I've read that Romans held the univira, meaning women who only married once, as the ideal. However, I also came across a law introduced in 9 AD called the Lex Papia et Poppaea, which actually encouraged remarriage, and gave widows only a couple of years to remarry before they were subjected to certain penalties.
So my question is, how did these conflicting ideas work?
I imagine that this law remained valid for at least a few years, but what happened later?
Was this law ever abolished, or was the univira ideal eventually dropped? What would happen to widows decades after this law was introduced, say, in 70 or 80 AD?
It’s important to remember that legal code does not always unambiguously reflect commonly held attitudes toward an issue, in that it can reflect more than one, not necessarily internally consistent, issue at the same time, and in that not everyone necessarily agrees with or follows it.
Augustan marriage legislation was incredibly unpopular from the outset, at least as reported by the elite sources who were most affected by it. Tacitus, who mentions it on more than one occasion, says that Rome, "just as once it was oppressed by disgraceful acts, then it was oppressed by laws" (Tac. Ann. 3.25). Beyond Tacitus' general disapproval of morality laws as a whole, both Suetonius and Dio report that the laws were unpopular at the time they were passed, and both credit public demonstration with concessions made to the protesting senatorial and equestrian classes.
The multiple forms the Augustan marriage laws took within a relatively brief period of time definitely support the idea that they were not universally agreed upon or particularly popular. Sources often refer to a singular lex Iulia et Papia Poppaea, but Augustan marriage law was actually a succession of related laws that, because of their common subject and changes made later in antiquity, got lumped together further on. The lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus, the initial Augustan law concerning marriage, and the lex Iulia de adulteriis, the law that made adultery a punishable crime for the first time, both passed in 18 BCE. The lex Papia Poppaea, passed in 9 CE, was essentially a revision or modification of the original law. Suetonius reports that in the lex Papia Poppaea Augustus was forced by the “agitation of those refusing it” to extend the original exemption window of the lex Iulia for widows to remarry and to lighten the penalties of the original law. The combined laws survived in various modified forms for centuries, with large revisions in the fourth and fifth centuries and a repeal of most provisions of the law in the mid sixth.
The reason for the laws’ longevity despite their unpopularity and perhaps also an explanation for the conflict between the moral ideal of the univira and the legal pressures for widows to remarry may lie in a secondary concern of the Augustan laws: children. The lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus introduced the ius liberorum, intended to encourage married couples to have children and penalizing through inheritance those who didn’t have it. While men with the ius liberorum could claim exemption from public charges, the biggest impact of this was on women. A freeborn woman with three children or a freedwoman with four had right of inheritance and were freed from the tutela mulierum, the guardianship over women who were under neither paternal power nor the power of their husbands. This was obviously a substantial incentive to bear children and reflected a concern that elite families were choosing not to have them, both in the Augustan period and in later periods where the law is mentioned. Kemezis notes that Dio’s account of the passage of the lex Papia Poppaea presents children as one of the main defining characteristics of marriage, a fact emphasized by the contrast of Augustus’ laws with the narrative of Augustus’ familial failures.
So while the series of laws that get lumped together into the lex Iulia et Papia Poppaea were unpopular at the time they were passed and contradicted certain moral discourses on women and marriage, they did reflect contemporary concerns about the Roman family as a whole and provided women with a major legal incentive to obtain the ius liberorum.
Grubbs, Judith Evans. Women and the Law in the Roman Empire. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
Kemezis, Adam M. “Augustus the Ironic Paradigm: Cassius Dio’s Portrayal of the Lex Julia and Lex Papia Poppaea.” Phoenix 61.3/4 (2007): 270-285.