Conjugia vs. Amor: How the Romans Saw Love

Image of a Roman wedding carved onto the side of a tomb.

The question of love is one that remains constant throughout the ages. Love’s definition is so difficult to pin down because of its fluidity and variability from person to person, circumstance to circumstance. Nowadays, we look at love as a mental phenomenon that simply happens because our brain wills it to. We naturally respond to our cravings of love by seeking out companionship. The psychological miracle that is love was no stranger to the minds of Roman writers, but unlike most modern-day romantics, the Roman world made an attempt to understand its workings. Romans separated love into two different styles: conjugal or maternal love, the kind that was intimately born from marriage, and erotic love, the essence of physical and sexual impulses. Though the Romans acknowledged these contrasting forces’ co-existence, they did not believe in their codependency, giving the two types of love their own distinct domains, governed by their own goddess (Juno for the conjugal world and Venus for the erotic). Furthermore, they were traditionally separated in a hierarchical order—an order which poets often like to disrupt. But, how do these forces interact with each other? And when they do, how does it affect the psyche of their host? 

Stumped by this question, I turned to the theory of transference by Sigmund Freud, father of modern psychoanalysis. Though transference is a modern clinical theory, it may have been the connecting bridge between the conjugal and erotic worlds that the ancient Romans could not yet express.

The Roman conception of love existed in a hierarchical dichotomy where conjugal/maternal love and erotic love were distinct forces. Marriage was generally perceived as a contractual relationship or a shared partnership between a man and a woman for the specific intention of producing a child. Though the act of marrying itself was treated rather like an ad hoc subject, often for political or financial reasons, its byproduct, the imminent creation of a child (who was preferably male), was strongly established in many Roman epithelema as the “raison d’être” of all marital contracts. If children were perceived as the glorious pinnacle of marriage, then their mothers were the heart of the matrix of conjugal love, tasked with the respectable duty of giving life. In Carmina 61, Catullus imagines the scene of a wedding night, where a young boy lies in his mother’s bosom—a symbol of pregnancy—outstretching his arms toward his father: “[the] mother guarantees the masculine offspring conjugal conception and legitimacy, bestowing her chastity upon the son, so that the son’s physical appearance mirrors his father’s.” The chaste image of the mother—specifically chaste in regards to her conjugal fidelity—and the  ritual-like and even legal-sounding description of her son’s “conjugal conception” emphasizes the contractually binding and sacred nature of Roman marriage, as laws were closely related to religious practices. Because of this rather legal marriage culture, some scholars even consider the mother to be the social linchpin upon which Roman citizenship was bound. In birthing a child, the gremium matris—the bosom of the mother—fulfills its responsibility to carry on the family. As such, marriage and motherhood are so closely interposed that the scholarly distinctions between the conjugium (conjugal) and genetrix (maternal) worlds have become incredibly fuzzy. Though some scholars prefer to use one term more frequently over the other, “conjugal” and “maternal” are often taken as cousin terms when referring to any type of familial love within the realm of Roman love. 

On the other hand, erotic love (also referred to as amor) was a form of physical, passionate affection. Erotic attraction was not contractual or treated as formal relationships—married men could sleep with a number of prostitutes or have affairs, so long as they weren’t overly frequent. Though in contrast, if a woman had an affair, she would be scrutinized for conjugal infidelity (sound like a certain Dido?). There was this underlying idea that love between spouses contained a deep-rooted affection that was less of passion and more of companionship, characterized by terms like concordia and societas. Erotic love wasn’t any less intense, but lacked the same fundamental initiative and chaste connotation as marriage. Even within the most affectionate lovers there would still be a separation between conjugal and erotic love. Gutting identifies marriage and erotic love as two different domains of sexuality placed in a hierarchy, with the conjugal world having “normative priority” over the erotic. Childbirth was the central element of conjugal love, and sexuality was merely treated as a means to that ultimate goal. Purely erotic love was treated as an end in itself, the “ultimate consequence of the needs and desires created by a physical and emotional focus on the beloved.” As long as the erotic urges did not interfere with the conjugal world, they were accepted, but if they ever did begin to invade and sully the righteous social convention that the conjugal world upholds, one’s erotic impulse would become averse. This worry is what Gutting considers a “displacement” of the conjugal and maternal world with the erotic, a phenomenon which modern psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud has given the name “transference.”

Transference suggests that, when we suppress our subconscious longings for the experience of companionship and love, in the purest sense of the word, we may unknowingly intensify and project our internal frustrations onto another person who we believe can provide the very fulfillment we ourselves lack, making them the object of our passionate desire. Freud originally conceived transference as the very essence of receiving and giving love. In line with the romantic ideas of Greek philosophers, Freud believed that the need to want and to express love was a principle of human existence. Love was the impetus for human convictions: however, Freud also points out that only the portion of these impulses which we are conscious of can dictate the relationships we actively form and enter into; the rest, which are subconscious, take on the forms of fantasies. Because we fail to recognize these fantasies, they are repressed and fester within our minds, taking on the form of latent erotic desire. Simultaneously, if we find ourselves frustrated and disillusioned by our lack of love in reality, our conscious dissatisfaction and subconscious yearning for this connection we lack intersect with each other. Consequently, Fraud claims:

"[if] someone's need for love is not entirely satisfied by reality, [he or she] is bound to approach every new person whom he meets with libidinal anticipatory ideas…we withdraw from reality by harboring our unsatisfied longings, making them ‘unconscious.’ In turn, our longings for love find satisfaction in the symptoms that become vehicles for our unconscious phantasies. In time, we become committed to whatever symptom our phantasies occupy, as though it were a lover.” 

To summarize Freud’s point, the circumstances that we face in reality frustrate our need to be loved. This internal frustration and dissatisfaction makes us—the “patient”—emotionally sick with a passionate yearning for love, and leads us to “transfer” these pent-up feelings onto our “analyst,” a person who we perceive as the cure—the one who evokes and makes conscious these suppressed feelings—to our symptoms. Through “transference,” erotic desire can permeate the conjugal world, resulting in a reversal of the love-hierarchy. 

In the Aeneid, Vergil constantly engages the conflicting forces of conjugal and erotic love in a battle for dominance, as represented by the feud between Venus and Juno—who represent the erotic and conjugal worlds respectively. However, the reversal of the hierarchy is best displayed in the internal turmoil of Queen Dido, whose story I will elaborate more on soon.