Woman in the golden ages

by Amelia Gere Mason

The details of Octavia’s life are few and meager. Fate gave her a prominent part to play on the world’s stage, and she played it well, but with an evident longing to fall back upon her affections. She was never a woman of initiative, but she was clearly one of moral force, framed to temper the friction of more powerful individualities, but to be herself crushed in their collisions. She stands for the purest and most gracious type of Roman womanhood. Many were stronger, many were more brilliant, but few left a memory so fragrant or so sweet.

III

There was another woman in the household of Augustus, who represented the new age on its worst and most dangerous side. In Julia we have the woman who lived to amuse herself, and left a name which has become a synonym for the appalling corruption of Roman society. No one was placed so high, no one fell so low; and no one has been so often quoted to “point a moral or adorn a tale.” But it has often been the wrong moral and the wrong tale. Bred austerely for a throne, versed in all the culture of her time, this brilliant, haughty, impetuous daughter of the emperor led the fast set at Rome for a few years, dazzled the world with her wit and her toilets, shocked it with her escapades, only to sink at last from her lofty pedestal to untold depths of infamy and a living tomb.

Given, a woman with the sensual, dominating inheritance of the Cæsars and the pride of a new race that knows no law but its own will, without the pride of character which serves always as a balance-wheel to the passions; imagine her a widow at seventeen, and married again, with no choice, to a plain but distinguished soldier, nearly thrice her age, whose lack of patrician birth humiliated her, and whose bourgeois habits were not to her liking; surround her with idle and conscienceless men who make love a pursuit and the arts of flattery a study—and we have already the elements of a tragedy. This hard-headed husband wearied her; his ways were foreign to her; his world of interest was not hers. Even the public spirit which led him to give so many fine temples and works of art to the city that honored him annoyed her. She had the tastes of a dilettante, but she believed firmly in the divine right of emperors and emperors’ daughters to command all things for themselves.

Nor did this petted child like any better the provincial notions of her old-fashioned father. It did not suit her to sew and spin with her stepmother, whose staid decorum irritated her. She belonged to the pleasure-loving set of an age in which luxury was uppermost and vice was a fine art. Fatal hour in any age when fashion laughs at morals and glories in the cachet of would-be elegant sin! “If my father forgets that he is Cæsar, I who am his daughter have the right to remember it,” said Julia, by way of comment on his democratic ways. One day at the theater he noticed the contrast between the dignified Livia, simply attired, but surrounded by grave statesmen and men of distinction, and the gaily dressed Julia with her train of gilded, dissolute youth. After his usual fashion of writing little notes when he had anything to say, he sent the latter a line of reproof. “Do not blame my young friends,” was her ready answer; “they will grow old with me.” On another occasion, after he had found fault with her showy appearance, she presented herself the next day in a plain and modest costume. To his compliment on the becoming change, she replied: “To-day I am dressed for my father; yesterday it was for my husband.” The subtle satire in this remark was only apparent to those who knew that she dressed for all the world rather than for either.

She was gifted, witty, and cultured, we are told; but to be lettered in the age of the Cæsars did not necessarily mean learning or serious tastes. One must dabble a little in philosophy, read the Hellenic poets, patronize famous Roman writers, and be able to talk of the Greek artists who were designing temples and flooding the imperial city with sculpture of various grades. It was even possible to have a long-haired philosopher to dress the intellect, as the maid dressed the person—the one a slave like the other. But all this might end in little more than the trifling of the dilettante, and was quite consistent with very bad morals—as it has always been and is to-day. To discourse of Ovid’s “Art of Love” was agreeable enough, and not mentally exacting. To be sure, the poet did not bring his admirers into very respectable society; indeed, we should think it not only altogether vulgar, but altogether base. But it appealed to the tastes of these spoiled darlings of fortune who had nothing else to do but amuse themselves—it did not matter how, so long as due regard was paid to the so-called elegancies. From love, as the Romans understood it, to unlimited license was but a step. They did not live in the “beyond” of refined sentiment. They mixed very little intellect or imagination with their passions, though they put a certain art into the stimulants of their sensations. When Catullus wished to add a last touch of seriousness to what he called his emotions, he said that he loved Lesbia “not merely as men commonly loved a mistress, but as a father loves his sons and his sons-in-law.” There was little romance in this epicurean life, in spite of a great deal of simple family affection outside of it, which these perfumed sybarites looked upon as bourgeois. Splendor and not too decorous pleasure were all-sufficient. Anything else they would have laughed at as moonshine. “When Queen Money gave a dowry,” said Horace, with his inimitable satire, “she gave beauty, nobility, friends, and fidelity.” With the exception of Horace and Vergil, who had already grown too moral for the highest fashion, Roman poetry was incredibly coarse and demoralizing; but this was the literary food of the reckless and dashing group that gravitated from the palace on the Palatine to Baiæ, the Newport of the Roman world, rushing from one novelty to another, from one excess to a deeper and more highly spiced one, until its rapid course was run.

Of this society Julia was the center, the life, and the inspiration. The days were past when the stern father put a man of high lineage peremptorily in his place for presuming to address her in the beautiful city by the sea. The complaisant husband, absorbed in affairs, no doubt thought it best to let her go her own way, but he died possibly unsuspecting. Again the still youthful widow was married in the interest of the State and of Livia—to Livia’s son. The brooding, gloomy student was equally far from filling the heart of the graceful woman who was overflowing with the joy of life, and intoxicated with a sense of power that knows no law. Livia may have been faulty enough, but she was above the degradation of the senses. In Julia the virtues of the Roman matron seem to have been lost. When her conduct came to the knowledge of her inflexible father, he was as bitter as he had been tender. Her maid hung herself, and Augustus only said: “I would rather be the father of Phœbe than of Julia.” Of the youth entangled with her, some were exiled and some took themselves out of a world that was no longer possible for them. Among the latter was the clever, fascinating, but dissolute son of Antony, who had been carefully reared by Octavia and befriended by the emperor, only to repay their kindness by striking both in the tenderest point. But Julia, the beautiful, brilliant, flattered queen of society, was sent away from all her pleasures, her luxuries, her gay companions, her matchless position, to languish for fifteen years in a desolate exile, with no friend but the mother who shared with her the bare necessaries of a squalid existence. No wine, no luxury, no fine clothes, no men-servants without special restrictions and surveillance. A rock for a home, the sea and the sky for companions, and not even hope for consolation. And she was little past thirty-five! Once she was removed to a stronghold of Calabria, with a larger guard and no added comforts, but a little less severity. Many times the Roman people, who had loved her buoyant spirit and winning personality, begged her inexorable father to forgive her. “I wish you all had such daughters and such wives,” was his only reply. She died shortly after her father, to lie, unsung and forgotten, far from her kindred in an unknown grave. Not a word is left to tell us the details of that long tragedy. Her daughter Julia inherited her vices and suffered a like fate.

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.