In ancient Rome, when a woman married, her family or other persons acting on her behalf would pay a dos (dowry) to her husband's family, as a preemptive financial compensation to their household for having an additional mouth to feed. Following the transition of the Roman empire from the pagan Religio Romana to Christianity, the customs and legality of transferred wealth and property changed as the religious connotations of marriage changed. In pagan Rome, divorce and remarriage had not been especially stigmatised, and it was not particularly unusual for a married woman to remain in the custody of her own father's household during times when her husband was away from the city for military campaigns or other purposes which might keep him away for months or years. Additionally, the first emperor, Augustus, created a precedent of discontinuing many marriages and remarrying their participants to different people, as an effort to correct Rome's low birth rate. The advent of Christianity in Rome brought with it an expectation that divorce was to be avoided, and a widow was not expected to remarry, but instead could expect to have her needs provided for, through a fund held in trust on her behalf, paid by her husband or his associates: the donatio propter nuptias.
Emperor Leo dictated that the donatio and the dos must be equal in value, while Justinian I judged that it was permissible to increase, but not decrease, the dos and donatio after the marriage had been finalised, but they must be increased by the same value. Prior to these judgments, it was legal for the two funds to be unequal (or for the donatio to be omitted altogether), and it was illegal for either fund to be changed after the marriage was finalised.
Practically speaking, the husband in a marriage had direct control over such contents of the donatio as were available to be used continuously (such as household goods, furnishings, dwellings, property, and livestock), but he did not have the legal right to settle his debts through the use of any component of the donatio, nor any material produced as profit from the ownership of the donatio (such as wool from sheep or fruit from fruit trees grown on an owned property). Likewise he could not sell, give away, or alienate from his wife's access, any component of the donatio or the profits thereof. If his wife consented to him using any aspect of her donatio for his own financial benefit or relief, it could only be done by her giving witnessed consent on two separate occasions, two years apart, and the huusband had to provide her with property of equivalent value as immediate compensation in exchange, meaning that the donatio was not a means by which a man could rescue himself from poverty. Regarding his compensation of the value of any used portion of the donatio, the wife legally held an hypothec over her husbands entire property, as collateral to secure her compensation from him, and under such circumstances, the property was not liable as payment of her husband's debts.
Prior to Justinian's rule, this provision was called the donatio ante nuptias, specifying that it could only be created before the finalisation of a marriage agreement, to ensure that all involved parties had full and detailed knowledge of the financial circumstances they would be entering into with the marriage. By converting the definition to propter nuptias, "because of" the marriage rather than "before" the marriage, it became possible for a married couple to secure portions of their property to stand outside that which was subject to taxation, debt collection, and other financially erosive concerns. Another reason for this change was that it put more of a husband's potential postmortem wealth into his widow's uncontested control, and less of that wealth into the immediate inheritance of his children, making it less likely (as the Romans regarded such things) that the wealth would be spent frivolously by inexperienced youngster. A widow could share the benefits of her donatio with her children if she wished, but they could not force her to share it, any more than she could seize their inheritance for her own use.
This legal mechanism obviously endowed women (especially widows) with drastically greater financial control and potential economic participation than they had enjoyed under previous administrations in the Empire, and we may speculate that Empress Theodora (or Justinian's notable respect for her) might have played a significant role in the matter, though we have no definitive documentation that this is the case. One notable aspect of Justinian's laws surrounding donatio was that it conditioned that divorce was interpreted as a matter of fault, which could be found in a court of law, and it was possible for that fault to lie with the husband or the wife. In the event of a divorce in which the husband is judged to be at fault, his ex-wife kept her donatio, just as she would have done in the event of surviving him as his widow. The husband kept the donatio in the event he survived his wife as her widower, or in the event of divorce found to be her fault, but if any component of the donatio was stipulated at the time of the wedding to be reverted to a previous holder (such as sentimental heirlooms belonging to the woman's extended family, gifted to her upon her marriage), it would be reverted accordingly.
The interested reader may find more on these and sundry other matters of Roman law in the 1890 edition of A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities by English classicist William Smith. The full text, which is currently in the public domain, may be read at the page linked here, which breaks the text down into individual dictionary entries by subject, alphabetically.
Iron Noder 2023, 21/30