[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.
To begin with, the boy and girl--for such they were, as we should look
on them, even at the time of marriage--have been betrothed, in all
probability, long before.
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