Concubinatus

Concubinatus (Latin, "concubinage") was a monogamous union, intended to be of some duration but not necessarily permanent, that was socially and to some extent legally recognized as an alternative to marriage in the Roman Empire. Concubinage became a legal concern in response to Augustan moral legislation that criminalized adultery and imposed penalties on some consensual sexual behaviors outside marriage.^[2]

Reasons for choosing concubinatus over marriage varied. If one partner was freeborn and belonged to the senatorial order, and the other was a former slave, there were legal penalties for marrying. More generally, wealthy widowers or divorced men might avoid the legal complexities of a second marriage in preserving their estates for heirs while still acknowledging a commitment to their partner. However, both partners might be freedpersons,^[3] with the benefits of concubinatus over marriage for people of this status not entirely clear in the historical record. Concubinatus was distinguished in Roman law from contubernium, a de facto marriage in which the partners were both slaves or one was a slave and the other a freedperson.^[4]

The female partner, "perhaps always" the person of lower social rank in the Classical period,^[5] was a concubina, literally a "bedmate", one for lying with, but a socially respectable role in contrast to the paelex, a sexual partner who was a rival to a wife. The naming of a concubina as such in epitaphs indicates that she was accepted as part of the extended family, and juristic texts accord the concubina certain protections. The listing of concubinae along with legal wives on grave markers indicates serial monogamy, not their coexistence, as tombs were often communal and included multiple members of a household, from different times of the male partner's life.

In Latin literature, however, concubinae are more often disparaged as female slaves kept as sexual luxuries, sometimes along with eunuchs.^[6] The discrepancy lies in whether the union was legally verifiable as monogamous concubinatus; an ancilla (female slave as part of a household) might be kept as a "bedmate" and referred to as concubina but was not eligible for the privileges of formal concubinage.^[7] The equivalent term for a male, concubinus, is used only informally, most often for a same-sex relationship.