Roman Women

by Alfred Brittain

There is another Roman woman who may be counted on the list of authors, and whose writings, had they only been preserved, would have proved of exceeding interest. This was the brilliant and accomplished Agrippina the Younger; a woman who was as finished a scholar as she was an experienced and successful politician. She wrote her Memoirs, not so much from a desire to make a contribution to history as to use them to blacken the character of the enemies of her house. She dipped her pen in the venom of hate and envy, and she found her material in the scandalous stories which floated about Rome, growing daily more exaggerated from an origin which no one knew. From this work of Agrippina, Suetonius and Tacitus doubtless drew much of the information which in their more serious productions blackens the character of Tiberius. It is also likely that, if it had not been for the facile and unrestrained pen of her successor, Messalina would have been known to us as a far less disreputable woman than she is made to appear.

Although there is no writing of Agrippina's extant, we do have what purports to be the speech in her defence which she made when accused by Junia Silana with a design of inciting Plautus to effect a change in the State, and, by marrying him, to regain her power in the commonwealth, which Nero had taken out of her hands. In it all we see nothing but the backbitings of two rancorous old women; but it was represented to Nero as a horrible affair. Nero's fears were so excited that it was with difficulty that he could be induced to allow his mother to survive until morning and have an opportunity to make her own defence. We have her speech as it is given by Tacitus. Possibly it is the historian's own composition; but it is exactly what we might expect from the fierce old empress-mother. And as it is certain that Seneca and Burrhus, to whom it was addressed, would have with them shorthand writers, it is not improbable that Tacitus took it from the official records. "I wonder not," said Agrippina, "that Silana, who never bore a child, should be a stranger to the affections of a mother; for, in truth, children are not so easily renounced by their parents, as adulterers are changed by a profligate. Nor, because Iturius and Calvisus, after having consumed their whole fortunes, as a last resource pay back to an old woman their services in undertaking my accusation, as an equivalent for their hire, does it follow that I am to be branded with the infamy, or that Cæsar should conceive the guilt of parricide. As to Domitia, I would thank her for all the efforts of her enmity to me, if she strove to exceed me in kindness to her nephew, my Nero. At present, by the ministration of Atimetus, her minion, and the merry-andrew Paris, she is framing a farce to fit for the stage. Where was she when I by my counsels obtained the adoption of her nephew and my son into the Claudian house? when I advanced his cause in every way necessary for getting him the Empire?--Admiring her fishponds at Baiæ." If this is Agrippina's composition, there is certainly no lack of force in it and she was preëminently an adept in the use of innuendo. We would like to have seen those Memoirs.

To turn to a pleasanter subject and introduce a more amiable, though less picturesque, character. While there were few women authors, there were many ladies who knew how to appreciate the work of their literary husbands; matrons who, in the bonds of legal marriage, were companions to their husbands in learning as well as in other things. Pliny has left us a most beautiful pen portrait of his young wife. He tells how, to please him more, she studied polite literature, learned his books by heart, set his verses to music, and accompanied them on her lyre. "How great is her anxiety," he says, "when she sees me going to speak in court, and how great her joy when I have spoken! She sets messengers about to report to her what favor and applause I have excited, and what is the result of the trial. Then whenever I recite she sits hard by, separated only from us by a curtain, and catches up with eager ears the praise bestowed on me."

IX

WOMAN AT HER WORST

In the course of this study there have come within our view some of the noblest women of whom the history of the world can boast. We have seen women of exalted purity in high positions, stately, dignified matrons, women renowned for intellect and noble spirit, women who have bravely endured unmerited suffering; we have also noted the women of the common people, and the gay ladies who ministered to love and laughter. But our account will be incomplete, the picture will not be a true one, unless it also represents the worst that human nature has produced, women stained with some of the basest crimes recorded in the annals of human depravity. It is a story in which the sober truth can only be told in superlative terms. What Scipio feared and Cato endeavored to prevent came to pass; and at the time when Rome centred in herself all the power and glory of the world, she also reached the climax of the vice and degradation of all ages.

The moral conditions which characterized the period between the reigns of Tiberius and Nero are, in these days, impossible of adequate comprehension. It was a continuous Saturnalia, a perpetual reign of terror, a paroxysm of indecency. What renders the situation so amazing and so difficult to describe is its strange mixture of civilization and savagery, of art and anarchy. The atrocious cruelties which render the history of that time so terrible and the lust which makes it so revolting are not attributed to half-clad barbarians or ignorant Asiatics; they were participated in by men and women whose outward life was marked and distinguished by all the signs and appointments of culture. The Julias and the Poppæas of the age were women who lived in beautiful houses; they were surrounded by a magnificence of art such as never since has been witnessed; they were the students of a literature which the world has never ceased to admire. Nor was the extravagant wickedness of the time a revolt against law; on the contrary, everything was done in accordance with legal forms. Vistilia, the wife of a Roman knight, in order that she might be unrestrained in her lasciviousness, went before the ædiles and proclaimed herself a prostitute, the law considering that prostitutes were sufficiently punished by merely thus avowing their shame. Even when the innocent children of Sejanus were put to death for the misdeeds of their father, the little girl--who asked what she had done that was wrong and if they were going to whip her--must be outraged by the executioner before he strangled her; for it was unlawful to inflict capital punishment upon virgins. While such things were being perpetrated, the ladies of Rome were studying the Greek philosophers, reading their own Virgil, and improving their diction by an acquaintance with the elegant periods of Cicero. It was an age in which the arts of civilization were entirely divorced from the best impulses of humanity, an age when the highest mental attainments were joined with the lowest moral conditions. The depraved Messalina was contemporary with the philosophic Seneca; the conscienceless Agrippina the Younger was a student of letters and an author.

It is easy to perceive that the cruelty and lust which render the history of the first two centuries of the Christian era so lurid are simply the natural developments from preceding conditions. The proscriptions and massacres of Sylla and the two triumvirates could but produce a society which would witness bloodshed with apathy, if not with delight. The total disregard of the sacredness of matrimonial vows, when political purposes were to be served, necessarily resulted in a generation of women among whom chastity was a matter of indifference and honor a thing unknown. Given a society thus, by heritage and training, predisposed to inhumanity and licentiousness, and it only needed the presence of favorable conditions for the introduction upon the imperial stage of a company of women upon whose actions the world has ever since gazed with profound amazement. Such conditions were then present in Rome in such a degree as they have never been at any other time or among any other people. The age was propitious and the circumstances were ripe for a climax in human depravity. The spoil of the conquered world provided Rome with incalculable riches; the Empire was the prize of him who could win and hold it, and of her who could maintain her position by the side of the ruler; power and the absence of restraint gave free rein to impulses which the existent conditions necessarily rendered evil. This was the entourage of the women of Rome under the first emperors. The ladies of the nobility were trained and urged to cruelty and prostitution by the exigencies of their position; the women of the common class, for whom tributary bread and sanguinary spectacles were freely provided, were impelled in the same direction by example and idleness.

The acme of female turpitude was attained by Messalina, whose name has ever since served as a byword for unparalleled incontinence. Valeria Messalina was the great-granddaughter of Octavia, the sister of Augustus, both on her father's and her mother's side; thus in her veins united a twofold stream of the sacred Julian blood, which fact she never allowed herself to forget while insisting upon her demands, though it had no restraining effect upon her conduct. When only sixteen years of age, she became the third wife of the feeble, half-imbecile Claudius; one of her predecessors was Plautia Urgulanilla, the daughter of that proud Urgulania whose debts Livia Augusta had been compelled to pay. Plautia was divorced for "scandalous lewdness" and on the suspicion of murder, after she had given birth to two children, the youngest of whom Claudius exposed, being convinced that it had no just claims upon his paternal authority. But his honor as a husband was far less safe with Messalina than it had been with Plautia. That she should have any affection for the doddering, gormandizing old man--he was nearly fifty--was hardly to be expected. During the first three years after the marriage, her position was comparatively private, her husband having no expectation of attaining to the imperial throne.