p. 30 sqq. To divide marriage into religious and civil, as Ridgeway does, op. cit. p. 13, is against all we know of early ideas of marriage; and all Roman marriages involved some sort of religious ceremony, see e.g. Rossbach, Röm Hochzeits-u. Ehedenkmaler, p. 9. The simpler forms were not at once recognised as marriages at all, see the references in Marq. p. 31, n.5. I believe the fundamental difference to have been, originally, that a patrician bride passed from one set of gentile sacra to another, while a plebeian did not, because neither she nor the bridegroom had any.
