Contubernium

This article is about the quasi-marital relationship. For the military unit, see Contubernium (Roman army unit).
Not to be confused with Concubinatus.

An imperial slave named Antiochus, reared as a verna (within the household he was born into), commemorated the death of his "well-deserving" contubernalis Valeria Fortunata in this Latin-Greek bilingual inscription, found along the Stoa of Attalus[1]

In ancient Rome, contubernium was a quasi-marital relationship[2] between two slaves or between a slave (servus) and a free person who was usually a former slave or the child of a former slave. A slave involved in such a relationship was called contubernalis,[2] the basic and general meaning of which was "companion".[a]

Under Roman law, the slave was treated as property (res) and lacked the legal personhood to enter into legitimate forms of marriage. Although not codified as marriage (conubium) in Roman law, contubernium had legal implications that were addressed by Roman jurists in case law[3] and was intended to be a lasting, ideally permanent union modelled on marital affection (affectio maritalis)[4] that was approved and recognized by the slave's owner.[5] Inscriptions indicate that contubernium with the intentions it expressed was primarily a concern for "upwardly mobile" slaves and former slaves who served the imperial house (familia Caesaris) and bureaucracy or who belonged to houses of senatorial or equestrian rank.[6] In contubernium when only one partner remained enslaved, most often the free person was a freedwoman (liberta).

Contubernium institutionalized[7] the slave's honorable intention to form an enduring heterosexual union with economic, emotional, and parental benefits—an acknowledgment of the inherent contradictions between the status of the slave as property and "tool" (instrumentum) and the individual's evident humanity and desire to participate in what Romans regarded as normal family life.

  1. ^ AE 1947, 77 = SEG 21, 1058
  2. ^ a b c Treggiari 1981, p. 43.
  3. ^ Martin Schermaier, "Neither Fish nor Fowl: Some Grey Areas of Roman Slave Law", The Position of Roman Slaves: Social Realities and Legal Differences, Dependency and Slavery Studies, vol. 6 (De Gruyter, 2023), p. 252.
  4. ^ Susan Treggiari, "Concubinae," Papers of the British School at Rome 49 (1981), p. 59.
  5. ^ Schermaier, "Neither Fish nor Fowl", p. 252.
  6. ^ Treggiari 1981, p. 59.
  7. ^ Schermaier, "Neither Fish nor Fowl", p. 252.


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