"Pagan" and "Christian" Marriage: The State of the Question

Abstract

There has been a great deal of scholarly interest in marriage and the family in pre-Christian Rome in the past ten years, and recent work has called for a reevaluation of older scholarly views al mores and family life. At the same time, much work has been done on attitudes toward sexuality and marriage in the early Christian period, particularly in the writings of Christian intellectuals like Augustine. Little attempt has been made, however, to bridge the gap between "pagan" and "Christian" or to examine late antique, Christian attitudes toward sexuality and marriage from the viewpoint of the "average" Christian. The first half of this article surveys marriage in pre-Christian Roman ideology and practice and in imperial law of the first three centuries; the second half looks at the evidence for Christian marital practice in the ante-Nicene period, using sources that are often overlooked: the Divine Institutes of the Christian writer Lactantius, the canons of early church councils, and Christian inscriptions of the second half of the third and early fourth centuries. These sources suggest a much greater degree of continuity with pre-Christian values and practice than the writings of more ascetically minded Christian theologians imply.