ROMAN LITERATURE tells us about the ruling classes, and preponderantly about the men within them. The length of this chapter, in comparison with the preceding one, will give a rough indication of the amount of both ancient material and modern scholarship that deals with lower-class as opposed to upper-class women. It must be evident that lower-class women were always more numerous, but less notorious—the activities of celebrities tend to captivate the historical imagination. Nevertheless, it is essential to acknowledge a new trend in Roman historical studies that is directed at finding out about the lower classes and which integrates women in its purview.
How can we know about the lives of lower-class women—slaves, ex-slaves, working women, and the poor? The literature does tell us the ways in which the lower classes pleased or displeased their social superiors. The sepulchral inscriptions that owners of slaves or members of the lower classes had carved for their associates and themselves give the messages they wanted to announce to posterity. Thus an epitaph may include not merely the name of the deceased, but the name of her owner or former owner if she were a slave or freedwoman (especially if she had belonged to an important family), the name of her husband, the duration of her marriage and the number of children in the family, her age at death, and her métier.
For the present chapter I have drawn heavily on the study by P. R. C. Weaver of the slaves and freedmen of the imperial household, which includes statistics on a control group of nonimperial slaves. Also of immense value have been S. M. Treggiari’s studies of slaves and freedmen of the late Republic and the early Empire.1 But the essential questions of how it felt to be a female slave among the Romans, and whether—if one were an ordinary slave—it was worse to be male or female, cannot be answered.
The Roman household (familia) included not only kinsmen legally dependent on the head of the family, but also slaves. The number of slaves of course varied according to the means of the family, but even humble families might own a few. There is more abundant documentation on the slaves of the wealthy, as is true of the wealthy themselves. Wealthy families owned thousands of slaves, living on their various holdings, and the household of the emperor (familia Caesaris) was probably the largest. Owners of slaves invested in human property with the expectation that certain services would be performed, and that their own wealth would thereby be increased and their personal comfort enhanced. The complexities of Roman slavery were such that a woman might gain more prestige by marrying a slave than a free person, and that slaves and ex-slaves might be more highly educated and enjoy greater economic security than the freeborn poor.
The variety of the jobs held by female slaves was more limited than those of the males. Some women were enslaved only in adulthood, either by kidnappers or pirates, or because they were camp followers or ordinary citizens where the Romans made a conquest. In a population of captive Greeks, the Romans would find male scholars, historians, poets, and men with valuable skills. Owing to the limitations of women’s education, a freshly captured woman may have been at most a midwife, an actress, or a prostitute. Most women did not have any training beyond the traditional household skills. In slavery, as in freedom, they could work as spinners, weavers, clothesmakers, menders, wetnurses, child nurses, kitchen help, and general domestics. The household duties of female slaves in Rome differed somewhat from those we observed in Greece. Because Roman engineers devised mechanical methods for transporting large quantities of water, Roman slave women did not carry water to the same extent that Greeks had done. Moreover, in Rome, unlike Greece, all clothing was not made at home.2 In addition, female slaves were given special training in the wealthy Roman home and worked as clerks, secretaries, ladies’ maids, clothes folders, hairdressers, haircutters, mirror holders, masseuses, readers, entertainers, midwives, and infirmary attendants.3 Children born into slavery in a wealthy Roman home thus stood a fair chance of receiving some education.
Some female slaves, like males, were employed as attendants to enhance the splendor of the mistress’ entourage when she went out of her home. Such slaves would clear the way before their owner. If her mistress was traveling on a litter, a female slave would put her sandals on for her and place a footstool next to the litter before the mistress alighted. A slave might carry a parasol for a mistress who was taking a walk. Naturally, slaves’ functions on a farm or country estate would have differed from those in the urban household, but less is known about rural slave women. However, Cato the Censor does list the duties of the vilica, the chief housekeeper, a slave woman who held a supervisory position of great responsibility, subordinate to a steward who was a male slave.4
Women were always employable for sexual purposes, either in addition to their other domestic responsibilities, or as a primary occupation. The master had access to all his slave women. Scipio Africanus favored a particular slave girl, and when he died, his wife Aemilia, far from being vindictive, gave the girl her freedom. Cato the Censor, who was an authority on Roman virtue, was visited nightly by a slave girl after his wife died, and the emperors Augustus and Claudius consorted with numerous slave girls with their wives’ explicit approval. Slave women were also available for sexual relations with the male slaves in the house, with the master’s permission. Cato, who was always interested in financial gain, charged his male slaves a fixed fee for intercourse with his female slaves.5
Employment in the sex trade brought great profit to the owners of female slaves. Women worked as prostitutes in brothels or in inns or baths open to the public. Exposed baby girls and daughters sold by their parents were raised for this trade. In this same category, but at a higher level, were the women trained to work as actresses and entertainers of all types. Actresses sometimes appeared nude and performed sexual acts on stage. However, actresses were not invariably employed sexually. Eucharis, a young performer who had been given her freedom sometime before her death at the age of fourteen, performed in the chorus at respectable public games given as “Greek theater,” and is described as “learned” and “skilled” in her epitaph.6
The fact of slavery disqualified a person from entering into a formal Roman marriage, but two slaves might have an informal marital arrangement known as “cohabitation” (contubernium). Although the usual incest regulations applied just as if it were legal marriage, this arrangement had no legal validity: the children of the union were considered illegitimate, and the woman could not be accused of adultery.7 But to the slaves themselves the marriages were valid, and in the epitaphs the partners refer to each other as husband and wife. It was in the master’s interest to promote family life among his slaves, for it improved morale and produced slave children who were the master’s to keep in his household or to dispose of as he wished.8 Slaves tended to marry other slaves, and were likely to marry within their master’s familia. With permission, a slave might marry a slave from another familia or a free person. However, if a male slave married a female outside his master’s familia, the master lost the profit that might be gained from the offspring, since the children belonged to the mother if she were free, or to her master if she were a slave. Hence such a marriage might not be permitted. There was no security in a slave marriage—either partner or the children might be sold to another owner or moved to a different property owned by the original master. Broken marriages left no record. But sepulchral inscriptions show that many slave marriages survived over long periods of time, regardless of changes in habitation or changes in status from slave to freed of one or both of the partners. In lives subject to the whims of others, the stability of the marriage bond was welcome.
The study of imperial slaves and freedmen shows that almost half the marriages of freedmen whose duration is mentioned lasted at least thirty years. Moreover, their wives had married young, like the aristocrats discussed in the previous chapter. In order that the statistics on the duration of marriage be consistent with those on the age of death of wives, it is necessary to remember Keith Hopkins’ hypothesis that the age of death of wives who die young is more likely to be recorded on a tombstone (see this page). Over half the wives of imperial slaves and freedmen were dead before thirty, with the highest proportion dying between twenty and twenty-five. Of the nine married women buried in the tomb of a wealthy family, the Statilii, studied by Susan Treggiari, five had died at age twenty or younger.9 The mortality was probably even higher among the slaves belonging to poorer families.
The Roman household employed a far larger number of male slaves than female. Among children of imperial slaves and freedmen, the proportion is sixty or more per cent male, and among the adults the proportion of males is far higher, owing to the nature of the work of this elite group of civil servants. Susan Treggiari’s study of the slaves and freedmen of Livia and of the Volusii likewise shows a ratio of roughly three males per female, with a slightly larger proportion of female slaves in a household owned by a woman than in the slave household belonging to a male owner. On the estates of the fictional Trimalchio were born thirty boys and forty girls in a single day. These statistics, like much in the Satiricon, are intended to be ludicrous, but nevertheless it is interesting to observe that all the slaves at Trimalchio’s dinner are male.10 Boy babies were retained to fill posts as their fathers were manumitted or died, but excess female children were disposed of in various ways. Some were sold to work as domestics in small households, many probably to brothels; others were perhaps exposed to die or be picked up by a slave-trader. Still others were given by the master to male slaves as marriage partners, with the expectation that children would be produced who would be the master’s property; some girls were purchased by male slaves from their own funds. Perhaps Aurelia Philematium, a freedwoman who died at forty, was one of these girls. Her epitaph states that her freedman husband took her “to his bosom” when she was seven, and was like a father to her.11 Apparently he was kind to her when she joined the household, and then married her. That this marriage could have been consummated when the bride was only seven is not impossible.12
Slaves were allowed to amass their own personal savings (peculium), and could use this money to buy other slaves. When a male slave purchased his wife, she had the status of a personal slave (vicaria) to her husband-owner—although, strictly speaking, like all her husband’s possessions she belonged to his master—and the disaster of being sold to separate households was less likely. This arrangement also offered a path of upward mobility for the slave husband, since his master might free the slave’s wife sooner than a valuable and industrious male slave.
The minimum age for manumission was thirty, according to the Lex Aelia Sentia of A.D. 4, but many slaves attained manumission earlier. Females were likely to be manumitted earlier than males for a number of reasons: consistent with the state’s policy of encouraging marriage, the law allowed a master to manumit a slave in order to marry her.13 Some masters will have manumitted and then married a woman with whom they were cohabiting so that their children would be free and legitimate. Marriage to women of slave or freed status was perfectly acceptable among the lower classes.14 But such alliances were a cause for censure among the wealthy, and according to Augustan legislation, men of senatorial rank were not permitted to marry freedwomen at all.15 Similarly, women of senatorial rank were prohibited from marrying freedmen. However, this restriction was not strictly observed in the first century A.D. The father of Claudius Etruscus was an imperial freedman of senior administrative grade, and he was able to contract a legitimate marriage with Tettia Etrusca, who was probably of senatorial rank.16 An owner who was himself a slave might arrange for his master to free his slave wife (contubernalis vicaria) so that their children would be freeborn, though of course still illegitimate since the father remained a slave. Since a manumitted slave continued to have obligations toward his or her ex-owner (patrona or patronus), the freed wife remained bound to her husband or his master, and could not desert him or remarry without his permission.17
Females could, win their freedom through routes other than marriage. As we have mentioned, slaves were allowed to amass their own personal savings with a view to repaying their purchase price. A woman employed in domestic work would have less opportunity to collect tips than a male slave in an influential post, and her savings would grow rather slowly, although the master’s favorite bedmate might receive gifts, and a lady’s maid would be given tips from her mistress’ lovers.18 On the other hand, as she grew older and less attractive her value decreased, whereas the value of a highly trained male slave increased with years. Thus a woman might eventually be able to purchase her own freedom. In addition, Columella, who in the first century A.D. wrote a treatise on farming, considered that a slave woman had repaid her purchase price by bearing four children to be her master’s property.19 Some urban slaves might get away with fewer than this number. Freedom was often granted to slaves voluntarily by owners, or by last testament. The manumission of the actress Eucharis may be attributable to the good will of her owner; for example, the slave girl may have been granted freedom as she lay ill. A married couple might be manumitted simultaneously, or the partner who was freed first could amass enough funds to buy the partner still in slavery and manumit him or her.
When both husband and wife had been slaves together, and the wife was a freedwoman, the husband could in turn be manumitted by marriage. However, a freeborn woman who freed a male slave and married him was disapproved of, and such marriages were outlawed by Septimius Severus (reigned A.D. 193–211).20
The motives leading a freeborn woman or freedwoman to marry a slave are an indication of the complexity of slave society. Male slaves of the emperor or of important Roman families in administrative posts held positions of prestige and economic security. The wife had a good chance of being buried in the tomb of her husband’s familia, and a place of burial was a concern to all Romans. The free woman who married an imperial slave was, in a sense, improving her status, while her husband also improved his. To the owner of the male slave, however, such an arrangement was detrimental, since the children were the property of the mother. Moreover, the prejudice against a free woman cohabiting with a slave extended even to slaves of high position within the slave hierarchy. Therefore a decree of the Senate was passed in A.D. 52 that discouraged freeborn and freedwomen from marrying slaves by reducing such a wife to the status of slave or freedwoman of her husband’s master. This regulation was aimed at slaves of the imperial household. The loss of status gave the husband’s master—the emperor in particular—financial advantages in regard to the wives and children of his male slaves.21
In contrast to male slaves, female slaves in upper-class families were less likely to marry above their station. Females, even in important households, were used only for domestic service and did not hold positions of influence. There was therefore little incentive for freeborn men or freedmen outside their households to unite with them. In a lower-class family a female slave could be freed to marry her master, but in senatorial or imperial households this route of upward mobility was closed. Men of senatorial status could not marry freedwomen, although they could, of course, cohabit with them.
A few female members of the imperial household attained positions of influence as the freedwoman concubines of emperors. These relationships were known publicly, often of long duration, and not a cause for scandal except when the woman misbehaved.22 Vespasian, Marcus Aurelius, and Antoninus Pius—all emperors of good reputation—lived with concubines after the death of their wives. They already had heirs to their throne, and, by choosing to live with women whom it was impossible for them to marry, they may have intended to avoid the squabbles between heirs descended from different wives which, as we have seen, characterized the Hellenistic monarchies.
A slave might have slave children, freeborn illegitimate children, and freeborn legitimate children. Children born in contubernium took the status of the mother. Thus, the children born while a mother was still a slave were slaves; those born after her manumission were freeborn, but not legitimate unless her husband was of freed or freeborn status. Freed parents might try to locate their children born into bondage, purchase them, and then manumit them.
A freedwoman’s care for her illegitimate daughter can be seen in the case of Petronia Justa. The eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79 preserved tablets at Herculaneum that record a lawsuit concerning the claim of Petronia Justa to free birth. Her mother had been a slave, was manumitted, and left Justa in the home of her patron. Justa claimed that she had been born after her mother’s manumission and was therefore freeborn, and that her mother had returned to reclaim her daughter from the patron and had reimbursed him for the expenses incurred in raising her. The expenses involved would not have been inconsiderable.23
The epitaphs of freedmen generally testify to small families of rarely more than two children, a tendency that we also observed among the upper class.24 This statistic makes us wonder how many women could take advantage of the Augustan marital legislation which offered privileges including exemption from guardianship to the freedwoman who bore four children, as it had to the freeborn woman with three children. Freeborn men, on the other hand, needed three children; while two free children served to release freedmen from obligations to their former owner.25 The stipulation requiring four children of freedwomen but only two of freedmen is probably a response to the fact that men could be manumitted fairly late in life, and might have the opportunity to produce only two additional children. But slave women as well were not manumitted until they were into their childbearing years, and they died at younger ages than men—conditions that made it rather unlikely that four additional children could be produced. However, as mentioned, it was theoretically possible for freedmen to find their own children born in slavery, buy them, adopt them, and have them count as legitimate children; the freedman would thereby be eligible for the privileges accruing to freedwomen with four children and freedmen with two children. The fact that the parents’ epitaph mentions two children, then, may not reflect the actual number of children in the family; additional children may have grown up and married and been commemorated elsewhere by their spouses.
Legislation concerning the right to bequeath property was applicable to freedwomen worth at least 100,000 sesterces, and the Emperor Claudius offered the privileges of women who had four children to freedwomen who invested in the grain market for the feeding of Rome.26 Both of these provisions show that there were some wealthy freedwomen, and the resources of many freedwomen are obvious from the burial places they were able to construct for themselves and at times for their own slaves and freedmen. A few wealthy freedwomen are known by name. Lyde, freedwoman of the Empress Livia, owned at least four slaves,27 and the fictitious Fortunata of the Satiricon, who wallows in riches, is probably a caricature of real freedwomen. Those freedwomen who were courtesans and consorted with wealthy men at bachelor parties and elsewhere were likely to have acquired some riches of their own. Volumnia Cytheris, a freedwoman who had been an actress in the mime, is one of the best known of the freedwoman courtesans. She was the mistress of Brutus the Tyrannicide, Marc Antony, the elegist Cornelius Gallus, and others. Cytheris was independent enough to be able to choose her lovers, and her desertion of Gallus provided the theme of Virgil’s tenth Eclogue.28
Most freedwomen, however, were not spectacularly wealthy, but rather comprised a large part of the Roman working class, serving as shopkeepers or artisans or continuing in domestic service. The occupations pursued by freedwomen were commonly those for which they had been trained as slaves, and are not notably more varied than the occupations we have listed for working women in Classical Athens. Nevertheless, women were the tastemakers of textile manufacture throughout classical antiquity.
Working in wool was traditionally a woman’s task, in Rome as well as in Greece. Spinning was so sex-stereotyped that, as we have observed, even in Dark Age burials spindle whorls served to identify corpses as female. The reader will be reminded of earlier references to woolworking by women: the tablets from Pylos, Homeric epic (Hector’s admonition to Andromache to return to her loom), Xenophon’s descriptions in the Memorabilia and Oeconomicus, the weaving of the peplos for Athena Polias, Erinna’s titling her poem “The Distaff,” and the predominance of woolworkers in a list of women manumitted in Athens between 349 and 320 B.C.29 We also recall that the Greek Plutarch noted Fulvia’s masculinity, pointing out that “she did not care for spinning.” The Phoenician queen Dido, who in many ways is modeled on Homeric queens, has a subtle blemish: Virgil never shows her spinning or weaving.
So among the Romans spinning was always a woman’s task. The sepulchral inscription of the archetypal Roman matron Claudia makes this association clear:
Stranger, what I have to say is short. Stop and read it through. This is the unlovely tomb of a lovely woman. Her parents named her Claudia. She loved her husband with her whole heart. She bore two sons, one of whom she leaves on earth; the other she has placed beneath the earth. She was charming in conversation, yet her conduct was appropriate. She kept house, she made wool.30
The old-fashioned Roman bride wreathed the doorposts of her new home with wool. When Augustus wished to instill respect for old-fashioned virtues among the sophisticated women of his household, he set them to work in wool and wore their homespun results.31 Many women of the lower classes, slave and freed, were also employed in working wool both at home and in small-scale industrial establishments where working-class men joined women as weavers and as weighers of balls of wool to be apportioned to weavers.32 Spinning, however, continued to be solely women’s work. But women were not restricted to spinning alone.
Laundry work was done by women and men, unlike the situation in Classical Athens, where this occupation was confined to women. That men worked as fullers and weavers is probably a result of the organization of this work into small-scale industries in the Roman period. At Pompeii, women worked at mills where grain was ground, and we find a landlady and a female moneylender.33 Freedwomen, since they often came from the East, frequently sold luxury items or exotic merchandise, such as purple dye or perfumes. They also sold more mundane merchandise, such as clothing and food, and worked as butchers or even as fisherwomen—and afterward hawked their catch.
The occupations of women at Pompeii give a good sample of the types of economic activity open to women. Moreover, the sepulchral inscriptions of many women from the entire Roman world record how a woman had made her living. Métiers as lowly as “dealer in beans” or “seller of nails” and as lofty as “commercial entrepreneur” or “physician” are found. Women’s names stamped on pipes and bricks also record their involvement with building activities—from the ownership of a brickmaking or stonecutting operation by an upper-class woman to actual participation in the making of building materials and construction work by working women of the lower classes.34
The best-known woman at Pompeii is Eumachia, a businesswoman whose family manufactured bricks. She was the patroness of the fullers, who set up her statue. She, in turn, donated to the town porticos, colonnades, and a crypt, and erected an imposing tomb for herself.
The selection of a woman as patroness (patrona) of a men’s guild (collegium) was by no means unique. A few women are known to have served as patronesses of guilds, either by themselves or simultaneously with male patrons who frequently were their husbands: yet, women comprised less than five per cent of known patrons during the period of the Empire.35 In return for the gratitude and praise awarded by the guild, the patrons and patronesses—who were wealthy and influential—were expected to bestow benefactions on their guilds. Women could belong to religious and burial guilds, and indeed a few held high office in them. At least two women were chosen as patronesses of synagogues. But there is no evidence that women were permitted to belong to the professional or craft guilds of men, even when they worked in the same occupation.
Many women worked as waitresses in taverns and at counters dispensing drinks and food. These women were selected, doubtless, for their ability to attract customers, and sometimes the taverns had rooms for prostitution upstairs. The names of waitresses and prostitutes are found scribbled on walls at Pompeii. The graffiti refer to the women’s vices and attractions, and announce that some women can be had for two asses—the price of a loaf of bread. But these may be written as insults, rather than reflect a true price. The highest price of a woman is given as sixteen asses.36
Prostitutes came from a variety of ethnic origins. Foreign-born prostitutes would be attractive both to men of the native lands who happened to find themselves in Pompeii and to men who wanted to try out exotic women. It is impossible to determine the status of the women who worked in brothels from the information in graffiti, but it seems likely that they were slaves or freedwomen. Prostitution was recognized and taxed, and brothels were regarded by some as a respectable investment, but the Roman comedy shows that slave-dealers who traded in prostitutes were despised.37 Relatively few respectable women wrote electoral graffiti, but women who mingled with the crowds—the waitresses and prostitutes—are responsible for numerous electoral endorsements (which incidentally indicate that they knew how to write): e.g., “Sucula [little sow] asks you to make Marcus Cerrinius aedile.”
Many freedwomen continued working for their former owners after manumission. Within the household, there was a good chance that female slaves engaged in female-oriented activities—such as ladies’ maids and midwives—would be freed by the mistress, and male slaves by the master. Freed slaves were legally obliged to provide service, so long as enough time remained to earn their own livelihood. Prostitutes were exempt from the obligation to continue service but often had no other way of making a living. Women of high status and those over the age of fifty were also exempt, and so, in practice, were women who had married with their master’s consent.38 Julia Phoebe, a freedwoman of Augustus’ daughter Julia, remained close to her patrona and hanged herself when Julia was exiled.39 Dorcas, the dresser (ornatrix) of Livia, was a freedwoman.40 Freedwomen, particularly domestics or ladies’ maids with no marketable skills, probably welcomed the opportunity to remain in the security of their patron’s employ and to continue living in the house, for it was preferable to being released into the throngs of the poor.
The fate of very poor women can only be guessed at. They were probably worse off than slaves, for slaves at least were property, and were cared for in a manner commensurate with their value. Some freedwomen, as well, might have been able to count on the good will of their former owners. We assume that many unskilled poor women maintained themselves through prostitution. Some did not even have the security of a brothel but practiced their trade out-of-doors under archways.41 Indeed, the word “fornicate” is derived from the Latin word for “arch.”
Beginning in the late Republic, a number of public-assistance programs were maintained by the Roman government, but most of them benefited free men and boys. The doles were motivated not so much by humanitarian reasons as by politicians’ desires to keep men pacified and to curry favor with the crowds. Thus Publius Clodius proclaimed a free grain dole in order to win votes. Since women, though citizens, could not vote, and their hunger was not likely to drive them to revolution, there was little point in including them in the largesse. Moreover, including women would have meant reducing the portions of men, and the benefactor would not have won the good will of those he courted. As it was, the imperial grain dole could maintain only one man. For some men the dole supplemented other sources of income, and they could therefore support a family. But any man who was maintained totally by the dole at Rome could not have shared it with a wife and children.
Similar factors operated in the assistance programs, occasional distributions, and public feasts established by private benefactors in various towns in Italy. Women, if included at all, were usually given less; this discrimination existed even when the donor was female, for it was the gratitude of men that was desirable to wealthy women.42 Only one public dinner for women to the exclusion of men is recorded. This was a dinner for the curia mulierum of Lanuvium in the late second or early third century, on an occasion when men were recipients of a cash distribution.43
Children were supported by special programs, in keeping with the state’s policy of increasing the Italian birthrate. These programs, because they were aimed at the future recruitment of soldiers, also favored boys over girls. Augustus included boys under eleven among those eligible for the irregular distributions (congiaria) he made on special occasions, and Trajan added five thousand boys to the adults on the grain dole of the city of Rome.44
Regular alimentary distribution programs for the support of children in Italy were also established by Trajan. According to inscriptions of Veleia (Elea), a town in southern Italy, the monthly allowance was at the rate of sixteen sesterces for boys, twelve for girls, twelve for illegitimate boys, ten for illegitimate girls. Boys were probably supported until seventeen or eighteen, girls until fourteen, when they were expected to be married. Of the three hundred recipients, only thirty-six were girls. As Richard Duncan-Jones suggests, this ratio may not reflect the actual proportion of the two sexes in the population at Veleia.45 The eligibility requirements for recipients of the alimenta are uncertain, but if each family was permitted to receive only one portion, it was likely that a boy rather than a girl would be enrolled, since the boy’s allowance was larger and of longer duration.
Private alimentary schemes were initiated earlier than the state-supported ones. The first recorded alimentary foundation was established by T. Helvius Basila sometime in the third quarter of the first century A.D.46 His gift was given to the children of Atina, in southern Italy, not distinguished by sex. At least a generation later, Pliny established a fund at Comum, in northern Italy, for the subsistence of freeborn boys and girls.47 Perhaps seventy-five girls and one hundred boys were maintained by Pliny’s foundation. The rates are known at a private foundation from the second century at Tarracina: following the government policy of giving more to boys than girls, this foundation, established by a woman, Caelia Macrina, provided monthly allotments to one hundred children at the rate of twenty sesterces for boys and sixteen for girls.48
The shortsightedness of the alimentary programs and doles which favored males would not have induced poor parents to raise the girls who might become the mothers of the next generation of soldiers. Therefore a few public and private funds were created solely for the benefit of girls. In memory of his wife, the elder Faustina, Antoninus Pius established the “puellae Faustinianae,” and Marcus Aurelius endowed the “novae puellae Faustinianae” honoring the memory of his wife, the younger Faustina.49 In the third quarter of the second century A.D., a daughter of C. Fabius Agrippinus established an alimentary fund at Ostia for girls in memory of her mother.50 Fabia’s grant probably supplemented a government-supported alimentary scheme at Ostia whose beneficiaries were principally boys. All the funds for girls were on a very small scale.
In the absence of information, the reader is free to imagine what it was like to spend most of one’s life in slavery, with a few years as a freedwoman, or to be a poor woman in Rome. Marriage and friendships must have provided some satisfaction, particularly for slaves and ex-slaves who had lost track of their blood relatives. Marriage bonds among the lower classes were at least as stable as among the sophisticated Romans of the upper class, although owners did not always respect the connubial arrangements of slaves.
Despite the sexual availability which was a fact of slavery, there is no evidence that freedwomen were notably more promiscuous than women who had never experienced slavery.51 A freedwoman remained under her patron’s guardianship; her patron was sometimes her husband or her husband’s master; and this surveillance, while keeping the woman in a subordinate position, was likely to have strengthened the marriage bond. The bonds of affection and obligation were so strong that they abided in some couples even after divorce, to the extent of seeing to it that a proper burial was awarded to an ex-spouse.52
A principal motive for marriage among the lower classes was likely to be affection. Thus the political alliances which encouraged successive marriages and divorces among the upper class would not be a significant factor, except for those who were social climbers. Whether divorce was frequent among the lower classes is difficult to ascertain, for divorces are not likely to be commemorated on tombstones. But some tombstones show that hoary Roman ideals could flourish among the very classes that were recruited from non-Roman or newly Romanized ethnic backgrounds: marriages were of long duration, and women were lauded for having been married only once.