Marriage in ancient Rome: joined hands, torches and the threshold

Many wedding customs we think of as modern have an ancestor in ancient Rome. The bride carried over the threshold in the groom's arms, hands joined before witnesses, the festive procession to the new home: all of this already appears in the Latin and Greek sources describing Roman weddings. Reconstructing how they unfolded means entering the heart of family life in a civilisation that considered marriage the very foundation of society.

Three forms of marriage

The jurist Gaius, in his Institutes of the second century AD, records three ancient ways in which a wife passed under her husband's authority: confarreatio, a religious rite with the offering of a spelt cake; coemptio, a sort of symbolic sale; and usus, uninterrupted cohabitation for a year. By his time, however, the most common form of marriage was one without transfer of authority, founded on consent and cohabitation.

Before the wedding came the betrothal, the sponsalia, with the exchange of promises and the gift of the ring. The date had to be chosen carefully, because some periods of the year were considered ill-omened: May, for example, was avoided, and Ovid in the Fasti records a popular saying that advised against marrying in that month. June, by contrast, was thought favourable.

The bride and the ceremony

On the eve of the wedding the girl dedicated her childhood toys to the Lares. On the wedding day she wore a white tunic, the tunica recta, fastened at the waist by a belt tied with the knot of Hercules, which only the groom would undo. Her hair, parted according to an ancient custom with the point of a spear, was gathered in six braids beneath the flame-coloured veil, the flammeum.

The heart of the rite was the dextrarum iunctio. A matron married only once, the pronuba, joined the couple's right hands before the witnesses. Plutarch, in his Roman Questions, reports the formula with which the bride presented herself: «ubi tu Gaius, ego Gaia», where you are Gaius, I am Gaia. Then came a sacrifice, the banquet and the good wishes of the guests, who cried «feliciter».

The procession and the threshold

As evening fell the bride was escorted in procession to her husband's house. Boys carried torches, one of which, according to the sources, was of hawthorn; jesting verses, the Fescennines, were sung, and the name of Talassio was shouted. Livy links this cry to the rape of the Sabine women, when a particularly beautiful girl was said to have been reserved for a man named Talassius.

Arriving at the house, the bride anointed the doorposts and tied woollen bands to them. Then she was lifted over the threshold so that she would not stumble on it: Plutarch discusses this custom among his Roman Questions, proposing several explanations, including the memory of the abduction of the Sabine women. The husband then offered her water and fire, symbols of shared domestic life.

In the Roman rite every gesture had a precise meaning: the knot to be untied, the hands to be joined, the threshold not to be touched. Many of these gestures have survived, transformed, in European ceremonies. When a groom lifts his bride over the threshold of their home, he unknowingly repeats a gesture the Romans performed more than two thousand years ago.