But the times were soon to change. Hitherto we have seen the Roman matrons living the simple, diligent, unsophisticated lives of women who were fitting mates for men who held to the plow for support, but dared not let drop the sword. Until then, Rome had been nothing but a city struggling for existence--sometimes a precarious existence. Instances there were when her fortunes waned almost to the vanishing point; when the tide of progress seemed to hang at the ebb. The god of victory, though honored as the tutelary deity of Rome, was frequently partial to her Italian neighbors; her walls were entered and her houses razed by the barbarian Gauls; and once she was at the point of being deserted by her citizens, the majority of whom could hardly be restrained by the ideals of religion from removing the State and the Capitol to Veii. Yet her star of empire persisted and, despite temporary eclipses, remained in the ascendant.
How did those centuries of varying civic fortune affect the status of the women? They were, by the necessities of their circumstances, trained to endure hardship. The temple of Janus was never closed, for warfare was unceasing; and it was usual for the widow's wailing death dirge to be embittered by the fact that the husband had been slain in his strength and prime. Slavery and outrage, the concomitants of barbarous warfare, were always included within the possibilities of a Roman matron's fate. Under such circumstances civilization necessarily advanced slowly; it is only as life and liberty and leisure are secured that existence can acquire the social graces. Hence the probability is that, during the first two and a half centuries of the Republic,--that is, until Rome was fully launched upon her career of conquest,--the position and the habits and manner of life of the women did not greatly change. It is true that there was a continuous internal development of the State; but this manifested itself in an accentuation of those laws which reveal the hardness of the old Roman character, rather than in any tendency toward the easement of the individual lives of the citizens. Never has personal privilege been so completely subjugated to State prerogative. The laws, which were rigidly--even slavishly--interpreted according to the letter and never according to the spirit, considered the individual from the standpoint of his value to the State, and rarely from that of his own rights. The woman's value to the State was entirely submerged in that of her husband. Therefore, we find that it was only with the greatest difficulty that edicts granting privileges to woman could be passed, unless it were in payment for some special act of loyalty on her part to the State. Hard and inflexible in their ideas of life were those old Romans, practical and unsentimental in their relations with each other, narrow in their conceptions, proud to arrogance of their State, and reverencing only their institutions.
But in course of time they broke through their insularity with the force of their own arms. Victorious contact with other States gave them a larger acquaintance with the fruits of civilization, and the spoils of conquest afforded them the means to enjoy it. Hence, during the latter half of the republican period we see life in Rome rapidly undergoing a change. As typical of this new state of things, as it affected the character, status, and condition of women, there is only one woman whom we need to select. In Cornelia, the daughter of Scipio Africanus and the wife of Sempronius Gracchus, is found the ideal of Roman femininity of that day. She was in every way worthy of her patrician ancestry, which had produced a greater number of eminent men than any other family, twenty-one consulships being held by the Cornelii in eighty-six years. Cornelia lived in a Rome which we can understand and appreciate; we begin to recognize social features upon which the imagination can lay hold and from them piece together some idea of the reality. Hitherto the data has been too foreign and too meagre for any great success in this; but when we read of Cornelia providing herself with a country house, riding to public worship, listening to the gossip of her friends respecting each other's jewelry, and interesting herself in Greek literature, we discover that the main features of a Roman matron's life were not essentially dissimilar from those which characterize polite feminine society in our own time. Indeed, there is more to evoke our sympathetic appreciation in the Rome of B.C. 150 than in the Europe of A.D. 1000 or in the Asiatic civilizations of to-day. We feel more at home in the patrician villas than in the mediæval castles; just as we find more that is applicable to modern life in the Roman poets than we do in the bards of chivalry. In studying the period when the ancient civilization of Italy was at its best, we discover habits of thought, bits of life, and social customs, which really startle us with their similitude to those to which we ourselves are accustomed.
The city, in the time of Cornelia, showed few outward signs of the magnificence it was to acquire under the emperors. The houses were mostly of brick, though domestic architecture had become quite ambitious in its character, Cornelia herself having built, as has been said, a very expensive villa at Misenum; those of the wealthy were filled with costly furniture and precious works of art, which the Romans first learned to admire in the countries which they subdued; and having acquired a taste for beautiful things, they made no scruple of appropriating them. Rome had now grown wealthy with the spoils of her extensive victories, and, as always comes to pass with the advent of riches, there had been brought about a great differentiation in the condition of the population. Polybius gives us a picture of the extravagant style in which Æmilia, the mother of Cornelia, appeared in public. "When she left home to go to the temple," says he, "she seated herself in a glittering chariot, herself attired with extreme luxury. Before her were carried with solemn ceremony the vases of gold and silver required for the sacrifice, and a numerous train of slaves and servants accompanied her." And this notwithstanding the Oppian law, which limited matrons to a half-ounce of gold on their wearing apparel and prohibited them from riding in carriages in the city, and which had not yet been repealed. As this modish lady passed through the streets of Rome with her brilliant retinue, exciting the envy of other matrons, and bestowing gracious recognition upon white-robed, stately patricians, she must have beheld as many signs of abject, suffering poverty as are prevalent in our own great cities. By this time, the plebeian order had been raised to equal legal privilege with the patrician, and society had now come to be divided into the enormously rich and the extremely poor. The former rendered their position secure by means of extortion in the provinces; the condition of the latter was made hopeless by the fact that all labor was performed by slaves. A state of things unknown to the old times was now prevalent in Rome: men and women were idle, willingly or perforce, according to their circumstances.
The position of women had also changed. They were now beginning to make a stand for their rights--a thing undreamed of in the old days. The father of the family was no longer allowed to execute his arbitrary power entirely unquestioned. Livy narrates an incident which illustrates this development and bears interestingly upon the character of Æmilia and the history of Cornelia. He relates that "the Senators, happening to sup one day in the Capitol, rose up together and requested of Africanus, before the company departed, to betroth his daughter to Gracchus; the contract was accordingly executed in due form, in the presence of this assembly. Scipio, on his return home, told his wife Æmilia that he had concluded a match for her younger daughter. She, feeling her female pride hurt, expressed some resentment at not having been consulted in the disposal of their common child, adding that, even were he giving her to Tiberius Gracchus, her mother ought not to be kept in ignorance of his intention; to which Scipio, rejoiced that her judgment concurred so entirely with his own, replied that she was betrothed to that very man."
It has been well said that the words which Plautus puts into the mouth of Alcmena may be applied to the character of Cornelia, who was thus bestowed by her great father upon a no less worthy man: "My dower is chastity, modesty, and the fear of the gods; it is love to my kindred; it is to be submissive to my husband, kind toward good people, helpful to the brave." She also received a dot, an accompaniment of marriage which was beginning to be highly considered among the matrons of Rome as of more practical value than the above-mentioned moral qualities. It consisted of fifty talents of gold. But the time had not yet arrived when the riches of virtue and goodness were entirely unappreciated; there were still matrons who could enter, with faces neither brazen nor abashed, the temple erected to chastity; and upon the tombs of many of them might have been truthfully inscribed, as upon that of Claudia: Gentle in words, graceful in manner, she loved her husband devotedly; she kept her house, she spun wool. Among these chaste matrons Cornelia excelled; her fame remains as that of the highest type of the pure-principled, noble-minded, cultured Roman matron. She lived in entire sympathy with her husband; and we may well believe that it was partly owing to her influence that the generous Sempronius Gracchus found it in himself to command an army enlisted from among the slaves, and to emancipate them upon the battlefield as a reward for the bravery which his leadership incited.
Plutarch, in his lives of the sons of Gracchus, repeats a story which, though characterized by the superstitions of the times, indicates in what estimation Cornelia was held by her husband and all who knew her. It relates that Gracchus once found in his bed chamber a couple of snakes, and that the soothsayers, being consulted concerning the prodigy, advised that he should neither kill them both nor let them both escape; adding that if the male serpent were killed, Gracchus would die, and, if the female, Cornelia would perish. Therefore, as he extremely loved his wife, he thought that it was much more his part, who was an old man, to die than it was hers, who as yet was but a young woman; so he killed the male serpent and let the female escape. Soon after this, he died, leaving his wife and the twelve children which she had borne to him. "Cornelia, taking upon herself all the care of the household and the education of her children, approved herself so discreet a matron, so affectionate a mother, and so constant and noble-spirited a widow, that Tiberius seemed to all men to have done nothing unreasonable in choosing to die for such a woman; who, when King Ptolemy himself proffered her his crown and would have married her, refused it, and chose rather to live a widow. In this state she continued, and lost all her children, except one daughter, who was married to Scipio the Younger, and two sons, Tiberius and Caius." The daughter, Sempronia, seems to have been in every respect unlike her mother. Unattractive and childless, she neither loved nor was loved by her husband; and, indeed, suspicion was cast upon her of having brought about his death.
Cornelia was well equipped to undertake the education of her children. What is told of her indicates a woman who was alert to advance with all that was progressive in her time. The spirit of literature had but recently attained its reincarnation, and that for the first time upon Roman soil. It was begotten, as it was again fifteen centuries later, by the immortal genius of Greek poesy. The Romans conquered Greece physically; but Hellenic learning subjugated Roman ideas. The Scipios were the ardent supporters of Greek culture; and in this, as in all other respects, Cornelia took a foremost position among the representatives of her gifted family.
She provided for her children the most erudite of Greek masters, and spared no efforts in training their minds in the love of all that was graceful and cultured. In the justly renowned eloquence of her sons, there was recognized a gift which they inherited from their mother, as was testified by Cicero, who had seen her letters. She possessed the ability and also the courage to incite them to noble deeds for their country. It was probably not so much ambition for herself as for them which caused her to reproach her sons with the fact that she was still known as the widow of Scipio and not as the Mother of the Gracchi. But they lost no time in earning for her, both on account of their deeds on the battlefield and by their devotion to the civil affairs of the State, the distinction of this latter title.
The Roman Republic had so far degenerated as to submit to be governed by an oligarchy consisting of a few proud and wealthy families--the worst of all forms of government. The Senators were flagrantly using their power to accumulate enormous riches and to monopolize the land by seizing upon the public domain. Middle-class independence was rapidly diminishing, and the growing masses of the people were oppressed by a poverty from which they had no means of freeing themselves. The Gracchi sought to relieve these evils by passing laws limiting the amount of land which might be held by one person, and offsetting the power of the nobility by securing the economic independence of the people. The Gracchi were reformers; and they each in turn attained to dictatorial power. But though they secured the enactment of their measures, they could not put them into effect; and in the end,--as is frequently the case with reformers,--because they were far-sighted enough to see evil in that which the majority of the rulers considered good, there was nothing for them but martyrdom. This they suffered in turn: Caius taking up the work where Tiberius was compelled, by assassination, to relinquish it.