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Can I add two bits worth? A good definition of marriage among the Roman elite is 'serial polygamy'. That is, you can have a large number of wives, but only one at a time. Cato even divorced his wife so that she could marry Hortensius, and remarried her after Hortensius died. I'd recommend this as a starting point to the discussion http://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/scheidel/010903.pdf With Augustus the autocrat (which is where we started) we need to remember that the position of emperor was dynamic. The line between the Principate and Dominate is largely artificial. Labels like 'emperor' or 'king' cover a much more complex reality, and are labels rather than definitions of what the role entailed. Augustus probably saw himself more as a princeps senatus rather like Crassus or Aemilius Scaurushad been, though with more power and authority. By the time of the Lex de imperio Vespasiani the princeps is not a person but a job description, and this law details the titles and powers that a new emperor would take up. Likewise we see Caesar move from a cognomen to a rank (Galba was the first non-Julian to call himself Caesar). However, we can't argue even Tacitus' interpretation of what being emperor meant to Augustus, let alone Zosimus' interpretation. The office evolved much too fast for that. Even Augustus was not the same emperor in AD 14 as he was in 30 BC.

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