02 - Who Will Pay Child Support? Divorce, Roman Citizenship, and a New Latin Papyrus

In Rome, divorce was not less frequent than it is today. Indeed, it may have been even more frequent, at least in the higher echelons of society, where remarriages could play a political role (Bradley 1991, Treggiari 1991a, and Corbier 1991). Though the political machinations of the imperial center were largely absent from Egypt, the situation there clearly did not differ much, given what private letters, petitions, and most of all census returns reveal about the fates of the province's marriages (Bagnall and Frier 1994, Huebner 2013). But what would exactly happen upon divorce? Were women adequately protected from an economic point of view? And most importantly, how were children divided among parents, was there any form of child support? Who would gain or lose more when a marriage was dissolved? Over time, the Greek women of Egypt gained more and more protections. If Demetria, the wife appearing in P.Eleph. 1 of 310 BCE, could divorce her husband only on breach of the terms enumerated in their contract, by the Roman era women could initiate divorce at will (Yiftach-Firanko 2003). They would receive their dowry back after a set deadline, and if they did not, they could and did sue (e.g., P.Oxy. II 281 = Chrest.Mitt. 66, 20 - 50 CE). The couple's children could follow either parent, and husband and wife could reach an agreement on this point before marriage (e.g. P.Oxy. II 496.9, 127 CE). These rights represent a significant departure from contemporary practice in Rome, where women could not initiate divorce easily until the second century, children of dissolved marriages followed their father, and a husband could retain part or most of his former wife's dowry (cf. Treggiari 1991b). In this talk, I illuminate these center-periphery contradictions by commenting on the available Egyptian evidence and presenting two unpublished fragments (P.Oslo inv. 261+137) from a Latin document. Probably from Karanis, this new text informs us about the marriage of a certain Sempronia to a Gaius Longinus Longus, for whom see P.Mich. IX 570 from 105 - 106 CE. Revealing the penetration of Roman law deep in the Egyptian chora, the document offers the first attestation of a set of rules that we know only through Tituli ex Corpore Ulpiani 6.9 - 13 and crucially shows how new Roman citizens (Longus likely became one through military service as a cavalryman) could rapidly learn how to use their recently acquired status to exploit laws that were much more advantageous to men than women.

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Presenters

Giuliano Sidro, University of California, Berkeley

  SCS-29