The Marriage of Soldiers under the Empire

Abstract

Roman soldiers were forbidden by law to contract a marriage during their period of military service, at least until the time of Septimius Severus. This restriction seems anomalous, especially in the context of the legal privileges conferred on soldiers, in the making of a will, in the relative freedom from some of the restraints of patria potestas, and in court. Some of these privileges were in part an attempt to protect soldiers against and compensate for the rigours of military life with its enforced lengthy absences from home, often in remote areas of the empire. And so it is strange that a soldier was prevented from obtaining the solace of normal family life through wedlock, by a law that was virtually unenforcible and which caused the authorities trouble from the start. The ways in which emperors reacted to the marriage ban and the uncertainty created by it, and sought to ameliorate its consequences, provide a useful study of the working of imperial ‘government’—how and why decisions were taken on a matter that was perhaps sensitive for the emperor's relationship with the army. Furthermore, I hope to demonstrate that the marriage prohibition was eventually lifted by Septimius Severus, and that this was an important part of the improvement in the material position of the army in the reign of this emperor—who used his troops to fight his way to power and allegedly proclaimed to his sons on his deathbed, ‘Enrich the soldiers and scorn the rest’. In what follows, section I considers the problems suffered by soldiers as a result of the marriage ban, and section II the attempts made before the reign of Severus to mitigate these. Section III examines the evidence of the literary sources for the removal of the ban by Severus, section IV the evidence of legal sources, and section V the evidence of military diplomata for the position of soldiers after Severus. Section VI provides a summary of the conclusions and their importance.