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H.I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity (page 287).
Marrou talks about “imaginary laws” that Roman students in higher education had to discuss. I gather that these were brain exercises, or opportunities for them to show off their rhetoric!
One imaginary law that Marrou mentions concerns a man who seduces a woman:
In this case the law is that if a woman has been seduced she can choose either to have her seducer condemned to death or marry him without bringing him any dowry.
That sounds somewhat like certain laws in the Torah. In Exodus 22:16-17, a man who seduces a woman who is not engaged to be married must marry the woman and pay the bride-price, unless the woman’s father disapproves of the marriage. In that case, the man must pay the father the bride-price for virgins, presumably because virgins cost more on the bridal market, and the man has brought down the woman’s economic value, for which he must compensate her father.
What I don’t understand is this: I thought that a dowry was the price that the man paid the woman’s father for the woman. So what’s the Roman imaginary law mean when it says that the woman can marry the man without bringing him any dowry? Did the woman ordinarily have to pay the man whom she wanted to marry? I looked up ”dowry” in wikipedia (see Dowry – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), and, apparently, that’s what a dowry is. A dowry is not the same as the bride-price (although the KJV in Exodus 22:17 translates bride-price as “dowry,” for whatever reason). A dowry is the wealth of the woman’s family that she brings into the marriage. If a man seduced her and they did the wild thing before marriage, she can marry him, without bringing a dowry into the marriage. That indicates a cultural disapproval by the Romans of sex outside of marriage.
Like the Torah, this imaginary Roman law offers the option of “You break it, you buy it.” (Others have used this expression to convey the mentality of that time, so I’m not trying to sound crass or sexist when I use it!)
According to Deuteronomy 22:23-24, if a man sleeps with a betrothed woman in the city and she doesn’t cry out (indicating her consent), then both the man and the woman will be put to death. Like the imaginary Roman law, Deuteronomy 22:23-24 mentions a death penalty for premarital sex. Unlike the imaginary Roman law, however, the death penalty in Deuteronomy 22:23-24 is for a very specific kind of premarital sex—that between a man and a woman who is engaged to somebody else.
Moreover, while Deuteronomy 22:23-24 mandates that both the man and the woman be put to death, since both consented, the imaginary Roman law gives the woman the power to have her lover executed, even though she consented to the act. I’ve often heard that the Romans were sexist towards women, and that’s probably the case. At the same time, Gentile society could be more progressive on women than the society of Israel, for Jews forbade a woman to divorce her husband, whereas many Gentiles allowed her to do so (thus the contrast between Matthew 19:19—the Jewish Gospel—and Mark 10:11-12—a Gospel to Gentiles, according to many scholars). So is it a surprise that, in an imaginary Roman law, a woman can have her lover executed, since he enticed her and made her cost less on the bridal market (if the Romans had the custom of bride-prices)? And yet, there’s an implicit sexism in this law, for it assumes that the man is responsible for his actions, whereas the woman is not, perhaps because she was deemed to be weak, one who could be swayed by a handsome man’s smooth words.
But the imaginary Roman law is the context for a mind game: A man violates two women on the same night. One asks for him to be put to death, the other chooses to marry him.
And so Roman students are to come up with solutions to this legal puzzle. It reminds me of the Mishnah, the Tosefta, and the Talmud: seeing how a law or principle applies in various situations. But, in the case of the Romans, the law is imaginary. And, come to think of it, not all of the laws of the Torah were in force when the rabbis and their students discussed them!
