Talk:Wife selling

War captives
Regarding this edit: It makes no sense to include the indiscriminate sale of war captives as slaves in an article on wife selling. It was not unusual in ancient warfare to sell off a population after a particularly virulent war: this might include surviving soldiers, but also women and children. "Women" may include married women, but their status as "wife" is irrelevant to their sale as slaves (except that it's especially insulting to their defeated husbands), and is most certainly not undertaken with the consent of their male relatives. It isn't "wife selling"; it's just a main feature of the ancient slave trade, which in ancient Greece and Rome largely depended on warfare. We could list dozens of instances of this kind of sale following the defeat of a city or tribe, but it is not an example of "wife selling" in ancient Greece. Cynwolfe (talk) 02:13, 27 June 2013 (UTC)
 * To clarify. the topic is "wife selling", not "woman selling" or "the selling of women who happen to be married": the woman's status as a wife has to be at issue, or the topic makes no sense. Selling the female population en masse (married or unmarried), along with children of any gender, cannot be characterized as "wife selling". Cynwolfe (talk) 02:40, 27 June 2013 (UTC)
 * The literature distinguished on the basis of wifehood and therefore it is within the scope of wife selling, the subject of the article, which is not limited to divorce cases or cases in which the selling was by wives' own husbands. The insult to husbands is indeed relevant, as is the insult to children losing at least their fathers and the insult to other slaves observing the fragility of slave friends' spousal relationships in the hands of slave masters. Also relevant is that slave wife sales were in spite of wifely status, because to masters that probably did not matter, whereas it probably did matter to slaves generally (many of whom over centuries and in many places married without masters' approvals or legal authority) and to nonslaves who thought that family was or should be important even among slaves. One step to restrictions on slave sales (in other places and times) was a prohibition on those sales that broke up marital couples, so that, even before that kind of regulation, an observation that slave wives were sold is relevant to the history of both wife sale and slavery. If that observation is reported in a source, it is reportable here. Mass slave sales without wifehood distinctions are not in the article because that would be outside of the article's scope. The content in this case is specifcally about "wives", not women, and the source did not say it was just about women. One could argue that all women who were slaves were described as wives back then but that view would need a source controlling or addressing the source cited (controlling if it overrides, such as if the same author later defined wife as 'any woman' so as to include the cited source but addressing if a source says some writers meant the word that way so that both views of the meaning of wife should be cited), because it's as likely or likelier that not all women were seen that way, because when gathered or lined up some would have been less likely to be standing next to men (thus more viewable by conquerors as women who were individually available), younger, and deemed as sexually attractive by conquerors and not sold into slavery (as the wives were) but taken by the conquerors for their own sexual use, thus taken into slavery but not necessarily sold into slavery (possibly that is even what was meant by "passion"). Whichever is the historical case, the source author distinguished by wifehood and so the article should cover that report, as it contributes to the history of wife sale, including that it was not just because a husband was tired of his wife. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:32, 27 June 2013 (UTC) (Edited a word: 16:38, 27 June 2013 (UTC))
 * I'm straining to follow the logic. This is a case of a population being sold off en masse as a result of a defeat in war—an extreme but not rare practice in ancient warfare. It is not a case of "wife selling": wives are simply one of the two components of the population in addition to children, and other than men of military service age. Besides, you're placing undue weight on a passing mention in an article that isn't at all concerned with "wife selling" or the status of ancient Greek women or even the slave trade: the article merely mentions that according to Diodorus one of the consequences of the Theban victory was that the wives and children of the defeated were sold into slavery. (I don't see anything at all of relevance in the article on the other pages that were cited.) "Children" includes daughters not married yet and underage sons, and it's assumed in ancient Greece and Rome that all mature women are wives. (Ancient sources aren't necessarily clear about what happened to the elderly who weren't fit for work and undesirable as slaves; one can guess, but again, that is a separate question.) They weren't selling the women because they were wives, and they weren't selling them to be wives. And at any rate, you may not be aware that in Greek and Latin, the same word can be used for "wife" and "woman", and translators decide which is best in context. In this case, the passage cited in H.'s article simply has τέκνα δὲ καὶ γυναῖκας, "children and women (who are presumably wives, since they are not children)". So while I imagine one could find material from ancient Greece that could be meaningfully described as "wife selling", this ain't it. Cynwolfe (talk) 19:15, 27 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I would also clarify that the passage is concerned with transferring free people into enslavement as a political and social consequence of the Theban victory; the existing slaves within the defeated population aren't at issue. Cynwolfe (talk) 19:53, 27 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I take it verification did not fail, despite the edit summary; I was going to check JStor again, but I see that's not necessary. The other pages, as stated, were cited to support inclusion in Greece and on a dispute against a critique. The passage as was quoted in Wikipedia did indeed say "sell their wives ... into slavery", so part of your clarification was covered; another part ("as a political and social consequence") is reasonable and likely but I don't want to go beyond the sourcing; and that "existing slaves within the defeated population aren't at issue" is true and the contrary wasn't in the Wikipedia paragraph. Child sales and sales of women to become wives are covered elsewhere in Wikipedia and only incidentally or not at all in this article.
 * The source author distinguished wives within the sales. We could say of almost any topic that it can be subsumed within another (for example, that all wife sales should be subsumed within spouse sales, spouse sales within people sales, the last within sales generally, the last within economics, etc., to take just one branch of knowledge organization), but here, as with many other topics, the source author identified wives separately from all other people as objects of sale. You may be right that wife was another word for 'woman' in Greece (I don't know Greek and haven't looked for a Greek or classical Greek dictionary with etymology), but then that would be a dispute against a source (we ordinarily accept a translator's choices unless a reason or a source disputes it, an unsourced reason being perhaps a clearly typographical slip, which this is not) and, for that, we need a source, so we can state and source both sides of the case, namely, approximately, that one view is that wives were sold when other women were not necessarily sold or that by another view a source saying wives were sold is saying only that women were sold. The latter is an interesting perspective but stating it would be original research now and the prospect that a source for the other view will turn up is not a basis for leaving out the sourced view entirely.
 * You said, "They weren't selling the women because they were wives"; if that's so (whether you meant the vocabulary point or not), please provide a source denying the motivation, since the cited source said wife and not woman in the context and we shouldn't ignore that. Why they sold the wives was not clear but that does not disqualify the content from weight in an article on wife sale, in which wife sale due to any reason, including unstated, is reportable. It's for the same reason that we include wife sales motivated by (say) divorce even though the reasons for wanting divorces are often unstated in surviving records. In the ancient Greek case, that wife sale occurred, even if we don't know why, is historically important, including knowing where and when it occurred and what is known of surrounding circumstances, such as war. Weight is solvable.
 * Nick Levinson (talk) 16:27, 28 June 2013 (UTC)
 * An article titled something like List of wife sales or Index of wife selling cases would not need to be as comprehensive, but then the other wife sale content would need an article anyway and there's not much reason for a split.
 * Some of the new content you added, such as on marriage, is, I assume, there to provide context for wife sale, although I would think it should go into other articles, if it's not substantively already there, and then linked to. I'm not inclined to move it out now while no one else minds its presence, since doing that would be a bunch of work and some amount of context being in the same article is not a bad thing.
 * Nick Levinson (talk) 17:23, 29 June 2013 (UTC)
 * My understanding of the scope of this article is that it is about the institution of wife selling as it existed in various cultures, not a list of every instance of a wife being sold. Thus I would agree that the section on the Thebans selling war captives didn't really add anything substantive to the article. Kaldari (talk) 17:51, 2 July 2013 (UTC)
 * The article is about wife selling generally, so I moved the content on Thebans to wife selling, where another several apparently isolated practices or instances are reported from sources, including several from the same continent (Europe), thus showing that even in societies where it may not have been widespread within one set of borders it does occur and does so across several societies. Previously, a similar concern was raised about India and dealt with in much the same way, and then more sourcing on India revealed substantially more wife selling there. "Other cultures" solves the weight problem on the Thebans. We don't list every wife sold, largely because citing to a source allows more instances to be found indirectly by readers, but we should cover whatever is important worldwide, so readers can research it further. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:29, 3 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't understand why you want to make the subject of the article so incoherent. A proper encyclopedia subject is not "the combination of the words 'wife' and 'selling'", but an actual idea that has some consistency and is notable. I would suggest limiting the subject to the topic of men selling their wives when it is done as part of an actual cultural practice (that is not already covered by another topic such as sexual slavery). Otherwise, it contributes nothing useful to article and just turns it into a list of barely related facts. Kaldari (talk) 00:03, 4 July 2013 (UTC)
 * The article shows how global the concept of selling wives has been. Marriage is considered special; relatively few societies are polygamous in either direction because usually an adult is supposed to have exactly one spouse; therefore, selling a spouse is unlike selling just anyone, even as extraordinary as selling anyone is. Sometimes, a husband sold his wife; sometimes, a third party sold a husband's wife; and sometimes the act was more important to an observer than to the third party who did the selling and becomes notable because of the observer's report. That last happened often with slavery, where masters sold slaves regardless of marital status and others who objected generally to slavery objected more acutely because the sales broke up families by separating wives from husbands and that became part of the public ground for opposing slavery in general, often on religious grounds of harming morality among slaves by disrupting marriage. That wife sale occurred in war does not reduce its importance. Among tools of war, besides bombs and arrows, there is rape; rape serves more than the satisfaction of victorious male soldiers because it also worsens the defeat of the surviving losers, who, after combat has ended, often ask the victors to restore civil order, there being no one else to ask, thus enhancing the power of the victors. That a victorious army practiced wife sale is not to be assumed as an accidental coincidence irrelevant to history. I don't say all of the foregoing in the article but present what is sourced on the subject of wife sale so that readers can see the breadth of it. Wikipedia has lists and indexes and this is more informative on topic. That people even think of selling wives apparently more often than they think of selling mice and rats (there are relatively few as pets or in laboratory suppliers' stocks) is culturally significant; we can explain it without agreeing with it but it is still significant. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:31, 5 July 2013 (UTC) (Corrected misspelling and clarified generally: 16:39, 5 July 2013 (UTC))
 * Again, the Theban example is not even an instance of wife selling: τέκνα δὲ καὶ γυναῖκας, simply means "children and women (who are presumably wives, since they are not children)", that is, the noncombatants of the community, who were sold by a conquering people en masse. It was the English translator's choice to specify "wives" to denote gunaikes or what in Latin would be matronae, "grownup women" who either are or have been wives because that is the cultural assumption (this can include widows). The issue is cherrypicking stuff out of context. Your long responses are pure OR and synth. You don't address the two main points of objection: that the source cited mentions this only in passing, as a selling off of noncombatants en masse as a result of military victory, and the source does not characterize this act as "wife selling", since the wife/female adult is simply an element of the total population sold. It's an instance of human trafficking in general, not "wife selling". Cynwolfe (talk) 16:07, 24 July 2013 (UTC)
 * You've stated a view. It may be reasonable and correct. But, here and now, it appears to be unsourced. We cannot exclude sourced content simply because of an unsourced view. Please cite a source. Then the view can be reported. I'll wait a week for anyone to cite a source that the previously-cited source by Hammond is wrong regarding Hammond's basis, presumably the Greek wording's meaning. If Hammond personally in a later source contradicted what was cited here, then probably the later view replaces the earlier one. If someone else disagrees or if Hammond's self-disagreement is not squarely on point, then we may have a disagreement between the sources that is reportable in the Wikipedia article regarding two views. We have the Hammond source for one view. We need a source for the other view.
 * What the Hammond source said was "wives". I did not change women to wives. Instead, I quoted the source so that the article would precisely reflect the sourcing, as it should. Therefore, a disagreement with whether the word "wives" was appropriate for the source is not a disagreement with any editor of this article. It is a disagreement with the source author. Contacting the author is one way to resolve the matter; perhaps Hammond personally has had published a retraction that I didn't know about. I have no reason to contact Hammond but anyone else might. Another way is for anyone to research the point in other sources. Perhaps you already know of a citable source that you can introduce here.
 * I have not checked the Hammond source for Greek text, re-retrieval time being limited now. Presenting it on the talk page is fine but, for the Wikipedia article, we normally would accept the author's translation of non-English sources. If it is disputed in sources we can cite in Wikipedia, doing so may be helpful to readers.
 * If the classical Greek wording has two meanings, such as 'wives' and 'women', that does not make Hammond wrong. That just means there are two meanings. Neither need displace the other unless a source establishes the displacement sufficiently to make Hammond wrong.
 * "[S]elling off the surviving population ... after a military victory" being "the common practice in antiquity" is not disagreed with in this aricle or this talk page. It may even be good context that should be added into the article, at least in brief, if that content is sourced. However, it does not refute that wife selling happened, if a source says it did. Perhaps the sellers didn't care whether whom they were selling were wives and perhaps only someone else cared and chose to describe some of the sold persons as such, but that does not alter the reportability, although it may affect how we word the report.
 * If women were presumed to be wives without individual determination of their statuses but on the basis that those women were adults and therefore must have been wives either then or earlier, that does not disprove what Hammond wrote, because they were still recognized as wives and were being sold with ascribed wifeness being important. If this was wrong in an individual case, in all cases, or in any other number of cases, we need a source that says so and then Wikipedia can say so, too.
 * When a translation is inherent in a source that meets Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, the translation generally meets Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. The translator's choice of translations is generally within the translator's intellectual authority. Within English, a word may have more than one meaning. Translating from another language into English and especially from a dead non-English non-Germanic-group language into modern English often entails uncertainty and a decision about which possible translation is the best choice. We depend on the source author when we add content based on the source to Wikipedia. Wikipedia does not support contradicting it on a Wikipedia editor's own unsourced authority. To contradict a source's translation requires a source for the contradiction. If you know one, please cite it.
 * A sale en masse is no less a sale than a sale of one object of sale. A sale of wives en masse is no less a sale than a sale of one wife. A source reporting a sale of wives en masse is no less citable than a source reporting a sale of one wife. A sale of wives en masse is no less reportable in Wikipedia than a sale of one wife.
 * Whether a female of any kind was sold alone or as part of a larger sale does not make the sale of the female into not a sale. Perhaps the seller was careless abut who or what they were selling, but that does not alter that it was a sale of the female. If the seller was careless to any degree, that may be worth reporting, provided we have a source for the carelessness. That applies to any issue of motivation.
 * If human trafficking is defined as requiring that the human be transported or made to travel a substantial distance (viz., be trafficked from one place to another), that being, as far as I know, common to human trafficking (although I didn't find this in a couple of dictionaries (Am. Heritage 5th (hardcover) or SOED 4th under h or t)), whether a wife sale incurred long-distance transport we often don't know to be true, or often do know to be false.
 * If a wife sale is human trafficking, it is still a wife sale. It is a notable form of human trafficking and therefore reportable as a subject for a separate article in Wikipedia. A logic that says otherwise could also apply to wife sale for divorce: we could say that such cases should be merged into an article on divorce. I would disagree with denying the notability of either subset of wife sales. The secondary sourcing is substantial for wife sale for divorce, wife sale for chattel slavery, and wife sale for uncertain purposes.
 * You've said that the deleted content's source does not discuss wife selling. Since by its words it does, the only basis for contradicting it is your view that wife selling did not happen as there discussed and therefore that the deleted content is wrong. I appreciate your view. I look forward to a source that supports that view. Then we can edit consistently with that view. Until then, we cannot.
 * To say that "the source does not characterize this act ["a selling off of noncombatants en masse as a result of military victory"] as 'wife selling', since the wife/female adult is simply an element of the total population sold" is imprecise on your part, confusing your argument. The deleted content was not about "a selling off of noncombatants en masse as a result of military victory" but about the selling of "wives". To call the former the same as what I wrote in the deleted content is a misrepresentation and an unsourced leap.
 * Whether "the source cited mentions this only in passing" is important if the mention is trivial. That's not the case in this case. Wife sale being the main topic of a source is helpful but not necessary.
 * I did not cherrypick from any of the sources I cited. But, by "cherrypicking stuff out of context", perhaps you meant that another source to the contrary exists. Wikipedia does not require that any editor know all of the possible sources (generally not even leading experts know all of them), just whether the content they add is sourceable and, if challengeable, that the editor cite the sourcing, and therefore blaming me is wrong. Instead, please cite that sourcing.
 * Some of my answers are long because I assume good faith on your part and assume that I am responding to a sincere misunderstanding, not to a deliberate misstatement, and therefore that I should explain the ground for disagreement. As you know, sometimes I agree, in which case an answer, if any, is much shorter.
 * While you say I "don't address the two main points of objection", I have addressed every point raised to me on this talk page.
 * While you say I wrote "pure OR and synth" in my talk answers, there was no OR or synth in the article and none that was impermissible in the talk posts.
 * Overreaching with charges is not helpful. When you describe my answers as "pure OR and synth", you are saying I wrote nothing else. To call everything I wrote as "pure OR and synth" lacks credibility. If a charge is made against me, I look for why the charge might have arisen and, if I was wrong, I try to correct it and, if I was not, I try to respond informatively. An overreaching charge prevents finding anything to remedy or respond to, hinders civilly collaborative communication, and increases or compounds misunderstanding. If you believe I did something wrong, please try to be specific about what it was. In some cases, you are, even when incorrectly, and then at least I can read what you are complaining about and either agree or disagree and supply reasoning. But in some cases you are so vague that I do not know what your accusation is about, and clarity would have helped.
 * Nick Levinson (talk) 16:10, 26 July 2013 (UTC) (Corrected syntax for number, definitional formatting, & bibliographic formatting: 16:22, 26 July 2013 (UTC)))
 * I re-added on Thebans but before I did so I researched points lately raised.
 * It was said above, "in this case, the passage cited in H.'s article simply has τέκνα δὲ καὶ γυναῖκας", ending with apparent Greek; however, there appears to be a disagreement not with my editing but with the Hammond source itself, and Hammond's article at the cited location had no Greek. Hammond wrote an English translation but did not quote or paraphrase the non-English from which translated. What Hammond wrote was "the Thebans proceeded to annihilate the Orchomenians and sell their wives and children into slavery (Diod. 15.79.3–6)". The citation abbreviation "Diod." was not expanded in the source (in JStor, as accessed August 4 & 11, 2013); however, presumably "Diod." meant Diodorus Siculus, for Bibliotheca Historica, book 15, chapter 79, most relevantly sections 6 and 5. Bibliotheca Historica is in Greek but, in the English Wikipedia, we normally cite sources that are in English or translated in a source into English, for the quality of which we generally trust the translators. Especially if ancient women were presumed to be wives and a source translated from a word more often meaning 'women' and less often meaning "wives', for us to claim in the Wikipedia article that the Greek word must be translated exclusively as 'women' and not at all as 'wives' requires a source to that effect or the absolutism would be original research. Such a source has not been offered, so the absolutist claim can't remain in Wikipedia. Instead, the difference of views is now stated in the note supporting the Hammond content. Researching the Greek phrase supplied above, since I don't know Greek, I used Liddell, Henry George, & Robert Scott, compilers, & Henry Stuart Jones, reviser & augmenter, A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press (Oxford Univ. Press), New (9th) ed. 1940 (reprinted 1977) (ISBN 0 19 864214 8)) (title also Greek-English Lexicon, per p. before p. before p. [i] (half-title page)) (cited as, e.g., L.S.J., per L.S.J. Suppl., p. [vi] (Preface)), & Barber, E. A., ed., Greek-English Lexicon: A Supplement (Oxford: Clarendon Press (Oxford Univ. Press), 1968 (reprinted 1977)) (cited as, e.g., L.S.J. Suppl., per p. [vi] (Preface)) (both bound together). For the first word ("τέκνα"), which did not have its own entry, I looked up all of the forms beginning with the same first four characters in L.S.J., p. 1768, and L.S.J. Suppl., p. 140, and they generally were about children; sometimes, they related to men and women, at least once as wives. For the second word ("δὲ"), I found an entry with a different diacritical mark over the second character, in L.S.J., pp. 371–372, and L.S.J. Suppl., p. 37, for which the meaning, if not changed by the diacritical mark, was 'but'. For the third word ("καὶ"), I found an entry with a different diacritical mark over the third character, in L.S.J., pp. 857–858, and L.S.J. Suppl., p. 77, for which the meaning, if not changed by the diacritical mark, was mainly as conjunctive 'and' but also as an adverb meaning 'even', 'also', or 'just'. Forms beginning as the third word did occasionally appear in entries for forms like the first word. For the fourth word ("γυναῖκας"), the key word in the phrase above, I started by looking up every entry that begins with the same first three characters as "γυν" in L.S.J., p. 363, and L.S.J. Suppl., p. 36; I did not find the exact form, but forms that began with at least the first three characters had definitions that more often centered on women but sometimes on wives. It thus appears that the first three words did not alter whether the fourth word was spousal in meaning. Apparently, the fourth word was usually not definitionally spousal but sometimes was. While I'm not confident enough in this research with L.S.J. for me to add it into the article, it clearly does not show that the Hammond source was wrong, showing only, at most, that the Hammond source can be disagreed with, a disagreement already reflected in the Wikipedia article.
 * It was said above, "it was the English translator's choice to specify 'wives' to denote gunaikes or what in Latin would be matronae, 'grownup women' who either are or have been wives because that is the cultural assumption (this can include widows)." That the translator might have been denoting either gunaikes or matronae is not in the source and there is insufficient basis for presuming it. Nonetheless, acting from an abundance of caution, I researched and found matronae in the Oxford Latin Dictionary (cited in the wife selling article) and I searched for but have not found gunaikes in L.S.J. or L.S.J. Suppl. (entries are only in Greek but I saw nothing beginning with gamma–upsilon–nū (the Greek solid nonhyphenated)), in Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged (G. & C. Merriam (Merriam-Webster ser.), 1966), or in Brown, Lesley, ed., The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press (Oxford Univ. Press), [4th] ed., thumb index ed. [1st printing?] 1993 (ISBN 0-19-861271-0)); while the latter two don't have entries for most non-English words, for a few they might, but this one wasn't in them. Matronae are 'wives', 'married women', or 'young girls of superior rank', Oxford Latin Dictionary (entry mātrōna), with no indication that the first two meanings are only because of cultural assumptions about large populations of women, although matronae might have been applied that way. But more important is that the point about "gunaikes or what in Latin would be matronae" is irrelevant because the Hammond source does not make that claim.
 * With respect to whether slaves married, according to Paul du Plessis, "public slaves could marry". du Plessis, Paul, Borkowski's Textbook on Roman Law (cited in the wife selling article), p. 88. "Public slaves (servi publici) worked for the Roman civil service, and were not considered to be owned by anyone except perhaps the State." Borkowski's Textbook on Roman Law, supra, p. 88.
 * du Plessis continued, "slaves [presumably nonpublic and perhaps also public] often did cohabit in stable relationships as though husband and wife." Borkowski's Textbook on Roman Law, supra, p. 95.
 * According to Frier and McGinn, slaves did something like marrying in ways that were legally not fully recognized but that sometimes bordered on legality. "Although Roman slaves were encouraged to reproduce, and although for this purpose they often formed family-like entities, for the most part Roman family law does not extend to slaves." A Casebook on Roman Family Law (cited in the wife selling article), p. 14. "Slaves have no conubium ['right to marry'] and so are unable to marry free persons, although they can enter a sort of informal (and legally inconsequential) union called contubernium ['cohabitation'] .... Paul ["late classical jurist Julius Paulus"] ... reports an interesting case in which a free Roman gave his daughter-in-power as wife to another man's slave, even supplying a 'dowry.' Paul rules that since there is no valid marriage, there is also no true dowry ..., but the money can be reclaimed as a 'deposit.' Marriages between slaves are also invalid at law, but they are sometimes recognized in fact. A poignant example is mentioned by Ulpian ["late classical jurist Domitius Ulpianus"] ...: A female slave, upon entering a long-term relationship with a fellow slave, provided him a dowry that passed from her peculium (a fund that her master allows her to administer) into his; later the couple were both freed and their relationship continued as marriage. If the dowry property still survives, Ulpian holds that it has been converted tacitly into a real dowry. The original 'dowry' had, of course, no legal validity." Casebook, supra, p. 33 (bracketed quotations per pp. 474 & 476, respectively (appx., Biographies of the Major Roman Jurists) (line break between "long-" & "term") and see p. xxi (Major Jurists Cited in This Casebook)) (conubium defined per p. 481 (Glossary of Technical Terms) & contubernium defined per Oxford Latin Dictionary).
 * Jane F. Gardner made several statements on slave relationships that may have been like marriages. "Since their continuance [as slaves' families that were "form[ed from] lasting paired relationships"] was entirely dependent upon the slave's owner, who might separate the couple from each other or from their children by sale or bequest, ... the stability of these relationships was never to be relied upon." Gardner, Jane F., Women in Roman Law & Society (cited in the wife selling article), p. 213. In one case, two slaves had "begun a de facto relationship" while "in the imperial household". Id., p. 59. "He was freed; he then purchased and freed her, and she became his wife." Ibid. In effect, because of the purchase, she, as a slave, was sold while in a relationship with the male slave when they could not legally be married, thus unlike a bride-buying case in which there is no prior relationship as a couple. Unions between slave men and free women were common in the imperial household and there were some between women and slave men in "the upper classes." Id., p. 59 (proximate n. omitted). "The senatusconsultum Claudianum [a recommendation, sometimes binding, from the senate to a magistrate] (A.D. 52) penalised women who formed such unions without the owner's consent with loss of liberty; even if he consented, a freeborn woman was reduced to freedwoman status. However, ... the aim of the measure was probably not so much to discourage such unions as [for another purpose]". Id., p. 59 (proximate n. omitted) and see pp. 59–60 & 229 (definition of "senatusconsultum Claudianum": Oxford Latin Dictionary). "Strictly speaking, these [pseudomarital or premarital] familial relationships between slaves had no existence in the eyes of the law. References in the legal texts to wives ... of slave bailiffs on estates are essentially terms of convenience. The whole concept of the family rested on conubium and potestas, and slaves had neither. Since, however, slaves on manumission moved into free sciety, some cognisance had from time to time to be taken of these relationships, at least among the freed." Women in Roman Law & Society, supra, p. 215. "If a slave woman used her peculium as 'dowry', to give to a male slave, and the couple both obtained manumission and continued in the marital relation afterwards, then the law tacitly recognised its conversion into dotal property—always providing, of course, that the former owner had consented to the retention of the peculium. Shtaerman and Trofimova ... mistakenly take this as amounting to a recognition of slave marriage, and think it an innovation dating to the Antonines or Severi. Buckland ... misleadingly talks of 'an effective transfer from one peculium to the other'. In fact, there was no marriage until both were free and continuing to cohabit; and if either had been freed without the other, the master was under no obligation at all to allow the 'dowry' to remain in the male slave's peculium. The point is made even clearer by another reference in the Digest to slave 'dowry'. If a slave woman, passing herself off as free, had 'married' a free man, the law was quite clear that the 'dowry' did not become his property but remained that of her owner." Id., p. 215 (emphasis & single quotations so in original). "Slaves could not contract legal marriages ...; nevertheless, some, particularly in larger households, could and did form lasting paired relationships, have children and behave, for a time at least, as a family." Id., p. 213. "Clearly, by the time of later classical law there was a certain amount of sympathy, in theory at least, though we cannot say to what extent in practice, for the personal ties of slaves; but they had been accorded no legal rights in respect of these relationships against the specific dispositions of an owner." Id., p. 217 (n. omitted). E. Polay wrote of "attitudes to slave 'marriages' from the early Republic to the late empire&nbp;.... Though [according to Gardner] the law largely ignored slave marriage, in practice it was often able to survive and carry through into free life." Id., p. 217 n. 37 (single quotation marks so in original). Stability was unreliable. Id., p. 213. "Slave 'marriages' probably had greater chance of stability in very large slave households, or where the 'husband' was living apart from his owner, as institor, vilicus or the like, and especially if he had slaves in his peculium." Id., p. 214 (single quotation marks so in original & "had greater chance" so in original, perhaps should have been "had a greater chance"). "What proportion was stable cannot easily be determined." Id., p. 213. "The largest single collection of evidence for slave marital couples is the funerary inscriptions from the city of Rome itself. Here, if free husband and wife have the same gentilicium, there is at least some presumption of a previous slave (or master–slave) link; the presumption is strengthened if the couple are expressly stated to be freed, and strengthened still further in the relatively small number of instances where some such word as colliberta or contubernalis is used. There are also some slave couples." Id., p. 214 (n. omitted). "Epigraphic evidence suggests that concubinage and other de facto marriages occurred more frequently among persons of freed and slave status than among the freeborn". Id., p. 58. "In the Delphic manumission records of the last two centuries B.C. the husband–wife relationship is explicitly attested only once". Id., p. 214. "As well as the free couples who lived together because the law denied them conubium permanently, there were those who lived together because they did not yet have conubium. This situation is reflected by the use of the word contubernalis (literally 'tent-companion', a word of army origin) in inscriptions from the city of Rome. It is likely that at least one partner in the union had, at some time in their association, been a slave. Some of these unions started as stable 'marriages' between slaves in large city households; if the union persisted after both were free, it would become valid marriage, even though the term contubernalis is still used in the commemorative inscription." Id., pp. 58–59 (n. omitted) (single quotation marks so in original; line break between "tent-" & "companion" in original; page break between "if the" & "union persisted"; "become valid marriage" so in original & probably should be "become a valid marriage"). "Even allowing for the fact that relatives might sometimes be released together, without the relationship expressly being stated, the overall high ratio of adults to children, together with the preponderance of single over multiple releases, makes it likely that family members were often manumitted separately .... Similar traces of separate manumission appear in the small number of inscriptions from Rome, noted by [M.B.] Flory [When Women Precede Men: Factors influencing the Order of Names in Roman Epitaphs, in CJ, vol. 79, pp. 216–224] (1984), in which the wife had achieved freedom while the husband was still a slave (though some of those were imperial slaves)". Id., pp. 213 (bracketed insertion of "M.B." & bracketed bibliographic insertion both per p. 269 (Bibliography)) (serial abbrev. "CJ" expanded in l'Année Philologique, per p. 267). "Bequest or sale was more likely to impose actual physical separation." Id., p. 214. "Marriage seems to have been the commonest ground for the manumission of female slaves". Id., p. 56.
 * Keith Bradley wrote of recognized marriages between slaves, some cases clear and others vague. "In practice it was impossible to deny that ["familial bonds" among slaves] ... existed altogether". Bradley, Keith, Slavery and Society at Rome (cited in the wife selling article), p. 27 n. 26 (bracketed passage per p. 27 (main text)). "In reality [despite "the law"], .. slaves did contract unions (contubernia) which they regarded as marriages .... Ironically in such cases slaveowners then expected slave families to conform to their own standards of moral comportment. From the slaveowner's vantage point of course it must often have been convenient to sanction slave marriages because of the new slaves that could be anticipated from them — so convenient that perhaps more than mere approval was involved." Id., p. 50. Among slaves' jobs was that of "vilica" or "wife" of a bailiff; another slave job was that of "vilicus" or "bailiff". Id., p. 60 (table 2 (items 35 & 34, respectively)) and see p. 163 (one "vilica" & one "vilicus" as "to be free" eight years thence). Referring to the work of agricultural writer Columella, "the vilicus and vilica ... [were] ranking slaves." Id., p. 98 (on Columella, also see p. 14). "At Rome the slaves who enjoyed the most elevated rank in the hierarchy were those like the father of Claudius Etruscus who belonged to the greatest and most powerful slaveowner in the world and who played a role in governing the Roman empire. Their standing was such that they were commonly able to take as wives women of superior juridical status, women that is who were freed or even freeborn." Id., p. 70. One slaveowner, "who had stated in her will that when she died all her female attendants (pedisequae) named in her account books were to be set free, ... before she died had given one of ["her female attendants"] ... to her bailiff to be his wife. The lawyers were interested in the question of whether this former attendant was still to be set free (she was), but they took the owner's action in marrying her off as inconsequential." Id., p. 50 (some or all bailiffs were slaves, per p. 60 (table 2) (only some, per Oxford Latin Dictionary (entry uīlicus))). "It cannot be proved that such manipulation was rampant". Slavery and Society at Rome, supra, p. 51. "[The historian] Ammianus Marcellinus ... tells of a slave named Sapaudulus who in AD 369 ... [had a] wife". Id., p. 108 ("historian" per p. 14). "Mucamas" were slaves some of whom were "owners' ... common-law wives". Id., p. 67 (table 5 (item 1(b))). "Musonius Rufus, [a] ... Stoic of the first century AD, .... [criticized] "the master who felt no shame in taking sexual advantage of a slave woman ('particularly if she happens to be unmarried')", id., p. 138 (single quotation marks so in original), implicitly acknowledging that slaves may be married, at least informally. "The logic of ["the Christian writer"] Tertullian (ad Uxorem ...) in addressing his wife as his beloved fellow-slave in the Master (conserva) was impeccable." Id., p. 153 (bracketed quotation per p. 5). "["Roman jurist"] Ulpian [hypothesized about] ... a spouse ... who had already been set free and had now saved enough money to buy the partner's freedom. The ancilla Helene was set free for a price ... put up by ... perhaps Helene's husband." Id., p. 159 (bracketed quotation per p. 3). Regarding housing of married slaves, "many rural slaves, pastores in particular but arable workers and fishermen too, lived in simple huts or cottages (casae, casulae) that were very unpretentious in quality and aspect. They could accommodate families of husband, wife and children...." Id., p. 86. "Sale under any circumstances threatened to sever servile family connections", id., p. 45, thus Bradley implied that some people among the servile had family connections. "For many, enslavement must have meant the rupturing of familial bonds that were never likely to be repaired." Id., pp. 44–45 (page break between last two words).
 * Bradley also wrote of bans against marriage between slaves. "Under the law slaves could not marry." Slavery and Society at Rome, supra, p. 50. "By definition slaves were kinless and were permitted no legally sanctioned familial bonds.... In reality of course some slaves reproduced, at times perhaps with the open encouragement of their owners (the benefits were often obvious), but the slaveowner was under no obligation to respect any quasi-familial ties that may have come into being among them." Id., p. 27. "There was ... no compulsion on ... captors to respect or even to recognise the kin associations of the captured". Id., p. 45.
 * And Bradley described popular culture. The novel Metamorphoses (Apuleius) described one "leading provincial citizen ... [as having a] slave retinue including a cook (who had his own wife ...)". Slavery and Society at Rome, supra, p. 63. Apuleius described "the vilicus and his wife ... [as] the highest ranking slaves on the farm". Id., p. 63 ("the farm" presumably being fictional). "In Petronius' [fictional] Satyricon ... the freedman Hermeros says ... that he bought the freedom of his contubernalis". Id., p. 159 (bracketed quotation per p. 64).
 * Some of what Gardner and Bradley wrote, as paraphrased or copied above, likely belongs in the article. I plan a review shortly.
 * Nick Levinson (talk) 19:02, 8 September 2013 (UTC) (Corrected book titles by replacing en-dashes with hyphens per originals, page numbers, omission of bibliographic cite, sentence, & excess period & clarified that Metamorphoses is a novel (so stated in WP but a source may be needed for being a novel): 16:38, 9 September 2013 (UTC)) (Corrected new quotation mark & missing italicization: 16:47, 9 September 2013 (UTC)) (Corrected misspelling in quote: 20:40, 22 September 2013 (UTC))
 * Nothing from the Gardner or Bradley content above should be copied into the article, even though some of the Bradley content (the quotation naming Ulpian and the Satyricon popular culture contribution) come close to qualifying (either might qualify if another source adding information about it is found). The above remains useful as showing that sources do recognize what was functionally or legally marriage among slaves and that, given that slaves could be sold, therefore slave wives could be sold as a subset of wives being sold. The sales may have been unlawful and the sellers may not have been the husbands but those facts wouldn't change that slave wives were salable. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:38, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Small item, about a slave having a wife: An additional source mentions "a bailiff's wife" and "the vilica (bailiff's wife)". Nick Levinson (talk) 17:10, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Theodosius and Eudocia
The example of the emperor Theodosius II being "persuaded" to sell his wife Aelia Eudocia into slavery is not an example of "wife selling". Theodosius was not persuaded, but tricked. This was not the deliberate selling of a wife as such, but a ruse to call attention to his inattention to detail: the point is precisely that selling one's wife was an outrageous thing that he never would've done knowingly. Moreover, it's a mere anecdote (dismissible as "court gossip") told to impugn his character and to show the enmity of two women. It's the opposite of evidence for wife selling: it presents wife selling as a preposterous thing to imagine doing—not to mention that Eudocia wasn't actually sold as a wife or slave or anything else. I expressed my concerns a couple of years ago (now archived) about the care required to keep this article within scope, and would like to reiterate those now. Cynwolfe (talk) 22:15, 27 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I have to get offline now, but you raise something interesting and I'll return, probably this weekend. That wife sale is outrageous is indeed coverable within the scope of wife selling and is covered elsewhere in the article, so this case is not irrelevant. I have indeed kept within scope in my editing; there seems to be a view that only certain kinds of wife sale are to be covered, but the scope of the article is reflected in its title, which is not exclusionary. Nick Levinson (talk) 17:17, 28 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I'll try to get both books you referenced. Possibly I can get Freisenbruch, Annelise, Caesars' Wives: Sex, Power, and Politics in the Roman Empire Tuesday and read it or relevant parts over the next few weeks. I can possibly access the full text of Holum, Kenneth G., Theodosian Empresses: Women and Imperial Dominion in Late Antiquity tomorrow or next Sunday; I'm assuming the library offering it is offering the full text. The page of the latter that you linked to in Google Books (p. 177) refers to a gift rather than some form of sale (e.g., barter or for money), so I want to follow the footnote (p. 177 n. 9) (the other page offered through that link was merely of an index page and not everything is displayed). Google Books seems too constrained for this. Maybe I'll need to use interlibrary loan, which can take a few weeks to a few months.
 * Whether something was court gossip is not dispositive but may be relevant and I'll consider it in context.
 * You "expressed ... [your] concerns a couple of years ago (now archived) about the care required to keep this article within scope, and would like to reiterate those now". You participated in two archived topics/sections. Your complaint in the topic/section India was based on a misunderstanding that if a source was about something it could not also have been about something else so as to be usable for the latter in this article and appears to have been resolved, including by the expansion of coverage on India. Your complaint in the topic/section Contemporary China was not about my editing, I helped resolve it, and you appreciated what I did. That's the total of your complaints archived here. Wife selling has many angles, has many things that can be said about it, and is not limited to actual sales but can encompass opposition to wife sales, theory of wife sale, and popular culture about wife sales, analogously with many other articles. Wikipedia intends that kind of breadth of coverage within a subject defined by an article's title. If you wish to be more specific about your present concerns, please do. If some other articles tend to be narrower than their titles encompass and the research that could broaden them has been performed, narrowness is not a limit on this one.
 * Nick Levinson (talk) 18:48, 29 June 2013 (UTC) (Corrected syntax: 18:54, 29 June 2013 (UTC))
 * I agree with Cynwolfe that the anecdote about Theodosius II adds nothing to the article and has no relation to the concept of wife selling. Kaldari (talk) 00:07, 4 July 2013 (UTC)
 * We would have included it had it been from popular culture (such as in a novel), and this was apparently an actual event (the signing of the contract), so it should be included. I was going to expand it today based on the sources identified by editor Cynwolfe to the following (except for links and sources):
 * Theophanes claimed that in the 5th century Theodosius II, emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, was persuaded "to sign unread a contract selling his wife Eudocia into slavery", although, according to Kenneth G. Holum relying on Theophanes, Pulcheria may have "tricked" Theodosius so that the wife would be given by Theodosius to Pulcheria so that Pulcheria could then sell the wife into slavery (this was a trick unless this information, said to be "apocryphal" and perhaps traceable to "gossip", is therefore false); in any case, that sale is not known to have occurred in fact, i.e., it is not known if the contract was actually carried out; what is known is that after the signing Pulcheria "gave him [Theodosius] a mighty scolding."
 * Sources are by Pazdernik, Holum, and Freisenbruch. The source that was already cited is from 1994 and none of the sources replaces any of the others. They do disagree and I have reported that disagreement. Managed and tricked have different meanings. The Pazdernik source said "persuaded" and I paraphrased it as "managed", which was a justifiable paraphrase. The other two sources said "tricked", which I quoted, thus showing the disagreement. Gossip and apocrypha may be true, false, or lacking a needed qualification; I reported the status as gossip and apocryphal in accordance with the sourcing. I did not use Google Books for the retrieval of any of these sources. What do you think?
 * I was going to post today about the sentence on prostitution as irrelevant (it was not my sentence) unless a source supporting it was explicit about wife selling, but the deletion of that sentence obviates the need for that discussion.
 * Nick Levinson (talk) 16:49, 5 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I edited on point, with shorter content. Nick Levinson (talk) 21:51, 6 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I've redeleted the section on Theodosius since it has nothing to do with wife selling. Please don't keep adding it. Thanks. Kaldari (talk) 06:19, 22 July 2013 (UTC)
 * The content is more significant than popular culture, it passes the test in that essay (one question is irrelevant as the article is not biographical and the other two are answered in the affirmative), and the essay is supported by the MOS guideline. Since sources report that the contract was signed in real life, this is more important than popular culture, which includes pure fiction, which we report across Wikipedia. So we should be reporting this signing. How is this less significant than popular culture? Or is there a better way suggestable for stating the content? Nick Levinson (talk) 15:48, 22 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Such an isolated and anachronistic event does little to improve the reader's understanding of the topic of wife selling. Nor does it follow the narrative begun by the previous two paragraphs. Part of the art of writing a good Wikipedia article is knowing what to throw out, even if technically it could be included. We don't want to simply throw random facts at the reader. We want to build a coherent, interesting article that gives a useful overview of the topic. When I read the content about Theodosius, it feels completely out of place and irrelevant. Kaldari (talk) 05:35, 23 July 2013 (UTC)
 * That makes sense; I don't want to confuse anyone. I'll move it to the section on ambiguous reports. (I do use selectivity; when I researched the subject, many sources were irrelevant and, as far as I know, never reported in Wikipedia. I just have not agreed with other editors over the years that only a subset of sale cases counts and therefore that mostly the only reportable practice was that which was advantageous to women.) Nick Levinson (talk) 15:51, 24 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Done. Nick Levinson (talk) 17:04, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

right, debt bondage, potestas, and nontransferrable property
The phrases "theoretically he had the right" and "this supposed right" seem contradictory. They are in the section History and Practice, the subsection Ancient Rome, in the first paragraph, in one sentence. Did he have the right?

The next sentence says "it was prohibited by law". Which was prohibited, debt bondage or the placing of sons in debt bondage?

Is "potestas" synonymous with "vitaeque necisque potestas"? They're in the next sentence.

In the third paragraph, a woman who is a citizen is described as "not ... property with a transferrable right of ownership". Presumably, property has no right, unless a woman was not entirely property. Was what was meant is that she was property but that no one had a transferrable right of ownership of her? Either way, it needs rephrasing. If "no one had a transferrable right of ownership of her" (my wording), that needs explaining, since I'm having a hard time understanding what property I have that I can't transfer into someone else's ownership apart from whether conditions of transfer may be regulated; for instance, I can transfer a kidney (by surgical gift); it seems implicit in an inalienability of property that is a human being that the said human is not property.

These are to clarify the article.

Nick Levinson (talk) 17:07, 28 June 2013 (UTC)
 * You have serious ownership issues with this article, and you're throwing around terms in the Roman section that you clearly don't know the meaning of. Cynwolfe (talk) 17:14, 2 July 2013 (UTC)
 * No ownership; the article should be clear. The terms that I didn't know were terms I asked about, which is what we editors should do, because if I'm not clear about them probably many other readers won't be clear, either: the writing using those terms seems to suggest interchangeability and I wanted to know if that was correct, because if they're not then clarification is needed, so could you please let us know or should I search for them elsewhere and apply what I find? I asked here because you had just written the passage and thought you would know. If anythng else seems incomprehensible (per your edit summary), please let me know what and I'll try to clarify. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:21, 3 July 2013 (UTC)
 * To clarify further on terminology about which you said I didn't know the semantics: If you meant familia, I sourced it and linked to definitions and I was correct, but you may be disagreeing with sourcing or with Wiktionary, in which case you may bring it up with a source author or at Wiktionary, because your complaint is not best directed to those of us who rely on sources. Since you had already edited the passage to delete that word, I assume this resolves your subsequent complaint; and you've added it in your other additions, and I relinked it. If you still are concerned about its use or semantics, feel free to edit or post.
 * The question on debt bondage and sons is now unnecessary, as the relevant text has been deleted from the article.
 * Nick Levinson (talk) 19:12, 20 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I edited two sentences into one and to reflect what the Westbrook source (Vitae Necisque Potestas, in Historia) said, so that they wouldn't misrepresent the source any longer. The source was not even partly about wife sale.
 * Doing so answers my question with respect to the two sentences with "the phrases 'theoretically he had the right' and 'this supposed right' [as] seem[ing] contradictory." (Apart from that: In a prior post, I referred to one sentence when I should have written of two.)
 * The synonymy of potestas is resolved; the terms in question are synonyms. Oxford Latin Dictionary (cited in the wife selling article) (entry potestās, sense 1d) offers a form similar to "vitaeque necisque potestas" (probably potestas uitae necisque) and meaning "power of life and death". Potestās means "possession of control or command (over persons ...), power". The entry for uīta appears to be the one for "vitaeque" (words with the initial as either "V" (capital only) or "u" (lower-case only) are in one alphabetical order, the two initials treated as having the same case-insensitive alphabetical position) and semantically generally refers to 'life', including "viewed as a possession, or smething that can be given and taken away". I have not found a separate entry for necisque other than nex, 'death', 'murder', 'killing', one exemplar including necisque, and, perhaps relevant, ne-, negation.
 * I added Jane F. Gardner's statement that in a free marriage a husband had no potestas over his wife and Mireille Corbier's statement that instead her father did.
 * Nick Levinson (talk) 20:57, 7 September 2013 (UTC) (Corrected a sentence: 17:10, 8 September 2013 (UTC))
 * Done, unless there's a new post. All of my concerns stated in this topic/section so far have now been resolved. Nick Levinson (talk) 17:10, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

marriage content seems excessive
The content on marriage and spousal relationships in the Ancient Rome subsection of the History and Practice section seems more relevant to articles on marriage and on Roman history. I think having content that is itself not even vaguely on wife sale is contributing to confusion about the scope of the article, as the recent content on prostitution may have done. While I originally thought it might be appropriate as context, I now propose to delete it. An alternative is to add explanations, if sourced, on how these relationships may have contributed to wife sale or, more than marriage elsewhere, may have constrained it, although I don't know of such sourcing. I'll wait a week for any response. Nick Levinson (talk) 21:46, 6 July 2013 (UTC)
 * The content was not mine, which is why I'm asking here. Nick Levinson (talk) 15:40, 7 July 2013 (UTC)
 * This content, "it was a transaction carried out through the mechanism of mancipatio, which conveyed ownership of property. Mancipatio, however, was also the legal procedure for drawing up wills, emancipating children from their parents, and adoption.", has one reference, which is at the end. I don't know whether the reference was intended to support both sentences or only the latter. I could not access Historia and do not know where to see it. The linked-to article, Mancipatio, has only two references and both are apparently only in support of one source for a quotation in that article, thus those references are presumably not entirely relevant to this article. And it appears that the passage may only be about bride-buying, which is excluded form this article (a hatnote above the lead states the exclusion); that it is about bride-buying is supported by the article on Manus marriage (the Coemptio subsection). Since the second sentence, "Mancipatio, however, was also the legal procedure for drawing up wills, emancipating children from their parents, and adoption.", adds nothing to this article (many of the procedures used in wife sale are also used for other purposes, such as deeds are), so I am moving it from this article into the other (with editing).
 * The paragraph beginning "[a] woman in manu had little independent legal standing" adds nothing to this article that should not be satisfied with linking. I plan to address this paragraph, probably by moving, when I have more time to work out the editorial issues.
 * Nick Levinson (talk) 16:40, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I will also consider moving what is left of the paragraph beginning "[i]n Rome's earliest period", as it appears to be entirely about bride-buying, thus outside of this article's scope, per the hatnote.
 * Bride-buying would belong if a bride being bought was already a wife and was being sold, but that requires that a source say so, which is not evident in this case from the article.
 * The quoted phrase "law of persons" should not have been directly linked, since it is in a quotation, and indirect linking with an Efn template should have been employed instead.
 * Nick Levinson (talk) 17:11, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Editing has now been completed on all paragraphs except possibly the first. I don't know if I will revisit that paragraph other than with respect to a prior talk topic/section. Nick Levinson (talk) 19:02, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

If all the sections are as full of synth and cherrypicking as the one on ancient Rome, then I reiterate my objections when this article was first under construction. A "legal fiction" is just that: a legal fiction. If the same legal procedure (mancipatio) pertains to adult adoption, wills, and similar transactions among gentes, it is not "wife selling": it is simply a means for sorting out property rights. Since it was standard practice in the "core" period of Roman history (2nd century BC to 2nd century AD) to keep the property of husbands and wives separate in Rome (because the wife's property was regarded as belonging to her paternal gens), a legal fiction was resorted to when it was desirable for the husband to manage his wife's property and have the legal right to make decisions about it. Otherwise, his wife was so legally independent of him that he couldn't make contracts concerning, say, sales from her wheat farm. I cannot emphasize strongly enough that "property rights" and thus sales transactions were not exercised over free people in Rome. That was the distinction between "slave" and "free", which under Roman law was the fundamental status distinction. Slaves had no legal right to marry, because they lacked legal personhood; if you had legal personhood, you could not be bought and sold. Roman law is an extraordinarily complex specialist topic. It should be enough that Frier and McGinn in their "casebook" on Roman family law state plainly that wives could not be sold in ancient Rome. This is a social impossibility, because slaves could not legally marry, and free people, who were the only ones who had the right to marry, could not be bought and sold. The only "gray" area is debt bondage, and anecdotal evidence such as exists deals only with sons (possibly daughters). I don't know how to make it any plainer that "wife selling" did not exist in ancient Rome, and the example of Theodosius is the definition of WP:UNDUE: the point of the tale is that it was a trick to embarrass him because he habitually signed stuff without reading it. The contract to sell his wife is meant to represent an outrageous thing, an anomaly, in order to show he wasn't paying attention. Now, there's a sort of trope of emperors selling difficult individuals of high status into slavery that this anecdote may draw on, but its illustrative value depends on being shocking: the sale of a free person is bad enough, but selling one's wife was unthinkable. Cynwolfe (talk) 21:30, 20 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Since it's quite possible that I'm overreacting, I'm going to drop a note to a couple of editors who followed up the AfD by participating on the talk page here (now archived). Cynwolfe (talk) 21:56, 20 July 2013 (UTC)
 * No WP:synthesis or WP:cherrypicking is present anywhere in the article in anything I wrote, nor has there been since I began editing it.
 * The content of every cited source is accurately represented without omitting disagreement or qualification from the source. But perhaps you mean by cherrypicking that other sourcing that has not been cited is absent. That's always possible because Wikipedia is a work permanently in progress, the final word never being published, and if you know of anything on point that should be added, please add it.
 * By synthesis, perhaps you mean that content is provided that you do not support through your knowledge of the subject and therefore that stating it here amounts to synthesis. In that case, it would apear that you disagree with one or more sources that have been cited. An editor is free to disbelieve a source and therefore not add content based on such a source. We're not citing children's sources specifically, but I mention them in the context of general reliability; there was recently a debate on whether children's books are reliable sources for Wikipedia; my view is that they have to be scrutinized more carefully to ensure reliability, but my view was distinctly in the minority and the result is that editors need no suggestion to check children's books more closely for reliability, and indeed a number of adult-level subjects in Wikipedia are already sourced to children's books with nothing to draw readers' attention to the sources being for children, unless they retrieve the sources for themselves and find out that way or recognize it in a citation. An editor, however, is free to not add content unless the sourcing is of a higher degree of reliability. I often don't add content for exactly that reason. For this article, I turned mainly to academic sources, including peer-reviewed journals, to compose it. You may have other especially reliable sources to add. Please do. If the result is a disagreement, then the proper resolution in the Wikipedia article is to report the disagreement. If sources generally favor one interpretation of events over another, then we report the one as the predominant view and the other as a minority view, but if the sources have not settled it then Wikipedia does not settle it for the field.
 * If wife sale in some cases is a legal fiction according to sourcing, then we should report both wife sale and that it is a legal fiction and the sourcing saying so. We report wife selling in popular culture; and, by comparison, legal fictions, when they are for legal purposes, are probably even more significant, even more deserving of weight, than fiction without legal effect, such as songs, which we report, just as we report popular culture reflecting nonfiction subjects in many Wikipedia articles. Until recently, nothing that appeared in the article established that a source showed that wife sale was a legal fiction. One of the edits I did yesterday added the concept of notionality with sourcing, thus providing clarity. In response to your comment, I have now further clarified the article's text. Whether the law recognized it as a fiction and why lawmakers chose to employ a fiction to accomplish a purpose should be reported if sourcing supports such content; it would be historically interesting to know those matters.
 * Marriage being unlawful may not have barred marriage in fact. In various cultures and eras, slaves married regardless of law, sometimes using specific rituals that both differed from those for lawful marriage and signified marriage to slaves and sometimes to other people; cf. jumping the broom. Sometimes, the fact of marriage influenced slave masters; sometimes, it did not. Sometimes, it was important to opponents of slavery, who complained that marriages were broken up by sales of slaves that separated spouses, and who at times found that to be a potent argument in pursuit of the abolishing or ameliorating of slavery, with some of those observations and critiques being reported in sources (and sometimes thence in this article). An unlawful marriage-in-fact may have caused no change in the legal status of a slave or in what a slave master could do, but that according to sources it happened and had an extralegal effect in society are reportable in this article. Law is often a lagging indicator of society and we don't report only what first became lawful. We report even if something was unlawful or extralegal.
 * We probably would have reported the "unthinkable" sale by contract even if it had been done by a commoner and reported in a source precisely to show that it was not unthinkable. Many busy people do not read every word of contracts; most of today's software clickable contracts probaby do not get read by most people who agree to them, U.S. President Truman signed by hand hundreds of documents of various kinds daily and since then aides sign a President's name by machine making thorough readings by Presidents unlikely, and probably most of the busier people generally rely on the word of trusted people about contracts they sign. It's important that the emperor (by having been managed or tricked but for our purpose let's say tricked) signed not an interplanetary notice but a wife sale. It's important that the thing that should have caught his attention but didn't was the wife sale, that what he was neglectful in reading was his proposed agreement to a wife sale. We report on specific bans on wife sale and we should report when what escaped an emperor's attention was a wife sale being signed for. It may have happened a dozen other times and it may have been equivalent to a modern-day April Fool's joke but the sources reported this one case from ancient Rome and that is a good representation of attitudes there and reportable as such, because attitudes are due weight. And Wikipedia does clarify that the source does not claim that an actual sale followed the contract signing, so what is factual is easier for readers to understand.
 * Casebooks are reliable sources but are not as good as treatises, journal articles, and a variety of other sources on law. Casebooks in U.S. jurisprudence are mainly used to teach law students how to analyze case opinions and how to determine case law. Because of that, they tend to be collections of cases that are especially important as precedent or especially illustrative for analytical technique and tend to omit codes and legislation. They do summarize much of the basic law. However, they do not state the law as comprehensively as treatises do, and, nowadays, once a law student has graduated, the lawyer is much more likely to rely on treatises and perhaps journal articles and to analyze primary sources including case reports as needed or as new opinions are published; like casebooks, the treatises and journal articles are secondary sources. I don't know whether casebooks on ancient Roman law are editorially structured to be fundamentally different, but if they have modern authorship and copyright dates and are from publishers in common law nations then they are probably structured like modern U.S. casebooks. Therefore, if we find a disagreement between sources as to whether wife sale was ever possible a casebook saying it never could have happened does not trump all other reliable sources but is includable in reporting a disagreement among sources; and if the disagreement is about whether wife sale ever did happen in fact and another source in history says it did happen then the other source is even more important than the casebook. The casebook's content is reportable but not to the exclusion of other sourcing if the latter disagrees.
 * If high respect for wives is held to mean that wife sale could not have occurred (as the Wikipedia content seems to imply), that does not necessarily follow. Art can be highly respected and have an especially revered status in a home but still be saleable. What is central is whether wife sale either could or did happen; if it was illegal but happened, that counts; if it was merely a topic of discussion, that may be important, too.
 * You or anyone else may well be a leading expert who disagrees with some sources and who has the knowledge and recognition with which to disagree authoritatively. Expertise can guide finding sources to support statements that are obvious to experts but uncertain or apparently wrong to laics. If a point is obvious but a source is unknown, posting a question to a talk page in the hope that someone else will know what source may be citable has sometimes worked. For what I read and write, I prefer precision and comprehensiveness.
 * Nick Levinson (talk) 17:59, 21 July 2013 (UTC) (Corrected a link format & clarified a sentence: 18:12, 21 July 2013 (UTC))
 * I added from Frier's & McGinn's A Casebook on Roman Family Law that wife sale may have been illegal only if the husband failed to consult a consilium, an important qualification the omission of which (not by me) was cherrypicking from the source, indeed from the same sentence. While the qualification is at the end of a sentence that listed three actions so that it is unknown from the modern English whether the qualification was for the third action only or for all three, selling being the first of the three, for any of us editors to assume that the Casebook authors meant that the qualification did not apply to selling is unsupported by the source. I have therefore listed all three actions in order to place the qualification in its proper context. The qualification is necessary because it is clear that with a consultation a so-qualified action may have been permissible, so, if the qualification applied to wife selling, then the consultation may have permitted the husband to sell his wife. That is reportable in this article as long as we do not exceed what the sourcing says.
 * I added a disagreement to the effect that a wife could not be sold into slavery, attributing it to du Plessis. That side of the disagreement does not deny that a sale could occur, as long as it wasn't into slavery.
 * I spaced the spelling of the word "pater familias" per what may be the majority styling in the Oxford Latin Dictionary, at pater, sense 4a with exemplars, and what is in the Casebook, supra, especially p. 486. It's common for English dictionaries to give only one styling beween solid, hyphenated, and spaced even if all three are correct, so the solid may not be wrong, but I'm relying on what's apparently the predominant styling.
 * Nick Levinson (talk) 19:46, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

RS and older source
You've found one or two errors. While one journal is indeed a reliable source (e.g., peer-reviewed), I probably should have moved that citation when other content was deleted and I re-added it elsewhere. The other direct source being an unsigned article with no peer review known, I'll drop it, subject to confirmation of its citation to Gibbon, ch. 44, for which I plan to look. Both journals were in JStor, but that's not dispositive. Rephrasing a however and nearby text would not have been a problem; I did not intend to communicate supersession, only that the sources disagreed. Nick Levinson (talk) 17:08, 21 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I added per Gibbon, ch. 44, essentially validating a deleted source. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:03, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Roman coemptio
The ancient Romans did not practice "wife selling", and the sources cited are misunderstood. The section needs to be deleted, as the legal procedures of coemptio and mancipatio (which etymologically means "a taking into the hand") are misrepresented. To quote Frier and McGinn, A Casebook of Roman Family Law in full on coemptio as a form of marriage:"Coemptio (purchase) is an imaginary sale, with prescribed words, in which the bride's pater familias hands her over to the groom in the presence of witnesses (Inst. 1.113); the legal result is the same as with confarreatio. The ceremony used for this purpose is an adapted form of mancipation, an almost infinitely flexible ritual that the Romans used also for adopting and emancipating children … and for making wills…; no money actually changes hand, although the parties may separately arrange for a dowry. Gaius strongly implies that coemptio was still a living institution in his day (the mid-second century A.D.), but there is little other evidence for its survival that late. Although in form coemptio resembles the sale of the bride to the groom or his family, this sale was unreal in historical times (i.e., no actual money was paid to the bride's family). We have no clear evidence that the sale had ever been a true one, although the practice of paying a brideprice (the reverse of dowry) was widely found among the Roman Empire's Celtic and Germanic neighbors (p. 55)."(The ellipses are only parenthetical references to the specific case studies presented in the book.) Notice that this form of coemptio even as a legal fiction is not "wife selling", but rather bride buying.

Gardner, Women in Roman Law and Society, describes coemptio as legal procedure with various applications in Roman family law: "Notional sale was used classically in certain situations where it was desired to terminate or create potestas—that is, emancipation, adoption, and the various applications of coemptio … ." Potestas is the power or authority the paterfamilias exercised over his family, his sons and daughters, but NOT his wife, who remained legally part of her birth family, under her own father's potestas. Roman was a patriarchal society in the most elemental sense of "rule by fathers".

The application of coemptio that Gardner describes, though typically involving a wife or widow, wasn't "wife selling" either, but rather a legal procedure resorted to for resolving property issues that might arise during a marriage. From Gardner p. 13: "Coemptio fiduciae causa was a notional sale of the woman, with the tutor's consent, to a man of her choice, who then manumitted her and became her tutor fiduciarius." This sale is not made by a wife per se: it's any adult woman who is sui iuris—that is, a woman who has been emancipated from the potestas of her father, and thus has a legal guardian (tutor) appointed to her. She could be a widow, or theoretically never married (that, however, is unlikely among the Roman upper classes who would be involved in legal procedures of this kind). This coemptio concerns the institution of tutela ("tutelage"), not marriage or "wifeness": the man by and to whom she is "sold" is her tutor, not a husband, since a woman sui iuris still had to have a legal guardian, usually a close male relative from her birth family, whose role was to look after her interests and especially her share in her birth-family property. The crucial point is this: even in this form of coemptio as a "notional sale", there is no wife selling. The woman notionally sold is an adult woman sui iuris (generally, a woman whose father is dead), and the sale is from one tutor to another tutor, emphatically not a husband. Notice on pp. 12–13 that Gardner refers to "the woman" and "an adult woman", not a wife, because the procedure does not depend on the woman's status as a wife, but rather as an emancipated adult woman. Cynwolfe (talk) 17:23, 24 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Actually, I should qualify this, and did mention it above: coemptio within a marriage, which seems to be what's referred to in the article, was the use of this legal procedure to enable a husband (instead of a tutor) to make legal decisions pertaining to his wife's property. Meaning, if she owned a farm or something, coemptio or notional sale in the manner of tutelage could give him the right to negotiate her business deals. Again, however, it's misleading to look at this out of context, and to make it sound as if wives were actually sold. It's a legal device pertaining to family law and property rights, with a particular application within a marriage. Cynwolfe (talk) 17:45, 24 July 2013 (UTC)


 * The evidence you've provided and both economics and law show that wife sale occurred, although your evidence shows that it was limited.
 * Some content does not belong in this article:
 * The article does not discuss bride-buying, which is part of what you are now discussing, including in the new quotation from the Casebook. A hatnote above the article's lead makes clear that bride-buying is outside of the article's scope. I'm thinking about how to clarify that further, perhaps in the body, but that would risk needing to do so in many locations, which might only confuse readers more. Bride-buying is beyond the article's scope because it is ordinarily not the sale of a female who is already a wife just before the sale, but a sale into wifehood. Since bride-buying is already reported elsewhere in Wikipedia, I see no reason to expand this article to include any bride-buying. On that, I think we agree.
 * If a dowry was arranged for "separately", the dowry may be irrelevant to whether a sale occurred. However, if a dowry was provided not so separately, perhaps it was part of a sale. But it may still be irrelevant if it was only part of making a female into a wife, because this article is about the selling of females who were already wives. As a clarification, I'll probably add dowry shortly to the article's hatnote on what is outside of the article's scope.
 * If the woman being sold was not a wife nor was sourced as having been perceived or represented as a wife, the sale is not reported in this article. We report only what is sourced as being within the scope of wife sale.
 * In determining whether a wife sale happened, not everything is a necessary element of wife sale:
 * Whether a procedure was often used for a purpose other than wife sale does not prove that it was not ever used for wife sale. If sourcing says it was used for wife sale, it is reportable for wife sale.
 * If a procedure for wife sale was only symbolic or fictional in law, that procedure is reportable although it needs to be stated clearly for what it is, a legal fiction or symbol, according to sourcing. It is important content because it shows that it was culturally acceptable to maintain that particular symbol or fiction. As far as I know, no modern U.S. jurisdiction has a legal procedure of wife sale as a legal fiction or mere symbol (or otherwise). That is a cultural difference even if no wife sale had occurred in Roman society, and it appears it did occur.
 * Who sold the wife does not determine whether what happened was wife selling. What matters is whether she was a wife and was sold. Whether a seller was the wife's husband, the wife's father, or someone else selling the wife, the sale of the wife would still have been a wife sale.
 * That "no money actually change[d] ... hand" may make what was otherwise a sale not a sale unless something other than money was exchanged in money's place. In economics, barter supports sale. Sometimes in U.S. law, as far as I understand it, even affection can be provided in place of money; and U.S. law provides that the general term for what is exchanged for something such as to create a sale is consideration, a term with a very wide meaning not limited to money.
 * The purpose of a wife sale did not alter whether it was a wife sale. That's true whether buyer and seller had the same or different purposes and whether buyer and seller knew or believed they knew each other's purpose or not. For example, selling a wife in order to cause a divorce of her, in order to result in the husband being able to manage her property for her benefit or otherwise, or because a seller has found a buyer and doesn't care what the buyer's purpose might be did not alter that what occurred was a wife sale. People have been selling goods and services for millennia without purposes altering the fact of the sales and that is long accepted in economics. Likewise, more specifically, wife sale was wife sale regardless of its purpose.
 * Whether the purpose was lawful or not did not alter that what occurred was a wife sale.
 * If a wife sale was illegal, it is still a wife sale.
 * Subsequent eventuation after the wife was sold did not alter that wife sale occurred. Possibly, a wife sale may turn out to have been fictional because a subsequent event was part of the plan of the sale and the subsequent event effectually nullified the sale, but even fictional wife sale (if sourced) is reportable, being culturally important to history.
 * Whether a sale resulted in the female being a wife did not determine whether an event was wife selling. What matters is whether she was a wife at the instant before she was sold.
 * Whether a wife sale was a sale "to a man of her choice" or not did not alter whether what occurred was a wife sale.
 * Whether a sale was to a tutor and not to a husband did not alter whether what happened was a wife sale.
 * Whether a wife sale's result was temporary or permanent and intentional or not were irrelevant to whether what happened was a wife sale. For example, if a wife was sold and what happened next undid the result of the sale, the sale in the first instance still occurred.
 * You wrote, supra, "[t]his coemptio concerns the institution of tutela ('tutelage'), not marriage or 'wifeness': the man by and to whom she is 'sold' is her tutor, not a husband, since a woman sui iuris still had to have a legal guardian, usually a close male relative from her birth family, whose role was to look after her interests and especially her share in her birth-family property." But that indeed does concern wifeness. Wifeness was not absent because of the purpose of the sale. This article is not about the sale of a female because when sold she was a daughter, was a random female, or was inside a building, but because she was a wife. That she was being sold not by or to her husband did not alter whether she was sold. That she was being sold by and to any particular person did not alter whether she was sold. That she "had to have a legal guardian" did not alter whether a wife sale occurred. That she needed or wanted someone "to look after her interests and especially her share in her birth-family property" or to do the looking herself or neither did not alter whether a wife sale occurred.
 * Gaius' implied view of how long "coemptio" lasted being disputed is not dispositive. If the duration is important, both sides of that dispute should be reported.
 * Etymology is interesting and tends to influence word usage but, if Romans' language operated like modern English, etymons generally did not regulate all speech and writing, just some. Words are often used in new ways; most well-educated speakers do not know most of the etymons of most of the English words commonly used.
 * I did not misunderstand the sources. The possibility that any source author misunderstood that on which they relied (if you thought that) can only be a speculation, and that is not a basis for editing Wikipedia.
 * You have presented interesting content some of which probably should be in the article in addition to sources already cited. What you show, in effect, is that some kinds of wife sale did not occur. But you've shown that some kinds did occur and were lawful and those are reportable as having occurred or been permitted. Clarification of this article thus may be advisable, without content deletion. And, overall, we may have a dispute between sources and both sides of that dispute are reportable. I'm considering looking for the sources you cited supra in hard copy or using what you have supplied to edit the article. Getting them through interlibrary loan may take a few weeks to a few months.
 * Links, I assume you now understand, should not be added into a quotation, given the MOS guideline, and I assume you added them supra in consideration of this being only a talk page.
 * Thank you for focusing on specific issues. I expect to follow up as indicated above.
 * Nick Levinson (talk) 16:49, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
 * There is only one issue: by taking coemptio out of context, you present it as if it's about "wife selling". It isn't. It's a procedure used for various purposes, one of which—and not a frequent use—is to allow the husband to make business decisions about his wife's property. The legal dodge actually indicates the degree to which a wife was legally independent of her husband, because of the principle of paternal potestas. Freeborn Roman women were citizens; they were not bought and sold. Slaves were bought and sold; slaves could not be wives, because they had no legal right to marry. The parts about ancient Rome are synth, as they result from decontextualizing and cherrypicking in order to draw conclusions not intended by the sources. That is the definition of "synth". You're engaging in an original argument that is not presented in any of the sources on coemptio. The synth policy states that the precise analysis must have been published by a reliable source in relation to the topic before it can be published on Wikipedia. There is no modern scholar who concludes that coemptio as a legal procedure is evidence that the Romans practiced "wife selling"; indeed, Frier and McGinn state that it seems to have been illegal to sell a wife, since coemptio was not in any real sense "wife selling". If the same methodology has been used to put together the rest of the article, it's all synth. Cynwolfe (talk) 17:18, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you for reducing that to being the only issue. That's easily solved. The claim that wife selling and coemptio are always one and the same is not my claim nor is it in the article, but from what you've written it's clear that coemptio was sometimes used for that purpose; you were the only editor to introduce the word into the article; and I mainly clarified about it on June 28, 2013, July 20, 2013, and July 21, 2013. What matters is whether wife sale occurred and your description shows it did, albeit in a limited way. Under what rubric it was done or discussed by Romans matters less; we can name it if the name applies and not if it doesn't. Marriage among slaves having been illegal does not matter, if they had what were recognized or perceived as one or more wives who were also slaves, and you did not refute that point (illegal marriage among slaves has been found in various societies and time periods). That coemptio was mostly used for other purposes is irrelevant to whether wife sale occurred. The purpose of a sale is unnecessary to determining whether selling occurred or was otherwise notable, the core of the article's subject being wife selling and not limited according to the purpose of the sales, and we can report that sales were for a benign purpose if that's what a source says. There was no synth or cherrypicking because you and I are using different sources and therefore I am drawing conclusions supported by the sourcing I cited while you are adding potential sourcing with additional information, and I am trying to bring the sources together for the conclusions they do support, which is how Wikipedia works and which is without any violation of any policy or guideline, a point you have not refuted. I did not write any original research on coemptio or anything else and therefore did not violate any policy or guideline on that. We are discussing coemptio on this talk page and that's for the purpose of improving the article, and on this talk page is where I have pointed out that you have presented evidence contrary to some of your more overly broad conclusions. The article does not have to claim that coemptio was the sole means by which a wife might be sold and did not make that claim; it is an article not about coemptio but about wife selling. That Frier and McGinn said that wife sale "seems to have been illegal" is not a ringing proof of nonoccurrence. It's not stand-alone proof of it at all. It may turn out to be an additional point to cite along with other sourcing, but, for what you have stated about that potential source, it does not replace other sourcing because it leaves wife sale an open issue (maybe just ajar) even in law (and casebooks generally aren't mainly cultural history books), and the article is not limited to wife sale that was lawful (Wikipedia writes about murders, too, and, to my knowledge, all of them are illegal, and writes about wars, some of which are illegal (e.g., civil wars when they begin probably always violate the laws of the nation where they occur, but not all wars are illegal under international law)). If by "real sense" you mean a semantic subset and therefore to exclude other wife selling shown by sourcing, the article subject supports inclusion of the various kinds of wife selling that are sourceable, not just those within a subset.
 * The Casebook in full text may be unavailable to me without buying it, as apparently the only U.S. copies are electronic (hardcopies are only in other nations). And it turns out the title is A Casebook on Roman Family Law (the preposition is not "of"). Page xxi apparently states the book's plan and was unavailable to me at Google or Amazon; since it is a casebook, it is probably not comprehensive on law but rather a work for teaching how to analyze representative legal sources. However, a search inside it at Amazon shows that the Casebook's authors recommend other sources and I have asked to get one of those through interlibrary loan, so it should arrive over the next few weeks or months.
 * The book by Jane F. Gardner is available through interlibrary loan and I've asked for it. The same time frame applies.
 * If under Roman law identical transactions had different names, if not of a wife, woman, female, or human then a name akin to sale but if of a wife then another name, that could be important. But definitionally in English if one was a sale then so was the other. We can elucidate the linguistic difference by stating the ancient names and the semantic distinction between them, with sourcing.
 * Nick Levinson (talk) 20:19, 27 July 2013 (UTC) (Corrected URL: 20:30, 27 July 2013 (UTC))
 * I still maintain that judging from the misuse of Roman social and legal concepts, this article is purely OR, and an impermissible synthesis that reaches new conclusions not intended by the sources. It actively misrepresents legal procedures and social customs as "wife selling", when that is, as I said above, an impossibility in Roman society, when only free people had the right to marry, and free people could not be bought and sold. The detailed, cherrypicking argumentation that tries to evade these fundamentals only indicates that an original argument is being made. Moreover, the introduction of the article makes generalized statements that don't exist in the sources: they are conclusions draw from specifics that have never been gathered together by scholars in a study of "wife selling". The statements can't be sourced. Cynwolfe (talk) 15:55, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * You're conflating sources you've seen but which were not cited with sources that were cited and conflating the history that the article discussed with the history that you know independently of the article, and that is not what constitutes original research, synthesis, cherrypicking, or misrepresentation on my part in violation of any policy or guideline, which govern not the state of all knowledge or of all publications but the content specifically of Wikipedia. Adding is the main way to edit Wikipedia. The problem with overly broad charges, even if believed by the one doing the alleging, is that they deny the ability to check any point that may be in error. I want to catch my errors; I don't want to spend hours re-researching what is merely speculation about error, but do check some speculative claims on good faith.
 * The lead reflects the body and is supposed to do so without the same length as the body, thus does so by summarizing, albeit accurately. The sources for the lead are in the body, as they should be. It is not necessary that the lead state only what is in a single source; the article and therefore the lead may be based on multiple sources insofar as they exist and most of Wikipedia's better articles are. Content I wrote is sourced.
 * I read the Borkowski and Gardner (1986) books and I'm amidst reading the Frier & McGinn casebook (it was miscatalogued by WorldCat) and am preparing accordingly. If you know of additional sources you'd suggest, I'm interested. I have some and will likely get a couple of others.
 * Nick Levinson (talk) 18:13, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I reorganized, subsectioned, and added to the section Ambiguous and Related Reports, one addition being by a move from the History and Practice section's subsection Ancient Rome, bringing legally fictional sales together and into a more pertinent section. I included du Plessis' description of a coemptio marriage termination by wife resale as ambiguous because of its description of it as "ceremonial" and because of the pre-existing description of a coemptio sale as fictional, although without the latter the "ceremonial" might have meant only 'ritualistic', not 'fictional'. I added three attributions, one only on good faith, as I had not read that source that another editor cited.
 * I did not add Jane F. Gardner's statement that a husband's power over his wife in a manus marriage "was more restricted than that over his children. He did not have the right of life and death over her, nor of noxal surrender or sale (other than the fictitious one in a fiduciary coemptio)." Gardner, Women in Roman Law & Society (cited in the wife selling article), p. 11 and see p. 76 (at p. 11, unknown if author was writing of all "sale" or only of "noxal ... sale"; at p. 76, author wrote that the wife's "husband's power over her was ... limited in classical times by absence of ... the right of noxal sale or surrender." (proximate n. omitted)). My concerns were that Gardner mentioned noxal sale, whereas I wonder if it existed if the person who had to carry it out had to pay damages or do a noxal surrender, noxal sale only seems possible if the person being turned over was worth more than the damages, and other sources seem to contradict that possibility; and that sale was not a husband's right other than the one in fiduciary coemptio, which would be reportable if not for the sale perhaps being noxal sale, which I'm questioning. If another editor feels the Gardner statement should be in the article in some form (the book is a reliable source), please edit it in or so indicate on this talk page.
 * Nick Levinson (talk) 21:39, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

no Roman source, mater familias, Google, and another source
A sentence said that no Roman source said that the pater familias held (apparently) the power to sell his wife into slavery or to kill her and that she held a respected position as mater familias and was sourced to two sources, bundled. The first source (by Westbrook, p. 222) did not support any part of the sentence. The second (the Casebook) supported only the clause about the mater familias. Therefore, I deleted the first part of the sentence and the Westbrook citation, added about a wife's weakness in her legal position despite being mater familias, and conformed the rest of the sentence.

I replaced the Google Books citation form since I read the source in hardcopy.

The reliance on the Westbrook source is concerning, since it completely missed the marks. I don't want to assume that irrelevantly citing it was anything but accidental. If some other source was meant, please add it or talk about it here.

Nick Levinson (talk) 20:05, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

two categories and accuracy
Two categories were deleted yesterday, and that was the correct action. I think they had remained from a prior revision's content that was since edited.

The article is accurate with respect to all of the referents insofar as I have edited it. If that results in the article being inaccurate, then sourcing may be at fault, which means that published knowledge may be inaccurate, a risk in most major fields of scholarship. If contrary or additional sourcing is known, it can be cited and content can be added on that basis. It is also possible, and it is likely, that the sources are generally correct and that popular impressions of the subject, insofar as contrary to the sources, are incorrect. That is true with respect to most major fields of scholarship.

Nick Levinson (talk) 20:57, 8 September 2013 (UTC)


 * On the deletion of the two categories, there was justification in the content for their presence, although perhaps not enough justification: An ancient Roman criminalization of wife sale as a violation of religious duty, the legal fiction/s, and the law on potestas and a concilium are reported and support one of the categories and two or three emperors' roles support the other. But I'm not proposing their restoration, given weight and consensus. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:55, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

NEEDS RE-WRITING !
Dear Nick,

The article abounds in scholarship, and it is visible you invested MUCH time in research. But sorry to tell the truth it is unreadable.

The problem are those lengthy enumerations. In their lieu, we need

- a listing of different SORTs of w.s. - for property; - legal Roman tricks - for divorce purposes - for magic reasons - clearly throwing out (albeit mentioning) pseudo-sales like Eudocia; Roman manumission, and non-sales like prisoners following a war -

- a listing according to regions/countries;

- a listing according to religions / cultures. So what is needed is a Scheme, and then re-writing the entire article according the outlined order of ideas. Good luck!

Ángel.García, Nuremberg 84.144.232.180 (talk) 16:04, 1 January 2014 (UTC)


 * What may be better and more consistent with how Wikipedia is edited would be subarticles on wife selling for divorce, wife selling into or within slavery, and so on, so that as they are created and content is moved from this article into those this article can be gradually turned into a summary. A difficulty with that is that, workload aside, some sources were vague or mixed about purpose but are reportable because the sources are about wife sale even if a motivation is unknown or unclear. The report on Eudocia does not go beyond what the source supports and it is clearly about selling even though the sale was not completed. If we disagree with a source on characterizing an event as a sale, we can still report what the source says; if another source contradicts the one, we can report both; but we can't delete content merely because we editors disagree with sourcing, so, if anyone believes that what has been characterized as a wife sale was not a wife sale, source that latter statement and it can be added. Manumission and postwar behavior by a conqueror may present such cases. In the same way, we can't just replace content with a shorter list of places or religions, because to name a nation is not the same as saying why it's included, but if a new short list or index would be helpful, one that links to the content, you might be able to create that list, but that method might be unorthodox and not accepted among Wikipedians, but you can look into it. I'll reconsider the lead for readability. Nick Levinson (talk) 23:19, 4 January 2014 (UTC)
 * The lead is rewritten and should now be clearer. I generally preserved its content but reorganized it. Nick Levinson (talk) 21:55, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

categorization into Wives
This article was recently categorized into the Wives category. Then it was decategorized from it. The category page has no exclusion stated on it. The category does not seem to include anything about behaviors specific to wives, but I don't see why it shouldn't and perhaps other articles about behaviors should be added (viz., uxoricide). Categories help readers find related articles, and the selling of wives is clearly related to wives. I propose to recategorize this article accordingly but would like to know if there is still opposition to it and why. Nick Levinson (talk) 00:25, 22 December 2018 (UTC) (Corrected: 00:30, 22 December 2018 (UTC))


 * Behaviours related to wives are not wives; this article should not be included in a Wives category. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:37, 22 December 2018 (UTC)
 * I've opened a discussion. Feel free to participate. Nick Levinson (talk) 20:28, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

The introduction is way too long
Just is. Especially for someone just trying to get a rough idea of what this is.WikiJoe24 (talk) 00:30, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Needs a review...
Hello, I know I may be late to the party, but this artile needs a through review/rewrite:
 * The intro is too unspecific. It probably mixes different times/cultures.
 * Even if it is an intro, I wuold like to see references
 * The view on the Ancient Roman pater familias is biased/wrong: In rome (the wealthy) lived in extended families, so that 2-3 generations lived in the same villa. Of these 2-3 generations, there was only one Pater famlilias, usually it was the oldest man. Only when a couple moved out of the villa did the husband perhaps become a paterfamilias. Again, needs references.

In short, this article needs to be reviewed; after he review, it should likely be split into smaller atricles which are then reworked. Eptalon (talk) 08:00, 28 August 2023 (UTC)