Abstract

Generally, a daughter in parental power in Roman family in the Republic and the Principate did not have personal name, but bore her father’s name in the feminine. A woman kept her father’s family name in marriage, but if she came under her husband’s lawful authority and became a member of his clan, her father’s family name became her personal name and her husband’s family name was added in the nominative or genitive case. In modern historical and legal science is traditionally considered that this custom was strictly observed in Republican Rome. But in the 2nd – 1st centuries BC this custom disappeared with the gradual withering away of cum manu marriage (confarreatio, coemptio, usus). The author, basing on the position of Theodor Mommsen about the family name of married women, analyses the sources of classical Roman law of the 1st – 3rd centuries AD and concludes that the marriages confarreatio and coemtio and the husband’s power over the wife continued throughout the Principate. In addition, the author hypotheses that the tradition of attaching the husband’s name to the father’s family name of the married woman also continued throughout the classical period of Roman law.

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