Roman Women

by Alfred Brittain

When this laxity came to be the prevailing rule, the wife who was rich and, moreover, inclined to be in any way disagreeable held her husband at her mercy. If he divorced her without any considerable fault of hers, or if they parted by mutual consent, she took her dowry and left him with the children. If, as was very likely to be the case, he had married her for her property, he was obliged to be submissive. Plautus says: "The portionless wife is subject to her husband's will; wives with dowries are as executioners for their husbands." Martial, inveighing against a miserly woman who will not furnish her husband with a new cloak as a New Year's gift, says: "Why, Proculeia, do you cast off your husband in the month of January? This is not in your case a divorce; it is a good stroke of business." During the worst times, the law restricted the number of divorces obtainable by an individual to eight. If we are to believe Juvenal, there were women who were sufficiently enterprising to reach the limit in five years. The satirist describes them as leaving the doors only recently adorned, the tapestry used for the marriage festival still hanging on the house, and the branches still green upon the threshold. Seneca says that in his time it had come to such a pass that women reckoned the years, not by the names of the consuls, but by the husbands they had divorced.

Yet, notwithstanding--perhaps it would be more correct to say, on account of--this excessive willingness on the part of the women to enter into contracts of marriage, it became necessary in the time of the first empire to decree severe penalties against celibacy; and bonuses were awarded to those in whose families children were born. Even as early as B.C. 121, Metellus the Censor, complaining in the Senate of the increasing tendency to avoid the responsibilities of matrimony, said: "Could we exist without wives at all, doubtless we should rid ourselves of the plague they are to us; since, however, nature has decreed that we cannot dispense with the infliction, it is best to bear it manfully, and rather look to the permanent conservation of the State than to our own passing comfort."

In a condition of society in which the most conspicuous women were unrestrained by any worthy ideals of the responsibilities of wifehood, and where men were at liberty, and found abundant opportunity, to gratify their basest propensities with no fear of any reproof other than being made the subject of humorous allusion, it is not to be wondered at that the latter were inclined to shun the cares and the vicissitudes of marriage. Juvenal claimed that a good wife was rarer than a white crow; and Pliny held that celibacy alone afforded an unobstructed road to power and fortune. The former's terrible sixth satire was written as a warning against matrimony. "And yet you are preparing your marriage covenant, and the settlement, and betrothal, in our days; and are already under the hands of the master barber, and perhaps have already given the pledge for her finger. Well, you used to be sane, at all events! You, Postumus, going to marry! Say, what Tisiphone, what snakes, are driving you mad? Can you submit to be the slave of any woman, while so many halters are to be had? so long as high and dizzy windows are accessible, and the Æmilian bridge presents itself so near at hand?" The women are accused of every enormity known in that Rome where vice attained such proportions as have never been approached in any civilization in the history of the world. But it is contrary to the office of the satirist to present a true picture of the whole. Writing of vice, he sees nothing but iniquity; of the good he has nothing to say, for it is not in his province. That even then there were good women we know full well. Julia, the aunt of Cæsar; Octavia, faithful to her marriage vows despite the ill returns she received from Mark Antony; Agrippina, the beloved and faithful wife of the noble Germanicus; Livia also, the wife of Augustus, whose matrimonial fidelity--whatever may have been her character in other respects--no suspicion ever assailed. If these women, in their high stations, could exemplify all the best traditions of the matrons of the old time, we may be sure that there were innumerable good wives in the commoner ranks.

Out on the Appian Way, there is to be seen one of the strangest monuments that a grotesque fancy ever devised. It is the tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, who was baker to the apparetores. The monument consists of a row of great cylinders representing measures for grain. Upon these, in three tiers, are huge kneading troughs, placed with their mouths turned outward. Above is a frieze representing various incidents connected with the baker's trade. There is evidence that originally there was a similar monument standing by the side of this, for an inscription was found which reads: Antistia was my wife; she was the best woman alive; of whose body the remains which are left are in this bread basket. Here was a man of the people who appreciated his wife. Doubtless Antistia was a good woman, and lived happily with the baker, just as there were myriads of other faithful pairs whose names are not recorded on monuments nor have any place in history.

And yet, even the highest Roman standards of morality were not such as have been evolved through many centuries of inculcation of Christian principles. Among the best of the pagan Romans, concubinage was looked upon as a defensible institution. The laws in regard to citizenship shut out a large class of women from the privilege of marriage with freeborn Romans; as, for instance, the daughters of foreigners who had not been naturalized. These could only become mistresses or enter into left-handed marriages. If a citizen who was unmarried wished to live with such a woman, of course no ceremony was needed; there was nothing binding about the union, and at the same time it was not considered to be in any wise indecent. On more than one tomb there is found an inscription to "the beloved concubine," Acte held this relationship with the Emperor Nero; and to her credit it surely must be allowed that she was the only person near him against whom he did not maliciously turn, and who seemed to have with him some slight influence for good. Antoninus Pius, one of the very best of the Roman emperors, when his beloved Faustina died, took a concubine. He would not marry again, because he did not wish to bring his four children under the uncertain care of a stepmother. And having before him the domestic history of more than one imperial family in which were exhibited the tender mercies of such a stepmother as was Livia the wife of Augustus, Antoninus may well be excused for his precaution. What was the name of the woman he took we do not know, nor are we informed as to her character; only, Marcus Aurelius says: "I am thankful to the gods that I was not longer brought up with my father's concubine."

VI

WOMAN UNDER JULIUS CÆSAR

Rome was now riven and torn by cataclysms of civil strife. The foundations of the Republic were shaken by the explosion of new social forces, the growth of which was naturally attendant upon the spread of conquest, and which could no longer be confined within the narrow limits of the old constitution. Marius, Sylla, Pompey, and Cæsar--these are the names around which gathers the history of the pains and death groans of the expiring Republic. Crimson was the color of each political party; and the blood of opponents was the means used for its exhibition. Rome had become too great for her ancient civic constitution: she was restlessly awaiting the arrival of a man who could thrust himself above all opposition, and in his own person unify the government. Imperialism or anarchy must necessarily follow such a Republic as Rome had become in the closing century of the pre-Christian era.

During those fierce political disturbances and bloody revolutions, how did woman fare? She was by no means secure in that quiet, unmolested round of conjugal duty and domestic life which had so long been hers by right. In the sanguinary civil wars and murderous proscriptions which resulted from the ambitions of the leaders, life for the Roman people was of extremely uncertain tenure. It is easy to surmise what the women of many Italian cities suffered when whole populations were put to the sword under the merciless Sylla. Death, outrage, and slavery became so common that there was developed in the Roman women that indifference to the sight of human suffering which appears to us as nothing less than monstrous. Under Sylla, wives were accustomed to being simultaneously robbed of their husbands and their sustenance; as in the case of that peaceful citizen who, finding his own name in the lists of the proscribed, exclaimed: "My Alban farm has informed against me," and was immediately thereafter slain.