I actually had a whole long writeup but a power outage wiped it all out and now I’m sad 😭

Long story short, I found some conclusions in Chapter 11 questionable, but on the whole it was a great read. Much of the book was detail-oriented in terms of qualifying what distinguished soldiers’ unofficial marriages from official/sanctioned marriages. I had a good overview of marriage of Roman soldiery before going in, but I learned a lot of the nuances that I didn’t know before.

For example, I understood that bastardy was pretty low-priority for Romans - whether someone was born out of wedlock was not a huge deal. Finding out, though, that the only Roman legal disability from being a bastard was that if your dad died without a will, you wouldn’t automatically inherit from him, was interesting. That a Roman jurist specifically justifies the lack of legal disabilities with the argument that people shouldn’t be punished for qualities that are no fault of their own was doubly interesting.

On the other hand, Greek cities, including at the time, still regarded being a bastard as disqualifying even just for citizenship, much less higher participation in civil society.

Human beings are funny. Cultures, doubly so.

And I knew that Roman soldiers were allowed to make simplified wills that were harder to contest, but I didn’t realize just how often ordinary wills were invalidated in Roman law over fairly petty matters. Given that wills in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries in the West were invalidated for extremely petty matters, though, perhaps I should have guessed that a legalistic peoples like the Romans would have similar problems, lmao.

On a darker note, I knew that slaves freed for the explicit purpose of marrying received normal (freedman) Roman citizenship, but I didn’t know it came with the legal disability of being unable to initiate a divorce with their husband/former master. 😬