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Updated: May 26, 2025
In two other forms, besides confarreatio, the bride could be brought under the hand of her husband, viz., coemptio and usus, with which we are not here specially concerned; for long before the last century of the Republic all three methods had become practically obsolete, or were only occasionally used for particular purposes.
Though confarreatio was the only essentially religious form of marriage, and was sanctified by the presence of the pontifex maximus and the flamen Dialis, yet marriage even in the less religious ceremony of coemptio was always a sacrum. The central ceremony of the confarreatio was an act partly of sacrifice, partly, one might almost say, of communion.
For the wife is the genus: there are two kinds of wife; one being those mothers of a family which become wives by coemptio; the other kind are those which are only considered wives: and as Fabia was one of those last, it appears that nothing was bequeathed to her.
In the earlier period a woman was acquired as wife in three different ways: I. By coemptio a mock sale to her husband ; II. By confarreatio a solemn marriage with peculiar sacred rites to qualify men and women and their children for certain priesthoods ; III. By usus, or acquisition by prescription.
Otherwise the marriage was absolutely as valid for all purposes private and public as it could be made even by confarreatio itself. The sacramental part was absent, and the survival of the features of marriage by purchase, which we may see in the form of coemptio, was also absent; but in all other respects the marriage ceremony was the same as in marriage cum manu.
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