Few scholars have offered a better portrait of the difficulties inherent in the study of ritual than the anthropologist Victor Turner, who in 1969 observed of his own work on the rituals of the Ndembu people,

For social historians of the Roman world, Turner's remarks ring especially true, for the problem of determining the meaning behind ancient rituals is compounded by chronological distance from long-dead informants and frustrating gaps in evidence. And in the case of the Roman wedding, we depend almost exclusively on upper-class male authors to reveal the meaning of a ceremony in which a young woman's transition to married life was the primary focus. Did the events of a Roman wedding and the thoughts and feelings of its participants (especially the bride), described by ancient sources, resemble in any way the reality of the ceremony? Even if we sifted through all the known evidence for Roman weddings, collected the elements common to each, and said with relative certainty that these were the rites and rituals of the Roman wedding known to Romans of that historical period, this ceremony – this amalgam wedding – would be our own creation, and not the experience of any one Roman.

As discussed in Chapter 1, on a man's wedding day, he was said to “lead a wife” (ducere uxorem). In this chapter, we observe that the groom's participation in the rituals of the wedding, as the details have been handed down in fragments, was not a primary concern to antiquarians. The sources provide only hints at a man's participation in his wedding – what he wore, thought, or did – and leading a wife was certainly not always highlighted.

THE IDEAL GROOM

Where was the groom during the wedding, and what was he doing? What we know of the groom's attitude and experience comes largely from epithalamia, and from these we learn that the mien of the groom was as prescribed as that of the bride. As the ideal bride is at once blushing, frightened, perhaps crying decorously, and radiant with joy that she will be married, the ideal groom is said to be sexually experienced and in most cases cheerfully eager for the wedding night. The groom could perhaps afford to be cheerful, for he did not experience in the space of a few hours, as the bride did, the probable shock of a very public display that ended in the greater shock of separation from family and a familiar environment and, finally, the loss of virginity with a man who was (ideally) unknown to her sexually.

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.”

RITUAL AND RELIGION

The Roman wedding comprised a collection of ritual acts: the gods' will may have been sought before the bride left her home; the bride, adorned in protective garb that she may have shared with priestesses in Rome, was led accompanied by music and singing to her husband's house; she performed small sacrifices to the guardian spirits of her natal home, her community, and her new abode; and, finally, she may have pronounced her consent to the marriage with a formula (perhaps less religious than legal or “customary”). At the same time, she was co-opted in to the new home by fire and water, symbolizing the sustaining of life. One scholar of Roman religion has noted that “religion consists normally…in ritual action that takes place in groups”; because the defining events of the wedding were rituals performed before the community, then we may look on the wedding as a religious act.

Evidence from legal, literary, and artistic sources suggests that the core event, or central ritual, of the Roman wedding was the procession of a woman, the bride, to her new home. A Roman woman was duly married, the sources suggested, if she had been viewed by the community in her wedding garb. Thus, for example, Apuleius was obliged to prove his good intentions when he married his wife, Pudentilla, far from prying eyes; he made it clear that these eyes were needed to give the wedding its legitimacy.

If the Romans viewed the symbols of their wedding in the way that the assembled evidence suggests they did, then they would have found much to appreciate in the trajectory of the standard modern American wedding. Of course, American brides and grooms, like their Roman counterparts, may choose different adornments or decorations depending on their taste, religion, ethnicity, or financial situation. But if the white dresses in the window of any given bridal shop or on the cover of Brides magazine on any given month are a guide to what most brides in this country prefer at the time of this writing, then modern brides too choose to clothe themselves in fabric symbolic of purity, whatever the status of their virginity. Moreover, because most of these grand white dresses represent a distinctly “Western” cut, anyone could argue that they represent a distinctly Western purity. In contrast, the American groom is likely to be identifiable by a suit differing only in price from those worn by his male guests; indeed, he may be distinguished from other men only by a boutonniere. Unlike the ancient or the modern bride, who was or is immediately recognizable by her flammeum or elaborate white dress and veil, respectively, and who presumably never wears her wedding finery again, the Roman groom probably did wear his shining white garment again to parties, as can the American groom recycle his tuxedo or fine suit for wear at elegant parties, other weddings, or indeed to perform music solo or in an orchestra.

THE IDEAL BRIDE

The purpose of a Roman marriage was to ensure that children would be legitimate, thus, the purpose of the wedding was to ensure that the sexuality and reproduction of the bride, who was expected to be a virgin if marrying for the first time, were transferred safely into the confines of a legal marriage. In descriptions of the wedding in epithalamia, virginity and desire are for the most part antithetical. Catullus described the bride Junia as cupida, or “desirous,” for her new husband, but this desire may not be sexual: the poet warned the virgin bride that she must take care to please her man or he will seek greener pastures. In later epithalamia, Venus and Cupid endeavor to make the bride beautiful and beloved for the pleasure of the groom alone; rarely is there an indication of the importance of the bride's pleasure. Roman writers asserted that if plans have gone according to schedule, the bride will be a virgin and the wedding night will be a horror. One of Nero's despicable acts was to make a joke of the bride's terror or pain as she lost her virginity. Was the image of a shy, reluctant, or grieving bride a mere artistic conceit? Was the core of this lament adapted from the Greek wedding? The frequency with which the grieving bride appears in Roman literature allows us to argue that the bride's lamentation itself, whether false or true, was a normal part of the ceremony.

In the epigraph to this chapter, Hasia Diner discusses how various factors contribute to food becoming a “locus of contestations and conflict” between European Jews who immigrated to America. This is by no means a modern phenomenon. Just as the Tannaim use culinary and commensal practices to establish distinct Jewish and male identities, so too did these practices serve to establish a Jewish, male, and rabbinic identity. In fact, the Tannaim devote more attention to parsing how their culinary and commensal practices distinguish themselves from other Jews than they do to any other “Other.”

The Tannaim construct their Jewish, male, rabbinic identity in part by way of four food practices. First, they develop the notion that there is a distinctive cuisine that comprises the diet and foodway of (and, thus, marks the socially constructed identity of) a rabbinic Jew. (Throughout this book, the term “rabbinic Jew” refers to a Jew who chooses to follow the prescriptions of rabbinic Judaism, as opposed to a nonrabbinic Jew, who, although unquestionably Jewish even in the eyes of rabbinic Judaism, has chosen not to adhere to rabbinic practice.)

With whom you eat is a powerful statement about your identity, whether you live in 210 c.e. or 2010 c.e. Breaking bread is a social language that operates under the assumption that commensality is a practice that results in social digestion – breaking groups into smaller social units. This presumption is tacit in English vernacular, as the Latin derivation of the word “companion” literally means “one with whom one shares bread.” When Shylock declines Bassanio's dinner invitation, his refusal to participate in commensality with Gentiles contains two assumptions that we have encountered throughout this book: (1) commensality leads to social intimacy and identity; and (2) pork is a metonymic food of the “culinary Other.”

Throughout, I have argued that the Tannaim innovate and manipulate food practices to construct a distinctly Jewish, male, and rabbinic identity. As I argue in Chapter 1, however, what the Tannaim ate, and how they obtained, prepared, and consumed their food, does not differ on the macro level (i.e., in general structure and appearance) from that of their ancient Mediterranean contemporaries. Where it does differ is on the micro level.