Behind every great man is a great woman. Indeed, of the 107 couples that allegedly populate this volume, the women always appear in conjunction with their male partners. In that sense, they form the ideal focus for a work on married life in Greco-Roman antiquity. Though women are not mentioned in the title, the implicit focus is largely on them: the volume includes wives in official and unofficial marriages, with and without a name, and with and without a voice. The result is an exceedingly rich overview of marriage practices and ideals throughout Greco-Roman antiquity.

This volume presents the proceedings of a conference entitled ‘Couple relationships in Antiquity: looking for real-life experiences’ held in Lausanne in November 2018. The 11 chapters aim at an investigation of ‘married life as the everyday experience of marital union, its resulting dynamics, and their effects on individuals’ (3). Contributions range chronologically from the Hellenistic period to the third century c.e. and cover a broad geographical area, from Asia Minor via Egypt to the western provinces of the Roman empire. The papers also deal with a large variety of ancient evidence. Centlivres Challet in her introductory chapter does an excellent job of identifying the common outcomes from this wide palette of studies on ancient marriages, most interestingly the fact that it was in many ways deemed ‘more important to be ordinary than extraordinary’ (6), in this instance by conforming to the norms and ideals of marriage as a means of social inclusion. As a marker of status, moreover, marriage could also be employed as a vessel for individual status elevation and boasting self-importance (7) through image and text. The way that the marital union played out in reality must have varied for each of the participants. Ranging ‘from bliss to nightmare’ (13), it is implied throughout the volume that the median lay somewhere in between, under the header of marital harmony or concordia.

In the search for daily life, letters on papyrus and curse tablets or oracular tablets are consistently interpreted as coming closer to reality than tombstones, literary texts and marriage (or divorce) agreements, that tend to conform to societal ideals. Ancient spouses were generally very good at keeping up appearances and thus in obscuring emotions. It is mainly the papyri, dealt with by MacLachlan, Toma and Parca, that offer tantalising hints of the practical implications of marriage in daily life. The state of the evidence is summarised eloquently by MacLachlan as ‘glimpsing through a keyhole into a lit room beyond’:

The authors cannot quite seem to figure out who the ‘ordinary’ people were that are the subject here; I would hardly call Maecenas or Pliny and their peers, discussed by Mastrorosa, ‘middle-class’ (99). It illustrates that in the ancient population under scrutiny, too, the volume is wide-ranging. It is all the more unfortunate that the papers rarely engage with one another (Parca being the positive exception). The direct cross-reference on I.Knidos 303 merely obscures repetition of the (legitimate) argument for a societal ideal rather than affection represented in this funerary epigram, which is proffered by both Golay and MacLachlan. Elsewhere, having just read that a disappointed Ovid condemned his wife to ‘total anonymity’ in his exile poetry (Fabre-Serris), the subsequent chapter presents a very different reading of the same corpus with Ovid’s wife — now referred to as Fabia (!) — as the model of a faithful and loyal spouse, ‘as the poet in exile recorded with nostalgia and trust’ (Mastrorosa, 93).

While all chapters have something to offer, some are more convincing in their argument than others. I am not persuaded that Statius’ wife necessarily ‘refused to leave Rome’ to join him in Naples (95), as Mastrorosa suggests, because his poetic attempt to convince his wife (Silv. 3.5) is so strongly intertextual. Harlow and Larsson Lovén’s paper provides a truly helpful overview. When an increase in funerary monuments for non-elite couples in the first century b.c.e. is stipulated (150), however, there is no indication of how this relates to epigraphic habit. When the authors then adduce two beautiful tombstones from Cologne and Mainz convincingly to illustrate different ways in which Roman style could be matched with Gallic identity, the fact that the monuments do not originate from Gaul might have been mentioned (160–2). Finally, the image on the ash urn of Vitalis and Vernasia Cyclas (first-century c.e. Rome, British Museum) is said to look ‘typical’ (their emphasis, 153). It is indeed so similar to the funerary altar of Tiberius Claudius Dionysus and Claudia Prepontis (first-century c.e. Rome, Musei Vaticani) also discussed in the paper, that one wonders what the exact relation between the two could have been.

Many of the papers implicitly or explicitly are not investigating the experience of both spouses, but rather aim at uncovering female agency and women’s position within the conjugal unit. Hallett draws attention to the presentation of the overseer’s wife or vilica in Cato’s De Agri Cultura, placing the text in valuable dialogue with Roman comedy. Highlighting the presence of women, moreover, works exceedingly well in Hersch’s reading of Petronius’ Fortunata as ‘the model of failed matronitas to his [i.e. Trimalchio’s] failed patronitas’ (117); I am equally convinced that women were important property holders, illustrated once more by Thoma through the unwritten marriage agreements based on loan contracts in Roman Egypt. No matter how much scholars would hope to identify a more egalitarian stance in marriage — or even love — in antiquity, however, the sources simply cannot always be read in this way. The late David Konstan in his contribution reveals a more progressive attitude underlying parts of Plutarch’s Marriage Precepts, but even so he is probably right in stating that Precept 9 ‘seems hard to rescue’ (135). The loan contracts just referred to indicate financial independence, but they were not always upheld in favour of women; petitions of widowed soldier-wives to the prefect, for example, were rejected (174). No matter how masterful the interpretation, therefore, there remain quite a few passages in addition to Plutarch that are proving equally hard to rescue.

In sum, using marriage as a lens does as much to reiterate and reaffirm ancient gender patterns and ideals as it does to empower ancient women. The value of the present book lies not in such commonalities, but in the particularities of understanding republican and imperial iconography, reading Plutarch’s marriage precepts or (Greco-)Egyptian legal and social traditions in Roman Egypt. Hersch may therefore have summarised the final outcome of this volume best: ‘women rule the world one man at a time’ (123). Not just in the text of Petronius, but in Greco-Roman antiquity.