SOME IMPORTANT TERMS AND CONCEPTS

What happened at a Roman wedding? As we started to discuss in the Introduction, the answer depends on which sources we consult. Some ancient Roman authors made it clear that a wedding is the union of two people, implying that they are equals, and described it with the verb iungere, meaning “to join.” Fittingly, this verb can also be used to describe the yoking of animals, and it may be that at one time Romans thought of a wedding as yoking together two people to “pull together through life,” as a team of oxen does. It is of importance that every literary description of this joining in marriage was slightly different. Sometimes a woman was joined to a man by a third party. Sometimes the couple was merely said to be joined. Moreover, we often cannot know by the author's use of iungere or its compounds whether the bride and groom were at the wedding symbolically joined or were physically joined (by standing next to one another, by the clasping of hands, or even by sexual intercourse, as some suggested).

But as often as a wedding was identified as a union, it was also described with terms that identified individual actions of the bride and groom; to speak of an individual's wedding was to identify that person's gender. When a woman married, she nubere viro – she literally “put on a veil for a husband.”