IV
It is needless to recall here the notorious women who followed in the footsteps of Julia, and added to all her sins a cruelty which she had not. The world is familiar enough with the crimes of Messalina, the second Agrippina, Poppæa, and others whose names have become a by-word and a reproach to womanhood. Men, and sometimes women, gravely tell us that these moral monsters are a measure of Roman standards, and a logical result of the culture of the feminine intellect. That two things exist at the same time does not prove that one is the result of the other. The facts in this case, indeed, prove quite the contrary. It would be idle to say that the weaker half of the human family hold a monopoly of the virtues, or that it is in the nature of things for them to pass unscathed through the fiery ordeal of a corrupt age whose supreme end lies in pleasures of sense. But even in Rome at its worst there was a great deal of pure family life, and its conservation rested with women. I have quoted elsewhere from the private letters of distinguished Romans who have given us pleasant glimpses of refined, accomplished, and learned women, as free from the taint of moral laxity as our own; and this when men made no claims to morality themselves. To the great body of Roman women a spotless virtue was among their most cherished traditions. So far from finding their increased intelligence a cause of the decline in morals, it is a fact that those of the highest character and ability constantly suffered indignity and wrong, because their presence was a restraint upon their unscrupulous masters. Long domination had fostered the egotism of men to such an extent that they could not brook opposition of any sort, and it was the ignorant and flexible who bent the most easily to their will, even when it led them to the last extreme of moral subservience. Only a fearless courage and a strong conviction could venture to take high ground against the fashionable sins of men in power. It is always more or less true that when a dominant class lowers its moral standards, it likes to ostracize those who even tacitly reflect upon it.
Examples of this in Roman life are so numerous that two thousand years have not sufficed to hide them all. Of women in high places who suffered death or banishment for their virtues, the list is a long one. Caligula decreed the same honors to his grandmother, the pure and high-minded Antonia, which had been given to Livia. But when this dignified matron, worthy daughter of the gentle Octavia, presumed to reprove him for his vices, he starved her to death. Vitellius banished his mother, Sextilia, a woman of admirable character, because she wept at his elevation to the throne. This was a reproach which he could not brook, and, failing to break her heart by his cruelties, he took her life, or made it so intolerable that she was forced to end it herself. It was impossible for a good woman to stay in the palace, and the Empress Galeria begged permission to retire to a modest dwelling on the Aventine. Domitian ordered a vestal, charged with scandalous acts which were denied and not proved, to be buried alive; but he consistently marked virtue for persecution, hesitated at no crime, and declared a woman to be “a natural slave, with man for her divinely appointed master.” Carrying this to its logical conclusion, he made the Palatine unsafe for any woman. That the great heart of Roman womanhood was on the side of loyalty and virtue, and looked upon conjugal infidelity as a sin to be frowned upon even in men, is shown by their attitude toward Nero when he sent away his young, lovely, and innocent wife, Octavia, to marry the most dissolute woman of the time. Many men remonstrated, and women rose in a body to demand her return. For the moment he thought it best to yield to the popular clamor, but he soon invented a pretext to send her to the long silence from which there is no return. Yet she was beautiful, of cloudless fame, and had lived hardly twenty years! Roman history is full of instances of moral heroism on the part of women, that had no counterpart among men, and of feminine virtue held at the expense of life. Servilia, the youthful daughter of Soranus, took upon herself a fault for which it was sought to compass her father’s death, and not being able to save him, died with him. Women in great numbers retired in sad dignity from a society whose current of vice they were powerless to change. A stately and pathetic figure is Pomponia Græcina, who wore mourning for forty years, and never smiled after her friend Julia, the daughter of Drusus, was murdered by Messalina. It was a pitiless world in which neither virtue nor life was safe, but it had its heroines, and they were not few.
Nor can the number of divorces be placed to the account of women. When a Julius Cæsar takes his tenderly loved daughter from her husband and marries her to another man in the interest of his own ambitions; when an Augustus makes laws against immorality, yet divorces an innocent wife who objects to his own infidelities, and puts in her place a beautiful woman of unsullied fame, whom he has taken from a worthy man; when both of these rulers of the world compel good citizens to divorce the consorts they possibly love, in order to dispose of one or the other for personal ends or the good of the State—it is hardly worth while to hold helpless women responsible for conditions made and enforced by men in power, who are called wise and think themselves passably good. The most that can be said is that women of knowledge and character are less likely to bear wrong and abuse silently, but they are more likely to uphold the dignity of the family and to ignore the petty vanities and jealousies which are among the most prolific causes of divorce. A cultivated intellect does not necessarily imply good morals, but, other things being equal, an educated woman is less easily led into wrong, as she has more resources and is better fitted to stand on her own feet; unfortunately, this is precisely what her critics in the past have not wished her to do.
With so many conspicuous examples in high places, it is hardly strange that divorces became deplorably common. “Does anybody blush at a divorce,” says one, “since illustrious and noble women compute their years, not by the number of consuls, but by the number of husbands they have had?” We hear of a woman who was the twenty-first wife of her twenty-third husband. The pretexts were often slight. It was said of Mæcenas that he had been divorced a thousand times, though he had but one wife, as he loved her and always married her over again. The woman who had been but once married was honored as a univira. She was too often, however, like a goddess worshiped from afar by men who found both interest and pleasure in the number of their wives. Much of the trouble was due to the fortune-hunters, who did not scruple to use any means to get rid of a wife and retain her dowry, at the expense of her fair name. Even good women were so wholly at the mercy of false charges that Antoninus made a law that no man could bring suit against his wife for immorality unless he could prove his own fidelity. We know that wise and virtuous women were often forced to seclude themselves from the aggressions of wicked men against whose machinations they were unable to find protection.
There was one law, however, which might be considered to advantage by some of our own legislators. It had been decreed that no one should marry sooner than six months after a divorce. Augustus extended the time to eighteen months. We talk much and with a fine consciousness of superior virtue about the chaotic state of Roman marriages. What will our fortieth-century moralist who reads present history, as photographed from day to day in the blazing journals, say of the decadence of a civilization in which people may marry two hours after divorce, or find themselves some fine morning released from their marriage bonds without knowing it? And we are an eminently moral people.
On the influence of the Roman women let the Romans speak for themselves. It was proposed in the Senate that men should not be permitted to take their wives into the provinces, as they had too much power with the soldiers, interfered in settling business affairs, and made another center of government—indeed, they sometimes “presided at the drill of cohorts and the evolutions of the legions,” besides dividing the homage. The majority of the senators objected to this bill, and pronounced its author “no fit censor.” An able and eloquent man, in reply to it, said that “much of the sternness of antiquity had been changed into a better and more genial system.” A few concessions had been made to the wants of women, but “in other respects man and wife share alike.” There might be some scheming women, but were the magistrates free from various unworthy passions, and was this a reason why none should be sent to the provinces? If husbands were sometimes corrupted by their wives, were single men any better? “It is idle to shelter our own weakness under other names; for it is the husband’s fault if the wife transgresses propriety.” This wise orator was sustained by eminent men who gave their own fortunate experiences, and the bill was lost. Such a tribute to the helpfulness and strong character of the Roman woman may be commended to a few of our enlightened thinkers who, curiously enough, use the low standards of men who never pretended to be moral, and the frailties of dependent women who were not permitted to be so, or of a class that has always appealed to the weaknesses of men since the beginning of the world, to prove the degeneracy of society under the influence of feminine intelligence! It was never the woman of strong intellectual fiber and serious interests that Rome had to fear. It was another class, that did not, in any sense, represent her either in intelligence or character.