The world of the high and late Empire kept the conservative ideal of Roman womanhood it had inherited from the Republic. At the same time, the discrepancy between the gender values of the period and lived reality was as great as it had always been; women’s lives were far more variable than the ideal indicated, and there were often more extreme differences in the circumstances of women of different social strata than there were in the lives of men and women of the same social stratum. This pattern we have seen as pervasive in all our discussions of Roman women.
In this chapter, we confront a new issue: geography. How are we to assess the lives of women across a gigantic and complex empire, one whose greatest expanse in the second century C.E., included southern Scotland and the Sahara, the Atlantic coast and inland Turkey? Here were women of the frontiers to whom the Romans referred as “barbarians” and women of Athens whose cultivation and nobility were irreproachable. Not only was the Empire larger and more diverse than ever, it also played an ever-larger part in the consciousness of the city of Rome and the emperor. Rulers and their wives now came from the provinces or from provincial ancestry. Soldiers and merchants came from everywhere and carried the ideas and customs of their own lands to every corner of the Empire at the same moment that they contributed to the dissemination of Roman ideas. And finally, in 212 C.E., the emperor Caracalla issued an edict making every freeman and woman who lived in the Roman provinces a full Roman citizen. Ultimately, the period we are examining, from the middle of the first century to the end of the third, saw the creation of a new culture, one in which local ways remained visible while Romanization was taking place and in which Romanization itself gradually changed from being clearly Italian as it absorbed elements of the local cultures of province and periphery and became increasingly hybrid.
To understand this complicated world is no easy task. Not only do we deal with an expanded geographic field, but the temporal field in this chapter encompasses two and a half centuries, from the death of Nero in 68 to the legalization of Christianity under Constantine in 311–12. This period was full of changes in politics and culture, yet its history has always been difficult to write because the evidence is so scattered and ambiguous. Unlike the Augustan period, the later Empire is represented by few surviving literary texts, especially after the mid-second century, when the interpretive work of an analytic historian like Tacitus is replaced by the anonymous and often self-contradictory biographies of the compendium called the Historia Augusta, the history of the rulers. Large-scale public monuments are still constructed until the early third century, then become rare until the end of the century. Private monuments are common everywhere but, like many of the inscriptions of the period, they are often difficult to date; and the abundant archaeological material is unevenly distributed both temporally and geographically. For all these reasons, to write a chronological history of women, never an easy task in any period, becomes almost impossible.
What guides our arrangement and discussion of material in this chapter, then, is a grid with multiple and variable lines on it. Time appears most regularly where place is less visible—in our section on the women of the court. Here, because of the chronology imposed by the rulers themselves, the women of their families can be seen in time, although patterns of historical change in their lives are almost as hard to make out as they are in the lives of “ordinary” women. For them, whoever these “ordinary” women might be, place and social status make more of a difference to the way they live than time seems to, although this is probably as much a result of missing evidence as of enduring or conservative gender roles. Our scattered and varied evidence of women in the high and later Empire, presented according to their social locations, suggests that the conservative Republican gender ideals of the elite men in the city of Rome remained normative and defined “tradition” for many within the Empire. Those in other parts of the Empire who shared the social standing or the social aspirations of that conservative elite drew on this tradition, and they used the gender ideal as a way to speak of belonging, whether to a social stratum, a place, or a moral vision. It helped to define them as ROMAN. For the rest, the ideal was unknown, out of reach, or perhaps we simply have no evidence of them and their motives at all. They are, nonetheless, a crucial part of the richness of this cosmopolitan imperial environment, called by the Romans orbis terrarum, the entire world.
Figure 13.1. Gold coin of Plotina from Rome, ca. 112–115 C.E., with her portrait on the obverse (A), and Vesta seated on the reverse (B).
Empresses and Women of the Upper Classes
The wife of Agricola, Domitia Decidiana, was a woman of Roman traditional virtue: the marriage, says her son-in-law Tacitus, writing toward the end of the first century C.E., was characterized by concord and praiseworthy kindness between the partners: “they lived in rare accord, maintained by mutual affection and unselfishness; but in such a partnership the good wife deserves more than half the praise, just as a bad one deserves more than half the blame” (Agricola 6.1; Mattingly 1948). The Panegyric, which Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia under Trajan, wrote in 100 C.E. to praise the emperor, compliments Trajan on his choice of partner and lets the world know that the empress Plotina’s traditional goodness (Fig. 13.1: Coin of Plotina associated with goddess Vesta), like Domitia’s, reflected credit on her husband and his public life:
your own wife contributes to your honour and glory, as a supreme model of the ancient virtues; the chief pontiff himself, has he to take a wife, would choose her or one like her—if one exists. From your position she claims nothing for herself but the pleasure it gives her, unswerving in her devotion not to your power but to yourself.… How modest she is in her attire, how moderate the number of her attendants, how unassuming when she walks abroad! This is the work of a husband who has fashioned and formed her habits: there is glory enough for a wife in obedience. When she sees her husband unaccompanied by pomp and intimidation, she goes about in silence herself, and so far as her sex permits, she follows his example of walking on foot.
(Panegyric 83; Radice 1975)
Compare this with an inscription of late fourth century C.E., Rome, set up by a member of the non-Christian elite in honor of his wife Paulina, whom he calls “chaste, faithful, pure in mind and body.” Paulina speaks in her own voice on the back of the statue base:
The glory of my own parents gave me no greater gift than that I have seemed worthy of my husband; but all fame and honor is in my husband’s name … Because of you (husband Agorius), all hail me as blessed and holy, because you yourself proclaim me throughout the world as a good woman; I am known to all, even those who do not know me. Why should I not be pleasing, with a husband such as you?
(Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 6.1779 / Inscriptiones Latinae Liberae Rei
Publicae 1259; Gardner and Wiedemann 1991: 66–67)
Traditional Ideals of Womanhood
Through much of the Imperial period, the ideal of Roman womanhood remained remarkably consistent. The ideal, rooted in the social conditions of the city of Rome, the capital of the great Empire, was articulated by Roman writers, largely men of the elite (upper-class or intellectual), and it drew heavily on the language of the conservative gender ideology of the Republican and Augustan periods, not least because these men, like Agorius, never stopped reading “whatever was composed in Latin or Greek, whether the thought of wise men for whom the gate of heaven stands open, or the verses which skilled powers have composed, or prose writings” (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 6.1779; Gardner and Wiedemann 1991: 67). Embedded in law, literature, and art, and supported in the East by comparable Greek traditions of literature (see below, Plutarch’s “Advice to Bride and Groom”) and social life, the ideal spread to the most Romanized and Hellenized parts of the Empire, often appropriated first by the local upper classes as a part of the process of assimilation and political mobility.
The Roman ideal appears most clearly in those passages in speeches to emperors, letters to mothers, and epitaphs that intend to compliment women. There the ideal was constantly reiterated in language that changed surprisingly little over the course of six hundred years. However, in other genres, it seldom finds pure and disinterested expression. We locate it in poems, histories, letters to friends, entangled in a web of political gossip, spoken in the same breath as castigation, enmeshed in and complicated by practices that seem to modern eyes to be in direct conflict with it. Two examples of upper-class Roman women of Italy mentioned in the letters of Pliny the Younger (compiled between 97 and 112 C.E.) may make the problem visible, if not clear.
[Pompeius Saturninus] has recently read me some letters which he said were written by his wife, but sounded to me like Plautus or Terence being read in prose. Whether they are really his wife’s, as he says, or his own (which he denies) one can only admire him either for what he writes, or the way he has cultivated and refined the taste of the girl he married.
(Letters 1.16.6; Radice 1975)
The letters cannot be by the wife, according to Pliny, but if they are, the credit must go to her husband for the education he has given her. Again we hear the language of Agorius’s wife Paulina, who credits all her fame and honor to her husband, and of Pliny’s discussion of Plotina, whose wonderful behavior he says is the work of the husband who formed her.
When credit does go to a woman, Ummidia, it is hardly unproblematically rendered.
Ummidia Quadratilla is dead, having almost attained the age of seventy-nine and kept her powers unimpaired up to her last illness, along with a sound constitution and sturdy physique which are rare in a woman. She died leaving an excellent will: the grandson inherits two-thirds of the estate, and her granddaughter the remaining third.… He lived in his grandmother’s house but managed to combine personal austerity with deference to her sybaritic tastes. She kept a troupe of pantomime actors whom she treated with an indulgence unsuitable in a lady of her high position, but Quadratus never watched their performances either in the theatre or at home, nor did she insist on it. Once when she was asking me to supervise her grandson’s education she told me that as a woman, with all a woman’s idle hours to fill, she was in the habit of amusing herself playing draughts or watching her mimes, but before she did she always told Quadratus to go away and work: which I thought showed respect for his youth as much as her affection.
(Pliny the Younger, Letters 7.24.1–5, abridged; Radice 1975)
Ummidia’s wealth allows her trivial and morally ambiguous pastimes, but she raises her grandson responsibly, keeps him out of the way of her games and her mime troupe, and then leaves all her wealth to her proper heir. Pliny does not mention another proper use of her money, but we can learn it from inscriptions; Ummidia was as generous a patron to her community as Pliny was to his, and she is on record as giving to her hometown, Casinum, a temple, an amphitheater and a stage (Raepsaet-Charlier 1986: 649, no. 829; Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum VI.28526; Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum X.5183 = Inscriptiones Latinae Liberae Rei Publicae 5628).
What emerges from these two letters is a sense that female virtue in the old Republican version is no longer the only form (was it ever?) for upper-class womanhood. Education and wealth may be both problematic and respectable at the same time. The writing wife, framed as her husband’s creature, is nevertheless part of the game, part of a literate, writing world; the rich old lady, freed from male control and able to do as she likes, nevertheless, like the men of her class, acts responsibly to her grandson and generously to her community. In neither case is virtue clearly expressed since the women involved are crossing some essential boundaries: both letters reflect the responses of a judgmental and conservative, though not unsophisticated, man, to these complex gender practices. Throughout this chapter we will continue to see representations of women behaving around, against, and near the ideal; however, only when compliments are paid to a mother, wife, or empress are women pictured as fully exemplifying this ideal.
Empresses
Pliny the Younger’s Panegyric, delivered in 100 C.E. emphasized virtues of modesty and restraint in speaking of Trajan’s wife Plotina and the emperor’s sister Marciana; the two women lived harmoniously in his household, united without envy or quarrels in their loyalty to the ruler (Panegyric, 83; see above, under “Traditional Ideals of Womanhood”). The ideal takes the usual form: self-effacing wives and mothers, dutiful and modest, placing family before everything except perhaps Rome itself. When Hadrian gave his funeral orations for Plotina (in 121 or 123?) and for his mother-in-law Matidia, the niece of Trajan (in 119), he stressed these same virtues once more. After speaking of his personal grief at the death of Matidia, Hadrian went on to describe her fidelity to her husband’s memory.
[She mourned him] during a long widowhood in the flower of her life, a woman of the greatest beauty and chastity, [very obed]ient to her mother, herself a mother most indulgent and a most devoted kinswoman, helping all. A burden to no man nor disagreeable to any man, and in her relations with me of extraordinary [goodness], with such modesty that she never asked anything from me [for herself and often] did not ask what I would rather have been asked by the women of my family. She in her good will prayed with many extended vows for such [good fortune] to befall me, and preferred to rejoice in my good fortune rather than benefit from it.
(Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 14.3579; Smallwood 1966: 56 n. 114)
Despite the laudable harmony of Trajan’s household, fourteen years elapsed after he became emperor in 98 before any of the women of his family were depicted on coins, including his wife Plotina, his sister Marciana (whose death in 112 may have provided the impetus for the coinage) and her daughter Matidia. Restraint in providing public honors to the women of the court characterized the reign of Trajan, as it had also the time of Augustus (at least in Rome and the West). The types the Trajanic coins use for these women include association with Vesta, Fides, and Pietas, all about traditional virtues of home, hearth, religion, and children (with Matidia) (Fig. 13.1). As far as we know, none of the Imperial women is represented on the historical reliefs of the period, but Plotina and Marciana did receive the honorific Imperial title of Augusta soon after 100, when Pliny commended them for their modesty in declining the Senate’s first offer of the title (Panegyric 84). Marciana and her daughter Matidia were the first Imperial women to receive the title without being either wife or mother of an emperor; other honors, however, came to them and Plotina only after Trajan’s death. His successor Hadrian, who was married to Sabina, daughter of Matidia and thus grandniece of Trajan, saw his association with these Imperial women as a guarantee of his own authority; for this reason, he declared Plotina Augusta in 128, and had both women deified on their deaths, starting with Matidia in 119 C.E.: “he bestowed special honors upon his mother-in-law with gladiatorial games and other ceremonies” (Historia Augusta, Hadrian 9, Magie 1967–68). Along with the funeral oration, he honored her with coins with the label DIVA AUGUSTA MATIDIA (British Museum Collection III: p. 281, nos. 328–32), and erected to her a temple whose remains have been identified in the Campus Martius in Rome. And, making his motives ever clearer, he issued a significant coin on the obverse of which Trajan’s portrait appears with the label Divus Traianus, while the reverse shows Diva Plotina (Fig. 13.2); his claims to the throne are thus doubly secured by his wife’s lineage and by his own adoption, and he merits the throne as well by the pious honors he offers to his adoptive ancestors (Boatwright 1991a, and Temporini 1978).
In his lifetime, Hadrian’s adopted son and successor Antoninus Pius had honored his deceased wife Faustina (d. 141) with a temple in the Roman Forum, had instituted charitable donations to worthy girl children from the Italian countryside (puellae Faustinianae [Historia Augusta, Antoninus 8]), and had named her diva on coins. The emperors who follow become ever more encrusted with honors, ever more clearly godlike, and their wives participate in the process. As these honors escalate in number and hyperbole, the tension increases between traditional womanly reticence and self-effacement on the one hand, and honors, funeral orations, coins, portraits, benefactions, and titles on the other (Faustina the Younger’s honors: Dio 72.5, Historia Augusta, Marcus 26.8, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 14.40, and BMC IV, nos. 700–705). By the time of Septimius Severus’s reign (197–211), the empress Julia Domna will be addressed as Mater Senatus (mother of the Senate: BMC V, clxxvi and cxcv ff.) and Mater Castrorum (mother of the military camps: Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 8.26598, a title first used apparently for Faustina the Younger when she accompanied her husband Marcus Aurelius to his campaigns in the eastern part of the Empire in 175, as in Dio 72.5, Historia Augusta, Marcus 26.8). Automatically granted the title of Augusta, she represents the trend away from the earlier tradition of emperor and empress as first among equals; yet at the same time, her many titles and honors retain their connection to motherhood and the primacy of family.
Figure 13.2. Qold coin of Hadrian, minted after 122 in Rome. On the obverse (A) is the divinized Trajan; on the reverse (B) Diva Plotina. Hadrian used these images to construct his new divine family.
Only rarely does our evidence provide information about the occupations and interests of individual empresses, about their social and political influence, or about their daily lives. Whether they had public prominence or were seen as essentially modest and retiring, the empresses do seem to have exercised private influence; the evidence is, however, very spotty. Julia Titi, the daughter of the emperor Titus, nominated the consul for 84 C.E., according to the later historian Dio (67.4.2), and Vitellius’s wife, Galeria, about whom we also know relatively little, saved the consul Galerius Trachalus from execution in 68 (Tacitus, Histories 2.60.2).
Plotina, self-effacing as she may have been, is said to have given advice in domestic matters just as Livia and the other empresses had. Thus we hear that Trajan betrothed his grandniece Vibia Sabina to Hadrian, “Plotina being in favor of the match, while (he himself), according to Marius Maximus, was not greatly enthusiastic.” (Historia Augusta Hadrian 2.10). Another abridged collection of Imperial lives (Epitome de Caesaribus 42.21; trans. Elaine Fantham) reports that when Trajan let his officials extort from the provincials, Plotina “reproached him for neglecting his own good name … and as a result she made him detest unjust exactions.” This comment is interesting both for Plotina’s role as moral arbiter and for her concern with the world outside of the city of Rome.
The empress’ clear awareness of public matters in the provinces can be seen in a letter she wrote to Hadrian after Trajan’s death (117 C.E). Inscriptions in colloquial Greek record her formal request to the emperor on behalf of Popillius (head of the Epicurean school at Athens) as well as her letter to Popillius. In the damaged Greek inscription we can see her adherence to Epicurean doctrine as she speaks of the principles of “our school.” The letter to the emperor reads,
How much I am interested in the sect of Epicurus you know very well, Master. Your help is needed in the matter of its succession; for in view of the ineligibility of all but Roman citizens as successors, the range of choice is very narrow. I ask therefore in the name of Popillius Theotimus, the present successor at Athens, to allow him to write in Greek that part of his disposition which deals with regulating the succession and grant him the power of filling his place by a successor of peregrine status,1 should personal considerations make it advisable; and let the future successors of the sect of Epicurus henceforth enjoy the same right as you grant to Theotimus; all the more since the practice is that each time the testator has made a mistake in the choice of successor the disciples of the above sect after a general deliberation put in his place the best man, a result that will be more easily attained if he is selected from a larger group.
(Inscriptiones Latinae Liberae Rei Pablicae II. 7784.4–17; Alexander 1938: 161)
The interest of empresses in philosophical matters reappears in information about Julia Domna’s patronage of Philostratus and the suggestion that she was even called Julia the philosopher (Bowersock 1969: 103). Julia Domna, Dio says, also took care of petitions and letters for Caracalla when he was emperor, from 211 to 217, (Dio 78.18.2–3 and 79.4.2–3) and held public receptions for the most prominent men, just as did the emperor (Dio 79.4.2–3).
The empresses traveled extensively with their husbands, as we gather from reports (some much later and of questionable reliability) of Plotina’s being with Trajan at his death on campaign (Historia Augusta, Hadrian 5.9–10) and of Faustina’s having accompanied Marcus Aurelius (Dio 72.5). Sabina traveled with Hadrian to Egypt (ca. 130 C.E.) where her friend Julia Balbilla commemorated the visit and her own poetic skill in Greek epigrams on the thigh of the Colossus of Memnon. Despite her Roman name, Balbilla was a Greek noblewoman and her epigrams adopt the dialect and language of Sappho (who lived almost a thousand years before her!) In part of a poem to honor Sabina and the trip to Egypt, Balbilla also proudly identifies herself:
Memnon, son of Dawn and revered Tithonus, sitting before the Theban city of Zeus or Amenoth, Egyptian king, as the priests who know the ancient tales relate, Hail! and may you be keen to welcome by your cry the august wife too of the Lord Hadrian …
I do not judge that this statue of yours can perish, and I perceive within me that your soul shall be immortal. For pious were my parents and grandparents. Balbillus the wise and Antiochus the king, father of my father. From their line do I draw my noble blood and these are the writings of Balbilla the pious.
(Bowie 1990: 63)
Like many wives of Imperial governors, and like some of the Julio-Claudian women as well,2 the women of the later courts traveled into worlds far beyond the imaginings of the writers of the Twelve Tables whose laws placed such clear constraints on the mobility and autonomy of Roman women.
Pliny’s evocation of Plotina as a retiring and rather dull matron becomes more colorful when we see the evidence of the travel, the cultivated interests, and the interventions behind the throne of the empress; if she, the least flamboyant of her century, had such a cosmopolitan life, we must see Sabina, Faustina, and the others as at least comparable. This hardly means, however, that these were women who exercised the influence of Augustus’s empress Livia. Their lives were apparently more private, more involved with other Imperial women, with family and property, and with literary interests (Boatwright 1991a). The orator Fronto, teacher of the Imperial heir Marcus Aurelius, thought it appropriate to write the following cloyingly conventional birthday greeting to Marcus’s mother Domitia Lucilla using the Greek language. However, he was sufficiently in awe of her standards (or her standing) that he first asked his pupil Marcus to check the correctness of the letter (mid-second century, and see the earlier letter about women’s birthday celebrations in the introduction).
To the Mother of Marcus
Willingly by heaven, yes, with the greatest pleasure possible have I sent my Gratia (his wife) to keep your birthday with you, and would have come myself had it been lawful. But for myself … this consulship is a clog around my feet …
The right thing, it seems, would have been that all women from all quarters should have gathered for this day and celebrated your birth-feast, first of all the women that love their husbands and love their children and are virtuous, and secondly all that are genuine and truthful, and the third company to keep the feast should have been the kind-hearted and the affable and the accessible and the humble-minded; and many other ranks of women would be there to share in some part of your praise and virtue, seeing that you possess and are mother of all virtues and accomplishments befitting a woman, just as Athena possesses and is mistress of every art.
(Fronto, Correspondence 2.7; Haines 1962)
Although the empresses seem to have had a voice in discussions about the succession in the second century, that voice was far quieter than those of the Severan Julias. Kin of Julia Domna, the three Julias (Julia Maesa, Domna’s sister, and Maesa’s two daughters, Julia Soaemias and Julia Mamaea) determined the succession and removal of emperors. Soaemias’s son Elagabalus became emperor through the intervention of mother and grandmother, and was replaced by his cousin Alexander Severus, son of Mamaea, by the manipulations of his mother and grandmother; Julia Maesa remained at the center of the politics of the period from 211 until her death in 226: “When he [Elagabalus] went to the camp or the Senate-house, he took with him his grandmother [Julia Maesa] … in order that through her prestige he might get greater respect—for by himself he got none.” (Historia Augusta Elagabalus 12.2–3; Magie 1967–68)3
The intervention or “interference” of the Imperial women in state affairs was always seen as problematic by Roman writers. These men always see such involvements as inappropriate and dangerous, for the women are crossing gender boundaries that are meant to keep social order. Perhaps this is why they constantly elide political and sexual transgressions, for both create disorder. No matter how self-effacing the women of the court may have been, no matter what the official claims of their virtue, there seem always to have been rumors of incompatibility or scurrilous tales in circulation about Imperial sexual adventures. Hadrian’s wife Sabina may have been chaste, but like Plotina she was childless and “he would have dismissed his wife … for being moody and difficult, if he had been a private citizen, as he himself used to say” (Historia Augusta Hadrian. 11; trans. Elaine Fantham). Marcus Aurelius’s empress Faustina, daughter of his predecessor Antoninus Pius and mother of his many children “allegedly had once seen gladiators pass by and was inflamed with passion for one of them. While troubled by a long illness she confessed to her husband about her passion.” The same author goes on to intimate that Faustina’s son Commodus was actually fathered by a gladiator:
[H]er son Commodus was actually begotten in adultery, since it is reasonably well-known that Faustina chose both sailors and gladiators as paramours for herself at Caieta. When [the emperor] was told about her so that he might divorce her—if not execute her—he is reported to have said, “if we send our wife away, we must give back her dowry too”—and what dowry did she have but the empire, which he had received from his father-in-law when adopted by him at Hadrian’s wish
(Antoninus. 19; Birley 1976)
The political goal of this kind of gossip is obvious: the writer damages the reputation of the emperor in an environment where his inability to control his wife speaks worlds of his other inadequacies. A passage about Marcus Aurelius giving Imperial posts to his wife’s lovers is just such a piece of scandal (Historia Augusta. Antoninus 29) exploiting the spicy combination of sexual transgression and political interference. Unquestionably late, unreliable, and often profoundly silly, Historia Augusta (late third and fourth century) reveals the persistence of this standardized gossip about female transgression.
In contrast with such scandalous rumors, the representations of the wives of Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius in state art and inscriptions provide us with a view of court women that more closely resembles the praise literature of speeches. Stressing marital loyalty (even a kind of affection) and dynastic duty, these monuments erase both the scandalous and the cosmopolitan elements of the lives of the empresses. The Column Base of Antoninus Pius, dated to 161 in Rome, shows the emperor and Faustina I ascending together to the heavens on the back of a strange youthful figure, a psychopomp or being who bears the soul away (Fig. 13.3). Just as the deceased Sabina is borne aloft on the back of an eagle on a relief (after 136–37) in which Hadrian sits watching, the apotheosis of Antoninus and Faustina suggests the marital harmony so important to the public self-representation of the Imperial family as family. Similarly, in the coins of Imperial couples that present husband and wife clasping right hands in a gesture (the dextrarum iunctio) associated with the concord of treaties and of marriage, the visual imagery of the state puts on parade a dutiful and harmonious couple. In fact, the public ideology of concord reached into the private realm (if we can even separate them by this modern polarization) when the senate decreed, on the death of Faustina II (175?), that “silver images of Marcus and Faustina should be set up in the temple of Venus and Roma and that an altar should be erected whereon all the maidens married in the city and their bridegrooms should offer sacrifice.” (Dio 72.31.1); they may be shown, on a coin, at the altar below the larger figures of the emperor and empress who join hands as Concordia brings them together (Reekmans 1957; Davies 1985).
Figure 13.3. Base of the Column of Antoninus Pius from Rome, erected around the time of his death, ca. 161 C.E. On the front is the apotheosis of Antoninus and Faustina, his wife, watched by the goddess Roma and the personification of the Campus Martius, the place where the funeral pyres of the emperors and their families burned.
The imagery of the good wife persisted, despite the scandal-mongering, in the state-sponsored public images for Faustina’s daughter, wife of their adopted son Marcus Aurelius. The coins associate Faustina the Younger with Marcus and their son Commodus (161–75 C.E.) and put her face on the obverse of coins whose reverses often show Felicitas (fruitfulness / good fortune), Felix Temporum (the prosperity of the era), Fecunditas (fertility) or Juno Lucina (protector of women in childbirth) with large numbers of children; the numbers and ages of the children seem to change with the births and deaths of the Imperial offspring (Fig. 13.4). The emperor and his wife thus emerge as the model not just of a dutiful but of a harmonious and fertile marriage: their domestication becomes the pattern of Roman marital harmony, as the state’s ideology penetrated the private once more (Fittschen 1982). This aristocratic image of marital concord has earlier models (see Chapter 12), but the Antonine dynasty appears to make the first broad public use of it. This may spring from the urge to win a more intimate loyalty from the empire’s people to their rulers as quasi-kinfolk; it may also indicate a state policy of reinforcing traditional (if reformulated) Roman concerns with domestic morality and reproductive responsibility. And as always, such visual ideology serves more powerfully than any speech or decree to remind people of the peace attending civil and dynastic stability.
The most interesting and latest case of the construction of the harmonious Imperial family with its virtuous wife is also the most obvious in its political motives. Septimius Severus, the Roman general from North Africa who overcame other contenders for the Imperial throne after the civil wars at the end of the second century, married Julia Domna, a Syrian aristocrat whom the third century texts describe variously as dramatically beautiful, intellectual, long-suffering, adulterous, powerful, and dangerous (for example, Dio 78.18, Herodian 4.3.8–9, or Historia Augusta, Severus 21.6–8). They are frequently represented together with their two sons Geta and Caracalla (or in various combinations) from the early childhood of Geta until Septimius Severus’s death in 211. Gold coins show Julia, her heavy looped and braided hair identifying her immediately, with her two boys. The nearly adult sons appear with their parents (riding in their father’s carriage, watching their mother make a sacrifice, Caracalla shaking hands with his father as Geta stands between them and Julia Domna looks on approvingly) (Fig. 13.5) on the family arch set up in 206–9 to commemorate their visit to Septimius’s birthplace, Leptis Magna (in Libya). And finally, as adults, the sons joined their parents and Caracalla’s wife and father-in-law on the Arch set up by the moneychangers in Rome. The vast public imagery of the family was reinforced by the many statue-groups that graced town squares and temple precincts in all parts of the empire; a great series is preserved at Perge, the town from which at least one other major Imperial family group, Hadrianic in date, remains to indicate the way the Imperial family image structured the cityscape.
Figure 13.4. Coin of Faustina the Younger from Rome, ca. 161–176 C.E. The reverse (shown) carries the label Felix temporum, the happy future guaranteed by the woman and her six children, presumably the same number the empress had at the time the coin was minted.
Only when we notice the frequent erasure or destruction of the head of Geta is the fiction of the happy family exposed: Geta was murdered by his brother Caracalla when their father died in 211, and Caracalla then decreed that Geta’s image be removed from all monuments (a practice called damnatio memoriae, erasure of memory.) The blank space where Geta’s head had been (now replaced by a modern one) on the handshake scene of the Leptis Arch, like the empty place on the arch in Rome, reveals the importance of the family myth—and its fragility. Official representation used Julia Domna as a linchpin to create a family, and thus gave an empress a central place in dynastic iconography in order to insist on a legitimate past and secure future for the people of the Roman empire (Kampen 1991).
Figure 13.5. Relief with Septimius Severus clasping the hand of his son Caracalla as his second son Geta and his wife Julia Domna (second from the left) look on. The relief dates to about 206 C.E. and comes from the Severan family arch at Leptis Magna in modem Libya.
What we have been seeing is, first, the discrepancy between texts and visual images that results from their differing traditions and functions and so projects conflicting impressions of the empress. Second, despite changes over time in the way the empresses were depicted and honored, there remained a core of imagery tied to the traditional gendered virtues of the Roman elite; this they preserved and disseminated to the world at large. The women of the court, regardless of how sophisticated and complex they might have been, always are praised in terms of conservative domestic behavior. Finally, all our evidence points to the existence of a long-standing public discourse, going back to the time of Livia and Augustus, about the empress’s sexuality. When she is represented for state purposes, it is often because her image acts as an indication of the stable and happy future assured by her reproductive contribution to the dynasty. When she is reproached or slandered, it is through the use of her political interference as it is associated with murderous or adulterous desires and acts: sexuality and power go wrong together, and each is a sign for the other, for each is about the transgression of social boundaries essential to preserving the Roman order. This order in turn depends on an ideal womanhood, defined both by the praise of the empress as a norm and the condemnation of transgressions attributed to her. As the Roman world expanded, the empress’s image remained of value for social reproduction on a vast scale.
Women of Wealth
Like the women of the court, rich women throughout the Roman Empire appear to us through the veils of ideology, genre, and chance. Not only do we know them only as far as we have surviving evidence, evidence shaped by the conventions of each genre from praise literature and public art to gossip, but we also read them as texts written by a small number of people who construct them according to their own interests, and these are not always the interests of the women themselves. Adding to these complexities the expanse of the Empire compounds the problems we met in the discussion of the empresses, since now local traditions may intervene. Thus, regional ideals may modify the ideal of womanhood diffused throughout the Empire in part by the image of the empress; how much diversity there was remains difficult to assess because of the uneven and scattered evidence.
The same problems are generated by the random and probably unrepresentative evidence of the conduct of wealthy women. Thus, for example, Pliny the Younger’s letters (late first to early second century) tell us a good deal about the vocal and influential upper-class women of Italy who brought lawsuits to preserve their own interests (as when the embarrassed writer had to act on behalf of his mother’s old friend Corellia Hispulla in her suit against a very important man [Letter 4.17], or when he represented a mother who brought a criminal case against two freedmen she accused of poisoning her son and forging a will to make themselves his heirs [Letter 7.6]). In addition to being implicated in their fathers’ and husbands’ legal affairs (for example, Letter 3.9), Pliny tells us that women were called as witnesses in political cases and exerted pressure themselves (Letters 3.11 and 9.13).
By comparison with these and other cases Pliny recounts about his years in Rome, the mention of cases in which women were involved under the writer’s governorship in Bithynia (110–12 C.E.) are few; two concern men’s petitions that involve women and one is a request for the emperor’s permission to let the governor’s wife travel for family reasons (10.59, 10.106 and 10.120). Clearly the disputes that needed the emperor’s opinion were rarely initiated by women during Pliny’s governorship; these letters to Trajan over the course of approximately twelve months are all that Pliny has to tell us about the women in his Eastern province.
More useful than the novel of Apuleius, Metamorphoses, for information about the lives of women in his own homeland of North Africa, is the second-century author’s account in the autobiographical Apologia of the circumstances of his marriage to the mature widow Pudentilla. This stylized defense speech throws light on the differing attitudes and motives of a moneyed woman’s male relatives to the question of her remarriage. Prevented from marrying again by the greed of her father-in-law, who feared that her money would pass away from his grandchildren (her sons), the widow finally fell sick “injured by the prolonged inactivity of her sexual organs, and because the lining of her womb was inflamed she often came near to death with her pains. Doctors and mid-wives agreed that the illness had been brought on by deprivation of married life.… while she was still in her prime she should heal her condition by marriage” (Apologia 69; trans. Elaine Fantham). So Pontianus, her elder son, encouraged his friend Apuleius to marry her, but once Pontianus himself married, his new father-in-law pushed him to prosecute Apuleius as a fortune hunter who had seduced Pudentilla by witchcraft. Pudentilla herself does not appear in court. Instead, the prosecution argues from one of her letters (written in Greek) “Apuleius is a wizard: I have been bewitched by him into infatuation: come and rescue me, while I am still able to control myself” (Apologia 82; trans. Elaine Fantham). Apuleius in turn shows that the letter has been distorted by selective quotation, and restores the context to reinterpret the widow’s purpose: “now, as our vicious accusers would persuade you, Apuleius is a wizard and I have been bewitched.” Quoting her explicit affirmation of sanity and acceptance of marriage, Apuleius constructs his defense (83, 84). We see a shrewd and mature widow whose personal life has been first sacrificed to the greed of her own father-in-law, then threatened by the greed of a new male interloper—her son’s father-in-law. Such family disputes in which the woman is merely an acompaniment of the coveted money and property, and her marriage a matter of men’s self-interested manipulation, cannot always have been so lurid as the case Apuleius sets before us, but they persisted as a social injustice into the nineteenth century. Here in second-century Africa the educated and articulate Pudentilla does not appear as a witness to confirm her intentions, but must depend on her new husband to represent her in the courts.
Far more widely distributed evidence about women of wealth and influence comes from the inscriptions of the Roman Empire. All over the Empire and in diverse communities women functioned as benefactors and participants in the public world and used their money to enhance their own and their families’ prestige and to fulfill social and religious responsibilities (Nicols 1989). Among the most interesting samples are inscriptions on public buildings and statue bases that tell of the patronage given and honors received by women in many parts of the Empire. For example, from a synagogue in Asia Minor comes a third-century inscription in Greek for Tation who helped finance the construction and decoration of the building:
Tation, daughter of Straton, son of Empedon, having built with her own money this hall and the court enclosure, made a gift of it to the Jews. The Jewish community honored Tation … with a wreath and the right of precedence.
(Corpus Inscriptionum Judaicarum 2.738; trans. Natalie Kampen)
These inscriptions, naming women of prominent families, including women of the court, also provide an important source of information about gender ideals and practices among the elite of the municipalities and provinces for which no literary evidence survives. Since they are meant to honor the benefactor as much as the recipients, their emphasis is on the social aspects of good character and family and on public material contributions rather than on domestic virtues.
Women of important families gave donations and patronage to the districts where their estates were located, to their birthplaces, and to regions where their own religious responsibilities or their husbands’ political duties took them, as indicated by the following inscription (abbreviations expanded from the inscription are indicated by lower-case letters):
TO CASSIA
CORNELIA
PRISCA Daughter of Caius, Most distinguished Lady
WIFE OF AUFIDIUS FRONTO Consul, Pontifex,
PROCOnsul of ASIA, PATRON OF THE COLONY
PRIESTESS OF AUGUSTA
AND OUR FATHERLAND.
THE PEOPLE OF FORMIAE
gave this base PUBLICLY IN RETURN FOR THE BRILLIANCE
OF HER GENEROUS BENEFACTION.
This late second-century inscription on a statue base from Formiae on the coast south of Rome honors a lady of the senatorial class in terms of her own gift, but it defines her identity by her husband’s Imperial magistracy and local patronage before mentioning her own religious office. Other evidence shows that she was in fact the granddaughter of Cornelius Fronto, tutor of Marcus Aurelius (see above). Her priesthood serves Augusta, the empress Julia Domna, and Patria “the native land,” not an Italian title or local to Formiae but almost certainly conferred on her by a Greek civic community in Asia while her husband was governor, the most prestigious senatorial office he could hold. Italian and Greek, public and private, personal and marital honors are combined in this inscription (Année Epigraphique 1971: 34; trans. Elaine Fantham), one of many that could be cited.
Inscriptions permit reconstruction of the long-standing traditions of public benefactions and patronage of wealthy women; both civic and religious honors were granted them in the eastern and western provinces (Nicols 1989, and Forbis 1990). From Utica in North Africa an inscription of the late second or early third century associates the wife and young daughters of the Proconsul Accius Julianus with him as patrons of the community, no doubt in order to guarantee continuity of patronage when the women outlived the middle-aged consul. The women share the senatorial honorific of their husband and father:
TO L. ACCIUS IULIANUS ASCLEPIANUS, MOST DISTINGUISHED MAN,4 CONSUL AND CURATOR OF THE COMMUNITY OF UTICA
AND TO GALLONIA OCTAVIA MARCELLA, MOST DISTINGUISHED LADY, HIS WIFE
AND TO ACCIA HEURESIS VENANTIA, MOST DISTINGUISHED YOUNG WOMAN
AND TO ACCIA ASCLEPIANILLA CASTOREA, MOST DISTINGUISHED YOUNG WOMAN
THEIR DAUGHTERS. THE COLONY IULIA AELIA HADRIANA AUGUSTA OF UTICA
MADE THIS DEDICATION TO THEIR PERPETUAL PATRONS.
(Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 8.1811;
trans. Elaine Fantham)
In Africa and central Italy women received the extraordinary status of civic patrons, and in Egypt a woman was named “father of the city” in a move that demonstrates the extent to which the occupation of a public role could confuse gender titulature (Sijpestein 1987: 141–42). The extent to which these honors carried any rights to membership in town councils or to the holding of other public offices remains unclear; the third-century jurist Paulus says that women may not hold civil offices (Digest 5.1.12.2), but contemporary inscriptions from Roman Greece and Asia Minor mention women officeholders, including magistrates (Pleket 1969). This is the well-documented case with Plancia Magna of Perge, on the coast of Asia Minor, around 120 C.E. (Boatwright 1991b). The daughter of a senator who had given the City Games and had been rewarded with the title of city founder, Plancia held several important public positions such as demiourgos, the magistrate whose name was used to identify the year; she also held a major religious position, as the inscription on the base of a statue erected by the community tells us:
PLANCIA MAGNA
DAUGHTER OF MARCUS PLANCIUS VARUS
AND DAUGHTER OF THE CITY
PRIESTESS OF ARTEMIS
AND BOTH FIRST AND SOLE PUBLIC PRIESTESS
OF THE MOTHER OF THE GODS
FOR THE DURATION OF HER LIFE
PIOUS AND PATRIOTIC.
(Année Epigraphique 1965, no. 209; trans. Elaine Fantham)
Plancia Magna gave to the city a monumental entrance-gate, parts of which still survive as do a number of its inscriptions and the graceful draped statue of Plancia (Fig. 13.6) that was one of many to decorate the gate. Included among the statues and Greek and Latin inscriptions were the deified Nerva, the deified Trajan and Marciana, the still-living Plotina and Hadrian, and also Plancia’s father and other members of her family and the community of Perge. Paying homage to the Imperial family as well as to her own blood and community family, Plancia used a traditional iconography of cult and kinship to foster the continuing success of her family (Boatwright 1991b).
Figure 13.6. Portrait of the municipal priestess and patron Plancia Magna of Perge, Asia Minor, dated to about 120 C.E.
Women like Plancia Magna or Cassia Cornelia Prisca (both second century C.E.) clearly controlled a substantial private fortune and shared in the ideology of public service for public glory that seems to have motivated generations of Roman men. Even in the Republican period before women had legal power to give away money, the provincials of Greece and Asia had honored governors’ wives with statues most probably in thanks for intercession with the governor in local issues. Now the practice was extended to the wives of local magnates as a routine response to benefactions and incentive to their continuation. There is no reliable way of estimating how many women of the Empire received honors from communities in the form of statues and inscribed bases, nor how many gave and on what scale, but the evidence points to a clear connection between honors and the importance of a woman’s family (Van Bremen 1983). Women who were chosen as priestesses may not have exercised power in any political sense, but they resembled benefactors in the sense that their public functions did bring them a certain prestige and authority. It was usual in the upper classes for women to be chosen as priestesses; their offices might be little more than a political compliment, as was the case for Cassia Cornelia Prisca, or they could mean a long-term renunciation of domestic life. The Vestals continued throughout the Imperial period to have social and religious importance, and their portrait statues, ranging in date from the second to the fourth century, can still be seen not only in the museums of Rome but also near the house of the Vestals in the ruins of the Roman Forum.
In the Greek part of the Roman Empire, women of “good” family might combine their secular lives with honorific services as priestesses, like Plutarch’s friend Clea, priestess of Delphic Apollo. From Plutarch’s dedications to Clea of his essays, “On the Bravery of Women” (see below) and “On Isis and Osiris” (late first or early second century), it is clear that she was a learned and revered lady, more like a city councillor or committeewoman than the inspired prophetesses whom we associate with Delphi.5 Oracles of Apollo, especially in Roman Asia Minor, did have power in that they often determined which women became priestesses. Even priestesses of Athena might be appointed by an oracular decision of Apollo. These priestesses were celibate, but an inscribed oracle from Miletus (late second to early third century C.E.) appoints a widow, Satorneila, the mother of two grown sons:
Late, O townsmen, concerning a priestess of Athena
have you come to hear the divine inspired voice—
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
for it was necessary that the honor of the priesthood of the self-appearing maiden
be received by a woman with the blood of noble ancestors
but after she had previously obtained her share of the gifts of Aphrodite,
for the Cyprian goddess vies with virgin Athena,
since the one is uninitiated in love and the bride chamber,
but the other rejoices in marriage and melodious bridal songs.
Accordingly, in obedience to the fates and and to Pallas,
appoint chaste Satorneila as holy priestess.
(Drew-Bear and Lebek 1973)
Priestly offices may, then, have been a way to honor and reward a benefactress, or they may have provided income for needy women or past priestesses in a community (Gordon 1990).
The picture of women’s political participation through honors, patronage, and officeholding comes to us from the inscriptions and the odd literary passage as a positive, praiseworthy phenomenon. Fathers, husbands, and sons may be named (they usually are) or unmentioned, but what we see is an indication of the public functioning of wealthy upperclass women. This is true as well for freedwomen with money who were to be found in Italy as patrons for local craftsmen’s guilds; these patrons are often named mater, as for example Claudia, the wife of a freedman from Faleri Piceni, who is called “mother of the brotherhood of fullers” (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 9.5450, undated; trans. Natalie Kampen). These inscriptions suggest the blurring of lines between public and private; for example, a third-century freeborn woman from Sentinum, Memmia Victoria, whose son was a local officeholder (decurio), was named mater of an artisans’ group (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 11.5748).
Women play public roles through private wealth, they enter public consciousness although they are private citizens unable to vote or (apparently) hold office in government, and they influence public events through acts of generosity that keep the men of their families in the public eye as potential officeholders. At every level in the upper classes, from Julia Domna’s patronage of the rebuilding of the temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum to the financing by Ummidia Quadratilla of Casinum’s temple and amphitheatre, women demonstrate the ambiguity of the terms “public” and “private” for the Roman world. And the inscriptions demonstrate as well the possible differences that social status and region can make to women’s lives even as they cling to the traditional list of feminine virtues.
Autonomy and Ambivalence
By comparison with the evidence from inscriptions, the comments of male authors on the (relative) autonomy of women seem striking in their ambivalence. The discussions about the education of wives that appear in the writings of Juvenal, Pliny, and Plutarch, all writing around 100 C.E. offer a picture of what in women’s lives and character most irritated, enraged, and provoked laughter among Roman (and Greek) men of a certain class and what they envisioned as the solution.
Yet a musical wife’s not so bad as some presumptuous
flat-chested busybody who rushes around the town
gate-crashing all male greetings, talking back straight-faced
to a uniformed general—and in her husband’s presence.
She knows all the news of the world
(Juvenal, Satires 6.398–403; Green 1967)
if she’s so determined to prove herself eloquent, learned,
she should hoist up her skirts and gird them above the knee
scrub off in the penny baths.6 So avoid a dinner partner
with an argumentative style, who hurls well rounded
syllogisms like slingshots, who has all history pat:
choose someone rather who doesn’t understand all she reads.
I hate these authority citers, … who with antiquarian zeal
quote poets I’ve never heard of. Such matters are men’s
concern
(Juvenal Satires 6.445–52; Green 1967)
The classical solution to such autonomous behavior is suggested by the Roman Pliny and his Greek contemporary Plutarch, since both wrote of women’s education in ways designed to overcome the undesirable characteristics Juvenal so gleefully skewers. Pliny writes (early second century) of his joy in his sweet young wife’s love for his work;
Because of her love for me, she has even gone so far as to take an interest in literature; she possesses copies of my writings, reads them repeatedly, and even memorizes them.… When I recite from my works, she will sit nearby, behind a curtain, eager to share the praise I receive. She has even set some of my poems to music, and chants them to the accompaniment of a lyre, untaught by any music-teacher, but rather by the best of teachers, love.
(Pliny, Letters 4.19.2 and 4; Radice 1975)
Plutarch, even as he mentions casually in his Advice to Bride and Groom (late first to early second century) that his wife Timoxena composed an essay for a friend against the use of cosmetics, advises his friend Pollianus, to whom his own essay is addressed, to educate his wife by oral instruction:
As for your wife, you must collect useful material from every source, like the bees, and carrying it in your own self share it with her and discuss it with her, making the best of these doctrines dear and familiar to her. For to her
Thou art her father and lady mother
yes, and a brother too [quoting Iliad 6.429]
This kind of study … diverts women from absurd conduct; for a woman studying geometry will be ashamed to dance, and she will not swallow any beliefs in magic spells while she is under the spell of Plato’s or Xenophon’s arguments.
(Plutarch, Advice to Bride and Groom 145c–d; trans. Elaine Fantham)7
Looking back over our evidence about the roles played by women of the privileged classes and about the reaction of our various sources to women’s public activities, there is a constant tension throughout this period of more than two hundred years between female autonomy and achievement and male response. Often the discomfort of Roman writers in the face of public and political roles for women is palpable. Both within the court (as in the stories of Plotina’s intervention to ensure that Hadrian was made Trajan’s successor: Historia Augusta, Hadrian 4.4 and 4.10) and outside (as when governors’ wives are portrayed as seeking power), power is condemned as inappropriate precisely because it is political. Yet throughout the Empire, inscriptions congratulate women for their generous use of private and family money for the public good, and the political implications for gaining authority and power for women seem to pose no problem. From the evidence we may draw two conclusions: (1) female political interference, like sexual misconduct, transgressed socially acceptable boundaries for upper-class life, no matter how common it was; and (2) there were alternative, socially acceptable frameworks for elite female autonomy, varying throughout the Empire but consistent in valuing public benefaction and religious service. In the end it is the contradictory and uneven nature of the evidence itself that poses the greatest problem for us in understanding the lives of elite women in the last centuries of the Roman Empire.
Gender and Social Position: Problems of Definition
The lives of women outside the world of grand families, social authority, or large-scale patronage are known to us through evidence that is even more scattered and inconsistent than what remains about elite women. Even the way we speak of this group is plagued by uncertainties. Should these women be called “lower class?” Is there such a thing as a homogeneous “middle class” of freeborn and freed slave artisans, businesspeople, minor priestesses, and professionals? Does it cross geographical boundaries and look the same in city and country, in east and west?
Where, for example, should we place an exceptional figure like Pamphila of Epidaurus in Greece? Our sources tell us that she came from Egypt and was the daughter of one scholar, Soteridas, and the wife of another with whom she lived at Epidaurus about the time of Nero (mid-first century C.E.); she composed some thirty-three books of historical materials (Hypomnemata Historika), which a certain Dionysius and other male scholars characteristically ascribed either to her father or her husband. She also composed epitomes of Ctesias’s histories (more than five hundred years old by that time) and treatises “On Disputation,” “On Sexual Desire,” and other topics. Luckily the bare notice in Suda, the tenth-century encyclopaedia, can be amplified by Pamphila’s own introduction to her work as reported by the Byzantine anthologist Photius (ninth century):
She says that after thirteen years of living with her husband since she was a child, she began to put together these historical materials and recorded what she had learned from her husband during those thirteen years, living with him constantly and leaving him neither night nor day, and whatever she happened to hear from anyone else visiting him (for there were many visitors with a reputation for learning). And she added to this what she had read in books. She separated all this material that seemed to her worthy of report and record into miscellaneous collections, not distinguished according to the content of individual extracts, but at random, as she came to record each item, since as she says, it is not difficult to classify extracts, but she thought a miscellany would be more enjoyable and attractive.
(Photius 175 S 119b; trans. Elaine Fantham)
Photius adds condescendingly that her style, shown in the prefaces and other comments, was “simple, being the work of a woman,” like her thought itself. Yet this extensive work was still used and quoted with respect by antiquarians a century or more after her death. Noble in her learning, child, wife, and friend of scholars, is Pamphila noble in social standing or would we today consider her to be a member of the cosmopolitan middle-class intelligentsia, those who might live in several parts of the Empire during the course of their lives? Is there anything particularly Greek (or Egyptian) about her life? To have been part of a world of learned visitors, with a library at hand, suggests a degree of prosperity that may or may not accompany noble birth or official standing in Greece of the first century C.E.
Once we leave behind the society of the court, and the great landowners with inherited wealth and power, we must imagine the communities of the Empire as mosaics of all kinds of people ranged along continua determined by ethnic, linguistic, financial, legal, and occupational variables, not all of which have analogies in the modern world. To this must be added once again the fact of geographical diversity. Although women of the highest social classes in all parts of the Empire probably shared a rather cosmopolitan life, just as they seem to have been equally subject to conservative norms of gender, this was not necessarily always the case for other women. Not only affected by regional differences, these women will have experienced the world differently inside each region according to their status, income, and the degree of Romanization prevailing in their area.
Tombstones, Social Ideals, Social Realities
The ideal of Roman womanhood, as we have seen it in the context of depictions of upper-class women, certainly played a role in shaping representations of women elsewhere, but there are clear differences in the way this worked. For example, the sexual division of labor—domesticity for women, outside occupations for men—seems to have determined the roles and character attributes that most lower-class families commemorated in women’s funerary monuments all over the Empire; the deceased are represented with their families and described in the vocabulary of traditional domestic and feminine virtues: one wife is mourned as “the best and most beautiful, a wool-worker,8 pious, modest, thrifty, pure and home-loving” (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 6.11602 [undated]; trans. Natalie Kampen). This kind of representation is usually found on funerary reliefs, the modesty of whose form and content indicates recipients outside the wealthy classes. The majority of these stelai give only names and ages, but a good many offer other information as well.
To the spirits of the dead. T. Aelius Dionysius the freedman [auc. lib.?] made this while he was alive both for Aelia Callitycena, his most blessed wife with whom he lived for thirty years with never a quarrel, an incomparable woman, and also for Aelius Perseus, his fellow freedman, and for their freedmen and those who come after them.
(Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 6.10676 [from Rome undated, but possibly
second century, C.E.]; trans. Natalie Kampen)
Thus, mixed in with formulaic statements of respect and affection such as “she is worthy of commemoration [bene merenti]” or that she lived with a husband without quarrels [sine ulla querella], we learn a bit about relationships and demographics. An interesting case of rich detail comes from Rome and tells about Valeria Verecunda, the first important doctor in her neighborhood, who lived thirty-four years, nine months and twenty-eight days; her daughter Valeria Vitalis made the monument for “her sweetest mother” (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 6.9477 [34th century, C.E.]). The deceased may be honored not only by her immediate family but also by fellow slaves, an owner or patron, or fellow freedmen and women. All this conforms to our understanding of familia in the Roman world as conceptually broader than the modern nuclear family. Slaves and freedpeople often constructed family for themselves both from the families of their owners and from each other as a parallel to the ties of duty and affection in free families, and the use of such terms as collibertae, “fellow freedwomen,” or contubernales, “companions in slavery” marks these relationships (Lattimore 1942).
Themes of affection and of praise for much-loved mothers, for sweet-natured and well-educated little girls, and for chaste and unquarrelsome wives are common all over the Empire. The inscriptions from Rome and large provincial towns parallel in words the repeated images on tombstones from such far-flung regions as Phrygia in Asia Minor. There, and to a lesser extent in Italy too, combs, cosmetic jars, hairpins, and sandals stand next to wool baskets, spindles, distaffs, and needles, and to keys and lockplates, to evoke the combination of personal beauty and domestic duty, wool-work and protection of the house and its contents (Fig. 13.7). Some of the Phrygian stones pair husbands’ symbols with those of the wife to show the sexual division of labor in visual form: his objects may be scrolls and tablets, sheep and oxen, metal tools or construction materials. In other words, his imagery is more varied and concerned either with literacy as a mark of status or officeholding, or, through the use of attributes, with a money-earning occupation (Waelkens 1977). Beauty and domestic labor for women; culture and occupational identity for men.
The iconography of virtue among those prosperous enough for tombportraits indicates a similar tradition of gender differentiation. Women’s funerary portrait statues, and this is true in reliefs and sometimes too in the choice of myths for sarcophagi, show a clear preference for Venus (love and beauty) (Fig. 13.8), Ceres or Salus (fertility), Diana (Virginity and Courage) and Hygeia (Health), whereas men prefer Mars (war), Hercules (strength), and Mercury (money-making). The message is conveyed through the use of the odd, very Roman combination of identifiable portrait heads with contemporary hairstyles and bodies copied from famous Greek statues of the gods. These funerary portraits, mimicking the use by the Imperial family of portraits in the guise of deities, were popular in the tombs of the later first, second, and early third centuries of our era; the evidence suggests that their patrons were mostly wealthy freed slaves and that the practice tended to be localized in Rome. To have a large-scale portrait statue that uses the formal typology of the grand Greek tradition was certainly to have pretensions to wealth and culture! (Wrede 1981).
Figure 13.7. Tombstone from Dorylaion in Phrygia, an inland section of Asia Minor. Dated to the late second or early third century C.E., it places the objects associated with men’s and women’s lives into twin doors, perhaps doors to the next world or to the house of the deceased.
Pretensions to culture can also be seen in the sarcophagi that become popular in Italy and the East after about 130 C.E. Sometimes the deceased or her family chose a design and had it made to order, or bought a partially completed piece and had inscriptions and portraits added; in either case women’s and men’s virtues are represented (though differently) through the use of divine and mythological imagery. A good example is the sarcophagus of Metilia Acte from the late second century C.E. in Ostia (Fig. 13.9). She was a priestess of Magna Mater, her husband a priest; the sarcophagus shows them as Alcestis and Admetus, she who volunteered to die instead of her husband and whose virtue was rewarded by her return to the living. Here both loving devotion and hopes for victory over death appear, and Metilia receives a heroizing commemoration through the appropriation of myth (Wood 1978). Similarly ostentatious monuments to the dead, like the sarcophagi of Asia Minor, in the third century C.E., show men as philosophers, women as muses, and both as readers—cultured people. We thus see the virtues that were considered most appropriate for women and men and the way these reinforced and expressed social expectations that were rooted in a gendered division of labor.
Figure 13.8. Tomb statue of a woman following the model of an earlier Greek statue of Aphrodite, perhaps one such as the “Venus de Milo.” This portrait from Rome of the later first or early second century C.E. uses the artistic connections to assert noble virtues of the deceased, who is presented as Venus.
Figure 13.9. Sarcophagus of Metilia Acte and her husband Junius Euhodus, from Rome in the third quarter of the second century C.E. The centralized composition focuses the viewer’s eye on the dead woman, reclining on her couch; the narrative elements on either side explain the death of Alcestis in her husband’s place (on the left) and her virtue rewarded by her return from the dead (on the right).
Most funerary images for nonaristocratic women were much simpler and less expensive, resembling the majority of commemorative inscriptions in that they choose to display family rather than gods or myths. In almost every part of the northern and western provinces and Italy, and some parts of the east as well, we find reliefs, ash urns, and altars with husbands and wives, children and parents, facing the viewer as if caught by a nineteenth-century photographer in all their stiff dignity. A family group on a stele made for residents of Dacia (modern Romania) (Fig. 13.10) resembles those of soldiers from Britain, although style and frame differ; in Aquileia in northern Italy another family looks out as silently as one from a painted stele in Thessaloniki in northern Greece. The traditions for such family images go back to the funerary stelai of Classical Athens as well as to Republican Rome, and remain alive as a favored setting for women of the “lower classes” in the Imperial period.
Some tombstones in the provinces that show women with families provide a sense of regional differences as well as similarities. Although few offer visions of worlds outside the context of family and domestic labor, there are bits of evidence for variation in the degree to which women assimilated into Roman ways. The tombstones show interesting distinctions between the eastern and western provinces through artistic traditions and the use of Greek names and language rather than the Latin of the West. But in addition, the tombstones of some more remote areas, away from coasts, cities, or trade routes, indicate that a number of women may have kept indigenous names, costumes, and customs even after men of their social stratum had taken on Roman ways. The evidence does not permit any statistical conclusions here since the tombstones that remain with both inscriptions and images are few and limited to those people who were prosperous enough to have tombstones and Romanized enough to want them with Roman words and decoration. Umma, a first-century woman from Noricum (modern Austria), wears a splendid local-style felt hat (Fig. 13.11) that goes with her non-Roman name, and other women in the northern and western provinces sometimes wear local brooches or carry local baskets or purses. Local taste is also evident in the large funerary monuments of wealthy merchants near Trier in Germany; many show family portraits and men hunting, but they include panels with the deceased in his place of business while his wife, seated in a local wicker chair on another part of the monument, is prepared for the day by her hairdresser and other attendants (Fig. 13.12). These late second- and third-century tombstones of a richer and more assimilated group nonetheless show their sexual division of labor (her inactivity brings him status) in localized forms.
Figure 13.10. Stele of a family from Roman Sarmizegetusa in Dacia, a province along the Danube, dated to the second or third century C.E.
The little we know about women in the provinces comes mainly from these many kinds of tombstones, from their rare petitions reported in the codes of Imperial law, from the odd references to a local issue in need of a governor’s attention, and from the broad context of changes in the empire. These changes came not only from conquest but from the entrance of soldiers and merchants into new areas (especially the non-Hellenized northern provinces). Intermarriage is hard to track and harder still to quantify, but two laws will certainly have accounted for a growth in the marriages of Roman citizens from all over the Empire with local women. One was Septimius Severus’s permission for soldiers who served twenty-five years to marry (Herodian 3.8.4 [first half of the third century]); this regularized some relationships between local women and the troops stationed on the frontiers of Empire. The second, and by far the more important law, was Caracalla’s edict of 212 that made all free residents of the Empire full citizens with the right to contract legal marriages. How much these new laws changed women’s lives in the provinces remains uncertain because the evidence has to be extrapolated from names and biographical data on tombstones such as we have described, but the impact on their sons, now eligible to serve in the army, and their daughters, now able to marry soldiers, would have meant some changes in patterns of mobility and Romanization. Nevertheless, inscriptions, reliefs, literature, and other testimonia for provincial women both before and after 212 remain firmly rooted in a gendered ideology and division of labor, and the tombstones continue to represent women with families and the signs of traditional domestic labor and virtue.
Only a minority of nonelite Roman women were represented in other forms by inscriptions and visual images, and these differ from one another according to region as well as class: though small in numbers, they raise fascinating questions about the social constraints and possibilities of gender and class in this period. There are a number of inscriptions and a far smaller number of reliefs or paintings that characterize women by work outside the house (Kampen 1981). Dating most of this material presents enormous problems to scholars, since so few of the inscriptions vary from formula and so many have no archaeological provenance that could add to the information deducible from spelling and letter forms; for this reason, we give almost no dates for the inscriptions we discuss here.
Figure 13.11. Tombstone of a woman named Umma, who lived in first-century C.E. Noricum (modern Austria). Her magnificent fur hat, like her name, testifies to the continuing presence of local customs, even after the process of Romanization had begun.
Figure 13.12. Funerary monument from third-century C.E. Neumagen, near Trier; like so many of the tomb markers in this area of Gallia Belgica, the “Eltempaarpfeiler” made for a merchant and his wife took the form of a tall structure decorated with portraits and scenes of everyday life. This detail shows the matron attended by her servants.
Among the inscriptions we find references to net-makers, including one who made gold nets, perhaps for women’s hair: “Viccentia, sweetest daughter, maker of gold nets, who lived for nine years and nine months” (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 6.9213 [undated]; trans. Natalie Kampen). We also see fabric and clothing workers (such as Lysis the mender or sarcinatrix from Rome who was described as being eighteen years old, thrifty and modest: Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 6.9882), dyemakers and perfumers, and vendors of fruit and vegetables. Many of these inscriptions name the women’s kin, age, status, and sometimes even the locations of their shops:
To the Spirits of the Dead. For Abudia Megiste the freedwoman who was most pious, M. Abudius Luminaris her patron and husband made [this monument]. She was most worthy [bene merenti]. She dealt in grain and beans at the Middle Stairs [wherever they were]. Her husband made this monument for himself and his freedmen and freedwomen and heirs and for M. Abudius Saturninus his son who belonged to the senior Esquiline tribe [a sign of social status] and who lived eight years.
(Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 6.9683 [from Rome, undated];
trans. Natalie Kampen)
The woman on a small relief, probably from the second century C.E., from Ostia (Fig. 13.13), Rome’s port city, appears surrounded by the produce and game she sold; even though we know nothing about her identity beyond her occupation, the specificity of the objects lets us know what the patrons of the relief felt was most important. For the working women of our inscriptions and images, as for the people whose lives take symbolic form from the tools and attributes of their lives on Phrygian tombstones, the naming and the representing of things, beans and chickens, wool baskets and mirrors, become a way to identity.
Little information remains about the qualifications and training of workers, although two categories of material are helpful here. The first comes from manuals such as those written about medical practice. In the Gynecology of Soranus,9 written in Greek in the second half of the first century C.E., one can find instructions for midwives and information about their qualifications; Soranus says the best are trained in theory as well as in all branches of therapy, can diagnose and prescribe, and are free of superstition (Soranus, Gynecology 1.2.4; Temkin 1956). Soranus also gives information about the qualifications of wet nurses. His description of the ideal wet nurse, that she be in her prime and have given birth two or three times, insists on the need for experience with children as well as specific physical qualifications (Bradley 1986). He lists emotional characteristics such as self-control and sympathy:
Figure 13.13. Small marble shop relief of a saleswoman from Ostia, dated to the mid-second century C.E. Cages of chickens and rabbits form the counter on which are a basket for live snails and two monkeys for the entertainment of customers and passersby.
Not ill-tempered: since by nature the nursling becomes similar to the nurse and accordingly grows sullen if the nurse is ill-tempered, but of mild disposition if she is even-tempered. Besides, angry women are like maniacs and sometimes when the newborn cries from fear and they are unable to restrain it, they let it drop from their hands or overturn it dangerously. For the same reason the wetnurse should not be superstitious and prone to ecstatic states so that she may not expose the infant to danger when led astray by fallacious reasoning, sometimes even trembling like mad.… And she should be a Greek so that the infant nursed by her may become accustomed to the best speech.
(Soranus 2.12.19; Temkin 1956).
The second category of material about the qualifications of workers, papyrus documents from Roman Egypt, provide us with apprenticeship contracts, as in this example from second century C.E. Oxyrrhynchus, in which a woman (with her brother as guardian) contracts a slave to a weaver to learn the trade over the course of four years
during which time the woman is to feed and clothe the slave and bring her to her instructor every day from sunrise to sunset so that the girl can perform all the duties assigned to her by him that are relevant to the aforesaid trade; her pay for the first year to be eight drachmas a month, for the second similarly twelve, for the third sixteen, for the fourth twenty. The girl is to have each year eighteen days off for festivals, but if she does no work or is sick for some days, she is to remain with her instructor for an equal number of days at the end of her time of service. The instructor is to pay for trade taxes and expenses.
(Papyri Oxyrrhynchi 1647; Lefkowitz and Fant 1982: no. 222)
The occupations of rural slave women may have differed from those of working women, free and enslaved, in urban areas; Columella, who wrote a book on agricultural life around the end of the Julio-Claudian period (ca. 60), describes life on a prosperous estate both for the wife of the estate manager (the couple are often slaves or freed) and for female slaves:
[A]t one moment she will have to visit the loom and impart any superior knowledge which she possesses, or, failing this, learn from one who understands the matter better than she does; at another moment she will have to look after those who are preparing the food for the family. Then too she will have to see that the kitchen and the cowsheds and also the mangers are cleaned, and she will have to open the sick wards [for the slave population] from time to time, even if they contain no patients, and keep them free from dirt, so that, when necessary, the sick may find them in an orderly and healthy condition.
(Columella, De Re Rustica 12.3.8; Forster and Heffner 1968)
The female slave is said to “have recourse to wool-work on rainy days or when, owing to cold or frost, a woman cannot be busy with field work” (Columella, De Re Rustica 12.1.6). The extent to which regional differences and variations in the scale of the farm or estate would have influenced work patterns is unclear from Columella’s work and may emerge instead from the archaeology of rural areas.
From legal texts or graffiti we hear of women whose reputations were often badly compromised by the nature of their work in public with men and alcohol. Those who managed stores (institrices) and worked as tavernkeepers, cooks, barmaids, and waitresses are referred to in the legal texts about tabernariae as quasi-prostitutes. The term may characterize only tavernworkers or apply more broadly to all workers in tabernae, defined in this case as shops:
If any woman should commit adultery, it must be inquired whether she was the mistress of a tavern or a servant girl … if she should be mistress of the tavern, she shall not be exempt from the bonds of the law. But if she should give service to those who drink, in consideration of the mean status of the woman who is brought to trial, the accusation shall be excluded and the men who are accused shall go free, since chastity is required only of those women who are held by the bonds of the law, but those who because of their mean status in life are not deemed worthy of the consideration of the laws shall be immune from judicial severity.
(Theodosian Code 9.7.1 [late fourth century]; Pharr 1952)10
Being of “mean status in life” to Roman law meant more than simply being poor or close to origins in slavery; it also meant that one was subject to different treatment by the law. The text here claims that these lowly women are not subject to the severity of the law, but the reason is that they are beneath contempt, outside the requirements of consideration given and responsibility expected of “decent” women. Whereas people of high status could expect to be taken seriously in the courts, the lowly (in the later empire they were even referred to as humiliores, humble people, in contrast with honestiores, “gentlemen and ladies”) could be subjected to torture to extract information from them, could expect capital punishment rather than exile for certain serious crimes, and could routinely expect less protection from the law than others. So being unworthy of consideration of the law put women who worked in certain public contexts automatically into the same legal realm as prostitutes.
Certainly there were prostitutes and madams everywhere in the Empire, although sex workers seldom name their jobs on tombstones. A rare example is Vibia Calybeni “the freedwoman madam. She made her money without defrauding others” (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 9.2029 [undated]; trans. Natalie Kampen). More common are the obscene scribbles on barroom walls that brag about sex with the innkeeper or the waitress (these come from many periods and places in the Empire).
The other occupations we have been discussing apparently granted women at a certain level of society a bit of prestige as well as income, just as they did routinely for lower-class working men; both sexes may name their jobs on tombstones (in addition to age and kinship), but this is recorded far more often for men than for women and is more common in Italy and the western provinces than in the east. Nevertheless, both slaves and free women were commemorated with occupation names that suggest less distance between them than the legal texts might indicate.
This lack of a clear differentiation between slave and free working women is consistent in many inscriptions and also in the few visual images that remain. These present vendors, serving women, nurses, and midwives in such a way that one cannot tell whether the subjects were slaves, freedwomen, or freeborn workers. The midwife shown delivering a baby in a small and inexpensive second-century C.E. terra-cotta relief that decorated a tomb from Ostia’s cemetery has no attributes that indicate her legal status; the focus of the scene is the activity itself. The image is interesting not only for its representation of a birthing chair and the information it provides about contemporary practices but also because it was accompanied by another terra-cotta showing a male doctor and male patient and because an inscription on the front of the tomb specified that the patron was a woman (Fig. 13.14).11 These reliefs and paintings, like the inscriptions that mention the occupations women practiced outside the household, come from very scattered sites in Italy, Gaul, North Africa, and the eastern provinces. Whether we should interpret the small numbers and scattered locations as evidence for the rarity of women’s nondomestic work or as an indication that it seldom added enough to a woman’s status to merit inclusion on a tombstone (or perhaps even lowered status in comparison with traditional domestic occupations) is unclear. The existence of these bits of information does suggest that economic forces as well as personal inclination may have drawn some women into nondomestic work settings. But the preponderance of occupations associated with clothing and fabrics, food, and the care and health of infants and women indicates that many of these jobs were only one step outside the home and so did little to rearrange the gendered division of labor among working women, both free and slave.
Figure 13.14. Terra-cotta painted relief of a midwife delivering a baby from a tomb in the Isola Sacra Necropolis of Ostia, mid-second century C.E.
Far more clearly honorific for women we might consider middle class (freed slaves as well as members of the business, tradesman, or artisan strata) were the positions they held in cults all over the Roman Empire. The popular cult of Isis was much favored by women of all classes in Italy and the western provinces, as we learn from the description in Apuleius’s novel, Metamorphoses, (third quarter of the second century) of a procession:
At the head [of the procession] walked women crowned with flowers, who pulled more flowers out of the folds of their beautiful white dresses and scattered them along the road; their joy in the Saviouress appeared in every gesture. Next came women with polished mirrors tied to the backs of their heads, which gave all who followed the illusion of coming to meet the Goddess, rather than marching before her. Next, a party of women with ivory combs in their hands who made a pantomime of combing the Goddess’ royal hair, and another party with bottles of perfume who sprinkled the road with balsam and other precious perfumes; and behind these a mixed company of women and men who addressed the Goddess as “Daughter of the Stars” and propitiated her by carrying every sort of light—lamps, torches, wax candles and so forth.… Then followed a great crowd of the Goddess’ initiates, men and women of all classes and every age, their pure white linen clothes shining brightly. The women wore their hair tied up in glossy coils under gauze head-dresses; the men’s heads were completely shaven, representing the Goddess’ bright earthly stars, and they carried rattles of brass, silver and even gold, which kept up a shrill and ceaseless tinkling.
(Apuleius 18; Graves 1951; emphasis added by Natalie Kampen)
Some female devotees of Isis are proudly depicted with their ritual implements on their funerary altars; such a woman appears with her sistrum or ritual rattle on an altar from Rome that was dedicated by Valeria, a woman who held the cult rank of mater: “To the Spirits of the Dead. For Flavia Taeleta and Flavia Faustilla, Valeria Prima Mater (dedicated this)” (Later first or second century C.E., Doria Pamphili; Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 6.18442; trans. Elaine Fantham and Natalie Kampen). Inscriptions record Jewish women such as Caelia Paterna called “mother of the synagogue of the people of Brescia” (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 5.4411 [undated]; trans. Natalie Kampen), who held offices, although not priesthoods, in synagogues throughout the Empire. Like many of their non-Jewish sisters, they gained in prestige and social standing in their communities through this honorific service and through their active patronage of buildings and institutions.
Christian women in Rome and the provinces were the only ones who differed from the model we have articulated for pagan and Jewish women; in the period before Constantine made Christianity a fully legal religion in his Edict of Toleration (311–12 C.E.), these women sometimes lost position and even families and lives through their involvement with their church. Whether because of overt persecution or simply through the loathing of Christianity that came from stories about cannibalism and incest, only the lowliest or the most privileged in Roman society could openly and with impunity admit to being a Christian. Of martyrdoms and persecutions we have many reports, including the famous narrative supposedly by St. Perpetua who tells her own story of captivity in third-century Carthage. Not only does she recount the attempts of her father to persuade her to recant, the visions she has, and the bravery of those around her, she also gives a picture of days spent in prison:
I was terrified, as I had never before been in such a dark hole. What a difficult time it was! With the crowd the heat was stifling; then there was the extortion of the soldiers; and to crown all, I was tortured with worry for my baby there.
(Acts of the Christian Martyrs 8; trans. H. Musurillo in Lefkowitz and Fant
1982: no. 266)
No less miserable was the situation of those questioned by Pliny the Younger when he was governor of the province of Bithynia and trying to extirpate the growing Christian presence in his area. He writes to Trajan (ca. 110) that he sought the truth “by torture from two slave-women, whom they call deaconesses. I found nothing but a degenerate sort of cult carried to extravagant lengths” (Pliny, Letter 10.96.8; Radice 1975). These deaconesses may have been the closest equivalent to the officeholders of the contemporary synagogue, but they were by no means priestesses. Permitted, briefly, to serve the orthodox church by assisting the priest in ministering to the sick and needy, counseling women, and even occasionally giving sermons, these women must have held positions of significant authority in the years before the Edict of Toleration. For the deaconesses, as for ordinary Christian women of the second and third centuries, little information remains, both because of persecution and because many of the church fathers who wrote in those years had little interest in women except as martyrs or objects of theological debate (on deaconesses, see Romans 16.1).
At the other end of the moral scale from religious service but overlapping with it were the less reputable rituals of magic in its many guises from folk medicine and fortune-telling to magic and witchcraft. Many of the women recorded by Roman writers as engaged with magic were from the lower classes and especially from certain parts of the east such as Thessaly and Syria, although elite Greek and Roman women were castigated for hiring such women to teach them the art of poisoning or for doing the dirty work themselves (for example, Tacitus, Annals 3.23, 4.8–11, or 13.1). Urban male fantasies are reflected in the tales of witchcraft in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in Lucan’s Thessalian witch Erichtho, who raises corpses from the dead for prophecy (Civil War, book 6), and in Apuleius’s witch Pamphile, who is also from Thessaly, which many ancient writers conceived as the wildest part of Greece. They transform what they do not understand, at one and the same time turning the peasant women working as midwives or gathering herbs and remedies for sick villagers into alien and dangerous forces and castigating lustful women by charging them with the casting of spells and the mixing of potions. Priestesses and witches alike are, in a sense, public women, serving officially or unofficially those outside their own families. Two sides of the same coin, they reflect the same permeability of the line between public and private that we saw among the women of the court and the wealthy benefactors of towns, workers’ organizations, and religious cults. At the same time, they create a picture of the lives of women outside the elite and outside of Rome that includes both the misunderstandings and prejudices of elite men and the variations around and beyond the norms of domestic virtue that can be seen as well in the pride taken in work as well as in family.
Gender and the Bottom of the Social Hierarchy
Before we end this discussion of women outside the aristocracy, we need to underscore the complex status distinctions within the “lower classes.” We have, after all, been talking about women who were freeborn, who were freed slaves and who were slaves, yet whose economic level within each group could be as different as the conditions under which they lived socially and geographically. Understanding the distinctions is hard in part because of the nature of the evidence (for example, the legal texts’ concern with distinctions between free, freed and slave); the laws have little concern with the potential economic similarities between categories. Again, the indifference of upper-class writers to distinctions between the freed and freeborn poor may mask distinctions that once mattered to lower-class people. And the way that people outside the upper classes thought about status, what it meant to them and where gender and degree of Romanization fit into those conceptions, remain clouded both by the upper-class literary and legal sources and by the conventional, even formulaic nature of the things people said about the dead. Yet our evidence suggests that there may well have been similarities in wealth and culture between some freeborn and freedwomen and that large numbers of freeborn and freed slave women looked nothing like Petronius’s ostentatious and grasping Fortunata or Apuleius’s lustful Thessalian witches. Instead, they were of modest means and took care to commemorate their familial and domestic lives; only a few of the women who worked outside the home could also afford to record such work on tombstones. And, perhaps most important in the context of a discussion of the tension between gender ideals and practices, most women of the prosperous lower classes, those who could be commemorated, clung to the traditional ideals of Roman womanhood as these were interpreted in their own part of the Empire.
At the bottom of the Roman social hierarchy came slaves, nonpersons in a legal sense, whose bodies and labor belonged to their owners. The occupations of enslaved women and men may often have resembled those of freed and free people, but there was a central difference; the slave served all of her or his owner’s needs and desires, and these included not only the agricultural, artisanal, and domestic labor already mentioned, but sexual services as well. This took three directions: reproduction of slaves, serving the sexual desires of male family members, and prostitution for the owner’s profit. In each case a woman’s body served another’s interests12.
Corresponding to the low status of slave women and their lack of control over their bodies are a set of representations of them as immoral and venal. Ignorant or drunken slave nurses, maids who act as go-betweens for adulterous lovers and demand bribes for illicit services are clichés in Roman comedy (Plautus, Menaechmi and Truculentus) and elegy (Ovid, Amores 2.7 amd 8) long before the conservative Messala’s complaint in Tacitus (later first to early second century):
Now the newborn child is handed over to some little Greek skivvy, along with one or other of the male slaves, usually the most worthless … and the boy’s green and fresh years are steeped in their ignorant stories and ideas.
(Tacitus, Dialogue on Orators 29; trans. Elaine Fantham)
How much the low and sexualized status of slaves was a result not just of upper-class Roman attitudes to slavery, but also of Roman ideas on ethnic hierarchies is unclear, but it appears that some foreign women, especially those from Syria and the East in general became associated with hypersexuality as well as with witchcraft. Although Apuleius’s Pamphile (third quarter of the second century), the wife of a wealthy miser in Thessaly, is both Greek and free, she is characterized as a lust-maddened witch:
She is believed to be the foremost mistress of magic and of all the spells of the grave. By breathing certain words and charms over sticks and stones and other trivial objects, she can cast all the light of the starry firmament into the depths of hell and reduce them again to original chaos. For as soon as she has caught a glimpse of any good-looking young man, she is overwhelmed with desire and sets both her eye and her soul on him. She makes wheedling endearments, takes possession of his spirit, entangles him with endless snares of immeasurable love. Then if any resist her filthy passion, she despises them … and turns them instantly into stones and sheep and any other animal she wants, and others she kills outright.
(2.5; trans. Elaine Fantham and Natalie Kampen)
The issue here is not Roman racial prejudice but rather the way status, gender, and ethnicity coincide. The woman of low status, like the woman of Thessaly or Syria, is open to charges of hypersexuality, of witchcraft, of criminality; she becomes Other.
The ultimate Other is the “barbarian,” the man or woman from outside the frontier, subject to conquest and enslavement as well as to Romanization. These are the figurations of the separation between inside and outside, between civilization and its opposite; they were used not for ethnography or the folklorist’s interests but as a way to describe Roman victory and, by opposition, Roman civilization. Whereas the funerary portraits of prosperous women from Palmyra or Roman Egypt (Fig. 13.15) preserve local materials and style elements such as the figures in traditional Pharaonic style, and may well have looked fairly exotic to Italian or Greek viewers, they do speak for the local population and its values and concerns. By comparison, the representation of “barbarian” women in Roman historical texts and images tells us less about “barbarians” than about the Romans themselves. The most familiar visual type is the mourning “barbarian” woman on coins and reliefs. She may stand with a chained “barbarian” man beside a military trophy, or sit head in hands, desolate at its foot, or drag along in a triumphal process as she does in the Severan arch at Leptis Magna (ca. 206). She recurs as the emblem of defeat in narrative settings as well, taken prisoner, or in flight, or even being killed, as on the Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome (ca. 180) (Fig. 13.16).
Until the emperor reaches out to raise her up and transform her into the personification of a happy province (Fig. 13.17) as is the case with Hadrian and Africa, the “barbarian” woman remains the Roman sign of conquest and the marker of that which is not Roman, outside of civilization.
Stories of “barbarian” women differ from visual images in telling us different things and with different motivation. Tales of “barbarian” queens leading troops against Rome, from Boudicca in Britain (first century C.E.) (Tacitus, Agricola 16.1; Mattingly 1948) to Zenobia in the East (third century C.E.), grant a certain misguided heroism to the Amazonlike women even as they go down in defeat. Writing about the queen of Palmyra who invaded Rome’s eastern territories and perhaps Egypt, Trebellius Pollio constructs for Zenobia a personality vivid in its gender mixing:
[A]rrayed in the robes of Dido and even assuming the diadem, she held the imperial power in the name of her sons Herennianus and Timolaus, ruling longer than could be endured from one of the female sex.… She lived in regal pomp. It was rather in the manner of the Persians that she received worship and in the manner of the Persian kings that she banqueted; but it was in the manner of a Roman emperor that she came forth to public assemblies, wearing a helmet and girt with a purple fillet, which had gems hanging from the lower edge, while its center was fastened with the jewel called cochlis, used instead of the brooch worn by women, and her arms were frequently bare. Her face was dark and of a swarthy hue, her eyes were black and powerful beyond the usual wont, her spirit divinely great, and her beauty incredible … her voice was clear and like that of a man. Her sternness, when necessity demanded, was that of a tyrant, her clemency, when her sense of right called for it, that of a good emperor.
(Scriptores Historiae Augustae: Thirty Pretenders 30.2–3, 13–18;
Magie 1967–68)
Figure 13.15. Painted linen mummy covering with the portrait of a woman named Ta-sheret-wedja-hor, who was married to a priest of Serapis; the portrait comes from Roman Egypt and dates to around 225 C.E. The combination of Pharaonic imagery and Severan hairstyle and portrait elements suggests the complexity of social and cultural relations in Egypt from the Ptolemaic period on.
Figure 13.16. Detail from the Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, later second century C.E. The Romans have taken a section of German enemy territory and are threatening and killing some of the women.
Figure 13.17. Gold coin of Hadrian helping to raise up a kneeling woman identified by the label as Africa; Rome, after 130 C.E. Hadrian and Antoninus Pius both used female figures on coins and relief sculpture to personify the various provinces of Rome’s Empire.
The fact that Zenobia had managed to fight and defeat Roman forces until she was taken by Aurelian and brought to Rome a prisoner meant that the author had to establish her credentials as a worthy opponent with characteristics a Roman could respect. In fact, he even quotes a letter supposedly from Aurelian to the Senate in which the emperor justifies taking a woman in triumph against accusations that it was an unmanly deed (non virile munus) saying “those very persons who find fault with me now would accord me praise in abundance, did they but know what manner of woman she is, how wise in counsels, how steadfast in plans, how firm toward the soldiers, how generous when necessity calls, and how stern when discipline demands” (30.5). Manly in certain respects, feminized through the same terms that are used for descriptions of eastern despots (the emphasis on luxury and jewels, for example), dazzlingly beautiful, nonetheless Zenobia is included in this text, says Trebellius Pollio, “that I might make a mock of Gallienus, a greater monster than whom the Roman state has never endured” (31.7). Composed between 298 and 303, Zenobia’s ennobling portrait is a means to political ends, designed to condemn the ruler who could not stop her and praise the successor who did.
Tacitus’s Germania, written some two hundred years earlier, also presents non-Roman women, on one level at least, as strong and righteous:
The men take their wounds to their mothers and wives, and the latter are not afraid of counting and examining the blows, and bring food and encouragement to the fighting men.
It stands on record that armies wavering on the point of collapse have been restored by the women. They plead heroically with their men, baring their bosoms before them and forcing them to realize the imminent prospect of their enslavement—a fate which they fear more desperately for their women than for themselves.13 It is even found that you can secure a surer hold on a state if you demand among the hostages girls of noble family. More than this they believe that there resides in women an element of holiness or prophecy, and so they do not scorn to ask their advice or lightly disregard their replies.
(Germania 7–8; Mattingly 1948)
The underlying program of the Germania helps to explain the positive elements here, since they clearly imply both contrast with the vaunted decadence and self-indulgence of women and men in Rome and a desire to unify the latter around their difference from the barbarous Germans. Nonetheless, toward the end of the Germania, Tacitus notes with contempt a group so degenerate that they are ruled by women: “woman is the ruling sex. That is the measure of their decline, I will not say below freedom but even below decent slavery” (Germania, 45). Clearly the message in both texts and visual images focuses on Roman moral and political concerns and functions as much for exhortation as for descriptive purposes. Neither slaves nor barbarians nor even conquered queens were in a position to leave much behind that would speak to their own perceptions of their status and way of life and of the many differences within each category that reveal the categories themselves as products of Roman imagination and power.
Plutarch’s dedication of his “Brave Deeds of Women” (the text dates probably between 90 and 120) to his good friend Clea, a Greek woman of the upper classes, gives us a sense of the way time, place, class, and gender interweave in the thought and life of the later Roman Empire:
Regarding the virtues of women, Clea, I do not hold the same opinion as Thucydides. For he declares that the best woman is she about whom there is the least talk among persons outside regarding either censure or commendation, feeling that the name of the good woman, like her person, ought to be shut up indoors and never go out. But to my mind Gorgias appears to display better taste in advising that not the form but the fame of a woman should be known to many. Best for all seems the Roman custom, which publicly renders to women, as to men, a fitting commemoration after the end of life.
(Plutarch, “On the Bravery of Women,” 242e–243e; Babbitt 1968)
Referring to the Greek authors of the past and to the normative Athenian tradition of keeping women secluded and their names unmentioned in public as a sign of their respectability, Plutarch places himself in the camp of modern Roman life; still Greek, he claims that respectable women should remain unseen, but their fame and good deeds should be commemorated publicly. In this passage, the relation between Greek and Roman, between elite and working women, between past and Roman present crystallizes as the author prepares to recount the brave and wondrous deeds of the women of the past.
Some of the women Plutarch discusses—Semiramis, Tanaquil, Porcia—have featured in earlier chapters in our book, but their world is far from either the pomp of the Imperial court or the daily occupations and domestic concerns of the freeborn and freedwomen of Italy and the provinces. We have chosen and considered here material from an enormous and disparate number of possibilities in order to show the tension between Roman upper-class gender traditions and ideals, the dominant ideologies, and the social and economic forces that permitted women some degree of autonomy or even authority. Just as these elements are always in complex and unstable relations with one another both historically and geographically, so also is there a tension between apparently opposed notions of public and private, Roman and outsiders, “upper” and “lower” class, that demonstrates how these categories blur and shift, often merging into continua through their own complexity or through the social and political needs of empire or period.
By the end of this period, new forces are shaping gender relations. The discussion of family and sexuality in Chapter 11 already articulated some of the positions that appear in the arguments over the nature of sexuality and of gender in late antiquity. The changing shape of the Empire and its shifts in population as new groups entered or took power had an impact on women and on gender ideology just as did new religious doctrines and new social attitudes. The writing and art of late antiquity, beginning with the age of Constantine, are beyond the scope of this book, but it is important to stress that much new research on the family, on ideas about the body and sexuality and on attitudes toward masculinity and femininity within a spiritualized religious framework is adding to our fund of knowledge about the positions of women and ideologies of gender in the beginning of the Middle Ages (see Further Reading for more information). Theological shifts of emphasis to the celibate body and to chastity equally for women and men or to the family in Christ rather than the secular family may have had only a minimal impact on the daily lives of the large number of women in the late Empire; nevertheless, such evidence as that from tombstones showing an increased valuation on burials of children and women in Christian communities (Shaw 1984) suggest that there may have been changes not only in social ideology but in social practice as well—enough eventually to change some parts of women’s lives and expectations as the map of the great Empire itself changed its shape.
1. “Peregrine status” is used to indicate that the candidate might lack Roman citizenship.
2. For example, Tacitus, Annals 3.34, where Drusus defends husbands who take their wives with them to Imperial posts [21 C.E.].
3. The author tells us at 4.2 and at 12.3–4 with equal conviction that Elagabalus’s mother and his grandmother were each first to attend the Senate “like a man” and witness the drafting of legislation. Confirmation from other sources is lacking.
4. The use of “most distinguished” or clarissimus for a man and clarissima for a woman is typical of later Roman inscriptions, especially from the mid-third century onward.
5. These did not in fact function as priestesses but were local women chosen as mouthpieces for divine inspiration.
6. Like a tunic-wearing Diogenes—careless male intellectual?
7. For this text the old Loeb edition with translation by Babbitt is quite misleading, because it mentions reading in books, where Plutarch speaks only of his wife “hearing about” geometry, ethics, and astronomy from her husband—and that in a carefully predigested form.
8. Lanifica here is a standard Roman compliment that probably indicates that she was attentive to her domestic duties rather than that she was a wage- or pieceworker.
9. See p. 196, and note that he was born in Asia Minor, trained in Alexandria and practiced in Rome.
10. This is a very late source but there are comparable rulings from the first and second centuries as well: Paul, Sententiae 26.11 and Digest 23.2.44.
11. The patron was buried in the tomb with her mother and her husband, but it is not clear whether the midwife represents the mother or the daughter.
12. This is true as well of young male slaves, as Martial’s epigram 12.46 indicates: “it’s they [the slave boys] who give [your husband] what you as a wife don’t want to give” (Ker 1968).
13. Besides this centurion’s assault on a foreign queen in Livy 38.24 and the rape of Boudicca’s daughters (Tacitus, Annals 14.31), there is little written evidence for Roman soldiers raping their female captives, but neither is there any parallel in the texts to the slaying of the female “barbarian” on the Column of Marcus Aurelius.
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