[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
At almost 600 pages, reading Au-delà de l’épithalame from cover to cover is no simple task, but the reader will find it well worth the effort. This is a weighty collection of twenty-one papers (notably, about two thirds of them are by female scholars) concentrating on the Roman literary discourse around marriage. The contributions—in French, English, Italian, and German—stem from a 2017 colloquium organized by the Foundation Hardt, with five additions. The coverage is wide, from archaic Latin literature all the way up to Late Antiquity, on genres such as comedy, tragedy, declamation, historiography, elegy, epigram, epic, epistolography, patristics, philosophy, lyric, and legal writings. Although there are some other excellent edited volumes on marriage, this latest collection makes clear that it remains a vibrant area of research.[1] The present collection, however, is uniquely thorough, as it traces marriage throughout Roman history, and in Roman literature at large, rather than in ritual or other forms of expression that preserve information about marriage, as iconography, epitaphs or letters.[2] In fact, its commitment to systematically considering marriage in different genres is particularly praiseworthy, as this shows how different discourses interact with the same event. As such, the papers reveal a history of the institution, demonstrating nuance and complexity around this event as it changed and developed. A primary result is the realization that there was no single way to describe marriage, the emotions that stemmed from it (or that led to it), or the roles and expectations that were placed upon the husband and wife. Instead, each genre and each author explore specific motifs connected to this long-lasting bond, confronting idealization and reality to move their audiences to engage with a topic that was deeply connected to their identity.
The introduction prepares the reader well for the studies that follow. It clearly notes some topics that appear throughout: the benefits and inconveniences of the institution (which remind us of its contractual nature); the centrality of family—organized around the male figure, frequently reliant on marriage to ascend socially—and childbearing; the kinds of emotion that appeared in marriage; and the power dynamics that shaped a couple’s existence. The chapters are a journey through different kinds of expressions of marriage, from the sexual fulfilment of the adulescens up to the spiritual marriage between Christ and the Church. The editors are interested in the centrality of marriage in the ancient mindset, and emphasize that the existence of a genre devoted solely to this event, the epithalamium, attests to such significance. While the wedding songs are a good conversation starter, perhaps a discussion on marriage discourse would be more accurate, as the contributors usually focus on the different phases of married life rather than the ritual singing and dancing that started it. In fact, the audience will read about many women and their unions, such as Dido seen as a hopeful bride, Deianeira, a second wife fearful of her husband’s adultery, Calpurnia, the virtuous and old-fashioned wife who gets Pliny to forget about his previous marriage, and many others. Indeed, a strength of this volume is how the papers bring to life many experiences of womanhood, even when these are told by male authors. That said, the female-centered view is complicated by Gracchus and Heliogabalus, two convoluted examples of masculinity, marked by their sacrilegious weddings and homosexuality.
The individual papers are uniformly strong: they are engaging, well-grounded, advance the topic, and their chronological ordering offers a striking sense of both continuity and development. The contributions frequently mark the paradoxes and ambiguities of marital experience, which indicates that the conflict typical to this rite of liminality remained active throughout the marriage. In what follows, I offer brief summaries of the individual chapters, which are ordered chronologically.
Faure-Ribreau starts off with a catalogue of misogynistic and satirical discussions on marriage and wives taken especially from Plautine comedy. Two views come to light: while happiness in youth was contingent on the wedding, this event unlocked a lifetime of hardship, with nagging, wasteful, and kill-joy wives. Next, Luciani sets the common disregard for marriage within the philosophical tradition against the Stoic theorization of marriage and the role of women in society. Stoics offer a new model for spousal harmony and societal growth based on equality, which had substantial influence on the later Christian tradition (see Chapot below). Laigneau-Fontaine notes yet another paradox by analyzing Catullus and the Augustan elegists: the poets present idealized love and envision its possibility within the knot. However, they are most often talking about adulterous relationships. The poets attach values of happiness and devotion to their dominae and uphold affection as a determinant factor for their relationships, which was foreign to the traditional approach to marriage at this time. Hersch and Nelis pivot to Vergil. Hersch takes up Dido’s union with Aeneas to suggest that Book 4 in its entirety (not only the much-discussed cave scene) engages with the epithalamium. This prompts a particularly potent reading of the heroine’s suicide and curse, which rewrite and reverse the epithalamic topoi as exemplified in Catullus’ long poems. That is, Vergil utilizes the wedding song to play with his audiences’ emotions: like Dido, we expect marital bliss, only to see her epithalamium turn into a dirge. Nelis concentrates on Idomeneus’ brief appearance in Aeneid 3. The passage allows the author to consider Fama broadly within the epic, an element that is always connected to the wedding. This reveals the self-conscious nature of marriage within the work, based on the expectation of reservation and a sense of shame, particularly from the wives. Once the different iterations of rumor alongside marriage are explored, the puzzling Idomeneus passage can be elucidated: his unfaithful wife Meda was killed by her lover Leukos, who drove Idomeneus out of Crete once he returned from the Trojan war. Nelis believes that Aeneas avoids mentioning the reasons for exile to Dido, as the queen, too, was forced to flee her country upon the killing of her spouse. Next, Keith notes that marriages frequently move epic plots as those of the Trojan cycle, so much so that nuptial language pervades the Metamorphoses when Ovid embeds these different stories in his work. Hence, the poet taps into the epithalamic register frequently to explore the failures of marriage and the wars that they start.
The papers relating to the Empire begin with Mal-Maeder, who examines rhetorical treatises. The author argues that these are traditional, utilizing exempla to depict marriage as an opportunity for reproduction and display of virtue in the Republican vein. The controversiae, by contrast, reflect contemporary concerns, focusing on adultery, divorce, inheritance. It is a remarkable disconnect: the revered institution in the handbooks often falls short of its venerable ideals, becoming prone to drama and strife in quotidian life. Battistella shows how Seneca’s reworking of Euripides highlights the fragility of marriage (even Juno is a subject of its perversion), while the marital plots guarantee that the later Hercules Oetaeus is read as a sequel to the Hercules Furens. As Galtier demonstrates, the female characters of Lucan are well aware of the fragility of their nuptial foedera, as their unions are constantly undermined by the actions of their husbands. Next, Galli Milić shows how pervasive the topic of marriage is within Statius’ corpus, highlighting it as a central (and provocative) theme in Achilles’ episode in Skyros: gender-bending transforms the youth into the warrior who negotiates marital and martial paths. Gibson, in turn, shows how the ethical construction of Pliny’s persona is anchored in the regional identity of his wives. His conclusions are significant: the morals of a region and the familial pedigree of a spouse were imprinted on the other because of marriage. Then, Santorelli considers Juvenal’s depiction of same-sex marriage in Sat. 2, when a certain Gracchus rejected his Roman nobility and masculinity to marry a horn-blower. The author demonstrates that the tale is a perversion of the anecdotes about Gaius Gracchus and the fistulator who accompanied his speeches, a sign of the moral decay of Juvenal’s time. Similarly, the attack against traditional marriage reappears in Poignault’s analysis of Heliogabalus, whose wickedness is signified through his depraved weddings, which were plentiful, fruitless, and self-aggrandizing manifestations of his fickleness and tyranny. Nicolini demonstrates that unlike the Greek novelists Apuleius is disinterested in idealized visions of marriage. Apuleius engages frequently with contemporary marital legislation and the commonplaces of wedding poetry, but except for Eros and Psyche (which Nicolini unfortunately skips over in order to focus on less well-commented moments of the work), perverts these with violence, death, and adultery. It seems that only in the realm of fairy-tale can one count on a successful union.
Chapot’s contribution serves as a terrific opening to the Christian material. The author presents the early Christian mentality around marriage, marked by affection, long-lasting devotion, and community. This is well exemplified by Morelli, who notes Ausonius’ domestication of the elegy and epigram in order to connect love and marriage, blurring the lines between the uxor and the amica. The poet recontextualizes older erotic topoi to downplay the traditional infidelity of these poems (Laigneau-Fontaine). This means that the image of the uniuira – the widow who never remarries – receives new attention, as the intimacy between spouses, their sexuality, and never-ending fidelity becomes an imperative. Next, Consolino turns to Claudian’s extensive engagement with the wedding, reaching far beyond his two sets of epithalamia. The tenderness shared between the poet and his patron Serena (whom he sees as a model and advocate for his own wedding) is noteworthy, especially when this is contrasted to the veneration and careful distance that Claudian uses to interact with her husband Stilicho, frequently praised for his (questionable) military prowess. Harich-Schwarzbauer stands out, since it is the only contribution concerning an epithalamium proper: Sidonius’ poem 15. As the author explains it, this carefully woven piece about a weaving bride utilizes traditional topoi to satirize the genre in order to turn the couple away from pagan myths and old-fashioned philosophical discussions of the wedding. Stoehr-Monjou maps out the vocabulary around union in Dracontius to explore the author’s complex approach to marriage, as the topic appears in both his pagan and Christian output and beyond his epithalamia. The contrast between adultery and the “charm of shared life” (expressed through the same vocabulary) exposes the different figurations of the union, while unifying the poet’s work. Next, Hecquet-Noti turns to the development of the praise of virginity and the creation of the hierarchy between the spiritual marriage to the Church and the carnal wedding. The topic is revelatory of the role of women in Christian aristocracy, as it proposes spiritual equality between the sexes. However, as a virgin girl is freed from a carnal wedding, she is placed in seclusion. At last, McClintock’s final contribution does a fine job explaining the legal vocabulary and context that underlines the discussions of the previous papers.
If I had to make a criticism, it is that the volume passes over the Republican evidence for weddings, choosing instead to focus on the Empire and Christianity. There is a lot of valuable evidence in Catullus’ wedding songs or Cicero’s letters, and more consideration of this material would have grounded the discussions on the later versions of marriage that the volume explores so vividly. The normative ideals of the Republic remained very productive, even if the Empire brought about some license to the matronae, particularly with regards to their display of beauty, wealth, affection. Then, with Christianity, new forms of marital happiness appeared, connected to the ecclesial community and the spiritual encounter of the couple, which revived some of those moralizing ideals. Hence, a contribution explicitly focusing on the wedding through the lenses of the mos maiorum would have been handy, especially since some of the contributions were commissioned after the colloquium. This is nonetheless a minor quibble: Au-delà de l’épithalame is an excellent volume, which will open avenues for further considerations about the impact of the wedding song and of marriage discourse in different registers and literary genres. These events were remarkably connected to female experience, and their reevaluation presents new contexts for our understanding of both women in antiquity and their representation in canonical authors as well as those who are less well studied. The volume is very well edited, and presents an extensive and up-to-date bibliography as well as neatly organized indexes. These demonstrate the careful work behind each paper and the collection.
Authors and Titles
Introduction (Lavinia Galli Milić & Annick Stoehr-Monjou)
Fin heureuse ou fin de la fête? Les deux faces du mariage dans la comédie romaine (Marion Faure-Ribreau)
Mariage et philosophie à Rome: de Lucilius à Musonius Rufus (Sabine Luciani)
De l’exaltation idéalisée au rejet provocateur du mariage: itinéraires élégiaques (Sylvie Laigneau-Fontaine)
Vergil’s Tragic Epithalamium (Karen Klaiber Hersch)
Marriage, fama, and the Story of Idomeneus in Vergil’s Aeneid (Damien P. Nelis)
Dira canam: Marriage and War in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Alison Keith)
Nubere dulce est? Représentations du mariage dans la rhétorique antique (Danielle van Mal-Maeder)
Hercules’ Wives: Broken Marriages, Revenge and Death in Seneca’s Hercules Furens and in the Hercules Oetaeus (Chiara Battistella)
Le mariage à l’épreuve de la mort dans la Pharsale de Lucain (Fabrice Galtier)
Pelea iam desiste queri thalamosque minores (Stat., Achil., 1.90): le mariage en filigrane dans l’Achilléide de Stace (Lavinia Galli Milić)
Calpurnia of Comum and the Ghost of Umbria: Marriage and Regional Identity in the Epistulae of Pliny (Roy K. Gibson)
Nubit amicus. Literary Tradition and Social Criticism in Juvenal’s Portrait of Gracchus’ Wedding (Sat., 2.117-148) (Biagio Santorelli)
La tomba dell’amore: il matrimonio nel romanzo apuleiano (Lara Nicolini)
Le bonheur et l’affection dans le mariage. Remarques sur quelques textes de la littérature latine chrétienne (Frédéric Chapot)
Héliogabale, ou le mariage perverti (Rémy Poignault)
Cum dignitate venustas. Eros coniugale e rielaborazione degli auctores classici in Ausonio (Alfredo Mario Morelli)
Matrimonio e matrimoni nella poesia non epitalamica di Claudiano (Franca Ela Consolino)
Satirische Transformation des Epithalamiums des Sidonius Apollinaris, Carm., 15 (Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer)
Consortia blanda (Laud. Dei, 1.363 ; Romul., 8.5). L’utilisation du préverbe com– pour dire le mariage chez Dracontius (Annick Stoehr-Monjou)
Au-delà du mariage charnel: l’éloge de la sponsa Christi selon Avit de Vienne (Nicole Hecquet-Noti)
Matrimonio e ricchezza femminile a Roma. Glossario giuridico (Aglaia McClintock)
Notes
[1] E.g., W. S. Smith’s (2005) Satiric advice on women and marriage: from Plautus to Chaucer (https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2007/2007.04.41/); L. L. Lovén and A. Stömberg’s (2010) Ancient Marriage in Myth and Reality (2010); J. Beneker and G. Tsouvala’s (2020) The Discourse of Marriage in the Greco-Roman World (https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2021/2021.03.05/); or C. C. Challet’s (2021) Married Life in Greco-Roman Antiquity (https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2022/2022.10.43/).
[2] Cf. e.g., part III of Stömberg’s (2010) book.