The Roman Wedding: Ritual and Meaning in Antiquity (review)

What rituals were performed at the Roman wedding? Who took part in the ceremony? How did the conjugal couple dress? The answers that handbooks or general reference works provide to these questions are based, more often than not, on late 19^th and early 20^th-century inter-pretations. Karen Hersch challenges these conventional interpretations and poses additional thought provoking questions about the ritual components of the Roman wedding.

How does this work differ from others written in the last 20 years (e.g. Boëls-Janssen 1989, Treggiari 1991, Horstmann 2004)? Many studies have focused largely on the origins of, the legal issues surrounding, and the roles of women in marriage (5), whereas Hersch's point of departure is ritual. In her introduction and five chapters she tackles a variety of literary, but limited number of artistic sources, to shatter some of the conventional views concerning the marriages of the Roman elite.

Chapter 1 examines how Roman marriage rituals mesh with the laws of gods and humans. Here, Hersch unpacks important terms and concepts related to the wedding ritual. For instance, she sets out the legal criteria for a marriage and defines the legitimate times for the ceremony to take place. In the end the reader comes away with a general understanding of the framework that constitutes the wedding ritual of the Roman elite.

Chapter 2 focuses on the ideal bride whose role in the wedding Hersch considers primary yet largely created by male authors to meet "the needs of an elite patriarchy" (65). She concentrates on three topics, specifically, rite, hairstyle, and dress, to help construct this ideal bride. The discussion turns briefly to prenuptial rituals - namely, girls' doll play in childhood—to emphasize the wifely ideals that the future bride was to embrace. Through a comparison between the accoutrements of the Roman bride and the Vestal Virgin, the crux of the chapter deals with hairstyle and dress to illustrate how the bride prepared for the ceremony.

The author also introduces material remains, that is the controversial biographical sarcophagi, to support her claims of dress habits of the bride and later the matrona. Following the analyses of Reinsberg (2006) she correctly concludes that the scenes on these sarcophagi do not represent wedding rituals. Rather their funerary context denotes the piety of the married couple over time. Given the scope of the book one wonders if this evidence would have been better left untouched. She undermines this conclusion, albeit at different places in the book, by offering the provocative suggestion that weddings and funerals share common ritual elements. At the end of the chapter, Hersch examines the various events that took place within the house of the bride, which include the taking of auspices, the performance of sacrifices, as well as the conferral of marriage contracts.

Chapter 3 takes readers into the world of the groom who leads the bride to her new home. The evidence to construct the roles that grooms may have played is, as Hersch demonstrates, piecemeal at best. Here one learns of additional participants (attendants who bore wool) involved in and some of the rites (chanting, throwing of foodstuffs, carrying of torches, anointing of doors) carried out at the wedding. Hersch effectively demonstrates that the antiquarians' evidence used to construct a symbolic interpretation of the events and accoutrements was a source of puzzlement even in antiquity. She proposes that perhaps a better way to deal with some of the inconsistencies of the sources is to show how the wedding ritual served to create a sense of community. The ritual, in turn, entrenched the community in set values, ideals that harkened back to the traditions of early Rome.

In the penultimate chapter, the author creates a better understanding of the presence of gods at the Roman wedding. Deities of choice both in the literary and artistic representations include Venus and Cupid, Hymenaeus, Concordia and the Lares. Of particular interest is the...