in peace and war.  To be a Roman citizen you must be the product of a iustum matrimonium.  From this initial fact flow all the iura or rights which together make up citizenship; whether the private rights, which enable you to hold and transfer and to inherit property under the shelter of the Roman law,[209] or the public rights, which protect your person against violence and murder, and enable you to give your vote in the public assembly and to seek election to magistracies.[210]

Marriage then was a matter of the utmost importance in Roman life, and in all the forms of it we find this importance marked by due solemnity of ritual.  In two other forms, besides confarreatio, the bride could be brought under the hand of her husband, viz., coemptio and usus, with which we are not here specially concerned; for long before the last century of the Republic all three methods had become practically obsolete, or were only occasionally used for particular purposes.  In the course of time it had been found more convenient for a woman to remain after her marriage in the hand of her father, or if he were dead, in the “tutela” of a guardian (tutor), than to pass into that of her husband; for in the latter case her property became absolutely his.  The natural tendency to escape from the restrictions of marital manus may be illustrated by a case such as the following:  a woman under the tutela of a guardian wishes to marry; if she does so, and passes under the manus of her husband, her tutor loses all control over her property, which may probably be of great importance for the family she is leaving; he therefore naturally objects to such a marriage, and urges that she should be married without manus.[211] In fact the interests of her own family would often clash with those of the one she was about to enter, and a compromise could be effected by the abandonment of marriage cum manu.

Now this, the abandonment of marriage cum manu, means simply that certain legal consequences of the marriage ceremony were dropped, and with them just those parts of the ceremony which produced these consequences.  Otherwise the marriage was absolutely as valid for all purposes private and public as it could be made even by confarreatio itself.  The sacramental part was absent, and the survival of the features of marriage by purchase, which we may see in the form of coemptio, was also absent; but in all other respects the marriage ceremony was the same as in marriage cum manu.  It retained all essential religious features, losing only a part of its legal character.  It will be as well briefly to describe a Roman wedding of the type common in the last two centuries of the Republic.