Concubinatus
Concubinatus (Latin, "concubinage") was a monogamous union, intended to be of some duration but not necessarily permanent, that was socially and to some extent legally recognized as an alternative to marriage in the Roman Empire.
Concubinage became a legal concern in response to Augustan moral legislation that criminalized adultery and imposed penalties on some consensual sexual behaviors outside marriage.
The listing of concubinae along with legal wives on grave markers indicates serial monogamy, not their coexistence, as tombs were often communal and included multiple members of a household, from different times of the male partner's life.
[6] The discrepancy lies in whether the union was legally verifiable as monogamous concubinatus; an ancilla (female slave as part of a household) might be kept as a "bedmate" and referred to as concubina but was not eligible for the privileges of formal concubinage.
According to the 2nd-century antiquarian Aulus Gellius, in early Rome paelex was a disparaging word for a woman in a continuing sexual liaison with a man who had also contracted an archaic form of marriage cum manu, meaning that he held patriarchal power over his wife.
"[10] The paelex in Latin literature is a woman perceived as a sexual threat by the wife, just as Juno was perpetually aggrieved by her husband Jupiter's "affairs", few if any of which were perpetrated with willing partners.
Writing under Augustus, Ovid often uses the word paelex for abducted or captive women and for non-wives subjected to domestic rape in the myths he depicts in the Metamorphoses and other works.
[12][13][14] As concubinatus became regularized under Imperial law and the status of the concubina elevated as the extralegal equivalent of a wife within imposed monogamy, usage of paelex inversely degraded so that it came to mean nothing more than a woman who had sex with a married man, and in late antiquity seems to have been a synonym for "prostitute"[15] or "whore".
Previously in the Republican era, the father of an unmarried daughter could bring a charge of rape against a man who had sex with her, regardless of her consent, because marriage was required for sexual access to women who had standing as citizens.
[25] If the man was unmarried, his female sexual partners were thus limited to slaves, prostitutes, or the infames, persons against whom stuprum could not be committed – "frivolous liaisons" and not the kind of moral uplift the legislation was intended to promote.
[26] Although not a legal institution, concubinatus raised questions in relation to marriage, and concubines occupied an entire chapter, now fragmentary, in the 6th-century compilation of Roman law known as the Digest.
[28] The jurist Ulpian said that "only those women with whom intercourse is not unlawful can be kept in concubinage without the fear of committing a crime,"[29] but if a woman was already a penalty-free sexual partner, concubinatus would not be necessary to avoid a charge of stuprum.
[40] The relevant passage from the Digest is vexed, but the jurist appears to recommend preparing such a document as the best way to ward off charges of stuprum when the concubine was a freeborn woman in good standing.
The purpose of this enactment under Constantine I was to discourage men of decurion rank from cohabiting with ancillae and introducing questions of legitimacy into the family's hereditary civic obligations.
[53] Men who violated the ban by marrying an inappropriate partner were legally considered caelibes, unmarried, and were subject to penalties under the laws regulating marriage and morality.
[54] The succession of female partners of the future Saint Augustine (born 353 CE in Roman Africa) demonstrates the pattern of the young man seeking steady sexual companionship in the period between puberty and age thirty.
He was faithful to her and wrote that their relationship was lacking only "the honorable name of marriage",[56] but when he became engaged to a ten-year-old girl[57] at the instigation of his mother,[58] he dumped the concubina and sent her back to Africa.
[65] If an emperor wanted a wife of appropriate social status, he could readily find one, and the choice of a particular woman, particularly a freedwoman as in all three of these unions, may argue for a relationship based on personal affection.
[69] Male partners were also employed in everyday occupations such as "repairer of carding-combs" or cloak dealer[69] that would make them the ancient equivalent of securely "middle class", neither poor nor wealthy.
[73] Epitaphs for the whole family to be laid to rest in a particular spot often were set up on a single stone in advance or were added to later, complicating the determination of the order in which the man might have had wives and concubines.
[82] The First Council of Toledo (400 CE) recognized the respectability of concubinatus as a monogamous union by not denying communion to the participants, but men who had both a wife (uxor) and a concubine were excluded.
[84] Literary references generally treat the concubinus of a man as a form of puer delicatus, a well-groomed slave boy who might be so young that from the perspective of 21st-century sexual ethics the relationship would express pedophilia.
