Control over descendants meant that the pater familias also enjoyed considerable power to arrange and dissolve their marriages.
As the jurists stress, in principle the consent of the bride and groom is essential to Roman marriage. But as we saw in Chapter II (esp. Cases 13 and 24), in practice this requirement was often formalistic, and perhaps particularly so in the case of a daughter just past the minimum age for marriage (Case 7).
Similarly, as Case 98 shows, the pater familias of a bride or groom must also consent to the marriage; but again this consent might often be interpreted rather broadly, as implied from the circumstances of a wedding (the father has not raised an objection), or even as presumptively present.In this way, the stark authority of the pater familias was accommodated to the realities of social life, which often required, or at least made desirable, a level of participation in these decisions not only by the affected child but also by the mother and other close relatives who had no legal standing. However, when a father actively found a marriage to be objectionable, his power to stop it, or even to dissolve it after it had been contracted, for a long time remained unassailable.
But this was an area in which the Roman government also had a well-recognized interest, especially in the wake of the marriage legislation of Augustus, which sought to promote marriage and childbirth as matters of public policy. To some extent, therefore, emperors and jurists alike were inclined to interfere with the fathers power when it was used to prevent a marriage from occurring; and their inclination could become even stronger when the father tried to break up a marriage that, at least in the view of the husband and wife themselves, was established and successful. The resulting collision between public policy and the traditional autonomy of the pater familias was not entirely resolved in classical Roman law. But in practice the clash was somewhat eased by the Roman demographic regime, in which high mortality rates meant that Roman men and women often no longer had a pater familias by the time they reached their thirties.
One point that emerges clearly from the juxtaposition of Case 97 with the Cases that follow is that Roman marriage, while subject to some indirect legal regulation, was not thought of as a “public” or “civic” act, similar to voting or holding public office. Accordingly, patria potestas is only sporadically trumped by public policy in favor of marriage and procreation.