12-28-2014, 11:59 AM
Quote:two types of marriage: marriage "with manus", by wich women litterally swiched family, and marriage "without manus", in wich instead she reamined in her father's family...
Yes, although it seems that the manus marriage was pretty much a dead letter by the end of the republic, and had died out completely by AD23, except in cases where it was necessary for the husband to hold a religious office (Gaius, Institutiones 110-111).
Quote:normally a woman wasn't a persona sui iuris (legal person)...but, if the woman was an orphan and she didn't have any male parents, then she would had been sui iuris, a legal person, and she could have received her father's legacy.
This is interesting, and might explain those cases that we hear about when women did appear to own property in their own names, and (for example) run businesses. Whenever further information is available, it often seems to be that these women are widows, and if they have no surviving male parents then, as you say, they could have acted legally and controlled their own wealth (despite not having potestas, officially speaking...)
This might explain the 'legacy hunter' as well - a dowry apparently had to be returned in the case of divorce, but if the wealthy widow was old enough then the scheming new husband might expect to outlive her, and inherit all her wealth!
In which case it might have been profitable for widows to remain unmarried, which might in turn explain the Augustan legislation that penalised women with few children who remained univira - they needed male heredes to secure all that potentially volatile money and property...
I've been reading Geoffrey Nathan's The Family in Late Antiquity, which has some useful stuff about later centuries, including the note that husbands could indeed leave large legacies to their wives (fideicommisa), either in total or as part of an inheritance kept in trust for their children. Despite this, it was only after the reign of Commodus that women could legally designate their own children as heirs (Ulpian, Regulae. 26, 7-8).
Nathan Ross
