Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius

by Samuel Dill

The demoralisation of a section of the upper class under the bad emperors must have certainly involved the degradation of many women. And one of the most brilliant and famous of Juvenal’s Satires is devoted to this unsavoury subject. The “Legend of Bad Women” is a graphic picture, and yet it suffers from a defect which spoils much of Juvenal’s work. Full of realistic power, with an undoubted foundation of truth, it is too vehement and sweeping in its censures to gain full credence. It is also strangely wanting in balance and due order of idea.[451] The problem of marriage is illustrated by a series of sketches of female manners, which are very disconnected, and, indeed, sometimes inconsistent. Thorough depravity, superstition, and ignorant devotion, interest in literature and public affairs, love of gymnastic and decided opinions on Virgil—in fact, vices, innocent hobbies, and laudable tastes are all thrown together in a confused indictment. The bohemian man of letters had heard many a scandal about great ladies, some of them true, others distorted and exaggerated by prurient gossip, after passing through a hundred tainted imaginations. In his own modest class, female morality, as we may infer from the Inscriptions and other sources, was probably as high as it ever was, as high as the average morality of any age.[452] There were aristocratic families, too, where the women were as pure as Lucretia or Cornelia, or any matron of the olden days.[453] The ideal of purity, both in men and women, in some circles was actually rising. In the families of Seneca, of Tacitus, of Pliny and Plutarch, there were, not [pg 77]only the most spotless and high minded women, there were also men with a rare conception of temperance and mutual love, of reverence for a pure wedlock, to which S. Jerome and S. Augustine would have given their benediction. Even Ovid, that “debauchee of the imagination,” writes to his wife, from his exile in the Scythian wilds, in the accents of the purest affection.[454] And, amid all the lubricity of his pictures of gallantry, he has not lost the ideal of a virgin heart, which repels and disarms the libertine by the spell of an impregnable purity.[455] Plutarch’s ideal of marriage, at once severe and tender, would have satisfied S. Paul.[456] Favorinus, the friend and contemporary of Plutarch, thought it not beneath the dignity of philosophic eloquence to urge on mothers the duty of suckling and personally caring for their infants.[457] Seneca and Musonius, who lived through the reign of Nero, are equally peremptory in demanding a like continence from men and from women. And Musonius severely condemns concubinage and vagrant amours of every kind, the man guilty of seduction sins not only against another, but against his own soul.[458] Dion Chrysostom was probably the first of the ancients to raise a clear voice against the traffic in frail beauty which has gone on pitilessly from age to age. Nothing could exceed the vehemence with which he assails an evil which he regards as not only dishonouring to human nature, but charged with the poison of far spreading corruption.[459] Juvenal’s ideal of purity, therefore, is not peculiar to himself. The great world was bad enough, but there was another world beside that whose infamy Juvenal has immortalised.

It is also to be observed that Juvenal seems to be quite as much under the influence of old Roman conventionality as of permanent moral ideals. He condemns eccentricities, or mere harmless aberrations from old-fashioned rules of propriety, as ruthlessly as he punishes lust and crime. The blue-stocking who is a purist in style, and who balances, with deafening [pg 78]volubility, the merits of Homer and Virgil,[460] the eager gossip who has the very freshest news from Thrace or Parthia, or the latest secret of a tainted family,[461] the virago who, with an intolerable pride of virtue, plays the household tyrant and delivers curtain lectures to her lord,[462] seem to be almost as detestable in Juvenal’s eyes as the doubtful person who has had eight husbands in five years, or one who elopes with an ugly gladiator,[463] or tosses off two pints before dinner.[464] We may share his disgust for the great ladies who fought in the arena and wrestled in the ring,[465] or who order their poor tire-women to be flogged for deranging a curl in the towering architecture of their hair.[466] But we cannot feel all his contempt for the poor penitent devotee of Isis who broke the ice to plunge thrice in the Tiber on a winter morning, and crawled on bleeding knees over the Campus Martius, or brought a phial of water from the Nile to sprinkle in the fane of the goddess.[467] Even lust, grossness, and cruelty, even poisoning and abortion, seem to lose some of their blackness when they are compared with an innocent literary vanity, or a pathetic eagerness to read the future or to soothe the pangs of a guilty conscience.

The truth is that Juvenal is as much shocked by the “new woman” as he is by the vicious woman. He did not understand, or he could not acquiesce in the great movement for the emancipation of women, which had set in long before his time, and which, like all such movements, brought evil with it as well as good. There is perhaps nothing more striking in the social history of Rome than the inveterate conservatism of Roman sentiment in the face of accomplished change. Such moral rigidity is almost necessarily prone to pessimism. The Golden Age lies in the past; the onward sweep of society seems to be always moving towards the abyss. The ideal past of the Roman woman lay more than two centuries and a half behind the time when Juvenal was born. The old Roman matron was, by legal theory, in the power of her husband, yet assured by religion and sentiment a dignified position in the family, and treated with profound, if somewhat cold, respect; she was busied with household cares, [pg 79]and wanting in the lighter graces and charms, austere, self-contained, and self-controlled. But this severe ideal had begun to fade even in the days of the elder Cato.[468] And there is hardly a fault or vice attributed by Juvenal to the women of Domitian’s reign, which may not find parallel in the nine or ten generations before Juvenal penned his great indictment against the womanhood of his age. The Roman lady’s irritable pride of birth is at least as old as the rivalry of the two Fabiae in the fourth century.[469] The elder Cato dreaded a rich wife as much as Juvenal,[470] and satirised as bitterly the pride and gossip and luxury of the women of his time. Their love of gems and gold ornaments and many-coloured robes and richly adorned carriages, is attested by Plautus and the impotent legislation of C. Oppius.[471] Divorce and ghastly crime in the noblest families were becoming common in the days of the Second Punic War. About the same time began that emancipation of women from the jealous restraints of Roman law, which was to be carried further in the Antonine age.[472] The strict forms of marriage, which placed the wife in the power of her husband, fell more and more into desuetude. Women attained more absolute control over their property, and so much capital became concentrated in their hands that, about the middle of the second century B.C., the Voconian law was passed to prohibit bequests to them, with the usual futile result of such legislation.[473] Yet the old ideal of the industrious housewife never died out, and Roman epitaphs for ages record that the model matron was a wool-worker and a keeper at home. A senator of the reign of Honorius praises his daughter for the same homely virtues.[474] But from the second century B.C. the education of the Roman girl of the higher classes underwent a great change.[475] Dancing, music, and the higher accomplishments were no longer under a ban, although they were still suspected by people of the old-fashioned school. Boys and girls received the same training from the grammarian, and read their Homer and Ennius together.[476] There were women in the time of [pg 80]Lucretius, as in the time of Juvenal, who interlarded their conversation with Greek phrases.[477] Cornelia, the wife of Pompey, was trained in literature and mathematics, and even had some tincture of philosophy.[478] The daughter of Atticus, who became the wife of Agrippa, was placed under the tuition of a freedman, who, as too often happened, seems to have abused his trust.[479] Even in the gay circle of Ovid, there were learned ladies, or ladies who wished to be thought so.[480] Even Martial reckons culture among the charms of a woman. Seneca maintained that women have an equal capacity for cultivation with men.[481] Thus the blue-stocking of Juvenal, for whom he has so much contempt, had many an ancestress for three centuries, as she will have many a daughter till the end of the Western Empire.[482] Even in philosophy, usually the last study to attract the female mind, Roman ladies were asserting an equal interest. Great ladies of the Augustan court, even the empress herself, had their philosophic directors,[483] and the fashion perhaps became still more general under M. Aurelius. Epictetus had met ladies who were enthusiastic admirers of the Platonic Utopia, but the philosopher rather slyly attributes their enthusiasm to the absence of rigorous conjugal relations in the Ideal Society.[484] Even in the field of authorship, women were claiming equal rights. The Memoirs of Agrippina was one of the authorities of Tacitus.[485] The poems of Sulpicia, mentioned by Martial,[486] were read in Gaul in the days of Sidonius.[487] Greek verses, of some merit in spite of a pedantic affectation, by Balbilla, a friend of the wife of Hadrian, can still be read on the Colossus of Memnon.[488] Calpurnia, the wife of Pliny, may not have been an author; but she shared all Pliny’s literary tastes; she set his poems to music, and gave him the admiration of a good wife, if not of an impartial critic.

Juvenal feels as much scorn for the woman who is interested in public affairs and the events on the frontier,[489] as he feels for the woman who presumes to balance the merits of Virgil and Homer. And here he is once more at war with a [pg 81]great movement towards the equality of the sexes. From the days of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, to the days of Placidia, the sister of Honorius, Roman women exercised, from time to time, a powerful, and not always wholesome, influence on public affairs. The politic Augustus discussed high matters of state with Livia.[490] The reign of Claudius was a reign of women and freedmen. Tacitus records, with a certain distaste for the innovation, that Agrippina sat enthroned beside Claudius on a lofty tribunal, to receive the homage of the captive Caractacus.[491] Nero emancipated himself from the grasping ambition of his mother only by a ghastly crime. The influence of Caenis on Vespasian in his later days tarnished his fame.[492] The influence of women in provincial administration was also becoming a serious force. In the reign of Tiberius, Caecina Severus, with the weight of forty years’ experience of camps, in a speech before the Senate, denounced the new-fangled custom of the wives of generals and governors accompanying them abroad, attending reviews of troops, mingling freely with the soldiers, and taking an active part in business, which was not always favourable to pure administration.[493] In the inscriptions of the first and second centuries, women appear in a more wholesome character as “mothers of the camp,” or patronesses of municipal towns and corporations.[494] They have statues dedicated to them for liberality in erecting porticoes or adorning theatres or providing civic games or feasts.[495] And on one of these tablets we read of a Curia mulierum at Lanuvium.[496] We are reminded of the “chapter of matrons” who visited Agrippina with their censure,[497] and another female senate, under Elagabalus, which dealt with minute questions of precedence and graded etiquette.[498] On the walls of Pompeii female admirers posted up their election placards in support of their favourite candidates.[499] Thus Juvenal was fighting a lost battle, lost long before he wrote. For good or evil, women in the first and second centuries were making themselves a power.

Although he was probably a very light believer in the old mythology,[500] and treated its greatest figures with scant respect, Juvenal had all the old Roman prejudice against those eastern worships which captivated so many women of his day. And, here again, the satirist is assailing a movement which had set in long before he wrote, and which was destined to gain immense impetus and popularity in the two following centuries. The eunuch priests of the Great Mother, with their cymbals and Phrygian tiaras, had appeared in Italy in the last years of the Hannibalic War.[501] The early years of the second century B.C. were convulsed by the scandals and horrors of the Dionysiac orgies, which fell on Rome like a pestilence.[502] The purity of women and the peace of families were in serious danger, till the mischief was stamped out in blood. The worship of Isis found its way into the capital at least as early as Sulla, and defied the hesitating exclusion of Augustus.[503] At this distance, we can see the raison d’être of what the satirist regarded as religious aberrations, the full treatment of which must be reserved for another chapter. The world was in the throes of a religious revolution, and eagerly in quest of some fresh vision of the Divine, from whatever quarter it might dawn. The cults of the East seemed to satisfy cravings and emotions, which found no resting-place in the national religion. Their ritual appealed to the senses and imagination, while their mysteries seemed to promise a revelation of God and immortality. Their strange mixture of the sensuous and the ascetic was specially adapted to fascinate weak women who had deeply sinned, and yet occasionally longed to repent. The repentance indeed was often shallow enough; the fasting and mortification were compatible with very light morals.[504] There were the gravest moral abuses connected with such worships as that of Magna Mater. It is well known that the temples of Isis often became places of assignation and guilty intrigue.[505] An infatuated Roman lady in the reign of Tiberius had been seduced by her lover in the pretended guise of the god Anubis.[506] The Chaldaean seer or the Jewish hag might often [pg 83]arouse dangerous hopes, or fan a guilty passion by casting a horoscope or reading a dream.[507] But Juvenal’s scorn seems to fall quite as heavily on the innocent votary who was striving to appease a burdened conscience, as on one who made her superstition a screen for vice.

In spite of the political extinction of the Jewish race, its numbers and influence grew in Italy. The very destruction of the Holy Place and the external symbols of Jewish worship threw a more impressive air of mystery around the dogmas of the Jewish faith, of which even the most cultivated Romans had only vague conceptions.[508] The Jews, from the time of the first Caesar, had worked their way into every class of society.[509] A Jewish prince had inspired Caligula with an oriental ideal of monarchy.[510] There were adherents of Judaism in the household of the great freedmen of Claudius, and their growing influence and turbulence compelled that emperor to expel the race from the capital.[511] The worldly, pleasure-loving Poppaea had, perhaps, yielded to the mysterious charm of the religion of Moses.[512] But it was under the Flavians, who had such close associations with Judaea, that Jewish influences made themselves most felt. And in the reign of Domitian, two members of the imperial house, along with many others, suffered for following the Jewish mode of life.[513] Their crime is also described as “atheism,” and Clemens is, in the old Roman spirit, said to have been a man of the most “contemptible inactivity.” In truth, the “Jewish life” was a description which might cover many shades of belief and practice in religion, including Christianity itself. The secret worship of a dim, mysterious Power, Who was honoured by no imposing rites, a spirit of detachment and quietism, which shrank from games and spectacles and the scenes of fashion, and nursed the dream of a coming kingdom which was not of this world, excited the suspicion and contempt of the coarse, strenuous Roman nature. Yet, in the gloom and deep corruption of that sombre time, such a life of retreat and renunciation had a strange charm for naturally [pg 84]pious souls, especially among women. There were indeed many degrees of conformity to the religion of Palestine. While some were attracted by its more spiritual side, others confined themselves to an observance of the Sabbath, which became very common in some quarters of Rome under the Empire. The children, as Juvenal tells us, were sometimes trained to a complete conformity to the law of Moses.[514] But Juvenal is chiefly thinking of the mendicant population from Palestine who swarmed in the neighbourhood of the Porta Capena and the grove of the Muses, practising all the arts which have appealed in all ages to superstitious women. Thus the Judaism of the times of Nero or Domitian might cover anything from the cunning of the gipsy fortune-teller to the sad, dreaming quietism of Pomponia Graecina.[515]

Yet it must be admitted that, although Juvenal, in his attacks on women, has mixed up very real vice with superstition and mere innocent eccentricity, or the explosive energy of a new freedom, the real vices of many women of his time are a melancholy fact. The Messalinas and Poppaeas had many imitators and companions in their own class. It is true that even the licentious fancy of Ovid and Martial generally spares the character of the unmarried girl. She was, in the darkest times, as a rule, carefully guarded from the worst corruptions of the spectacles,[516] or from the reckless advances of the hardened libertine, although an intrigue with a tutor was not unknown.[517] Her marriage was arranged often in mere childhood, seldom later than her seventeenth year. A girl was rarely betrothed after nineteen.[518] Her temptations and danger often began on her wedding-day. That there was a high ideal of pure and happy marriage, even in the times of the greatest licence, we know from Pliny and Plutarch, and from Martial himself.[519] But there were serious perils before the child-bride, when she was launched upon the great world of Roman society. A marriage of convenience with some member of a tainted race, blasé with precocious and [pg 85]unnatural indulgence, and ready to concede the conjugal liberty which he claimed, was a perilous trial to virtue. The bonds of old Roman marriage had, for ages, been greatly relaxed, and the Roman lady of independent fortune and vigorous, highly trained intellect, could easily find consolation for marital neglect. From Seneca to S. Jerome, the foppish procurator of the great lady was a dangerous and suspected person,[520] and not always without good cause. Surrounded by an army of slaves and the other obsequious dependents of a great house, treated with profound deference, and saluted with the pompous titles of domina and regina, the great lady’s lightest caprice became law.[521] Costly jewels and the rarest luxuries of the toilet poured in upon her from regions which were only visited by the captains of Red Sea merchantmen, or by some Pythagorean ascetic seeking the fountains of the wisdom of the East.[522]

The political life of Rome had been extinguished by a jealous despotism, but social life in the higher ranks was never so intense and so seductive, and women had their full share in it. Ladies dined out regularly with their husbands, even at the emperor’s table,[523] and they were liable to be assailed by the artistic wiles of which Ovid taught the secret, or by the brutal advances of the lawless Caligula.[524] It was a time when people loved to meet anywhere, under the trees of the Campus Martius, in the colonnades of the theatre, or round the seats of the public squares. Everywhere were to be seen those groups which spared no reputation, not even the emperor’s. And behind the chair of the young matron often hovered the dangerous exquisite, who could hum in a whisper the latest suggestive song from Alexandria or Gades,[525] who knew the pedigree of every racehorse and the secret of every intrigue. It is at such scenes that Tacitus is probably glancing when he says that in Germany no one makes a jest of vice, or calls the art of corruption the fashion of the world;[526] chastity is not sapped by the seductions of the spectacles. [pg 86]Augustus had, indeed, set apart the upper seats for women in the theatre and amphitheatre,[527] but on the benches of the circus the sexes freely mingled. It was there, while the factions of the red and blue were shouting themselves hoarse, Ovid pointed out to his pupil in gallantry, that he had his fairest chance of making a dangerous impression.[528] Yet even Ovid is half inclined to be shocked at the scenes on the stage which were witnessed by women and young boys.[529] The foulest tales of the old mythology, the loves of Pasiphae or the loves of Leda, were enacted to the life, or told with a nakedness of language, compared with which even Martial might seem chaste.[530] Not less degrading were the gladiatorial shows, so lavishly provided by Augustus and Trajan, as well as by Caligula and Domitian, at which the Vestals had a place of honour.[531] It is little wonder that women accustomed to take pleasure in the sufferings and death of brave men, should be capable of condemning their poor slave women to torture or the lash for a sullen look, or a half-heard murmur. The grossness with which Juvenal describes the effect of the stage on the morals of women savours of the Suburra.[532] But of the poisonous character of these performances there can be no doubt. And actors, musicians, and gladiators became a danger to the peace of households, as well as to the peace of the streets. The artistes of the pantomime were sternly suppressed both by Tiberius and Domitian, and not without good cause.[533] One famous dancer had the fatal honour of captivating Messalina.[534] The empress of Domitian was divorced for her love of Paris.[535] And the scandals which darkened the fame of the younger Faustina, and impeached the legitimacy of Commodus, even if they were false, must have rested on a certain ground of probability.[536] It is melancholy to hear that M. Aurelius had to restrain the excesses of Roman matrons even under the reign of the philosophers.[537] To all these perils must be added the allurements of household slavery. While a Musonius or a Seneca [pg 87]was demanding equal chastity in man and woman, the new woman of Juvenal boldly claims a vicious freedom equal to her husband’s.[538] The testimony of Petronius is tainted by a suspicion of prurient imagination. But the student of other sources can hardly doubt that, in the first century, as in the fourth, the Roman lady of rank sometimes degraded herself by a servile liaison. A decree of Vespasian’s reign, which his biographer tells us was called for by the general licence, punished the erring matron with the loss of her rank.[539]

These illustrations from other authorities may serve towards a judicial estimate of Juvenal’s famous satire on women. That it is not a prurient invention is proved by the pages of Tacitus and Suetonius and the records of Roman morals for more than two centuries. On the other hand, it must be read with some reservations. Juvenal is a rhetorician with a fiery temperament, who will colour and exaggerate, if he will not invent. He is intensely prejudiced and conventional, a man to whom desertion of ancient usage is almost as bad as a breach of the moral law, a man incapable of seeing that the evils of a new social movement may be more than compensated by the good which it brings. Moreover, the graver vices which he depicts with so much realistic power were certainly not so general as he implies. It is to be suspected that single instances of abnormal depravity have swelled in his heated imagination till they have become types of whole classes of sinners. At the worst, these vices infected only a comparatively small class, idle, luxurious, enervated by the slave system, depraved by the example of a vicious court. The very scorn and indignation with which Juvenal pillories the aristocratic debauchee reveal the existence of a higher standard of virtue. Both the literature and the inscriptions of that age make us acquainted with a very different kind of woman. Over against the Hippia or Saufeia or Messalina of Juvenal we must set the pure and cultivated women whom we meet in the pages of Pliny or Tacitus, or the poor soldier’s concubine in the Inscriptions, who has all the self-denying love and virtue of our own cottagers’ wives.[540]

Just as Juvenal misunderstood the movement of female emancipation, which was to culminate in the legislation of the Antonine age, so has he misconceived some other great social movements of his time. Two in particular, the invasion of the new Hellenism and the rise of the Freedmen, he anathematises with the scorn and old Roman prejudice of the elder Cato.