medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Sherry Reames quoted:
: "In the third century, the Roman Emperor
: Claudius II had decreed that single men
: made better soldiers than those with wives
: and families, so he outlawed marriage for
: young prospective warriors for the Empire.
and asked:
: Have any of you ever encountered it (or
: parts of it) in a reasonably reliable source?
The date of the alleged marriage ban is suspect: Roman
soldiers up to the centurionate were forbidden to
contract legal marriages, and their existing marriages
were terminated on entering service, by the beginning
of the Principate under Augustus (who attempted to
extend this to higher ranks), and even those in the
army who could marry legally were forbidden to marry
women from the provinces in which they served - the
main motives for this seem to have been to avoid both
divided loyalties and the necessity of transporting and
defending large civilian populations. Considering that
a Roman soldier ordinarily served for more than two
decades, most young recruits probably would not have
been married at the time of enlistment; however, over
the course of service, many soldiers could and did form
long-term, marriage-like relationships with women, whom
they might or might not eventually marry, and indeed
the army required this, for actual celibacy throughout
service would have severely limited the reproductive
possibilities for soldiers (and therefore harmed the
future of the army). Shortly before 200 CE, Septimius
Severus allowed soldiers to live with their partners in
these unofficial marriages, and the legal texts
apparently take this to mean that the ban on marriage
was lifted (as it had been for the navy under Marcus
Aurelius), leaving the only bar the question of whether
the soldier and his partner were legally entitled to
marriage (under restrictions which applied to all
Romans), but this problem was solved, as least in
regard to the citizenship, when Caracalla in 212 (under
the so-called Antonine constitution) extended it to all
(or virtually all) free people in the Empire. A
standard and accessible treatment, with references to
primary sources, would be the section beginning p. 133
in
- G. R. Watson, The Roman Soldier (London : Thames and
Hudson 1969 [and reprints])
Claudius II, by the way, had a very short reign,
268-70, and Watson has no mention of him, though his
aim is to survey the life of the soldier from the early
Empire to Diocletian [284-305].
Terrence Lockyer
Johannesburg, South Africa
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