On the Washington Post/Newsweek Online (when did those two get hitched?) site is an article by a Notre Dame professor of Law and Theology on the evolution of marriage. In Marriage as a Changing Institution, M. Cathleen Kaveny says that until fairly recently, marriage was a private matter in Roman and then Roman Catholic Church law.

So for the ancient Romans, marriage was essentially a private matter–not one which the legal system had much to say!

In the Roman Catholic tradition, marriage is both a legal contract and a religious sacrament. What many people do not know, however, is that it is a sacrament that the parties perform themselves. In other words, the priest does not, technically speaking, perform the marriage. He is an official witness. And for most of the Church’s history, he was not even a necessary witness.

I received notice from John Jackson about a system that works with a Palm Pilot that is designed to modernize the method Heinrich Schliemann used to study ancient languages, and partularly the Bible. You put the Greek, translation, and a lexicon on your PDA. I don't completely understand it, but you can read more about it here: HandHeld Classics, and download the material here: Text.HandHeldClassics.com.