The precise customs and traditions of weddings in ancient Rome likely varied heavily across geography, social strata, and time period; Christian authors writing in late antiquity report different customs from earlier authors writing during the Classical period, with some authors condemning practices described by earlier writers. Furthermore, sources may be heavily biased towards depicting weddings of wealthier Roman or portraying a highly idealized image of the Roman wedding, one that may not accurately reflect how the ritual was performed in ordinary life by the majority of Romans. In some circumstances, Roman literary depictions of weddings appear to select the practices included within their portrayal based upon artistic conceit rather than the veracity of those accounts; writers may have intentionally imitated the works of earlier, more famous authors such as Statius or Catullus. For instance, the writer 4th-century poet Claudian frequently notes the presence of pagan deities at the wedding of Emperor Honorius () and Maria, despite the fact that Rome had already been Christianized by his lifetime and thus most Romans likely had little concern for paganism.

Roman weddings were likely highly religious affairs: the date of the wedding itself was potentially influenced by religious superstition regarding auspicious and inauspicious dates. Prior to the wedding, the auspices may have been consulted to ensure the presence of propitious omens; Roman authors often note the presence of inauspicious signs at doomed or otherwise misfortunate weddings. Sacrifices may also have been performed at Roman weddings, with authors such as Varro noting the presence of pig sacrifices at weddings, although this practice may have been antiquated by the Empire as it is unsupported by artistic evidence. Other forms of sacrifice, such the sacrifice of bulls or sheep, are more commonly showcased in artistic portrayals of Roman weddings scenes.

The Roman wedding was centered around a ritual referred to as the , a ritualistic kidnapping in which the bride was led from the home of her original family to abode of the groom. This ritual was often described with violent language, with Roman authors emphasizing the fear, suffering, and reluctance of the bride throughout the entire ceremony; they typically mention the bride's tears and blushing, associating her with a sense of shame and modesty referred to in the Latin language as . This was done to convince the household guardians, or lares, that the bride did not go willingly. Afterwards, the bride and the groom had their first sexual experiences on a couch called a lectus. In a Roman wedding both sexes had to wear specific clothing. Boys had to wear the toga virilis while the bride to wear a wreath, a veil, a yellow hairnet, sex crines, and the hasta caelibaris.

Clothing Bridal clothing Tunics and belts

The 1st-century CE writer Pliny the Elder claims that both brides and , new recruits into the Roman army, wore a piece of clothing called the . Pliny states that Tanaquil, the wife of the 5th King of Rome Tarquinius Priscus, weaved the first of such tunics.Pliny. Naturalis Historia. 8.194. Festus, a 2nd-century grammarian, also mentions that brides and wore a type of tunic, although he refers to the garment as "" ("royal tunics") and claims that brides wore it alongside yellow hairnets called "reticula lutea." According to Festus, the were woven by "those standing," possibly referring to the bride herself. The 3rd-century CE Christian apologist Arnobius references a practice in which brides have their offered, possibly by themselves or others, to the deity Fortuna prior to the wedding; he is the only Roman author to describe the goddess in the context of the wedding. The classicist Karen Hersch suggests that the account of Arnobius may be inaccurate, as his assertions remain entirely unsupported by other pieces of Roman literature; other Roman authors fail to mention such a tradition even when describing the bridal attire. Although Hersch concedes that the remainder of the account of Arnobius is supported by other Roman authors, such as his reference to the bridal ("couch, bed") and the ("spear").

The tunic of the bride may have been tied together using a type of belt called the or the , which possibly functioned as some signifier of chastity. In Roman poetry, a belt is sometimes used as shorthand for the either the wedding or the virginity of the bride: Catullus describes a father dishonoring his son's bride by untying her belt and mentions the "," a "little girdle" untied by the brides for the god Hymen.Catullus. Carmen. 61.Catullus. Carmina. 67. Marcus Terentius Varro, a 1st-century BCE Roman polymath, claims that the groom would untie the belt and remain silent for the duration of the task. Festus also describes the presence of a belt in the Roman wedding, claiming that the goddess Juno Cinxia was "sacred" to weddings since the ceremony began with the "unloosing of the belt." The 4th-century BCE Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo also references a wedding belt when he satirically implores the remaining Roman polytheists to replace their many gods with one version of Jupiter worshipped under many epithets, advising the Romans "As the god let him [Jupiter] unite married couples, and when the bride's girdle is loosed let him be invoked as ."Augustine. The City of God against the Pagans. 4.11.

Festus mentions another garment called the ("knot of Hercules"), which Festus claims is untied by the husband whilst the couple is lying in bed. According to Festus, the knot represented the bond between the bride and the groom, claiming that the husband shall be bound to the wife as the tufts of wool are bound together to create the knot. It thus may have served as some variety of love charm for the bride, although was also said—by Festus—to ensure the groom could be as fruitful as Hercules, who had 70 children. Pliny mentions that the knot in a medical context, declaring that binding wounds with the knot "makes the healing wonderfully more rapid" and mentioning an unspecified "certain usefulness" that "is said" to derive from tying a girdle with the knot daily.Pliny the Elder. Naturalis historia. 28.63.

Sex crines Festus claims that Roman brides wore a hairstyle referred to within the text as , an inflected form of either or .Festus. De verborum significatione. 454.23. It is possible that "" is an adjective deriving from the numeral "," meaning six. According to this view, the "" likely would have comprised six locks of hair. The 1st-century Roman poet Martial mentions a wife adorned with a .Martial. Epigrams. 12.32. This unusual bridal hairstyle, likely containing 7 locks instead of 6, has been argued—by the classicist Laetitia La Follette—to be an intentional discrepancy used to portray the bride as aberrant and unfaithful. Another possibility is that the word, at least in this context, derives from proposed reconstructions of the Proto-Indo-European verbs "," meaning "to bind," or "," meaning "cut." If these theories are correct, then it could indicate that the hairstyle involved bounded or cut hair respectively. However, evidence from comparative linguistics strongly suggests that the first reconstruction is inaccurate. The second reconstruction, suggesting that the bride's hair was cut, is incongruent with Roman standards of beauty: long hair was considered to be a component of the ideal feminine physique, indicating that—if the practice of cutting the bride's hair did occur—this ritual would have been shameful for the bride.

Other components of the bridal attire functioned to honor the bride in some manner: the was woven by the bride herself, showcasing her skill at weaving, and the yellow-red wedding veil—known as the —symbolized faithfulness and fertility. According to Festus, brides favored the style due to its age; he also stated that it was used by the Vestal Virgins, lending some credence to the theory that the bridal hairstyle was cut as vestal virgins certainly wore short hair. However, the vestal virgins may have worn a fillet to compensate for their shortened hair, allowing the analogy between the bridal and vestal hair to remain compatible with long bridal hair and short vestal hair. In , a play by the Roman 3rd-century BCE comic playwright Plautus, the author portrays a woman dressed like a standard married Roman woman: her hairstyle is described as having "locks with her hair arranged, and fillets after the fashion of matrons" as part of an effort to disguise the woman as another character's wife.Plautus. Miles Gloriosus. 3.1.790. This seemingly contradicts the idea of short bridal hair, as Plautus explicitly describes the woman as wearing long hair.

In his description, Festus leaves the proper origins of the ambiguous: he does not clearly indicate whether the vestal virgins coopted the style from brides or vice versa. Another passage from Festus appears to support the idea that the brides copied the style from vestals: Festus mentions that brides adopted a veil called the flammeum due to its usage by the , the high-priestess of Jupiter and the wife of the .Festus. De verborum significatione. 82. The similar nature of both these scenarios indicates that, just as bride's may have coopted the flammeum from a religious order, they may have coopted the . Mary Beard, an English classicist, argued that both vestal virgins and brides embodied a liminal state between youthful virginity and adulthood as a Roman matron; Beard proposed that vestal virgins copied bridal attire due to these shared connotations. American classicist Edward Ross expresses that the may have merely showed that the bride possessed the ideal state of virginity and purity also demanded of Vestal Virgins. Ross cites a passage from Festus which proclaims that other women, along with brides, adopted the sex crines from the Vestal Virgins. The reason given was that the chastity of the Vestals "was promised to their men... by others." To reinforce the connection between the bridal hairstyle and the vestal virgins, the number of locks likely present in the hair exactly corresponds to the number of vestal virgins during reliably recorded parts of Roman history: 6. Although, the 1st CE historian Plutarch records that the number of vestal virgins changed from 2 to 4 to 6 during the regnal period.

The German classical philologist August Rossbach argued that the were a typical component of the attire of a Roman matron, and that brides wore the headgear merely because it marked their transition into marriage and matronhood. Rossbach cited the section of Miles Gloriosus by Plautus, in which the author describes a woman dressed to look like a married woman wearing a hairstyle with fillets modeled after those worn by matrons. The fillets mentioned by Plautus, called "," are not definitively supported by any other evidence to be a component of the bridal hairstyle in ancient Rome. Furthermore, it is unlikely that the crines mentioned by Plautus are the same cosmetic as the described by Festus. The 1st-century BCE Roman poet Horace uses the same word, "," completely unrelated to Roman brides when he describes the hairstyle of the mythical figure of the Trojan War, Paris.Horace. Odes. 4.9.13.

Hasta caelibaris