Chapter 2
It’s the Cash That Counts: Roman Social Classes
In This Chapter
How Roman society was divided up
Tensions between nobles and the mob
Slaves and freedmen
Women and children in the Roman pecking order
Roman society was ultimately based on wealth – and how much you had of it – and what family you’d been born into. At rock bottom were those with nothing: the men and women who didn’t even own themselves. They were the slaves, the engines that drove the Roman world, often treated like a disposable resource constantly replenished through conquest. Above them came the freed slaves (freedmen), then freeborn Roman citizens, and at the top was the two-tiered aristocracy of equestrians and senators.
This chapter explains how Roman society was divided up, and what qualified a man to be at any level within the structure. It’s absolutely fundamental to understanding how Roman society worked. Another key to understanding Roman society is to remember that this was primarily a man’s world. It was men who did the voting and who held the jobs. But it’s important to bear in mind that these traditions grew out of the old days of the Republic. In the days of the Empire, society gradually started changing and by the fourth century many of the old ways and distinctions had fallen into decline.
First Things First: The Roman Family
The core component of Roman society was the family (familia). The Roman family was a private and public affair. In both respects, total loyalty from members was expected and given, though more than a few of the emperors set an appalling example – the emperor Caracalla murdered his brother Geta to make sure he had sole power (see Chapter 18).
A Roman familia was much more than a married couple and their children. It was the whole extended family, overseen by the senior male, the pater familias (‘master of the household’ – he had to be a Roman citizen), even if members were living in different houses. It also included a man’s adopted sons, who were treated legally as blood members of the family. The senior male had total power over all the members of his family (patria potestas), which means he made all the decisions over what happened to any one of them, including marriage and punishments, and also acted as family priest. He controlled and even legally owned all their property, and also had the power to sell his son into slavery or kill him. The family was sub manu, ‘under his hand’. The familia also included the slaves of the household, and any freedmen, too, and were linked to other families by marriage into clans called gentes (singular gens). The clan leaders became the most important controlling members of the state (more on this in the section ‘Being on Top – Upper-crust Romans’).
Patrimonium:
An inheritance
Patria:
One’s native land (or fatherland)
Patriarch:
Tribal chief
Pater Patriae:
‘Father of the Country’, a title awarded to Augustus and his successors
A family day
Family life was reinforced by the daily routine. Roman days were divided into 12 hours, measured by a sundial. This is how a typical day panned out:
First hour: light breakfast (jentaculum) and pater familias says the morning prayers with the household
Second hour: Everyone gets about their work and the pater familias greets his clients (see below)
Sixth hour: Lunch (prandium) followed by a siesta (meridiatio)
Eighth hour: Back to work. Affluent men headed for the baths
Ninth hour (mid-afternoon) or later: The main family meal (cena)
Being on Top – Upper-crust Romans
Early Roman society was made up mostly of free citizens, but there was a core group of aristocratic families. The distinction between the general free population and the aristocrats gradually became clearly defined into ‘orders’ known as the plebeians (the majority) and the patricians (the aristocrats). There doesn’t seem to have been any ethnic basis for the division. Instead, the distinctions came about through wealth founded on land.
The original patrician families became organised into clans (gentes) of families tied together through marriage and by owning so much land they ended up controlling Roman society. In Rome’s early days, the patricians had total control of all political privilege and all high offices including the priesthood. They achieved this out of a powerful sense of social solidarity. They were absolutely determined to hang on to their power and exclude the rest, the plebs, from sharing in it.
As you can imagine, this was an arrangement that the plebs – especially the wealthier and more educated ones – resented. A political struggle between patricians and plebs, called the Conflict of the Orders, ensued (you can read about this struggle in Chapter 10). Essentially, the plebeians fought to end the patricians’ monopoly on political power and all the chief offices of state. One of the most significant changes came in 455 BC when the ban on intermarriage between plebs and patricians was lifted. In practice what happened was that patrician families accepted marriage with wealthy pleb families because one of the key ways to keep power was to marry money. These wealthy plebs really became indistinguishable from the patricians and had little in common with the rest of the plebs.
Pets
The animal-killing frenzies that went on in the arena (Chapter 8) doesn’t mean Romans were totally unsentimental about animals. Some did have pets, or at least working animals that were part of the family household. Dogs and cats were essential for the control of rodents, and dogs were useful guards. There’s a fourth-century AD dog tag from Rome inscribed ‘Hold me, lest I flee, and return me to my master Viventius on the estate of Callistus’. A doorway mosaic in a house at Pompeii has an inscription reading Cave Canem, ‘beware of the dog!’ A wall-painting from another house at Pompeii shows a terrier-like dog that must have been a household pet. One of the most famous relics from Pompeii is the cast of a dog, tied up and unable to flee his post as the pumice and lava rained down during the eruption of AD 79 (the dog’s remains decayed, leaving a void in the packed pumice and ash which was filled with plaster by archaeologists). For a curious use of dogs, see Chapter 9.
The old patrician families struggled for survival as intermarriage and the growing power of the wealthy plebs eroded them. By Augustus’s reign (27 BC–AD 14) only about 15 patrician families were left, and by Trajan’s (AD 98–117) just six. In Constantine I’s time (AD 307–337) the title ‘patrician’ had come to mean anyone who held high office in the imperial court.
The patron acted like a father figure to his clients, who were often his freedmen (former slaves): He took a personal interest in their careers, financial concerns, and any legal or business problems.
The client had a duty of loyalty to his patron, which meant helping with money if his patron was in public office or had been fined, for example, or if he was captured in war and held to ransom, and generally offering him support.
Patrons and clients could never appear against one another in a court of law, even as witnesses. Having plenty of clients was a sign of status and especially useful to politically-ambitious nobles.
Nobles (Nobiles)
By the third century BC, the mixture of old patrician families and wealthy plebs had become the new aristocracy (nobiles) of rich landowners – the only respectable source of wealth for a Roman aristocrat. The nobles took no part in trade or anything commercial (at least directly). Simply because they were wealthy, they fulfilled the property qualification to enter the Senate (one million sesterces by the time of Augustus) and serve in the magistracies as aediles, praetors, and so on, because all these positions were unpaid and were regarded as a public honour (honor). Noble families were regarded as those who had had consuls amongst their number and who expected later generations to follow in those footsteps, serving in the magistracies of the cursus honorum (‘the succession of honours’), the career ladder for up-and-coming Roman politicians and statesmen. So although plebs had won the right to stand for office, in practice those without a substantial income couldn’t consider it. (To find out about political positions, go to Chapter 3.)
The Toga
The toga was a piece of clothing unique to the Romans. A toga was a woollen sheet made in the form of a rather stretched semicircle around 6 metres wide. It was worn by free-born Roman males as a mark of distinction. But an incredible piece of irony is that the only women who wore togas were prostitutes, making it a badge of shame for them. A toga was worn over the left shoulder with the rest gathered up into folds around the back and then hung over the left arm. It was only suitable for special occasions because it was completely useless for any sort of action or physical effort and had become almost redundant when Augustus revived it as part of restoring Roman traditions. Domitian (AD 81–96) said anyone attending the games had to wear togas. There were several different types:
Toga virilis or toga pura: Plain off-white toga worn by adult male citizens
Toga praetexta: Off-white toga with a broad purple border, worn by magistrates of aedile or senior status (see cursus honorum in Chapter 3), and also by free-born boys until they were old enough to wear the toga virilis
Toga candida: A specially whitened toga worn by nobles standing for magistracies to suggest their purity
Toga picta: Purple toga decorated with gold thread worn during victory parades by generals, and by emperors on special occasions
Toga pulla: A dark toga for mourning
In theory, the whole citizen body could vote for the magistrates. In the real world, though, the only people who could vote were those who were in Rome at the time. What’s more, the powerful noble families used their influence over their clients, as well as bribery and other means, to make sure the magistracies only went to their own. The result was that office became as good as hereditary because the key families manipulated elections to make sure the positions were handed down from generation to generation.
Nobles wore tunics with a broad vertical purple border (laticlavius) on either side, and togas, a traditional piece of Roman clothing (see the sidebar on ‘The Toga’), with a broad purple border. Some nobles clung to the habit of wearing an iron finger ring, as an ancient symbol of simpler times.
The nobiles families possessed the right of ius imaginum. Ius means ‘law’ or ‘right’. Certain high offices allowed the holder the right to sit in public in a special chair inlaid with ivory called the Sella Curulis. Descendants of such men were allowed to make figures with wax faces of their ancestors (imagines) and display them in the public rooms of the family house for all to see. The more such figures a noble family had, the greater its esteem and dignity. Men who came from families without the ius imaginum, but had managed to obtain high office, were called ‘new men’ (novi homines) and were treated with great hostility (see Chapter 7 for the experience of Marius as a new man).
Equestrians (Equites)
Equestrians went back to the days of the kings when Roman society was divided into classes according to ability to pay for military service (see Chapter 3). The top class was made up of men who could afford to field a horse and were known as the equestrians (equites from equus, ‘a horse’).
Over the years, as Rome’s wealth grew, there were far more men with the necessary qualification to be equestrians than were needed for war, especially as Rome came to rely on allies and provincials to do the bulk of the fighting. The equestrians became more and more involved with commerce, from which the senatorial nobiles were excluded. By the days of the Second Punic War (218–202 BC), government contractors were supplying the Roman army, and these must have been equestrians. After the War, anyone who had the property qualification of 400,000 sesterces was counted an equestrian. These included some municipal aristocracies in Italian cities with Roman citizen status as well as the businessmen ‘financier equestrians’ in Rome. In the late Republic, equestrians formed an important rival political force to the senators, especially in Rome after 122 BC, when Gaius Gracchus brought in a law that said judges in jury trials had to be equestrians.
By the first century BC, equestrians were becoming recognised in their own right (ordo equester), and were united as a single order in the year AD 22 under the emperor Tiberius. There was no longer any connection with military service. To mark their status and distinguish them from nobles, equestrians wore a gold finger ring and their tunics had a narrow vertical purple stripe (angusticlavius) on either side. Equestrians could be promoted to senatorial status en masse to bump up the Senate’s numbers or as individuals.
By the days of the Empire, equestrians were used to fill lots of administrative posts, such as the financial affairs of provinces, or the governorship of lesser provinces. The most famous equestrian of all is Pontius Pilate, who became governor of Judaea. You can find more about the important role equestrians played in Roman society in Chapter 3.
Ordinary Citizens
The world of senators and equestrians was very different from the one spent by the ordinary citizens in the Roman world, who fell into various types: Roman citizens, Latin citizens, and the rest (apart from slaves). These people passed their time working desperately hard to earn a living. As they were practically ignored by historians of the time, we only know about them from their tombstone inscriptions, graffiti, and archaeological remains.
These tell us that the Roman world was heaving with all sorts of service industries like clothes dyers and launderers, teachers, civil servants, and money collectors and lenders. There were manufacturers of clothing and shoes and repairers, artisans who made metal tools, implements, architectural fittings, and furniture. There were also builders, plasterers, sculptors, carpenters, and brick-makers. Food was supplied by shippers and traders, cooks, bakers, restaurant owners, fishmongers, butchers, and farmers. Some jobs were done by both slaves and freedmen.
These people led hard, short, and dangerous lives in a world where protective health and safety legislation were non-existent. But it was also these people that the nobles entertained in the circus and amphitheatre, and were fed with the corn and oil dole. The nobles might have looked down on the Roman mob, but they knew they could not do without them.
Roman citizens
Although some of the plebs had grown wealthy and joined the ranks of the aristocracy whether as senators or equestrians, the vast majority of the Roman population were just ordinary citizens.
The important thing about being a Roman citizen was that each man had the right to vote (suffragium) and also had duties (munera) to the state, which meant paying taxes and military service (women had none of these rights or duties). People power came through the Concilium Plebis Tributum (Council of Plebeians arranged by tribes) and its officials: the tribunes and their assistant aediles (more about this and other assemblies in Chapter 3). A man could lose his citizenship under certain conditions, for example, if he deserted the army, mutilated himself so he could not serve, or dodged a census to evade taxation.
.jpg)
Tribal membership
It wasn’t until the time of Servius Tullius (579–535 BC) and his census (see Chapter 10) that the Roman people were divided into 30 tribes, with one tribe per region. Servius Tullius did this because, until that date, the plebs were just a confused mass of people, which made them difficult to govern. Four of the new tribal regions were in Rome (the Tribus Urbanae) and the other 26 (originally 16) were in the countryside around Rome (Tribus Rusticae). Landowners were allocated to the tribe of the region where their land was. People without land were allocated to one of the city tribes.
As Rome’s territory increased, more tribes were added until, by 241 BC, there were 35. Despite a short-lived plan in 90–89 BC to add 10 more, 35 was all there ever were. So any new citizens, wherever they lived in the Roman Empire, were allocated to one of the existing tribes, but, of course, unless they were close enough to Rome to vote, the privilege wasn’t much use.
What’s in a name?
Roman citizens had a triple name, the tria nomina made up of:
praenomen (forename)
nomen (name of clan)
cognomen (family surname)
Some had an agnomen (additional surname), too. So, Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus was a member of the Cornelii clan, of the Scipio family, with the forename Publius. His additional name Africanus helped distinguish him from other family members with the same names.
Universal citizenship
In the early days of Rome, to be a citizen, you had to be the child of a Roman father and mother, or of a Roman parent married to someone from an approved place. Later on, citizenship could also be held by:
The adopted children of such men
Those who bought citizenship or earned it through membership of a city or an auxiliary army unit privileged with a grant of citizenship
Those who had been honourably discharged from an auxiliary unit of the Roman army after serving for 25 years
Those granted citizenship by petition to the emperor
Being a Roman citizen was a jealously guarded privilege, at least until AD 212 when the emperor Caracalla issued his famous Constitutio Antoniniana which made all freeborn men of the Empire into Roman citizens (see Chapter 19).
Latin citizens
Latin rights were originally dreamed up as a sort of halfway house for some of Rome’s allies in Italy during the third century BC. Men from these towns were called Latin citizens and were allowed to conduct law suits in Roman courts on the same terms (commercium) as a Roman citizen. If they moved to Rome, they became Roman citizens. A Latin woman could marry a Roman citizen and her sons would become Roman citizens (conubium).
Towns instituted with similar rights were called municipia with a legal status called civitas sine suffragio (‘community without the vote’). These towns had to provide troops. After 89 BC, they got the right to vote and municipium came to mean any self-governing Italian town except colonies. Outside Italy, municipia with Latin rights came first, and later Roman citizen rights were created as special privileges.
To discourage people from moving en masse to Rome, a law of 150 BC made magistrates of these towns into Roman citizens. It was a handy way of easing provincials into becoming Roman citizens. In 89 BC, Transpadane Gauls were made into Latins, with full citizenship following in 49 BC. Obviously after AD 212 and the edict of universal citizenship, the distinction between Roman and Latin citizens ceased to exist.
Everyone else: Provincials
Because people moved fairly freely around the Roman Empire until Diocletian’s time (AD 284–305), even in the remotest areas, a traveller would find Roman citizens in the form of soldiers and administrators, Latin citizens in the army or trading, and local citizens. These non-Roman and non-Latin citizens were known as peregrinae (‘foreigners’), and had to fulfil all the local responsibilities of their own communities. Peregrinae had no civil rights under Roman law unless they were represented by a citizen patronus, couldn’t exercise any political function in Roman assemblies or magistracies, and were banned from wearing togas in case they tried to enter a Roman assembly.
Any such man could be granted Roman citizenship, after the reign of Augustus, though such men still had to take care of their own local responsibilities. Sometimes units of provincial soldiers in the Roman army (see Chapter 5) were rewarded with Roman citizenship en masse for acts of valour. Normally such soldiers had to wait until their term of service was up to be made citizens.
Trading insults
There was a strict protocol in Roman society about insults. Vespasian (AD 69–79) ordered that no-one should insult a senator with foul language, but if a senator insulted an equestrian, then the victim was perfectly entitled to insult the senator back the same way. In other words, any citizen could respond to an insult from another citizen in the same way, regardless of whether they held different status.
Are You Being Served?
Slavery was endemic in the Roman world, as it was throughout antiquity. As Rome grew more powerful, the numbers of slaves increased, and Roman society became increasingly dependent on them. The slave revolt of 73–71 BC, led by Spartacus (see Chapter 14) and which had nearly devastated southern Italy, preyed on Roman minds. The Senate once considered forcing slaves to wear distinctive dress until someone pointed out that then the slaves would realise how many of them there were. But if slaves made up a huge part of the population, so also did the freedmen – ex-slaves freed by their masters.
Slaves
Anyone conquered by the Romans was liable to be enslaved, and so were rebellious provincials. Their children were automatically slaves. There were other sources of slaves, like people convicted of capital crimes.
Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (c. 210–150 BC), the Roman commander in Spain 180–179 BC (see Chapter 14), crushed a rebellion in Sardinia in 177 BC. He captured so many slaves there that the Roman slave market was flooded with cheap Sardinian captives. Sardi venales, ‘Sardinians for sale’, was the cry, and it became an everyday Latin expression for any commodity available in abundance and cheap as a result – a bit like our ‘Made in China’!
A slave’s life
Slaves could have desperately hard lives, like those sent to work in the mines or on large agricultural estates, but educated slaves owned by rich masters often lived better than poor free people. Slave marriages existed but had no legality so either partner could be sold if his or her master decided. Female slaves were liable to be sexually abused by their masters or overseers, but they also could be freed and married by their former owners (see the sidebar ‘Regina the freedwoman’, later in this chapter, for just such an example). Punishments were arbitrary and down to the master or mistress’s whims. Slaves were expensive to buy, clothe, and feed and that could encourage meaner masters to scrimp.
Slaves in the household of a wealthy man could have a relatively pleasant life, especially if they came from parts of the Roman world thought civilised, like Greece. Pliny the Younger mentions walking and talking with educated slaves of his. Many of his slaves might have been born in the household and were treated as part of the home.
One of the reasons for better treatment was that the smarter members of the free population realised abusing slaves was likely to backfire. Largius Macedo was a praetor around the beginning of the second century AD, but his father was a freedman. As was so often the case with men who came from lowly origins, Largius Macedo went over the top to show how upper class he was and treated his own slaves cruelly. So one day, while he was bathing at his villa, some of his slaves attacked and beat him and left him for dead. Other faithful slaves revived their master and a hunt went out for those who had escaped. Most were recaptured and punished, but Macedo died a few days later.
Slave rights
Slaves also had some rights, which were steadily increased in the days of the emperors. It became illegal to kill a slave or get rid of a slave simply because he or she was ill. There were strict laws against castrating slaves or abusing their bodies in other ways. Antoninus Pius (138–161 AD) even made it possible to prosecute the murderer of a slave.
In Egypt in the year AD 182, during the days of Marcus Aurelius, an 8-year-old slave boy called Epaphroditus rushed up to the roof of his master Plution’s house to watch a procession of dancers go by. He fell off in the excitement and was killed. He might only have been a slave boy, but the papyrus document that records the disaster also records how his master’s father-in-law Leonidas made arrangements for the boy’s proper burial.
Slaves, wherever they lived, had no freedom. One of the ironies of the way Roman society evolved into the Dominate established by Diocletian at the beginning of the fourth century (refer to Chapter 20), is that many ordinary citizens found themselves effectively enslaved to their jobs and homes with no right to move away or change profession.
Freedmen
Slaves in the Roman world, unlike most other slave-owning societies from ancient to early modern times, could always hope they might one day be freed. There were millions of freedmen and women in the Roman Empire, found in all provinces at all times and in all walks of life. As free people, they were entitled to the privileges of citizenship and some rose to positions of high status. The emperor Claudius notoriously relied on freedmen to run the Empire for him (flick to Chapter 16 for more on this).
Freeing a slave
A slave could be freed by his master in the master’s will (the most usual) or as a gift during his master’s lifetime, which meant going before a magistrate who touched the slave with a rod after his master had given him a pretend slap as a symbol of his last punishment as a slave. Slaves could even save up money from casual earnings or gifts and purchase their own freedom, but that usually meant negotiating a deal with their master to compensate him for the original purchase price.
Even though he was now free, a freedman had a duty of obligation to his former master and that meant becoming his client and remaining tied to him in that mutually-advantageous relationship. In fact, the new client might even carry on in his old job. Refer to the earlier section ‘Being on Top – Upper-crust Romans’ for details of the patron-client relationship.
The advantage to the old master is pretty clear: He no longer had to feed and clothe his former slave, who now had to deal with all that for himself. An ex-slave could vote on his old master’s behalf, too. If a court case blew up, then his ex-slave could now serve as a witness on his behalf. The disincentive was the tax levied on freeing each slave at 5 per cent of his or her value.
Stigma
Freedmen could never become equestrians or reach senatorial rank; they suffered the social stigma of having been slaves, and were looked down on as coarse and vulgar. But it wasn’t a prejudice many Romans could afford to have because so many people were descended from slaves at some point in their ancestries, even a few emperors. The emperor Pertinax (AD 193), for example, was the son of a freedman called Helvius Successus who had made his money in the timber trade; you can read more about Pertinax in Chapter 18.
The most average freedmen could hope for was to serve in the administration of their city or on the imperial service, or become modest businessmen like merchants. If successful enough, a freedman could afford to become a member of the seviri Augustales (‘the board of six priests in the cult of Augustus’), which was monopolised by freedmen. As Pertinax’s example shows, unlike their fathers, the sons of freedmen could rise as high as any man from a free family, without any obligations to their father’s old masters.
Regina the freedwoman
Regina (Latin for ‘queen’) was a slave girl from the British tribe called the Catuvellauni. She was owned by a Syrian called Barates who fell in love with her, freed her, and moved her with him to South Shields on the northern frontier in Britain. Sadly she died when only 30, in the early years of the third century AD. Barates invested in a magnificently carved tombstone to his beloved wife, which has survived. You can see it in the museum there today.
Women and Children Last!
Women and children naturally made up the bulk of the population, but in theory, they were totally subject to men. Although women could be citizens, they couldn’t vote.
Women
Women could have citizenship status, but they had no formal role in Roman society. Women couldn’t serve in any of the capacities men served in as magistrates, politicians, or soldiers. A woman couldn’t even be an empress in her own right, though they were used for family alliances, such as when Augustus made his daughter Julia marry Marcellus, then Agrippa, and finally Tiberius (see Chapter 16) in an effort to establish a dynasty through his only descendant. If an emperor left only a daughter, then the succession passed to a male relative or another man altogether.
Women had almost no legal identity other than as a man’s daughter, sister, wife, or mother. Vespasian (AD 69–79) passed a law that said any woman who had become involved with a slave man should be treated as a slave herself. Real slave women had even less of an identity, if that’s possible to imagine.
Education
Women were generally excluded from education, which was biased towards boys. But some girls from good families were taught to read and write and were known as doctae puellae, ‘educated girls’.
Here’s an exceptional case of an educated woman in the public eye. After Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, heavy taxes were imposed by the Second Triumvirate on anyone implicated with the conspirators. A woman called Hortensia (whose father was an orator called Quintus Hortensius) made a speech to the Triumvirs in 42 BC on behalf of the wives of the men affected. It was written down and studied in later years as an example of an outstanding speech and not just because it was by a woman.
Women in the home
In the man’s world of the Roman Empire, women were theoretically confined to running the home and having children. The wife of a pater familias was known as the mater famiilias domina (‘mistress mother of the household’), and she was supposed to be entirely subject to her husband and, before him, her father. In general though, Roman society (which means basically men), reserved their admiration for women renowned for their upright moral virtues who were regarded as the guiding force behind teaching their sons the value of honourable behaviour in public and private life. In 215 BC, during the Second Punic War, the lex Oppia imposed limits on women’s right to own gold, wear elaborate dresses, or ride in fine carriages. It was repealed in 195 BC much to the annoyance of moral diehards like Marcus Porcius Cato (whom you can read about in Chapter 23).
By the first century BC women’s rights were improving. Those over the age of 25 could have their own property and divorce their husbands if they chose. Women could also play a more important role in society, though they were still never allowed to take on any official jobs. But women were still primarily seen as wives and mothers. Augustus penalised unmarried women and men (for example, bachelors were prevented from inheriting legacies), but he rewarded those who did marry and had children.
Even so, Roman women could be legally beaten by their husbands. In fact, it was even considered a reasonable way to treat a woman if her husband thought she had misbehaved. As a result, it was not unusual for women to bear scars on their faces from the treatment they had received. One of the most horrible cases was that of Egnatius Mecenius, who beat his wife to death for drinking wine. No-one criticised him, all thinking she had deserved it.
Women’s clothing and beauty treatments
Women’s clothing, like most Roman clothing, was much simpler than today’s:
Breasts were supported by a strapless band (strophium).
Instead of panties or briefs a sort of bandage (feminalia) was often used instead, though panties very like modern ones have been found.
A slip (tunica interior) was worn over these undergarments.
On top was a woollen gown (stola) tied in round the waist and perhaps a shawl (palla).
Wealthy women could afford silk and a Greek woman called Pamphile invented a way to weave silk so fine that the clothing made women look nude. Bronze (or silver and gold for the rich) brooches, like our safety pins, were used to hold the clothing in place. Shoes were like open leather sandals today, sometimes elaborately decorated with patterned cut-outs. Cosmetic treatments included using ass’s milk on the skin or even a jelly made by boiling a bull-calf’s bone for 40 days to avoid wrinkles, antimony as an eyebrow make-up, and kaolin as a face-powder.
Women and their children
Roman women had no legal rights over their children. Unwanted children could be exposed (abandoned in the open air), which might mean death or enslavement, depending on where the child was found and whether the mother wanted that or not. If her husband died, then the estate passed to the son and a woman could find herself with nothing at all.
Women who kept their children faced all the worry and tragedy of a very high level of infant mortality and all the pressure to produce a healthy son who lived to adulthood and could inherit his father’s estate.
Special women
Apart from being confined to special jobs like serving as Vestal Virgins (refer to Chapter 9), the limitations on women didn’t affect some in powerful families from having a huge amount of influence on the men around them. Agrippina the Younger, Caligula’s sister and Nero’s mother, was effectively in total charge until Nero had her murdered (see Chapter 16). Some of the women of the Severan dynasty – Julia Maesa, Julia Soaemias, and Julia Mamaea – were the real power behind the thrones of Elagabalus and Severus Alexander (refer to Chapter 19). Under special circumstances, women from more modest origins could also play an important role in the lives of their communities. Here are some of them:
Eumachia of Pompeii was one of the city’s most important businesswomen in the mid-first century AD; she dedicated a building in Pompeii’s forum to the corporation of dyers, weavers, and launderers. Her building was used as a wool market, and Eumachia was able to afford a substantial tomb outside the city gates but no-one knows much about her. She may have been a widow who took over her husband’s businesses or she may have been wealthy in her own right.
Sempronia lived around the time of the Catiline Conspiracy of 62 BC (see Chapter 14). A former prostitute, Sempronia was a supporter of Lucius Sergius Catalina. Extremely good-looking and a talented musician and dancer, she had even managed get married and have children. But she was notorious for being as bold as a man in daring and wasn’t the slightest concerned about her reputation. She was lustful and would approach men directly, she’d been an accessory to murder, and was constantly in debt due to her extravagant lifestyle. But according to the historian Sallust, she was witty, charming, excellent company, and a talented poet.
Volumnia Cytheris was a freedwoman actress and probable prostitute in the mid-first century BC. A poet called Cornelius Gallus wrote poetry dedicated to her. Her sexual status gave her access to relationships at the top end of Roman power politics and she found time to be Mark Antony’s and Brutus’s mistresses. Cicero was disgusted by how she moved in such circles. Unfortunately for women like Volumnia, age was their enemy and they could easily lose favour and disappear . . . and that’s what happened to her.
Children
Children were immensely important to Roman families, not just as potential heirs or wives to make family alliances but as individuals, too. The tombstones of children show that their loss was mourned just as in all societies. Children had hard lives though, even if they were born into wealthy households. Firm discipline was routine and was thought to toughen them up for adulthood and improve their character.
Upbringing and education
The better off a family, the more likely the children would be handed over to the care of a nurse when small and then male slaves (paedagogi) who accompanied the child everywhere: to school, or on outings to public places like the baths and theatre. They were more than just protectors: Nurses and paedagogues had to take care of their charges’ moral education, manners, and behaviour.
Education was simply a matter of family wealth, but rich or poor, it was often only boys that had any real chance of a serious education. There was no system of public education in Rome or anywhere else in the Empire, though Vespasian (AD 69–79) was the first emperor to hire teachers of rhetoric at the state’s expense in Rome.
Boys from wealthy families could expect the best education, which was designed to prepare them for a career in military and public life so that they could take their place amongst the movers and shakers in the Roman world. That meant grammar, rhetoric, music, astronomy, literature, philosophy, and oratory, rather than subjects we would recognise today, though, of course, reading and writing were an essential foundation.
Educating the enemy
In order to get conquered provincials ‘on side’, a tried-and-trusted Roman technique was to educate the sons of local rulers at Rome so that they grew up within the Roman system and took Roman ideas and customs home with them. It’s just what the British did with their Empire in places like India nearly 2,000 years later. A good example is Juba II who was educated in Rome and made client King of Mauretania in 25 BC (see Chapter 16 for more on client kings) by Augustus. Juba ruled till AD 23 and introduced all sorts of Greek and Roman customs to his part of north-west Africa. It didn’t always work. See Chapter 21 for Attila the Hun, who was brought up in the court of the emperor Honorius.
Teaching was conducted in a schoolmaster’s house, apartment, or even in a public place, while the rich had their own personal tutors. Basic schooling just involved literary and familiarity with literature, myth, and law. Better schools included more in-depth study as well as a grounding in Greek, while the boys from the top families went on to be taught by a rhetor (a teacher of oratory) to prepare them for public life.
Some examples of writing exercises have survived, showing that children could expect to find themselves copying out passages from works by Virgil or other poets, regardless of where they lived in the Roman Empire. Most of the time the students had to listen to their teachers and memorise passages because writing materials were costly. But many children went without, and only perhaps picked up reading and writing in later life if they were lucky. It’s clear from archaeological evidence of graffiti and other surviving written evidence that soldiers and veterans were on the whole more literate than most of the rest of the population.
Children’s charities
Charity was all-important in a world with no proper social services. Alimenta worked like this: The emperor lent money at low rates of interest to farmers. The farmers paid the interest, which went into a pot to pay for the upkeep of a predetermined number of children. But charity could also be private. Pliny the Younger gave half a million sesterces (equal to the annual pay of 417 legionaries) in his lifetime for the support of girls and boys in Rome. Sometimes wealthy men would leave a capital sum in their wills, so that the interest could be used to take care of poor children. Publius Licinius Papirianus of the city of Cirta in North Africa left 1.5 million sesterces to earn 5 per cent interest annually to pay for the upkeep of 300 boys and 300 girls.
Poor children
Poor children had far fewer opportunities, though under Nerva (AD 96–98) and Trajan (AD 98–117) the imperial system of alimenta was introduced to provide funds to educate poor Italian children (see below).
All this presupposes poor kids were even allowed to grow up. Poor families were used to the idea that another unwanted mouth to feed, especially a girl, would be cast out (exposed) in the hope that they would die or be picked up by someone else. In the East anyone who found an exposed child could enslave it until Trajan outlawed the practice. Constantine I (AD 307–337) started state assistance to prevent exposure – the Empire simply couldn’t afford the loss of any additional labour, though it wasn’t actually banned until 374.
Children were liable to be orphaned if their mothers died in childbirth, which meant they had to hope their fathers or other relatives would take them on. The best hope for slave children was being brought up in the household where their parents worked, as nothing stopped them being sold off. Children born with congenital ailments or other serious birth defects had little or no chance of survival.