Contubernium

[8] Men who commemorate the death of a female partner set up epitaphs for a contubernali bene merenti ("to a well deserving companion"), carissimae ("dearest"), piissimae or pientissimae ("most devoted"), optimae ("best"), incomparabili ("incomparable"), rarissimae ("most rare"), sanctissimae ("most sacred"), and dulcissimae ("sweetest").

[23] The paterfamilias would have retained the right to break up contubernia,[24] just as a father might seek to dissolve the marriage of his son or daughter against their will,[25] but the agricultural writers in particular thought that an attachment to family and home made workers more stable and productive.

[32] "Upwardly mobile" slaves who served in the imperial bureaucracy[31] also could expect to accumulate wealth and were regularly manumitted in their early thirties.

[36] As another example, a woman born into first-generation freedom as the daughter of a successful freedman might have limited prospects for finding a financially secure husband of compatible social standing.

Contubernium with an imperial slave, who reasonably expected to be manumitted between the ages of 30 and 35 in possession of a certain amount of wealth, might be attractive, allowing her to start a family during her childbearing years before he completed his service; their children would be born illegitimate (spurii)[b] but free.

[40] In one case, a domina had given[c] one of her female slaves (pedisequae, "footwomen") to her business manager (actor) to serve as his wife; the relationship is specified as a contubernium.

When the domina died, she freed all the pedisequae in her possession by the terms of her will, and the court ruled that the bequest of freedom applied also to the wife of the actor,[41] whose status is not noted.

The legislation, drafted by Claudius's freedman Pallas, seems to have been motivated by unapproved cohabitation between imperial slaves and women from outside the familia Caesaris,[43] and the ambiguous status of children produced by such a union.

[48] A further refinement of the decree under the emperor Vespasian was that a liberta who entered into a contubernium with a male slave without the consent of his owner or her patron not only could be re-enslaved by her former master but was denied the hope of citizenship from a second manumission.

[49][d] Constantine I decreed that the offspring of a freeborn woman and a slave serving in the imperial treasury would hold only Latin rights if freed.

[51] No law against contubernium between a free woman and a slave she owned is known until the 4th century AD, but the Romans generally disapproved of relationships in which the female partner was of higher social status than the male.

[54] A freedman was not supposed to marry his deceased patron's wife or daughter; the punishment as specified in the Sententiae Pauli (late 3rd or early 4th century) was condemnation to hard labor.

[55] Among the 260 inscriptions from the city of Rome referring to contubernales, there is very little evidence of contubernium between a male partner who can be securely identified as free while the female is still enslaved.

[61] A man of senatorial rank would face legal penalties, including degradation of status, if he married a freedwoman (liberta), but monogamous concubinage (concubinatus) was an alternative.

Because contubernium expressed a relationship based on mutual affection and contubernalis was used fondly for a dear companion, as in epitaphs of those legally married, common usage is at times looser than juristic.

For example, after the death of his wife, Vespasian maintained a relationship with Caenis, the freedwoman and former secretary of Antonia Minor, even when he became emperor as he neared the age of 60, at which time she was around 58.

In his Life of Vespasian, Suetonius calls their union a contubernium but also refers to Caenis as a concubina "almost in place of a legal wife" until her death in AD 74;[66] the inscription commemorating her does not use either term.

Until AD 213, soldiers serving in the legions were not permitted to marry until they were discharged,[71] placing them in a position rather like that of the imperial slave awaiting an expected or contractually fixed manumission.

A soldier who consorted with women who were not supposed to be sexually available to him was subject to prosecution under the Augustan laws of morality that regulated illicit sex (stuprum).

One such epitaph was set up in Corduba, Roman Spain, by an aquilifer (legionary standard-bearer) named Marcus Septicius on behalf of himself; his contubernalis, Sabina; and his biological son (filius naturalis) Martialis, who died aged ten years, seven months, as the freedman (libertus) of his own father.