Slaves, Concubines and the Legitimacy of Children

[Sean Manning]

Outside of the army, inscriptions suggest that the rules about who could enter into what sort of marriage-like relationship with whom were often broken in the Roman world. Nathan Rosenstein suggests that soldiers' marriage was a non-issue before the late first century BCE, because most men spent their late teens and early twenties in the army and married in their late twenties when they were less likely to be conscripted. If he is correct, Augustus' law against soldiers' marriage was another "return to the mores maiorum."