Introduction: The Discourse of Marriage and Its Context

University of Wisconsin Press Chapter Title: Introduction: The Discourse of Marriage and Its Context Chapter Author(s): Georgia Tsouvala Book Title: The Discourse of Marriage in the Greco-Roman World Book Editor(s): Jeffrey Beneker, Georgia Tsouvala Published by: University of Wisconsin Press. (2020) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv136c5bq.5 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of Wisconsin Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Discourse of Marriage in the Greco-Roman World This content downloaded from 83.212.248.199 on Mon, 27 Jun 2022 12:19:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Introduction The Discourse of Marriage and Its Context G e o r g i a Ts o u v a l a Μετὰ τὸν πάτριον θεσμόν, ὃν ὑμῖν ἡ τῆς Δήμητρος ἱέρεια συνειργνυ­ μένοις ἐφήρμοσεν, οἶμαι καὶ τὸν λόγον ὁμοῦ συνεφαπτόμενον ὑμῶν καὶ συνυμεναιοῦντα χρήσιμον ἄν τι ποιῆσαι καὶ τῷ νόμῳ προσῳδόν. ἐν μὲν γὰρ τοῖς μουσικοῖς ἕνα τῶν αὐλητικῶν νόμων ἱππόθορον ἐκάλουν, μέλος τι τοῖς ἵπποις ὁρμῆς ἐπεγερτικὸν ὡς ἔοικεν ἐνδιδόν τε περὶ τὰς ὀχείας· φιλοσοφίᾳ δὲ πολλῶν λόγων καὶ καλῶν ἐνόντων, οὐδενὸς ἧττον ἄξιος σπουδῆς ὁ γαμήλιός ἐστιν οὗτος, ᾧ κατᾴδουσα τοὺς ἐπὶ βίου κοινωνίᾳ συνιόντας εἰς ταὐτὸ πράους τε παρέχει καὶ χειροήθεις ἀλλήλοις. Following the traditional custom, which the priestess of Demeter enjoined upon you as you were being locked away in the wedding chamber, I think that a speech also, pertaining directly to you and joining in with the marriage hymn, would make for a gift that is useful and in harmony with the melody. For in music there is a melody for the aulos called “The Breeding Horse,” a certain tune that stimulates horses and they capitulate, it seems, during the breeding season. And though there are many fine subjects in philosophy, none is more worthy of our study than this discourse of marriage, by which philosophy charms couples who embark upon a common life and makes them gentle and amenable toward each other. Plutarch, Marriage Advice, 138B 3 This content downloaded from 83.212.248.199 on Mon, 27 Jun 2022 12:19:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms G e o r g i a Ts o u v a l a I begin this introduction with the opening of Plutarch’s Marriage Advice, a treatise composed as a wedding gift for a newly married couple—and his former students—that contains more than forty precepts that the author hopes will improve the couple’s marriage. Plutarch appears to have genuinely believed in the importance of this discourse, returning to it in other philosophical works, such as his study of erotic love between spouses in Dialogue on Love, his examination of character (including spousal loyalty) in Virtues of Women, and in his touching Consolation to His Wife on the death of their young child. Plutarch also explored the marital relationship less directly in his biographies, through the narration of interactions between husbands and wives in many of the Parallel Lives. Included mainly to supplement the exploration of the character of his biographical subjects, descriptions of marriages and homelife nonetheless reveal Plutarch’s views of how a spouse—man or woman—should behave and how a household should be run. The essays in this book take as their starting point Plutarch’s commitment to exploring the marital relationship in a variety of literary forms. Our first step in assembling the essays was a panel sponsored by the International Plutarch Society and held during the annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in 2013. While the panel fostered lively discussion, it also made us realize that in order to discuss Plutarch’s works on marriage in any depth, we needed to understand the cultural and intellectual context of his late first- and second-century CE milieu and the tradition of the discourse that came both before and after him. As a result, we enlarged the focus of the panel (only three of those initial presentations have been revised, expanded, and included here) in this volume. Although there is much more that could be written on the subject, this book can provide a lens through which one can appreciate how the discourse of marriage, as found in the different genres that might have been important to Plutarch or related to his writings—philosophy, art, epithalamium, epic, and the novel—developed over time.1 As a result, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of classics, ancient history, philosophy, art, archaeology, and gender and women’s studies, as well as to those who are interested in the history of the family. For this study, we have assembled scholars who examine ancient views of marriage in important samples of the philosophy, literature, and art produced by Plutarch’s predecessors and contemporaries, as well as in some of his own works and in works that come after him. It is not our contention that these ancient works and authors had a direct influence on Plutarch (it is almost impossible to know what Plutarch read or saw in his daily life). Rather, we are seeking to explore the broader intellectual 4 This content downloaded from 83.212.248.199 on Mon, 27 Jun 2022 12:19:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Introduction and cultural context of writing about marriage in the Greco-Roman world in the late Hellenistic period and the early Empire.2 It will become clear to the reader that the traditional chronology for the Hellenistic period (from the death of Alexander to that of Cleopatra) does not apply here, especially since the different Hellenistic kingdoms and the Greek confederacies on the mainland came under Roman military (but not necessarily cultural) control at different times.3 The military and political mechanism of the Romans on the Greek mainland, for example, arrived in the second century BCE with the establishment of the provinces of Macedonia and, later, Achaia. Hellenistic culture, art, and literature, however, remained dominant well into the Principate and the emergence of the so-called Second Sophistic.4 The arrangement of the chapters, therefore, is more topical and less chronological, and it veers between Greek and Roman authors based partly on our understanding of the intra- and interconnections of their works and Plutarch’s. The thread that ties all these chapters together is the discourse(s) about marriage, and how this discourse reflects changes over time in the Greco-Roman world of the late Hellenistic period and the early Roman Empire. The ancient sources are more numerous and diverse in this period and, thus, attest to the variation in perspectives and the transformation of the institution over time. Such emphasis allows for a more nuanced discussion about the different ways in which marriage is represented by diverse kinds of artistic and literary sources (both surviving and fragmentary) than one might have encountered previously. The most important scholarship on Greco-Roman marriage includes Susan Treggiari’s volume Roman Marriage (1991) and Sarah Pomeroy’s edited collection of essays, Plutarch’s “Advice to the Bride and Groom” and “A Consolation to His Wife” (1999), both of which take a legal, “fact-based,” and historical approach to the topic. Since then, and while the international bibliography on matrimony has grown immensely, there have been three more recent books devoted to marriage in the ancient world that I discuss here briefly.5 Lena Larsson Lovén and Agneta Strömberg’s Ancient Marriage in Myth and Reality (2010) examines marriage as an institution rather than as a philosophical topic or a subject for literature and art, and Claude-Emmanuelle Centlivres Challet’s Like Man, Like Woman: Roman Women, Gender Qualities and Conjugal Relationships at the Turn of the First Century (2013) takes a theoretical look at Roman marriage and gender relations in the late first century CE, and so it deals with roughly the same time period as this volume. Its focus is on Rome and on Latin literature (primarily Pliny the Younger and Juvenal but also Statius, Martial, Tacitus, Quintilian, and Musonius Rufus) to discuss issues of 5 This content downloaded from 83.212.248.199 on Mon, 27 Jun 2022 12:19:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms G e o r g i a Ts o u v a l a gender and relations between men and women. Finally, Nikoletta Manioti’s volume Family in Flavian Epic (2016) discusses all kinds of familial roles and ties, including those of wife and husband, in Valerius Flaccus, Statius, and Silius Italicus.6 While complementary in many ways to the aforementioned scholarship, our focus in this volume is the discourse of marriage rather than marriage as a legal, anthropological, or social institution per se. Furthermore, this volume deals with both Greek and Roman literature and highlights the diversity and change found in the literary, philosophical, and artistic representations of the marital relationship when the Hellenistic and Roman societies encountered each other militarily and politically in the late Hellenistic period and the early Empire. Not every ancient author was as deliberate or as direct as Plutarch about their engagement with the conjugal relationship, but all the texts and art examined in this volume reveal varying conceptions of an institution that was central to ancient social and political life, and which remains central to life in the modern world. Survey of Chapters and Their Context Our collection begins with a study of the iconography of marriage on late Classical and early Hellenistic pottery. For more than twenty-five years, The Wedding in Ancient Athens by John Oakley and Rebecca Sinos (1993) has been the standard examination of the Athenian wedding and its rituals. In “Wedding Connections in Greek and Roman Art,” Rebecca Sinos broadens the lens by exploring the development of images that unite the themes of wedding representations on Athenian vase painting and of mystery cult initiation. The wedding is a ritual, Sinos posits, for which late Classical vase painting, in particular, exploits the artistic possibility of blurring the boundary between mortals and divine or heroic figures, and thus, it gives shape and form to the abstract message inherent in the ritual itself. This connection contributes to our understanding of the “wedding experience.” The great majority of wedding scenes on late Classical and early Hellenistic vases portray the wedding as an occasion when mortals are invested with divine presence (for example, that of Aphrodite, Eros, Pothos, or Himeros). References to the bride as Aphrodite or the groom as hero have been established in Classical wedding imagery, while Eleusinian allusions entered the picture in the late Classical period. The Mysteries provided “an unusually close parallel to the wedding ritual, including preliminary sacrifices and baths; a procession involving songs, ceremonial mockery, 6 This content downloaded from 83.212.248.199 on Mon, 27 Jun 2022 12:19:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Introduction and torches; entry into a structure excluding all but the initiates; and the experience of revelation, with the promise of a better life and afterlife for initiates,” similar to the experience of the groom in the nuptial chamber (θάλαμος) and the unveiling of the bride. According to Sinos, there is a “fundamental connection . . . between the aims of mystery cults and the iconographic strategies of wedding scenes” on paintings from the Classical through the late Hellenistic periods. From a visual representation of the wedding experience we move to symbolic imagery in Greek and Roman authors with Karen Klaiber Hersch’s chapter, “Violence in the Roman Wedding,” which investigates the violent component of the wedding ritual in Rome. In particular, Hersch elucidates how the mental and physical assault of the bride, in the form of abduction, lamentation, and the symbolic death of her previous life and identity, is connected to the Roman understanding of the foundation of the state and the gods that protect it. Literature (and to some extent art) entertain the possibility that many Romans associated the rituals of the wedding with the bride’s (symbolic) sacrifice on behalf of the state. By comparing Athenian and Roman wedding traditions, Hersch argues that the vis (force, violence), real or perceived, exercised on the bride during the nuptial ritual was a distinct Roman custom. The founding myths of Rome, and especially the rape of the Sabine women, served as models for the Roman wedding. The identity of the (Sabine) “brides” was subsumed in the foundation of the Roman city, and (marital) sex served the state through procreation.7 To the epithalamic tradition of Catullus detailing the transition of the unwilling, fearful bride into the possession of her new groom, Statius adds a new twist in his epithalamium for Violentilla and Stella: Venus’ message to the unwilling bride is not about a marriage of love, a union of the hearts, or marital concordia but about submission to the yoke of marriage and marital sex in the service of the state. Violence in the form of sexual penetration of the (virginal) bride by the groom, argues Hersch, was expected by the guests at a Roman wedding, as well as the cries of terror and pain of the bride in the wedding chamber, as a way to confirm the bride’s virginal state and to ensure, thus, legitimate progeny to the groom and the Roman state. While Hersch considers the epithalamium, among other genres, in Rome during the early Empire, Paolo Di Meo moves us to the Greek world and to Plutarch’s redeployment of themes found in this ancient genre. His chapter, “Plutarch’s Marriage Advice and the Tradition of the Poetic Epithalamium,” examines the relationship between Plutarch’s precepts on marriage and the 7 This content downloaded from 83.212.248.199 on Mon, 27 Jun 2022 12:19:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms G e o r g i a Ts o u v a l a literary tradition of the epithalamium, or wedding song. From Sappho to Catullus, and from Statius to Claudian, the epithalamium was produced well into the sixth century CE. The verse epithalamium was the basis of the creation of the epideictic genre of the wedding speech, similar to Plutarch’s Marriage Advice and to the rhetorical texts of the late imperial period. Although the epithalamic models follow either that of Sappho or that of Statius, the history of the epithalamium is characterized by a strong sense of tradition, which allows us to make certain judgments regarding the whole collection without regard to chronology or metrical structure. Therefore, Plutarch, like the poets and rhetors of the epithalamic tradition, acts like a teacher (both real and metaphorical) who gives advice to the young and inexperienced couple. In Marriage Advice, in both the prologue and the epilogue (as well as in single precepts), we find elements that are traced back to epithalamic models and motifs. For example, Plutarch describes plants with thorns, such as the rose and asparagus, that deter the lover, and insects such as bees that protect their honey with their sting; he invites the newlyweds to collaborate during their first intercourse and to transform their physical union into a harmonious relationship; and he invokes the gods that are present not only to inspire poets but also to take part in the festivities and to make the union of the couple stable and harmonious. Once the wedding rituals have been performed, and the couple has consummated its relationship in the wedding chamber while friends and family sing the epithalamic songs or give the wedding speech, the conjugal relationship must survive the daily grind of communal life and household management. The authors of the Empire focus on the purpose of marriage and provide a prescriptive way of life for the married couple, who may or may not come to terms with each other. The often-quoted fourth-century BCE Ps.Demosthenes’ Against Neaera 59 summarizes the purpose of marriage until recently: procreation. Marriage is a social and state institution grounded in the need to create progeny, heirs to the family property and name.8 By the Hellenistic period, however, some argued against the necessity to marry. Although the philosopher Epicurus (fourth to third century BCE) accepted the traditional view of marriage for procreation, he also argued against the institution or, rather, for its avoidance, except in certain circumstances. Geert Roskam in “Epicurus on Marriage” explains that the Epicurean understanding of marriage was based on the general principle of seeking the satisfaction of limited natural desires, which brings freedom from physical and mental pain and achieves tranquility and contentment (ἀταραξία). The avoidance of 8 This content downloaded from 83.212.248.199 on Mon, 27 Jun 2022 12:19:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Introduction marriage, in Epicurus’ view, was the avoidance of harming (or being harmed by) a spouse or one’s children. If the spouse or the children were a source of misery and trouble, marriage could be understood as a source of pain, and to marry, then, would be the pursuit of pain; the premature death of a child (or children) could also mar one’s tranquility. Such reasoning may have convinced Epicurus that his pleasure and tranquility were better guaranteed by avoiding marriage and procreation. Under certain circumstances, however, marriage could yield more pleasure than pain. Roskam argues that these special circumstances must include significant advantages for the Epicurean philosopher, advantages that would balance the possible pain and trouble that a marriage and children could bring. Such circumstances could include financial reasons, such as inheritance, the presence of an heiress (ἐπίκληρος), or existing dynamics and relationships between extended families.9 The discourse over the usefulness and, even, spirituality of marriage is especially prolific in the early empire. The role that the institution of marriage plays in the creation of the state and Empire, and in its continuation, had been spelled out in Cicero’s On Duties: “Because the urge to reproduce is an instinct common to all animals, society originally consists of the couple itself [in ipso coniugio], next of the couple with their children, then of one house and all things held in common [communa omnia]. This is the beginning of the city and the seed-bed of the state” (1.54). The family unit and the begetting of children, who can become citizens, is by this argument the foundation of the city and the state. In the first century CE, Musonius Rufus prescribed (specifically, to husbands since they are thought to act on their sexual passions more easily than wives) sexual intercourse only in marriage “for the begetting of children, since that is lawful, but unjust and unlawful when it is mere pleasure-seeking, even in marriage” (12). The prescriptive role of the conjugal unit and its responsibility to the state was not heeded by all, however. Clearly by the late Hellenistic period, the upper classes were abstaining from marriage and were not producing the citizens the Roman Empire needed, as the laws against remaining unmarried at various points in Roman history, but especially under Augustus and the Julio-Claudians, show. Under the Julian Laws, Areius Didymus restated the Aristotelean position that a politeia is the coming together of a man and a woman according to the law for the procreation of children and community of life (Stob. 2.7.26). The conduct and purpose of the family unit were especially important under Augustus, who publicly memorialized the imperial family for the first time on a state monument, the Ara Pacis, although ultimately his legislation failed, as did the persistent idealization of the univira 9 This content downloaded from 83.212.248.199 on Mon, 27 Jun 2022 12:19:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms G e o r g i a Ts o u v a l a (the woman who had married only one husband) compared to the realities of the elites who pursued serial marriages and divorces, and even adultery, in order to advance their status. Authors in the first century CE moved toward “separate-but-equal” roles for the spouses in marriage. Musonius Rufus’ ideas about marriage (mid-first century CE), for example, in which a philosophical woman’s capacity for virtue is equal to that of a man, retained a traditional role for the wife in the conjugal relationship: she is a wife and a mother who is expected to nurse her children from her own breast and serve her husband with her own hands.10 Both Musonius Rufus and later Plutarch agreed that the foundation of marriage is the mutual affection and care expressed by the couple to each other and their offspring. But both authors, although they acknowledge the uxorial potential for virtue and seek an “elevated” form of the conjugal relationship based on companionship (κοινωνία, or societas in the expression of Cicero, Off. 5.65), nonetheless maintain the limited, traditional gender roles for a woman, as loyal wife and mother. Martha Nussbaum, in the title of her 2002 article, called the approach to a conjugal relationship that extends the role of the wife beyond that of a vessel for procreation to that of a caretaker and, possibly, a companion to her husband the “incomplete feminism” of Musonius Rufus. Alex Dressler engages directly with such modern and ancient discourses on marriage. While poets such as Juvenal and Martial continued the antimarriage tradition in their satires, the Stoic philosopher and poet Seneca proposed alternatives to traditional patriarchal marriage through his tragic female characters, as Dressler argues in “The Impossible Feminism of ‘Seneca, On Marriage’: Style and the Woman in Jerome, Against Jovinian 1.” Seneca’s “incomplete egalitarian marriage,” as it survived in Jerome’s Christian text, persisted into late Antiquity and the rise of Christianity. While Seneca allows for marriage for female self-realization, his tragedies and philosophical treatise, as the latter survives in Jerome, portray women who dislike marriage, even companionate marriage.11 Dressler argues that these women, not by themselves but in the various contexts in which we find them—in Jerome’s treatise Against Jovinian and in the context of Seneca’s other writings, especially his tragedies— bring the feminism that Nussbaum finds in Musonius Rufus nearer to “completion.” These tragic wives in Seneca’s works shoulder the negative effects of marriage, an institution they understand as a symbol of servitude. Instead of marrying for a second time, they seek violence against their own bodies by choosing death. Thus, in their assertion to self-destruction, they choose 10 This content downloaded from 83.212.248.199 on Mon, 27 Jun 2022 12:19:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Introduction abjection from the patriarchal system, a system that wants them to marry again. Nevertheless, female self-determination marks the impossibility of Senecan feminism—that is, of a “completed” feminism that not only theorizes the end of patriarchal marriage as a satirical reflex of some Roman women’s lifestyle choices but also actively practices the destruction of the institution through the agency of women. In Seneca, this “completed” feminism remains always only a possibility, according to Dressler. In general, he argues that Seneca proposes alternatives in marriage (for example, nontraditional power dynamics between husband and wife) and, eventually, to marriage. While Jerome’s Seneca supports celibacy, Jerome and Seneca (in his tragedies, at least) may even propose the obliteration of marriage. Inbuilt culturally gendered associations for both men and women in the context of marriage and marital values is the theme of Katarzyna Jazdzewska’s chapter, “Marriage and Animal Exemplarity in Plutarch.” Ancient authors, including Plutarch, develop animal stories and elaborate them into a model of temperate male sexual desires and, most often, uxorial values—wifely love, care, dedication, loyalty, and fidelity. Animal descriptions and mating behaviors are anthropomorphized and become moral examples for human behavior. Traditionally gendered male and female sexual behavior required the male animal or human to be the active agent in seduction and the sexual act, while the female was submissive and desirable. Thus, while men were advised to temper their lust, women were instructed to suppress outward expressions of sexual desire. According to Plutarch, this ability to temper (male) and suppress (female) desire distinguishes human from animal behavior. Furthermore, the most important aspects of marital life touched upon in animal stories include procreation, child rearing, sexual morality, and marital (in particular, wifely) loyalty and fidelity. Being in support of the need to procreate, which Plutarch accepts as natural, he admonishes those who do not marry and produce children as unnatural. Thus, Plutarch’s representation of animal reproduction is constructed in a way that validates the idea that procreation is the primary, natural purpose of marriage—and not pleasure. During the right season (preferably spring), sexual intercourse can fulfill successfully its reproductive goal when the wife becomes pregnant, at which point she modestly withdraws her sexual availability to her husband and focuses solely on the fetus. Following the impregnation of the wife, the couple rears its offspring by and while showing forethought, endurance, and self-control (probably in sexual activity). In general, in Plutarch’s works on animal mating behaviors, as well as in his works on conjugal relationships for humans (in Marriage Advice and Dialogue on 11 This content downloaded from 83.212.248.199 on Mon, 27 Jun 2022 12:19:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms G e o r g i a Ts o u v a l a Love), we are confronted with two prescriptive lenses in respect to marriage: one emphasizing the traditional, procreative function of the institution, and consequently subordinating the relationship between the (heterosexual) mates to their relationship with their children; and a second one, celebrating marriage as an idealized companionship (κοινωνία) relying on the husband’s and, especially, the wife’s love and care. Spousal devotion and loyalty are also topics discussed in Jeffrey Beneker’s chapter, “Death Is Not the End: Spousal Devotion in Plutarch’s Portraits of Camma, Porcia, and Cornelia.” Although elite marriages in Greece and Rome during the Empire continued to be made for procreation and the creation of heirs and heiresses, and for the betterment of one’s finances and status, a strong romantic element could be present, at least in the literary and philosophical representations of these marriages. By the second century CE, eros (sexual desire) is a prerequisite for a successful and virtuous marriage, according to Plutarch in Dialogue on Love (769F–770A).12 Procreation is the principal that moves everything, but conjugal eros combines the physical with the spiritual, and the personal with the public; that is, it creates harmony in one’s soul as well as children for the continuation of the species. In Plutarch, the promotion of marriage as an idealized companionship (κοινωνία) subordinates not only the heterosexual couple to the upbringing of the children but also the wife’s needs and ambitions to those of her husband. As much as Plutarch would have us believe that the wife is equal to her husband if she is σώφρων, φιλόσοφος, and φίλανδρος (husband-loving), the examples of Camma, Porcia, and Cornelia attest to something more nuanced and complicated. In fact, Plutarch does not expect a wife to act independently except in rare circumstances. Her behavior and virtue are “proper” when they are subordinate to the husband and his interests. In Plutarch, as in Xenophon (Oeconomicus, Cyropaedia) in the fourth century BCE, the husband continues to be the one who leads, teaches, and guides a virtuous but “incomplete” (in Aristotelian terminology) wife. She can act independently and take matters into her own hands when he is absent or dead but only as long as she continues to act in the interests of her husband and (his) household. So when the husband dies (or is murdered, as was Camma’s husband), the ideal wife continues the conjugal mission by remaining loyal and defending the husband’s interests: she takes revenge on her husband (as Camma did), or endures pain and suffering (as Porcia did), or dedicates herself to the appropriate upbringing of (his) children and, thus, ensuring the continuation of his line (as Cornelia did). 12 This content downloaded from 83.212.248.199 on Mon, 27 Jun 2022 12:19:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Introduction Camma and, possibly, Porcia even commit suicide so they can be joined with their husbands in death as they had been in life. According to Plutarch, then, a widow’s life has no purpose unless she has children. By raising her husband’s children, however, she continues to protect and promote his interests. Cornelia, therefore, remains a univira, a model of spousal devotion even though a king asks for her hand, in order to fulfill her role in raising the children and continuing the husband’s line and household. By elevating these women and their behavior after the death of their husbands to a status of exempla for the Greek and Roman matronae of the early Empire, Plutarch idealizes and promotes a gendered and patriarchal model for marriage. Of course, these examples apply to the prescriptive world Plutarch creates in his works and do not necessarily reflect reality in the Roman Empire, where we know that not only did women continue to live and remarry after their husband’s death, but elite widows and widowers were forced by Augustan legislation to remarry after a short period of grieving. While erotic passion develops in the conjugal relationship according to Plutarch, the authors of the novels experimented with the idea of eros as a prerequisite to marriage. Silvia Montiglio discusses the intertwinement of erotic passion with marriage in the novels of the second, third, and fourth centuries CE in her chapter “Erotic Desire and the Desire to Marry in the Ancient Greek Novels.” In Leucippe and Clitophon, erotic desire is the initial driving force that brings the couple together, and it would have found satisfaction outside of wedlock if external forces (Artemis and Aphrodite) had not intervened. The desire for marriage, then, comes not from the young woman or man but from Artemis and Aphrodite, and also from the lovers’ fathers. Daphnis and Chloe further suggests that a desire to be forever together with one’s beloved is instinctual, but a desire to marry that person is not. Daphnis is the first to see that love and wedlock go together but also the first in the novels to have an active role in procuring his own marriage, to his beloved Chloe. In sharp contrast, An Ethiopian Story shows erotic desire finding complete fulfillment in the wedding night. This novel suggests that the couple is determined to be together and relatively independent of their families’ impediments, especially in the case of Theagenes, the young man who is in a foreign land and free from parental supervision. Both partners embrace the priest Calassiris’ point of view that their erotic passion be converted to wedlock, a lawful union (4.10.6). Both partners, therefore, are willing to marry, and abstain from premarital sex voluntarily. In Ephesian Tale, both the young man and woman have agency. Consent 13 This content downloaded from 83.212.248.199 on Mon, 27 Jun 2022 12:19:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms G e o r g i a Ts o u v a l a to both sex and marriage by both parties is a requirement in this novel alone: “it is necessary that the two parties be of one mind” (1.21.2). Chariclea cannot be given in marriage against her will. As Montiglio observes, on the one hand, Chariton (second[?] century CE) and Heliodorus (third century CE) bring instinctual erotic desire and the social institution of marriage together. On the other hand, Xenophon of Ephesus (second[?] century CE), Longus (third[?] century CE), and Achilles Tatius (fourth[?] century CE) keep erotic desire separate from wedlock, emphasizing the naturalness of erotic passion and the artificiality of the conjugal institution. To satisfy their passion, the protagonists have no choice but to tie the knot. Yet the only couple to internalize this proscriptive requirement is Chariton’s, for whom erotic love equals marriage from the first moment they feel sexual attraction to each other (though under the guidance of the priest). In the other novels, the protagonists’ desire has a life of its own, though outside forces inevitably tame it and steer it toward the ideal outcome, marriage. Marriage in the Greco-Roman World of the Late Hellenistic Period and the Early Roman Empire As the world of the Greek poleis changed over time with the campaigns of Alexander and his successors, and the wars of the Roman consuls and generals, who brought the Hellenistic world under the sway of Rome and its empire, ideas and customs about the institution of marriage must have changed as well. We read in Plutarch’s Alexander and On the Fortune and Virtue in Alexander the Great that the Macedonian king incorporated Median and Persian customs into the wedding celebrations at Susa, where he and his officers married royal and elite Persian women in 324 BCE. It is unclear, however, whether Alexander’s successors continued the practice of combining Macedonian nuptial customs with those of the people they conquered or whether they continued to encourage intermarriage.13 On the Roman side, intermarriage was part of the fabric of Roman society as the foundation myths of Rome show; it is not a surprise that Romans intermarried with the conquered. How local marriage customs might have changed is not entirely clear, but the status of women visà-vis that of their Classical counterparts in both the Greek and Roman world had changed. The Hellenistic world stopped being a collection of independent citystates; instead it opened into a vast cosmopolis where ideas and people flowed. Both men and women moved around the Mediterranean more than ever before, 14 This content downloaded from 83.212.248.199 on Mon, 27 Jun 2022 12:19:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Introduction and this mobility and uncertainty brought with them disadvantages and privileges that some, especially Greek but also Roman, women did not have before. Far removed from their original families, women and men needed to be protected with marriage contracts that spelled out the responsibilities of both spouses in the conjugal unit. And, as Theocritus’ poems show, elite women generally enjoyed greater freedom: they could, for example, take a stroll in public without male supervision, exhibiting their own and their family’s wealth. While Macedonian and Hellenistic queens, as well as late Roman Republican and imperial elite women of privileged citizen status, continued to be married off in their teens and used as pawns in the marriages that their kin arranged on their behalf, some acquired financial independence during the last four centuries BCE, which in turn allowed them to sometimes challenge the status quo. Their new status was not necessarily generally accepted, however. The socalled new woman of the late Republic and the early Empire, for example, who had agency in her own life could be feared and condemned as adulterous and unrespectable.14 For elite women, choices in marriage, as in the other areas of their lives, had to have the approval of their male kin, who continued to use them for their own political and economic alliances and advantages. Many marriages involved premenarchal brides being matched with considerably older grooms, as was customary in both Athens and Rome in all historical periods. Among the many results of such practice was that women could become widows at a young age, and in Rome, especially after Augustus’ laws, they were compelled by the state to marry again and continue to produce children. Serial monogamy was the norm rather than the exception. Although Greek and Roman male authors would exalt the univira in their works during the early Empire, in reality the pressure on a young widow to marry again and have children was likely to have been enormous, and it was coming both from her familial circle and from the laws of the state. Ironically, the benefit conferred on a free Roman mother of three children (or on a mother of four, if she was a freedwoman), established by Augustus to encourage procreation, formally freed women from tutelage. Whatever freedom a Roman woman (after mothering three children) or a financially independent Greek woman might have enjoyed, in reality her liberation was limited by controlling elders, parents, and male kin. Apuleius’ Apologia provides an excellent example of such intruders in a case brought against the author around 158 CE: a very rich woman, Pudentilla, decided to remarry with her older son’s support and encouragement. After her son Pontianus realized that his mother’s wealth could pass on to her new husband, 15 This content downloaded from 83.212.248.199 on Mon, 27 Jun 2022 12:19:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms G e o r g i a Ts o u v a l a Apuleius (and any stepsiblings), he encouraged his younger brother, their paternal uncle, and his own son-in-law to impeach Apuleius for seducing Pudentilla with charms and magic. The case was heard by Claudius Maximus, governor of the province of Africa, in Sabratha near Tripoli. Although we do not know the outcome of the trial, one can surmise from this example the limitations placed upon women, who could be wealthy and legally independent (suis iuris, and not under the patria potestas) but nonetheless not entirely autonomous. Romanticized emotional and sexual bonds between husband and wife are found in the philosophy, tragedy, and novels of the late first and second centuries CE. Perhaps it was due to the influence of Roman law, which required the consent of both bride and groom if they were sui iuris (or also of their parents, if still in their father’s power, [Ulp. Reg. 5.2]), or the change in the status of Greek and Roman elite women over time that a prescriptive emotional bond between husband and wife, as we find in Plutarch’s Dialogue on Love, or a passionate sexual bond between lovers, as in the Greek novels, became the ideal basis for a conjugal relationship. Consent or agency, as well as sexual attraction, for both men and women become important elements, especially in the novels of the second and third centuries CE.15 In some writers (Chariton, Heliodorus), erotic passion and marriage come together. In others (Xenophon of Ephesus, Longus, and later Achilles Tatius), erotic passion stands separate from marriage; sexual attraction is natural, and wedlock is a social construct. Should the lovers, then, do what comes naturally? Or should they follow the parameters set by convention, family, religion, or state? Can sex exist separate from marriage? Are the rules the same for men and women? In Chariton’s novel, state and religion require that, in order for the unwed couple to satisfy their sexual passion, they have no choice but to tie the knot. In this way, unconsummated erotic desire is allowed, but sex can exist only within the marital relationship (at least for the woman) and, thus, it can be regulated further not only by the family but now by the institutions of the state and even by religion. The reality of the second century CE, however, could differ greatly from the idealized relationships found in literature, as in the case of Regilla, an affluent Roman woman with education, imperial connections, and means, who was abused and murdered while pregnant by her husband, Herodes Atticus, a wealthy Greek man of education and status.16 It is difficult to know, then, where the ancient authors found real-life examples of the “companionate marriages” that they promoted. Perhaps, among freedmen and freedwomen or the lower classes, women and men had more liberty to create companionate partnerships out of mutual and reciprocal affection, attraction, desire, and 16 This content downloaded from 83.212.248.199 on Mon, 27 Jun 2022 12:19:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Introduction commitment to parenthood and familial survival. But that is not the historical reality of the marital unions about which we have the most evidence (i.e., elite marriages).17 This tension—between sexual passion, on the one hand, and procreative marriage for the good of the family and state, on the other—will continue to assert itself in the discourse of ascetism in the late Roman Empire and in the Christianization of marriage in the Medieval period, and it will eventually find its way into the political discourse of the twenty-first century. Notes I would like to thank the reviewers of this volume for their comments; Ronnie Ancona, Lee L. Brice, and Sarah B. Pomeroy for their insights; as well as my coeditor, Jeffrey Beneker, for his scrupulous proofreading, prodding questions, and patience over a period quite longer than expected. Support for this project was provided by Illinois State University. 1. Other potential subjects include, for example, marriage in Greek and Roman comedy, marriage in Roman art during the Empire, Neopythagorean philosophy, medicine, or law. 2. The bibliography on the topic of marriage is large. One can read about the status of the scholarship on the topic in two broad chapters in the Blackwell Companions series: Cox 2011 (on Athenian marriage); Dixon 2011 (on Roman marriage). 3. For the historical background, see Gruen 1984. 4. On the Second Sophistic, see Goldhill 2001; Whitmarsh 2001. On the influence of Greek culture on Rome, see Gruen 1992; Wardman 2002; Spawforth 2012; Madsen and Rees 2014; Picón and Hemingway 2016. 5. For the different views of Roman Stoics, middle-Platonist, and early Christians on marriage and the relations between the husband and wife in the conjugal relationship, see Ramelli 2008, which focuses mainly on the teachings of Zeno, Hierocles, Stobaeus, Antipater, Musonius Rufus, Plutarch, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen. 6. Two chapters in particular deal with marriage and the role of concordia and discordia in the conjugal relationship as well as in Flavian society and complement the readings in our volume: Buckley 2016; Newlands 2016. Karen Klaiber Hersch’s edited volume A Cultural History of Marriage in Antiquity (2020) was not published in time to be included in this discussion. 7. The rapio of the Sabine women, for example, in the foundation story of the Roman state and its political ramifications has been examined by Brown 1995; Miles 1995, 184; Tsouvala 2008, 709–11. 8. On marriage alliances and their economic and social realms, see Arist. Pol. 1304a4–17; Pomeroy (1975) 1995; Leese 2017. 9. One such special circumstance where marriage was allowed was the case in Epicurus’ own will, which made a provision for a future marriage between the 17 This content downloaded from 83.212.248.199 on Mon, 27 Jun 2022 12:19:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms G e o r g i a Ts o u v a l a daughter of one of his own students, Metrodorus of Lampsacus, and another Epicurean philosopher. 10. See Nussbaum 2002. 11. For the term “companionate marriage,” see Treggiari 1991, 215–20. 12. See also Tsouvala 2014, 200–203; and what Susan Treggiari (1991) has described as “companionism,” a notion that combines sex, affection, and possible equality in a heterosexual relationship. 13. On Hellenistic marriage, see Vatin 1970. 14. For example, see the relevant chapters on Hellenistic and Republican women, and the excursus on the “new woman” in Fantham et al. 1994. On women in Hellenistic Egypt, see Pomeroy 1990. 15. With the expansion of Roman citizenship in 212 CE, when every free person in the Roman Empire came under the protection of Roman law, the right of consent (if it was part of Roman law at this time) was extended to all free persons, both women and men. 16. Pomeroy 2007. 17. I would like to thank Judith P. Hallett for making this point in correspondence. Works Cited Brown, R. 1995. “Livy’s Sabine Women and the Ideal of Concordia.” TAPA 125:291–319. Buckley, E. 2016. “Over Her Dead Body? Marriage in Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica.” In Family in Flavian Epic, edited by N. Manioti, 61–88. Leuven. Challet, C.-E. C. 2013. Like Man, Like Woman: Roman Women, Gender Qualities and Conjugal Relationships at the Turn of the First Century. Vienna. Cox, C. A. 2011. “Marriage in Ancient Athens.” In A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds, edited by B. Rawson, 231–44. New York. 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