Historia Militum Discusses the Marriage Ban

Cloak and Stola

All of my Roman fiction is based around rank and file Roman soldiers attempting to establish families during the era of the Roman marriage ban. In fact, my novella, “Cloak and Stola”, is based on the exact situation mentioned in the video: a Roman soldier on the edge of the empire buying a woman for the purpose of starting a family, and thereafter considering her his wife.¹ [In this novella, I assume that the ban has recently taken effect, and the work-arounds are just starting to be developed, leading to bad misunderstandings that must be worked through.]

I have been wondering whether I was missing something, due to coming late to this area of study, and not reading the usual classic sources directly.

My scholarship on ancient Rome has taken a rather odd and circuitous route. Until last year, I had never read the Aeneid, nor any other of the classics by ancient Romans. I found out about the marriage ban for Roman soldiers purely by accident: I’ve always loved the answer the centurion gave to Jesus when he offered to cure his boy. In trying to figure out why the Greek and Latin both use a word that CAN mean “servant” but isn’t the usual word for servant, I found out about the marriage ban.

This ban immediately struck me as ridiculous and unenforceable. And yet, neither the modern scholars nor the scholars from the last couple of centuries seemed to have any trouble accepting that the soldiers would simply obey it. The moderns (with some exceptions noted below) seemed to think that, while of course the men would have by-blows from the local women, they would not really care about marriage itself or children. The scholars from the 1700’s and 1800’s seem to think that they would just obey. As the video above notes, some even identify the final end of the marriage ban in 197 AD as contributing to the decline of the Roman empire – since they assume that the soldiers were all obeying it up to that time.

But there is a subset of modern scholars, who make extensive use of archeological evidences, papyri, and writings on pottery shards, who have found evidence that the soldiers objected and actually wanted to form families, not just have sex.

My first evidence came from excerpts from Phang, Sara Elise. The Marriage of Roman Soldiers (13 B.C. - A.D. 235), (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 05 Oct. 2021). Her book costs over $200, and tends only to be available for loan at college libraries that loan to students only, so I have not bought it up to now.

Since then, I have continued to find archeological evidence, a great deal of which is available for free on-line. But this is the first time I’ve heard someone say, directly, that the best option for rank and file soldiers on the edge of the empire to get married was to buy a slave and free her, thereby making her a Roman or Latin woman, and thus marriageable.

This is why I don’t take for granted that any record of a Roman soldier, on the edge of the empire during this time period, is attempting to abuse a slave. Or that the woman herself is a victim. While such abuse could and probably did happen, nevertheless, given the expense of a slave to a man on the pay of rank-and-file soldiers (not low, but not high enough to afford a slave for trivial reasons), I have to at least consider that everyone involved was a willing participant. At least after the ban and workarounds became widely known.

1. Link to buy from various online sources, including Amazon: Cloak and Stola