Research On Ancient Roman Wedding Ceremony

The wedding ceremony in ancient Roman is a combination of long-standing traditional customs and religious rituals.For the ancient Romans,the wedding was the beginning of a married life and also an important part of the ancient Roman family life.This ceremony is of great significance to both sides of the married couples.In the early Republic,Romans' weddings presented different rituals due to social class differences.For the nobility,the confarreatio was a relatively common form of the wedding ceremony,whereas for the civilians,they had coemptio or usus,for which there was no solemn wedding ceremony to commemorate such a sacred moment,and the main purpose of the wedding was to transform the ‘patria potestas' to the ‘manus'.From the late Republic to the early Roman Empire,with the legalization of the marriage between the nobility and the civilians,the increase in the wealth of the Romans and the changes in the marriage forms,the Roman wedding ceremony also changed: some cumbersome religious rituals were simplified,and the purpose of the wedding was more to show the transformation of male and female identities.During this period,the ancient Romans' weddings included the marriage preparations along with the rituals at both bride's house and bridegroom's house.This paper explores the influence of the patriarchal paternalism on children's marriage choices in different periods by analyzing the family background of ancient Roman marriage.Meanwhile,the paper also sorts out the differences in Romans' wedding ceremony between the early Republic period and the early Empire period.The changes in these wedding ceremonies also reflects the changes in social life and class status in Rome.Finally,this paper analyzes the reasons for the changes of wedding ceremony in different periods from the perspective of women and gender,and also discusses the influence of wedding ceremony on the status of ancient Roman women.This paper is divided into three chapters,taking the wedding ceremony as the main research object,to analyze the changes of the wedding ceremony from the early Republic to the early Roman Empire.The first chapter,beginning with the background of the evolution of the wedding ceremony,expounds the influence of “the patriarchal paternalism" on marriage in ancient Roman families,and then discusses the changes of ancient Roman marriage forms,and finally sorts out the engagement system and the dowry background of the ancient Romans.The second chapter mainly explores the evolution of the wedding ceremony of the ancient Romans.This chapter starts with the changes in marriage preparation,and then discusses the main processes of ancient Roman wedding ceremonies in different periods.The third chapter sheds light on the reasons and influences of the evolution of ancient Roman weddings from three aspects: firstly,the reasons for the evolution of the weddings are analyzed in terms of the ceremonies;secondly,the changes of the status of ancient Roman women are explored;finally,the practical significance of the ancient Roman wedding ceremony is analyzed.