The Romans of the Decadence, Couture, 1847. Image courtesy of Thomas Couture.

Particularly in comparison with earlier eras, we know a great deal about women's lives in the century and a half between late Republic and early Empire from the comparative richness in original sources that remain to us from that period. Cicero, Sallust, Catullus, Livy, Horace, Suetonius, Juvenal, Virgil, Pliny, and many more provide constant glimpses of the women behind the men in Roman political and social life. Whereas the values of earlier Roman women must be extrapolated from the legends of Livy or the complaints of Cato the Censor, we are on firmer historical ground with the advent of the 1st century BC.

Already by that time, as in Cicero's letters or speeches, Rome was in a reminiscent mood, looking to its past as a simpler time when the complexities of Empire had not corrupted society. The spectacular stresses of the failing Republic and the rise to empire would change everything, including the position of Roman women. Yet the feminine ideal of the earliest years of Rome apparently endured, even if more honored in the breach than the observance.

Our perceptions of Imperial women are also influenced by the fact that, for hundreds of years in the West, the alleged "decadence" of Imperial Rome has created its own evergreen tradition, in which women, as well as men, were sexually perverse and morally bankrupt. The more sensational tales of historians such as Plutarch and Suetonius and legends of women like Messalina and Agrippina have created the image of female depravity that artists have delighted to portray (such as Couture's painting in which the "abandoned" woman is the centerpiece of the painting, embodying Rome's fall from moral grace.) Obviously the Romans themselves viewed the increasing emancipation of their women with deep and abiding doubts.

Rome in the 2nd Century AD EUR model Image courtesy of B. McManus.

Changes in the Marital Foundation

The late-Republican age that celebrated the nobility of Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi, also saw an increasing emphasis on individuality in both men and women. Men began to compose their autobiographies and noblewomen were given public eulogies at their funeral. Caesar followed the conservative Catulus' example in giving a public eulogy of his female relatives - in this case, his aunt Julia, noting the nobility of both her mother and father's ancestors (and thus his own), and his wife. Cicero agreed to write a biography of Porcia, wife of Brutus and stoic daughter of Cato the Younger. Men were beginning to see, as with Cornelia, that public praise of their wives and daughters brought honor to the family as well as increasing his political profile in an age increasingly "every man for himself."

At the same time, new stresses began to be placed upon the marital unit. In the time of Cato the Censor a century before, only a few reasons justified divorce - among them, infertility, drunkenness, or infidelity (or, oddly, stealing a husband's keys). Now, political power seeking made divorce a tool of personal and family advancement. Marriage had always been viewed as a tool of alliances between families for the betterment of the gens as a whole. By the time of the late Republic, with Rome's increasing dominion over the riches of the Mediterranean, marital alliances were made and broken off to suit changing political or factional opportunities. Caesar, at a critical point in his fortunes with Pompey, broke off his young daughter's engagement elsewhere and married her to the middle-aged Magnus, thus secured several additional years of political support. Cato the Younger divorced his wife, loaning her to Hortensius, a friend and political supporter who needed an heir. When Hortensius died, Cato remarried her (and acquired her inheritance). Even Cicero divorced his wife of thirty years, Terentia, and remarried a girl younger than his daughter (unhappily, as it turned out).

The marriages in Augustus' family, patriarch of domestic virtue as he tried to be, were endless catalogues of marriage, divorce, and remarriage (not the least being his own divorce of his wife, Scribonia, on the day she bore him his daughter, to marry Livia, newly divorced from her husband). His daughter, the unfortunate Julia, was married off from her early teens until her thirties to three separate men whose political alliance Augustus required. When, finally, she rebelled by choosing her own sexual partners, she was exiled for life. Yet others of Augustus' family (for example, his step-daughter-in-law, Antonia, wife of Livia's son, Drusus) showed Republican simplicity and chastity in a corrupted age. Valerius Maximus tells the tale that Antonia (magnificent daughter of Marc Antony), after she was widowed young, shared the bed of her mother-in-law, Livia, rather than sleep alone, a prey to sexual temptation. The idea of sharing a bed with Livia Augusta might, indeed, drive all thoughts of infidelity from a young woman's mind.

Fertility was one of a woman's most highly cherished virtues, yet even in her own time, Cornelia's production of twelve children, although admired, was an anomaly; by the late Republic, upper-class women were producing notably fewer children. At the same times, deaths in the wars of conquest and the increase in slave populations made preserving pure Roman blood a vital political issue. By the end of the first century BC, Augustus mandated laws (including the lex Julia et Poppia Poppaea) providing privileges to women who bore at least three children (four for slave women) and forcing them to remarry, if widows, after only ten months of mourning. Women had access to certain contraception methods (although the physicians of the time were completely wrong about the times of a woman's ovulation). Abortions, whether surgical or induced by philters or charms, were, if not more common - women have always found ways to prevent childbirth -then increasingly open. Literary testimony, including Ovid and Juvenal, show that there were concerns about abortions and that upper-class women had access to and increasingly used them.

The Absent Paterfamilias

Similarly, the decimation of the Roman ruling society during the prolonged civil wars, culminating in the Civil Wars between Caesar and Pompey and, later, Augustus and Antony, meant that for decades in the mid-first century, Roman women had to do without men for prolonged periods of campaign or in the chaos following political proscription, murder, and confiscation. The changes this wrought in the Roman familial fabric were significant. Apart from the upper classes, poorer women also lost their men in untold numbers as soldiers died, small farms were confiscated or looted, and large sections of arable land was given to veterans or political cronies. Although forbidden to marry in the early Empire, soldiers yet kept common-law wives, mothers and sisters who, in the years of their absence, had to maintain the family fortunes as best they could. An increasing number of women inherited independent fortunes through their dead men folk; although procedures were in place to limit their free use of it, the power money created gave many women a new relative independence. Livia, for example, was financially independent and used her personal fortune to enhance her political clout.

Appian tells of numerous women who, in the Civil War following Caesar's assassination, showed loyalty and courage equal to the heroines of legendary Rome. They escape to their fleeing husbands across half the Empire, disguised as slaves, smuggle them out of watched houses to foreign ports, and assist them in every type of escape and disguise. Although some were caught, in every sense, "sleeping with the enemy," his admiration is evident for those who exceed the supposed weaknesses of their sex to emulate the virtues of fortitude, self-discipline, loyalty, and courage. Ironically, he places these admiring paragraphs directly before similar stories of the courage and integrity of slaves, as if to find such qualities in women and slaves was equally admirable - and surprising.

Pliny the Younger writes, over a century later, of Arria the Elder, who committed suicide when her husband, Caecinia Paetus, was condemned to death by the Emperor Claudius in 42 A.D. Perhaps a participant in the conspiracy against the Emperor, she chose to commit suicide rather than live on in poverty or possible exile after her husband's death. Arria died first, stabbing herself in the breast with a dagger with the last words to her husband, "Paete, no dolet" (It does not hurt, my Paetus.). Pliny, Letters, IV.19. To Pliny, she had earned a place in the pantheon of Roman matrons both by her feminine compassion for her husband's agony of mind, and her strong-minded courage in dying before him as an example.

Women of Power

A concurrent trend with the increasing move of women towards more independence and a more public role was a hostile reaction from many male writers who sought to speak for their society. The backlash was partly against women, true, but also represented an established tradition of looking back to a supposedly innocent, virtuous Roman past in contrast to its decadent present. For every Pliny who can speak with admiration of a woman like Arria, there were ten slashing satires of a Juvenal or Martial, who apparently found nothing whatever to commend in any women in any condition, maid, wife, or mother. While the very essence of the satires was to hold a mirror up to an unsatisfactory nature in their own times, yet a truly misogynist note is difficult to ignore. It can be argued that the tone arose from the writer's own personal relations with women; one is also curious if a century of increasingly strong, even dominant and domineering, imperial women had soured the male perspective of how much power and influence a woman should properly wield.

Unlike Greek women, who had no political identity nor status, Roman women were citizens from the earlier ages of the Republic; although their citizenship did not confer the right to vote or stand for political office, yet its status was a clear indication that Roman women were considered to be participants in the res publica. Yet it was considered reprehensible for a woman to "unsex herself" by seeking active political participation. In the societal disjoint of the first century BC, woman began to do so anyway and historians began to write of women who were nothing like the noble Cornelia.

Shortly after the rebellion of Cataline in 63 BC, literature pillories for us a Roman woman with aggressive sexual appetite; the incomparable Lesbia, beloved of the poet Catullus and taunted by Cicero. There is no precedent in earlier Roman literature for Catullus' savage, despairing portrayal of a sexually active woman who is incapable of fidelity. The fact that scholars have identified Lesbia with Clodia, a sister of Publius Clodius notorious for immorality in her own day (Cicero called her the "Medea of the Palatine") portrays this real upper-class woman in a light unthinkable to the earlier Roman tradition. Cato the Censor would have had her killed.

Fulvia, a descendent of the Gracchi and wife of (respectively) Publius Clodius, Scribonius Curio, and Marc Antony, was an active participant in each of her husbands' careers. A prototype for the later empresses, she took an active part in Antony's management of politics after Caesar's death and became wealthy in the resulting proscriptions. When Antony took charge of the east, she headed his opposition to Octavian in Italy, combining with his brother in raising troops and protecting Antony's interests. She was actually besieged with Antony's brother, L. Antonius, in Praeneste; although allowed to rejoin Antony after its fall, she found him obsessed with Cleopatra and died soon thereafter. Attacked with specific venom by Cicero in his Phillipics, Fulvia is one of the first Roman women since the Tarquins to be portrayed as an ambitious, active counterpart of his political life. She was said to have hated Cicero so passionately than, after his murder, when his severed head was brought to Rome for display on the Rostra, she stuck hairpins in the tongue that had attacked her and her husbands in the past.

The alternative to Fulvia during the period was Augustus' own sister, Octavia, and his wife, Livia. Augustus shrewdly promoted both women as representing the traditional values of the Roman matrona that Fulvia had so shockingly transgressed: passivity, moral integrity, and concentration on the traditional woman's sphere of family and religion. Both were, uniquely, declared sacrosanct in 35 BC, giving them independent rights and stature unheard of in Roman history. Yet no woman before Livia had exercised such real political power, although (like her husband) she cloaked it in the traditional values of womanhood. Augustus liked to present her to senators carding and spinning wool in the imperial residence, just another simple matrona making her husband's clothes. During his long rule, Livia was portrayed on coins and statues throughout the Empire, another "first" (the only woman previously portrayed in art was Tarquinia of infamy and the celebrated Cornelia). Livia was active in administering the Empire during Augustus' absence, assisted his clients, and built her own imperial state buildings. She was the first Empress to be deified after death. If Fulvia represented a woman's attempts to wrest political power from men, Livia embodied the women who were actually beginning to wield it.

A fashionable Flavian, early 1st Century AD

The Male Backlash

The more prominent or influential women become during the course of the tumultuous 1st century BC, the more they are likely to be attacked by male writers of the period for betraying their feminine natures and, in some cases, becoming monsters of depraved appetites. Sallust complained bitterly of Cataline's supporter, Sempronia. Her "masculine boldness" led her to "commit many crimes." He noted that she was well read in Greek and Latin literature, played the lyre, and danced with great skill, but that modesty, chastity, and reputations were worthless to her. She was so vilely oversexed that she pursued men, rather than the other way round.

The complaints of Cicero against Fulvia can be followed in progression to the monstrous behavior Tacitus attributes to Livia (whom he alleges poisoned every one of Augustus' heirs so her son, Tiberius, could rule). In the early Empire, Suetonius featured women almost equal to (or as repulsive as) men in their appetites for power and all its scandalous trimmings. Plutarch wrote at length about Messalina, the allegedly sex-mad wife of Claudius who challenged courtesans to stud contests, or the horrific Agrippina the Younger (the unhappy Claudius' last wife) who allegedly poisoned him with a dish of mushrooms so that her son, Nero, could become Emperor, only to be murdered in turn by her son when she would not give up her political power.

Many men viewed it as a societal imbalance when women began acquiring independent wealth through remarriage and inheritance: their economic power was not supposed to exceed that of men. From the woman as honored matrona to the woman as monster, the long century between the death of Caesar and the death of Nero changed the image of Roman women as much as it did the face of Rome itself.

Changing Roles: The Learned Woman

Although female children in wealthier families had received elementary schooling since the late Republic, women were increasingly seeking not merely literacy but higher education. Many male writers satirized this trend. Juvenal wrote bitterly of ".the women who begs as soon as she sits down to dinner, to discourse on poets and poetry, comparing Virgil with Homer; professors, critics, lawyers, auctioneers - even another woman - can't get a word in." He warns this unnatural woman that she should learn the philosophers' lesson that moderation is necessary, even for intellectuals. "And, if she still wants to appear educated and eloquent, let her dress as a man, sacrifice to men's gods, and bathe in the men's baths. Wives shouldn't try to be public speakers . . . there ought to be some things women don't understand."

Continuing his satirical diatribes, he writes of a supposed senator's wife, Eppia, who ".went off with a gladiator to Pharos and the Nile.forgetting her home, her husband, and her sister, she showed no concern whatever for her homeland (she WAS shameless) and her children in tears and (you'll be dumfounded by this) she left the theater and Paris the actor behind." Satires, 6. Yet one suspects that Juvenal is trying to shut the barn door after the horse is missing; independent and learned women were not going to go back to the farm, however much conventional thinkers wished them to.

Women in the Later Empire

All cultures evolve and in the long evolution of Rome from Republic to Empire towards decline, the positions of all citizens continued to change as the times changed them. Yet, for Roman women, it is arguable that no changes in how society viewed them matched the dislocations and opportunities of the period between Cornelia and Agrippina. Although Augustus attempted to legislate a return to the older, restrictive morality, women were never again as invisible or as voiceless in the Empire as they had been in the Republic. Restrictions once removed were not effectively reimposed.

The older customs requiring a guardian or tutor for women who wished to transact business were frequently ignored from the first century AD and after. Women could now frequently participate in commerce or become patronesses of craft or professional guilds. Loopholes in inheritance laws permitted them, increasingly, to build up independent fortunes. Building on Livia's example, later Empresses frequently governed in the Emperor's absence and wielded genuine power, more or less overtly. Their images were frequently shown on the Imperial coinage, individually or side by side with the Emperor. Their idealized images, as his, were distributed throughout an interconnected Empire. They were frequently deified with their husbands and shown ascending with him to the gods. The wife of Emperor Septimus Severus, Julia Domna, was a power in her own right. The mother of Constantine, Helena, created a new sphere of influence as she assisted her son, Constantine, in making Christianity the religion of the Empire. As discussed in "The World Within," the rise of Christianity gave a peculiar twist to the status of women in the Empire as did their increasing elevation as saints and martyrs.

In the slow twilight of Rome's decay, women struggled equally with men to hold together their families and culture until the memory of Rome's original values were as confused as the barbarian cultures overwhelming the state. It is poignant that the Vestal Virgins, once the very epitome of a woman's spiritual importance in Rome, were outlawed and their temple closed in 393 AD. An old prophecy foretold that, when the Vestals no longer maintained the sacred fire in their temple, Rome would fall; it was less than two decades, indeed, before Alaric sacked Rome in 409. With the collapse of the empire, the old Roman standard for a woman's value was bound to change, although in reality in the centuries after Rome her position and influence would significantly decline.

Sources:

Juvenal, Satire 6, trans. Roger Killian, Richard Lynch, Robert J. Rowland, and John Sims. Link to Juvenal through About's Ancient/Classical History. Bust of Augustus' wife, Livia. Military detail from Trajan's Column. The quotation about Antonia and Livia may be found in Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings, IV.3 (p. 369, Loeb edition). For Fayum portraits, see "Links," this site. These encaustic portraits of late-Imperial provincial women were likely prepared for display but used as funerary markers in the tomb. Linked biography of the Empress Messalina courtesy of Romanae Antiquae.