why were men reluctant to marry in

ancient Rome?

In ancient Roman, most men were denied the right to vote, had no
realistic opportunity to hold public office, and owned little or no
property. In addition, men were conscripted into military service.
Theexploitation of ordinary men, common throughout history, was
not just a feature of Roman public life. Roman men also evidently
found their family obligations toward women to be oppressive. By
about 18 BGC, a large share of Roman men were reluctant to marry.
To encourage men to marry, Roman Emperor Augustus passed a
series of laws penalizing unmarried men and rewarding men who
married and had at least three children.[1]
The disabilities imposed on unmarried men included social
devaluations. Unmarried men were forbidden to attend public
games and banquets. Unmarried men were also forced to sit in less
desirable seats in the theatre.[2] These sorts of laws point to
broader processes of social control. Social strategies of shaming and

dishonoring have powerfully affected mens lives throughout history.

[3] The status of menin any society cannot be adequately
understood merely by literal reading of formal law and simple
demographic analysis of office-holding.
Coercing men into marrying is not a historical aberration. In his ideal
state, Cicero had state magistrates prohibit men from remaining
unmarried.[4] According to Plutarchs Parallel Lives, Lycurgus, the
famous law-giver of the Spartans, penalized bachelors:
Lycurgus also put a kind of public stigma upon confirmed
bachelors. They were excluded from the sight of the
young men and maidens at their exercises, and in winter
the magistrates ordered them to march round the marketplace in their tunics only, and as they marched, they sang
a certain song about themselves, and its burden was that
they were justly punished for disobeying the laws.
Besides this, they were deprived of the honour and
gracious attentions which the young men habitually paid
to their elders. [5]
In his Roman History, Cassius Dio wrote of Emperor Augustus
separating the Roman aristocracy into married men and unmarried
men. The married men were much fewer in number. Augustus
praised the married men for following the examples of their
fathers and perpetuating their class. Augustus demeaned the
unmarried men:
O what shall I call you? Men? But you are not
performing any of the offices of men. Citizens? But for all
that you are doing, the city is perishing. Romans? But you

are undertaking to blot out this name altogether.

Augustus described unmarried men as worse than murders and
robbers. Unmarried men, according to Augustus, were immoral
beasts:
You talk, indeed, about this free and untrammelled life
that you have adopted, without wives and without
children; but you are not a whit better than brigands or
the most savage of beasts. For surely it is not your delight
in a solitary existence that leads you to live without wives,
nor is there one of you who either eats alone or sleeps
alone; no, what you want is to have full liberty for
wantonness and licentiousness. [6]
After World War II, the Soviet Union, Poland, and Romania
enactedspecial taxes on childless persons. At least in Romania, the
taxes in actual administration were paid predominately by men.
Historians have focused on why Augustus enacted laws penalizing
unmarried men. Explanations put forward for those laws are to raise
revenue, to promote morality, as a eugenic measure to increase the
upper-class population, and as a measure to encourage the transfer
of inheritances through family generations. In any case, the laws
generated widespread resistance and evasion. Historians have
largely regarded the laws as failures.[7] By the fifth century, the
laws punishing unmarried men and favoring men with more than
three children were repealed.
Historians have largely ignored the question of why Roman men were
reluctant to marry. Some share of Roman man undoubtedly were
gay, but that share probably didnt change much over time and

probably wasnt large enough to create the public problem of men in

general being reluctant to marry.[8] If marriage were an opportunity
for Roman men to exploit women, self-interested men would have
been eager to marry. The situation seems to have been the reverse.
[9] Marriage was a burden to men.
Augustus shaming of men suggests that Roman men were reluctant
to marry because marriage deprived them of freedom, including
sexual freedom. Marriage could provide men with freedom to enjoy
a wider range of life opportunities and freedom to have sex as much
as they desire with a loving spouse. The extent to which marriage
actually provides men such freedom affects mens willingness to
marry. The extent of discrimination against men in family courts also
affects mens willingness to risk entering into marriage. These issues
are hardly recognized publicly in most societies today. Historians
unable to recognize and discuss the reality of marriage law in the
societies in which they currently live cannot credibly analyze ancient
Roman family law and marriage.
* * * * *
Read more:
husband treated like slave in ancient Rome
upper-class women sexually desired gladiators in ancient Rome
discrimination against men in child custody and child support

Notes:
[1] Lex Julia de Maritandis Ordinibus (Julian law on regulating
marriages in the social order), enacted about 18 BGC. The text of
the law hasnt survived. In 9 GC, the Lex Papia
Poppaea supplemented and modified provisions of the Lex Julia de
Maritandis Ordinibus in response to protests from the Roman elite
(the equestrian order). What is know about these two laws cannot

be distinguished between them. Hence they are commonly

described with the unified name Lex Julia et Papia Poppaea. The law
required male citizens between the ages of 25 and 60 and female
citizens between the ages of 20 and 50 to be married. Unmarried
persons of these ages could not receive legacies or inheritances from
anyone with whom they were not related by six degrees of relation.
Grubbs (2002) p. 84. Persons who had at least three children
received legal privileges according to the ius trium liberorum. The
growing prosperity of the Roman Empire seems to have been broadly
correlated with mens worsening position within the family and mens
increasing reluctance to marry.
[2] McGinn (1998) p. 71. Attendance at public entertainments was
crucial for social networking and social status:
The penalties regarding public entertainments were
broadly conceived and were perhaps more keenly felt
than we tend to imagine.
Id. p. 79. The law also apparently recognized the problem of female
hypergamy (seeking to marry up):
The law evidently imposed a tax on celibate women with
fortunes of 20,000 sesterces or more, a meaure that
reached fairly far down the social scale.
Id. p. 80. Men throughout history have been much more willing to
marry spouses with less financial resources than themselves. The
prevalence of divorce and rules on income distribution upon divorce
affect incentives to marry across wealth classes. Hypergamy and
assortative mating promote income and wealth inequality.
[3] Consider, for example, the U.S. case Dubay v. Wells (2007). In
that case, an unmarried man reasonably sought not to have

unplanned and unwanted parenthood legally imposed on him. The

court ruled against Dubay. It declared his case frivolous,
unreasonable, and without foundation. The court sought to shame
Dubay with a reference to man-degrading chivalry: If chivalry is not
dead, its viability is gravely imperiled by the plaintiff in this case.
Men in the U.S. have no reproductive rights. Moreover, knowledge of
biological paternity is considered to be important only for imposing
financial burdens (child support) on men.
[4] Cicero, De Legibus 3.3.7.
[5] Plutarch, Parallel Lives, Lycurgus 15.1-2.
[6] Cassius Dio, Roman History, Bk. LVI.1-10.
[7] With respect to Lex Julia et Papia Poppaea, Tacitus, Annals 3.25,
declares: marriages and the rearing of children did not become
more frequent, so powerful were the attractions of a childless state.
More generally, after Augustus death, most commenters did not
think that the laws were succeeding. The judgment that Augustus
marriage laws were a failure has prevailed to the present. Field
(1945) pp. 411-5.
[8] The category gay wasnt used in ancient Rome. Men who were
homoerotically inclined might marry a woman and have affairs with
men and boys. Moreover, such men could gain legitimate children
and the ius trium liberorum through the services of other men.
Juvenal,Satire 9, ll. 85-89, from Latin trans. Braund (2004) p. 359.
Nonetheless, greater homoerotic inclination probably decreased a
mans incentive to marry a woman.
[9] The reality of mens guardianship over women is instructive. A
close analysis suggests that guardianship over women (tutela
mulierum) was a burden that men sought to avoid. Ng (2008) pp.
690-1. With apparent contempt for mens welfare, a leading, early

twentieth-century scholar of Roman history declared:

He {Augustus} devised an ingenious system of rewards
and penalties to overcome the selfishness of bachelors;
there were to be rewards for the responsibilities and cares
inseparable from marriage, and penalties to outweigh the
obvious conveniences of celibacy.
Ferrero et al. (1909), vol. 5, pp. 60-1. The conveniences of celibacy
are obvious only in misandristic and gynocentric societies. Marriage
could be very attractive to men in the right circumstances.
[image] Roberto Marcelo Sanchez-Camus, Prometheus Bound, Act
Act London 23. Thanks for sharing.
References:
Braund, Susanna Morton Braund. 2004. Juvenal and Persius.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ferrero, Guglielmo, Alfred Zimmern, and H. J. Chaytor. 1907. The
greatness and decline of Rome. New York: G.P. Putnams Sons.
Field, James A. 1945. The Purpose of the Lex Iulia et Papia
Poppaea.The Classical Journal. 40 (7): 398-416.
Grubbs, Judith Evans. 2002. Women and the law in the Roman
Empire: a sourcebook on marriage, divorce and widowhood. London:
Routledge.
McGinn, Thomas A. J. 1998. Prostitution, sexuality, and the law in
ancient Rome. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ng, Esther Yue L. 2008. Mirror Reading and Guardians of Women in
the Early Roman Empire. The Journal of Theological Studies. 59 (2):
679-695.