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Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian (Clarendon Paperbacks)

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This book explores the Roman marriage customs and laws from the late Republic period to the third century into the Empire. As the author uses many Latin sources, this book tends to get tedious to read. Despite the dense prose, the author demonstrates that the Romans predicated marriage on consent and the idea that it helped procreate. The story unfolds to tell about the tenuous marriage laws. In fact, in "Manus," a woman usually could never recover her dowry, but on other legal bonds, the laws allowed her to keep part of her dowry. The contemporary connotations abound; For instance, the author recognizes that adultery precipitated some spouses to sue for divorce. Also, women usually married self-sufficient, older men. Not surprisingly, this book gets bogged down into gender stereotypes, including the "double standard" laws about adultery that usually favored men. Roman Marriage is a good book into the obfuscated laws regarding marriage in the Roman Empire.