... The Emperor
Valentinian further defined low and abject persons who
might not aspire to lawful union with
freemen--actresses, daughters of actresses,
tavern-keepers, the daughters of tavern-keepers,
procurers (leones) or gladiators, or those who had kept
a public shop.... Till Roman citizenship had been
imparted to the whole Roman Empire, it would not
acknowledge marriage with barbarians to be more than a
concubinage. Cleopatra was called only in scorn the
wife of Antony. Berenice might not presume to be more
than the mistress of Titus. The Christian world closed
marriages again within still more and more jealous
limits. Interdictory statutes declared marriages with
Jews and heathens not only invalid but adulterous."
"The Salic and Ripuarian law condemned the freeman
guilty of this degradation [marrying a slave] to
slavery; where the union was between a free woman and a
slave, that of the Lombards and of the Burgundians,
condemned both parties to death; but if her parents
refused to put her to death, she became a slave of the
crown. The Ripuarian law condemned the female
delinquent to slavery; but the woman had the
alternative of killing her base-born husband. She was
offered a distaff and a sword.
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