FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD 159In some early modern societies, the dowry constituted the daughter’s share
of the family estate, or at least the bulk of it. This was not the case in Rome,
where daughters could expect an equal or at least substantial share of their
father’s estate on his death. Insofar as we can judge from the limited fi gures
available, Roman dowries were relatively modest in comparison with the
father’s estate – of the order of one year’s income (5 to 10 per cent of
the estate). Consequently, though dowries were reckoned as part of the
daughter’s share of the family estate, they probably represented only a
fraction of her full share. According to legal texts, they were intended to be
of a size to contribute to the household living expenses. Modest dowries
make sense in the Roman context of early female marriage and frequent
divorce. A father would have been reluctant to give his daughter a full share
of the patrimony before his own death or to hand over a large dowry to a
husband who might well divorce the daughter and keep some fraction of it.
The modest size of dowries also helps to explain certain noticeable silences
in our texts: in contrast with the early modern period in Europe, few
complaints were voiced by Romans about extravagant dowries ruining
family fortunes; furthermore, there is little evidence for dowry hunting, in
marked contrast with the frequent reference to legacy hunting.^30
The right of the wife to divorce and take much of the dowry with her,
together with her independent right of ownership, gave some wealthy
women considerable fi nancial leverage and freedom in their marriages. This
should be set against the paternalism inherent in the age difference and the
ideology of the husband’s superiority. Martial explained that he was not
interested in marrying a rich woman lest she be a husband to him ( Epig.
8.12). Juvenal wrote of a husband’s incapacity to control his adulterous wife
because of his fear that she would leave him and take her money ( Sat.
6.136). These verses no doubt contain an element of satirical exaggeration,
but such fears are an intelligible result of Roman rules and mores regarding
divorce and separation of property in marriage, rules that contrast sharply
with other systems. In early modern English law, ‘by marriage, the husband
and wife became one person in law – and that person was the husband
[who] acquired absolute control of all his wife’s personal property, which he
could sell at will’.^31
With the exception of the age gap, the discussion so far has concerned
husbands and wives of the leisured classes, because the literary sources offer
virtually no useful information about marriages between humble Romans.
This silence has recently provided the basis for an argument that marriages
were not entered into by ordinary Romans until aristocrats disseminated the
institution in the Principate.^32 However, the epigraphic evidence shows
conclusively that from the time that funerary inscriptions began to be erected
in the late Republic, husbands and wives of low station commemorated
each other and their marriages (e.g. CIL 1 2 .1221). The pattern of dedications
from the imperial era shows that rank infl uenced the selection of mates in
the lower classes: freeborn Romans occasionally took spouses from the