A current academic phrase in women's studies is "construction of gender," defined as "society's creation of a set of expectations about the appropriate traits of character and forms of behavior for men and women." I Claudia II, 77. Such constructs or stereotypes are, in their own time, taken as inevitable but are actually variable depending upon cultural and historical influences. This is particularly true of the amalgam of Greece and Etruria that influenced Roman women.

A fertile mix of influences from both Greece and Etruscan forbears, and the legends of early Rome itself, helped create the dichotomy of the Roman upper-class woman of the late Republic and Empire; she was expected to ambitiously practice power politics and reflect the sophistication of an imperial society and, at the same time, reflect the early values of Roman women by spinning her own cloth and thriftily managing household and children. She was to be both emancipated and respectable in a world dominated by men but in which women had carved out spheres of moral influence all their own. Through her fertile moral values, the strength of Rome would be transmitted to future generations.

The Roman past was inhabited by idealistic myths of a simpler golden age. Both the men and women growing up in an increasingly powerful Rome imbibed concepts of heroism and duty based on the collective strengths of the Roman city-state. Roman woman were expected to embody and support that cultural greatness as much as her men. "Working in wool," found in so many admiring epitaphs, meant a woman who had stayed in touch with the deepest values of Roman tradition.

The Feminine Paradigm

Any reader of Livy, the Augustan historian who has best preserved the legend-fact mix of ancient Rome history, finds many women to either condemn or admire. Titus Livius (59BC - 17 AD) wrote during the Augustan age, when a half-century of civil war and a flood of imperial wealth had, in the opinion of his time, undermined the strong moral values of the early Republic. His purpose in writing down the early legends of Rome was to instruct as well as correct; they are brilliant propaganda for the moral reforms Augustus was optimistically proposing. In these fables - possibly, though not probably, with a basis in historical fact - women figure prominently in the reflected glories of Rome's unsullied past. However political the use of these heroines in Livy's histories, they do represent feminine values which were cherished in the early Republic and Empire, arguably by women as well as men. No writer of the classical world peopled his histories with more images of strong but compassionate Roman women than Livy.

Thus in the early stories of Rome, we meet Cloelia, Lucretia, Veturia and Verginia, women who took the male concept of "duty, honor, country" and made it their own, as well as women like Tarpeia who betrayed Rome's values and the Sabine women, who personified it. The courage and self-sacrifice of its heroines were considered worthy of both admiration and reverence. Their tales are instructive in portraying feminine behavior admired or condemned in the early centuries of Rome's development.

From the days of legendary Romulus himself, the famous story of the rape of the Sabine women provided a tender counterpart to the savagery of early Rome. Romulus and his warlike band needed one element to complete the founding of the great city; women to provide children. No neighboring tribe, however, would agree, as they viewed the brutal Romans as barbarians and criminals. Typically, the Romans decided to obtain wives by force and went to a neighboring tribe, the Sabines, with a crafty proposal of burying the hatchet by jointly celebrating religious observances with the Romans. Unarmed and unprepared, the Sabines (with their wives and daughters) attended the Consuelia festival in Rome, only to find their women taken by force. Three years later, the Sabine fathers and brothers returned for revenge and successfully breached the Palatine defenses; before the Romans were destroyed, their now-reconciled women (with children in tow) threw themselves between the parties, begging mercy for their husbands. War was averted and Rome - based not on blasphemy or rape, but on forgiveness - was well founded.

The Rape of Lucretia

Lucretia (traditionally, ca. 510 BC) was the virtuous young wife of Collatinus during the decadent last years of the Tarquin the Proud. A woman's most special virtue was supposed to be her pudicitia, a mixture of chaste modesty, sexual fidelity, and fertility. While at war near the town of Ardea, not far from Rome, the young warriors boasted one night about what their wives were doing back in Rome, each claiming his wife would be faithful and virtuous in his absence. Collatinus claimed his wife, Lucretia, would surpass the rest. Racing disguised to Rome, the young men found their wives were partying with friends at a great banquet. Only Lucretia was found in her atrium with her maid servants, modestly working wool by lamplight and worrying about her beloved husband's safety. The king's son, Sextus Tarquinius, became obsessed with desire for the virtuous young wife. Returning some nights later in her husband's absence, he forcibly raped her after threatening that, if she refused, he would simply kill her and place the body of a murdered slave next to her in bed, telling everyone that she had been killed when taken in adultery. After the rape, Lucretia sent urgent messages to her husband and father, who arrived with friends. After hearing the facts of the rape, the horrified men absolved Lucretia and promised that Tarquinius would pay for his crime. However, the woman's grief was such that she did not absolve herself from paying the penalty for adultery, however forced; in the men's presence, she stabbed herself to death, crying that, from now on, no woman could use the example of Lucretia to live unchaste. The public horror over her rape and suicide led to a revolution, toppling the Tarquin dynasty and establishing the Republic.

Cloelia

After the overthrow of the last Tarquin king, his ally Lars Porsenna, king of Clusium, attempted his restoration and warred on Rome (traditionally, 506 BC). During a truce, Porsenna took a group of young Roman men and maidens as hostages. Cloelia, one of the female hostages, escaped from the king's custody and led several other female hostages to freedom by swimming the Tiber on her horse under a hail of enemy spears. When the Clusian king protested that the truce had been violated and threatened to renew hostilities, Cloelia dutifully agreed to return to him as a hostage to preserve the peace. Porsenna's admiration for her courage was so extreme that he permitted her to choose further hostages and return safely to Rome. Cloelia, realizing how desperately Rome needed its warriors, chose a group of young men rather than her female companions. An equestrian statue of the heroine was set up in Republican days at the top of the Via Sacra, the first such honor ever accorded to a woman: she was to be honored alike for her courage in escaping, her duty in returning to the king when peace required it, and her pragmatic patriotism in choosing to liberate young Roman soldiers rather than her own friends.

Veturia and Volumnia

In the war against the Volscians (traditionally 488 BC), the famous Roman general, Coriolanus, changed sides and led the troops of Rome's enemies within striking distance of his former city. Pleas and appeals from Rome's greatest men left him unmoved; so, the women of Rome went in a body to his loyal mother, Veturia, and Volumnia, his wife, and begged them to intercede for the desperate city. Taking Coriolanus's sons with them, the women journeyed to the enemy camp, where Veturia reproached her son: "Before I admit your embrace suffer me to know whether it is to an enemy or a son that I have come, whether it is as your prisoner or as your mother that I am in your camp. Has a long life and an unhappy old age brought me to this, that I have to see you an exile and from that an enemy? Had you the heart to ravage this land, which has borne and nourished you? However hostile and menacing the spirit in which you came, did not your anger subside as you entered its borders? Did you not say to yourself when your eye rested on Rome, 'Within those walls are my home, my household gods, my mother, my wife, my children'? Must it then be that, had I remained childless, no attack would have been made on Rome; had I never had a son, I should have ended my days a free woman in a free country?" The weeping women persuaded Coriolanus to withdraw (some say this led to his later murder by his erstwhile allies). The tears of children and a mother's moral authority had saved Rome. It is significant that, in both Livy's and Plutarch's recounting of the story, the wife had far more moral authority over her erring son than his own wife.

Virginia

During the historical struggles between the Patricians and the Plebians during the rule of the Decemvirs (451 BC), Verginia (or Virginia) was the educated young daughter of a well-respected army officer, Verginius, and the fiancée of a young and prominent plebian, Icilius. The patrician nobleman Appius Claudius was one of the ten ruling Decemvirs. As such, he served as a judge of civil disputes. Appius fell in love - or lust - with Verginia and, in the absence of her father and fiancé with the army, attempted to seduce her, but was repeatedly rebuffed. Appius then devised a brutal plot. While Verginia was passing through the Forum on her way to school, she was seized by a client of Claudius who took her before the magistrate claiming that Verginia was not, indeed, the daughter of her father, but his own slave, stolen in infancy and insinuated into Verginius' household as his own child without the father's knowledge. He demanded that, as a slave, the court must return Verginia to the client's custody and ultimately into Appius' power. Appius was only persuaded to delay giving judgment against Verginia by the timely arrival of Icilius and the distress of the indignant crowd. It was agreed to delay the hearing until Verginius could be summoned. The next morning, the father and daughter returned and testimony was heard; to the horror of the crowd, Appius gave judgment that Verginia was a slave and must be returned immediately to her former "owner." Verginius then begged that he be permitted to question his daughter and her nurse in private to determine the true facts of her birth. Taking her some distance from the tribunal, Verginius grabbed a knife from a nearby butcher's stand and stabbed his child to death, crying out that it was only by her death that he could secure her freedom. The abuse of power by Appius allegedly led to the overthrow of the corrupt Decemvirate.

Tarpeia

The tale of a traitorous woman was equally as well known to Livy's world as the heroines he exalted. According to old Roman legend Tarpeia was the daughter of Spurius Tarpeius who was the defender of the Capitol in Rome in a war against the Sabines. She delivered the great citadel over to the enemy in exchange for gold and ornaments. Another tale suggests tells she was driven by love for Titus Tatius, the leader of the enemy, rather than mere greed. The Sabines, once she led them into the citadel on the Capitoline, promised to give her what was on their left hands (which she took to mean, their golden armbands and bracelets). Instead, the treachery complete, the contemptuous Sabines crushed her beneath their shields (also in their left hands). The great rock of the Capitoline became known as the 'rupes Tarpeia' (''rock of Tarpeia') and for centuries thereafter, traitors and other heinous criminals were thrown from its height to their deaths.

These fables of Roman women, all as well known to Romans as the story of George Washington and the cherry tree to older Americans, are instructive for the feminine virtues they exalt. In each story, part of Rome's political history - the overthrow of the tyrant kings, the struggles for law and political freedom, the courage and self-sacrifice required in war - is told as moral history exemplified by a woman's nobility or, in rarer cases, a woman's treachery. The early stories of Rome admire no quality more than courage and the exaltation of the community over the desires of the individual. Here women can be seen to be capable of supreme bravery and self-sacrifice for the good of the state, perhaps equal to men. But in all cases, women are expected to accept the authority and protection of their husbands and fathers, to look to them for protection, and to value a male warrior over a "mere woman." Arguably, Roman women could share in the patriotic self-sacrifice of their menfolk, but were never placed in a position to compete with them as primary instruments of political strength.

With examples such as these, the women of early Rome were expected to place duty to their families and city above personal inclination. But another essential element of a woman's place in Roman life was the anomalous authority of her father - the pater familias - within the family itself and her subjection to it as shown in the Republican period.

Sources:

Livy, History of Rome, I.9, I.13 [Rape of the Sabine Women];.I.57 [Lucretia]; III.48 [Verginia]; I.11 [Tarpeia]; II.13 [Cloelia]. Images: Rape of the Sabine Women[detail], David, Louvre Museum. The best source for Livy's own tales (Books 1-X) may be found at The Perseus Project. Link for Livy's biography courtesy of Thinkquest's Forum Romanum. Photograph of unknown Roman woman from the Vatican Museum (taken by the author).

An interesting discussion of just how far the notorious Etruscan women mentioned in Livy were more liberated than their Roman sisters may be found online at Livy and Etruscan Women (Ancient History Bulletin).