A look at Roman marriage ages
Were the Romans pedophiles?
Alert: I have a new X account. Refollow me on X here.
It’s amazing how much average age of marriage and norms around it changes between civilizations and over time within civilizations. Considering between-civilizations, take a look at the distribution of Roman marriage ages:
A lot of these are actually illegal now in most places. Many were literally child marriages:
For Roman girls the legal minimum age at marriage was 12; but the law provided no sanctions and was contravened. The usual age at puberty (at least for the upper classes) was probably 13+. In fact menarche was not always a pre-condition of marriage; nevertheless marriages were usually consummated immediately. Even if pre-pubertal marriages were regarded by some as deviant, they were not exceptional and were condoned.
I suggested a minimum age of marriage for modernity of 15, since this is when the brain and reproductive system both tend to be done with childhood. But in the data, 38% of girls were already married by this age.
But it’s even worse than this. The female marriage curve has two humps, and one is in the early 30s. The paper says:
The age at first marriage might have been lower than the inscriptions reveal, since it is likely that some of the inscriptions refer to second or subsequent marriages. The husbands who set up their wives' tombstones understandably enough did not as a rule mention these earlier marriages.
Luckily we now have the tool needed to shine light on the average first age of marriage. It’s called a Gaussian Mixture Model.
The male mean age of marriage goes down from 25 to 21, and the female mean age of marriage goes from 18 to 15 or 16. As you can see, the age of 25 is nearly out of the distribution for women. 30 is out of the distribution. First marriages over 30 are ahistorical; first marriage between 25 and 29 are extremely old.
In fact, it’s safe to say a Roman woman was approaching left-over status by 20 or 21. Women today, held to the same standards, would need to desperately find a man to court them by the time they graduate high school, to make sure they are likely to be married by 20 or 21.
That man would be on average 5 or 6 years older. 23 and 18 was quite average, even late (this is what I got mobbed off of X over by the way).
Here, early marriages are mostly the same frequency, but late marriages become much more rare. Almost all marriage after the mid 20s in women were second marriages, not first marriages. By historical standards, women in their late 20s and later are literally too old to be first wives. Mid 20s women are extremely late, and it was probably seen as embarassing and a sign of poverty or inceldom.
The other side of this is that men did not marry after around 30 for the first time. By 25 a man was starting to be left over; this means he should start courting a girl aged 5 or 6 years younger than him by 22 or 23 (so, a 16 to 18 year old girl), to have a decent chance of not getting too old.
To replicate Roman norms, a society with a 20th century education system would have social functions for high IQ male recent university graduates, and smart female high school students in 10th to 12th grade. This would be perfectly natural, but for some reason aging homosexuals and porn addicts today say that this age gap is “huge” and basically like a girl “dating her father”, even though 5 year old boys can’t sire offspring.
Was it just pagans?
There’s a claim floating around that only pagans practiced early marriage.
.
The difference between the means is not statistically significant.
The true female means could easily be 18, and the true male means could easily be both 25.5. The author of the original article wasn’t statistically advanced enough to compute this (he is a historian, and the article is quite old, so it would have had to have been done by hand, or on a mainframe).
Conclusion
Roman men aged 18 to 24 were usually marrying girls aged 12 to 18. If a Roman bachelor went through a wormhole and ended up in Western modernity, he would probably go to a middle or a high school looking for a wife. He’d be very confused when he finds the locals think this act is “evil” and try to commit violence against him.
If he is smart he’d learn to use a computer and he’d try to read about why this is, perhaps using Google Translate to put things into Ancient Latin. All he would find is that things were more historically normal 70 years ago, during the “Baby Boom”, and that for some reason all of the nigrans were freed, men let their wives divorce them for no reason, and it’s illegal in most places to talk to half of Roman-marriagable women. Also, the fertility rate is sub-replacement, most men are “incels” and everyone is unhappy, even though they have amazing technology like air conditioners, cars, computers, and the internet.
Very weird! Maybe if he’s really smart he’d start a blog and investigate the trajectory of average marriage ages and fertility in modern history.
This is exactly what I’ll do. Next time, we’ll look at the Baby Boom and the Western European Marriage Pattern.
The fact that people are getting married so much later becomes a bit unintentionally funny in Serbia where the word bride (mlada) is just the word for "young" accented differently.
One has to remember the risk of dying in childbirth prior to 1900. Ranges run from 1 in 100 to 1 in 20 or even less - but the more pregnancies (completed or not), the greater the risk of death. All of the things we can now treat - preeclampsia, large for gestational age infants, chorioamnionitis, prolonged labor with resultant hemorrhage -etc, etc. It meant you needed to get a girl at peak fertility and health because every pregnancy reduced that health. Pregnancy draws on every resource that a woman has whether it be micronutrients or macronutrients. With women dying around age 25 to 35 on average in Roman times, the only unmarried women would likely be quite a bit younger. Since modern women are far less likely to die of any cause by age 25, it really isn't an argument to say that a 25 year old man should pursue a 15-year-old girl because they did it in the first century AD. If we are going to argue those sorts of things, then let's go back to "medicine" in Roman times as well. Most people will die of some infection before the age of 5 in that case.