WOMEN IN ANCIENT ROME
The other great classical culture was Rome. Its development from a small village on one
of the seven hills of Rome to a world-wide empire is a remarkable story. As ancient Rome
changed from a monarchy to a republic, and finally an empire, the status of women changed as
well. However, at no time were women as restricted as Greek women.
Roman legacies to Western Civilization were as numerous and important as the Greek
heritage. Roman architecture, education, engineering, governmental structure, law, and the
Christian Church have had lasting influences on the rest of the western world. Additionally,
Rome became the great transmitter of Greek culture.
The mythical story of Rome’s foundation clearly establishes the tone of women’s
treatment. Amulius wanted the kingdom of Latium, so he killed the two sons of the king, and
required the king’s only daughter, Rhea Silvia, to become a virginal priestess for the Goddess
Vesta, deity of the household. When Rhea fell asleep, the Mars, the god of war became
overwhelmed by her beauty and seduced her. Rhea gave birth to twins, Romulus and Remus, but
Amulius demanded that they be drowned. Instead they were placed on a raft which drifted ashore
where they were suckled by a female wolf, and then later raised by a peasant family. Romulus
ended up killing his brother, and when he established a village in 753 b.c.e. it was called Rome.
As there were not enough women for each man to have a wife, Romulus invited the neighboring
Sabine tribe to a barbecue. In a premeditated plan, the Sabine women were seized and the
husbands were driven away. In the seventeenth century, the great Baroque Flemish painter, Peter
Paul Rubens, will paint this event in his celebrated nude entitled the “Rape of the Sabine
Women.” When the husbands of the Sabine women later returned armed for battle, their wives
were pregnant and asked for peace, saying they had lost one set of husbands and did not want to
lose their new ones. Ancient Rome right from the beginning was a mixture of various tribes and
cultures.
Until 509 b.c.e. Rome was ruled by kings. Some of these monarchs were Etruscans,
another important group of people north of Rome. This occurred not through Etruscan conquest,
but through their assimilation with Rome. The Etruscans resided in the Tuscany plain and
beyond. As the Etruscan language has not been translated, we are not sure of some of the details
of their society, but we know that they were heavily influenced by the Greeks, who had colonized
southern Italy. These Greeks were vastly more advanced in the civilization process than the
Romans. What was so unusual about the Etruscans was how well they treated their women.
There was an equality in their society similar to the ancient Egyptians and Celts. Not much of
this fairness to women was passed on to the ancient Romans, although the Etruscans’ influence
might have been responsible for what scholars attest is Rome’s better treatment of their
womenfolk than the Greeks practiced.
Rome does not have the same literary foundations that the Greeks had. Rome’s literature
was basically produced five or so centuries after the actual events. While the Romans had an epic
tale like the Iliad and the Odyssey of the Greeks, it was written late in the days of the Republic
(the Republic ended 31 b.c.e.). Entitled the Aeneas, it was written by Virgil who modelled it after
the famous Greek stories. A near contemporary of Virgil’s was Ovid (43 b.c.e. - 17 c.e.), who in
his poem, The Metamorphoses, was the first to organize all the Greek and Roman myths into a
cohesive, chronogical collection. The Romans might have had their indigneous deities, but they
also borrowed heavily from the Greek ones.
There are many historical sources for reconstructing the lives of ancient Roman women,
but not that many that offer the personal voice of a woman. Rome was patriarchal in its
organization during its one thousand plus years of history. Literature, philosophy, politics, and
the arts were dominated by men. Men had both public and private identities, while women
usually had only private lives. Generally, only in the area of religion did some Roman women
have a powerful, public role, although wives, sisters, and mothers of Roman senators and
emperors at times exerted great influence over political affairs and their male relatives.
There were three identifiable groups in ancient Rome: the patricians, the plebeians, and
the slaves. The patricians were the landed class, who became dominate in the Senate. The
plebeians were constantly striving for more political power, and over the centuries of Roman
history were able to make some gains. When the transition from republic to empire was achieved
about one-third of the population were slaves, captured from many centuries of warfare.
Morally, women were to be positive role models, which idea the Christians will adopt. A
story from the monarchical days of early Rome clearly illuminates this important and honorable
role prescribed for married matrons. Lucretia was the wife of a soldier. When her husband was
gone from Rome with other soldiers, they started bragging about whose wife was the most
faithful and honorable. In the course of the discussion, one of one of the soldiers surreptiously
slipped away to Lucretia’s house and raped her. Rather than suffer the lost of her family’s
reputation as a result of this incident, she committed suicide, salvaging her family’s name.
Another laudable legend was about Cornelia, the exemplary daughter of Scipio Africanus, the
general and hero of the final Roman battle against Carthage, who was Rome’s main competitor
for commercial domination in the Mediterrean Sea basin. Cornelia was the wife of Tiberius, and
mother of the reformers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchi, who were both assassinated for pushing
land reform legislation, which was threatening and thwarting to the wealthy patrician class.
During the centuries of the Republic and Empire, women were under the guardianship of
their male relatives, their fathers before marriage and their husbands after. In every aspect of their
lives women were expected to defer to men. The head of the household was the oldest adult
male, the paterfamilias, literally father of the family. The paterfamilias could legally kill his wife
for adultery, divorce her at will, and expose a new-born infant without the mother’s consent.
When a maiden married, her father’s authority passed to her husband, and she was considered an
infeliae loco or a child in the family.
During the approximately five hundred years of the republic, girls had only one name, the
family one. There were no specific names for Roman girls, only masculine ones that changed
their ending to a feminine one to indicate a girl. If there was more than one girl then they both
had the same name, but with the additional moniker of elder and younger or first, second, and
third, etc. By the time of the Empire, women had two names, but again they were taken from the
family and the father’s name. No girl names were specifically female in origin. Thus, Claudia,
Julia, Victoria, Livia, and Cornelia were feminized male names respectfully of Claudius, Julius,
Victorius or Victor, Livy, and Cornelius.
Education for the girls of the patrician and plebeian classes was based on three
fundamentals: the study of classics including the Greek language, needlework, and the art of
pleasing. Classics were the accepted literary endeavors of the Greeks and Romans. It was
expected that perspective wives were to receive enough education in order to appreciate their
future husband’s work, wit, writing and worth. An intelligent and talented woman had to be
careful not to appear more clever than the men she came in contact with. This idea will percolate
down through the centuries to modern times.
As for the Romans and most all ancient cultures, marriage was the expectation for young
maidens. During most of the republican days of Rome, there were three forms of marriage. One
was where the power over the girl passed from her father to her husband. The next was where
brides were purchased, and the third was basically a common law type of marriage. After
spending a year living together the couple were considered married.
Dowries and trousseaus were part of the Roman marriage contract. The dowry for upper
class brides could be paid in three annual installments. When the famous lawyer and orator,
Cicero, saw his daughter Tullia married for the third time, Cicero had difficulty making the last
payment to the extent that he considered arranging for a divorce for his daughter to avoid paying
the final dowry fee. Usually ten months was allowed to provision the trousseau.
Some of the wedding customs of the ancient Romans have carried over to today in
Western societies. As Juno, was the goddess of love and marriage, she was honored by brides
wanting their weddings to be in June, her month. White was the usual color of the bride’s
wedding dress, but her veil was flaming red. A bride carried a bridal bouquet, but it was not
flowers but composed of garlic, chives and other strong herbs to symbolize fertility and drive the
evil spirits away. Ancient Romans broke a thin loaf of bread over the bride’s head at the end of
the ceremony. The loaf symbolized fertility, and the crumbs eaten by the wedding guests brought
good luck. Cracked walnuts were thrown, again to wish them luck and prosperity. Vesta, was the
goddess not only over the hearth and threshold, but over virgins. It was considered back luck for
a new bride to stumble or trip as she entered her new home, so the groom carried his bride over
the threshold.
By 200 b.c.e. the other forms of marriage died out and only the first one or free marriage
became common practice. The young girl was married after the signs had been read by the family
male priest, a forerunner of the reading of the banns in the Middle Ages and beyond. Girls were
of legal age for marriage at twelve, and boys at fourteen, but generally the husband-to-be was in
his thirties, similar to ancient Greece. Christians later on will use the ages of twelve and fourteen
respectfully as the age when marriages could legally be consummated because of infant betrothal.
The ancient Roman philosophy of procreation and birth control were different than for the
ancient Greeks. At various times the Romans actively sought to encourage population growth.
Emperor Caesar Augustus gave special recognition to mothers of three or more children by
freeing them from male guardianship. Prospective wives were given vaginal examinations by
midwives to give comfort to prospective grooms’ families that the women were fertile. Doctors
could recommend that various plants be consumed if a wife was barren, and offer other
ingredients for aphrodisiacs. As Roman families were quite small - two or three children - we
think they used contraceptives. These would have included rue, pennyroyal, aesofedia, and
artemisia Abortions were acceptable for upper-class women, and used as a birth control method
too. Now numerous abortions and subsequent serious population decline are being touted as
some of the reasons why Rome fell in the West. By the end of the second century a.c.e. under the
emperor Septimius Serverus, a law was passed punishing a wife who aborted without her
husband’s consent. Infanticide was another way to control Rome’s population. One of the most
common methods was to leave the infant child exposed on a hilltop. Rescued foundlings in
Roman Egypt were given the name meaning “off the dunghill”, in remembrance of their place of
retrieval. It appears that more girls than boys were exposed. In a letter sent to a wife from her
husband: “if as may well happen, you give birth to a child, if it is a boy let it live, if it is a girl,
expose it.” Both ancient Greeks and Romans thought it peculiar that ancient Egyptians, Germans
and Jews did not expose their children, but raised all of them.
Although divorce was uncommon in the early period of Roman history, it was still
permissible on specific grounds. A husband could obtain a divorce for the following reasons: his
wife using contraception or an abortifacient without his approval; wife’s adultery, barrenness of
the wife, excessive drinking by the wife, wife’s sojourn outside the home without her head
covered, wife’s mismanagement of her husband’s household goods, and if a wife counterfeited
the household keys1 If a wife committed adultery, then divorce was obligatory. Otherwise it was
thought that the husband condoned it, making him liable to prosecution as his wife’s pimp. In the
Julian Law of 17 b.c.e. was the provision that a father could kill both his daughter and her lover
if she was unfaithful to her husband. A husband was not permitted to kill his wife for adultery,
but he might kill her lover.
Divorce was not as easy for a wife, but it was possible after 200 b.c.e. There were three
reasons allowed for wives to divorce their husbands: if her husband deserted her, if he was
convicted of certain crimes, and if he was made a prisoner of war. By the second century b.c.e.
divorce had ceased to be a rare occurrence. In fact, divorce had become so common that it was a
public scandal, especially in the upper classes. Julius Caesar and Marcus Cicero both divorced
twice and married three times. According to the writer Seneca, he sarcastically said that women
1
some scholars think this unusual reasons was to keep wives out of the locked wine cellar as winedrinking was a capital offense for women
of his day counted their years not by consuls (highest Roman officials), but by their husbands. A
Christian writer, Tertullian, living in the late second and early third centuries, remarked: “
Divorce was now looked upon as one of the fruits of marriage.” (See the remarks in the
Christianity chapter on why they will advocate no divorce.)
Concubinage was practiced by the Romans for several reasons. Laws restricted people
from different classes marrying. For instance, a senator and a freed slave could not marry, so they
lived in a concubine relationship. Usually bachelors had a concubine before they married legally.
Severe punishments were meted out for rape and fornication. Fornication was a crime for
women. Even the Emperor Caesar Augustus exiled both his daughter and granddaughter for
illicit intercourse. Some upper-class women protested against the curtailment of their sexual
freedom by registering with the aediles (Roman officials) as prostitutes, because then the laws on
criminal fornication would not apply to them. Rape was treated the same way as in the Ancient
Near East. If the girl was willing when she was raped, then as a punishment for her fornication
she was burned to death. If she was unwilling, she was still punished albeit a lighter one, for she
should have screamed and brought help from her neighbors.
Respectable women were not supposed to use cosmetics, perfume or hairpieces to seduce
their husbands, and the ideal Roman matron was to wear her hair in a severe style. Both genders
dyed their hair however, and yes, blond was in then too. Even bikinis were worn by women
based on some artifactual evidence. All these prohibited practices were unenforceable, but so
many visual depictions of matrons in the Republican days show women with a severe
countenance. Sumptuary laws were enacted for both men and women during wartime to force
them to economize in the use of luxuries. Women were more affected than men by these. During
Rome’s fights with the Phoenicians or Carthagians, known as the Punic Wars, the Oppian Law
was enacted. Women could not wear their jewels, purple clothing, and items with gold
embroidery, and could not drive in carriages within the city, all signs of wealth and status. After
the Roman defeat of the Carthagian’s war leader, Hannibal, in 202 b.c.e., the law was repealed
for the men, but not for the women. When the women’s menfolk failed to listen to their
legitimate concerns, the women marched on the Senate in Rome in mass to demonstrate publicly
against this inequality. Pontificating in the all-male Senate was the self-imposed censor, Cato,
who stated: “Woman is a violent and uncontrolled animal, and it is no good giving her the reins
and expecting her not to kick over the traces...All men rule over women, we Romans rule over all
men, and our wives rule over us.” Finally, the tribune L. Valerius won repeal of the Oppian Law
confounding women by saying in effect: “Give the women their babbles, these will satisfy their
trivial minds and keep them from interfering in more serious matters.”
Life expectancy of women was thirty to forty. Mortality rates for women were high
because twenty-percent or more succumbed while giving birth, and many infant girls died of
infanticide immediately after birth. Most women raised their families and died before reaching
middle age, having become grandmothers by the young age of thirty. Some of the most useful
sources for our reconstruction of Roman history have been the epitaphs left on their tombstones.
One poignant example is: “Here I lie, a matron named Veturia, my father was Veturius. My
husband was Fortunatus. I lived for twenty-seven years, and I was married for sixteen years to the
same man. After I gave birth to six children, only one of whom is still alive, I died. Titus Julius
Fortunatus, a soldier of Auxiliary Legion II, provided this memorial for his wife, who was
incomparable and showed outstanding devotion to him.”
Roman religious aspects involving women are fascinating. Religion was multi-faceted
and evolved over the centuries. Rome originally worshiped the natural spirits, including an
individual spirit for each home. As the Romans conquered non-Romans, the religious tenets of
these new territories were incorporated into the existing rituals. The Olympian Greek pantheon of
deities were taken over by the Romans, but the names were changed except for Apollo. These
omnipotent and immortal gods and goddesses, however, acted more morally upright than the
Greeks’ version. As most ancient cultures, the Romans practiced divination. The pattern of a
flock of birds or the entrails of a sacrificed animal were analyzed for their omens. When Livia,
the later wife of Caesar Augustus, was expecting, she wanted to know if she was to give birth to
a son. She took an egg from under a sitting hen and reheated it until it hatched. Claiming the
chick sported a fine crest upon its birth, Livia foretold the child would be a boy. The Sibyls were
wise priestesses and prophetesses of the God Apollo. Their pronouncements, like the Delphi
Oracle in Greece, were sought after by Roman political leaders, and many others. A record of
these predictions were contained in nine volumes kept in the Roman Temple dedicated to three
deities: Jupiter, Minerva and Juno. Most modern sources mention only Jupiter, but the two
goddesses were always included in this most sacred temple in all Roman towns. After this temple
burned down in 83 b.c.e., the Emperor Augustus built a new temple, this time to Apollo, where
now only priests offered divinely inspired pronouncements.
Romans offered prayers and sacrifices to the many deities for every conceivable
opportunity. Priests and priestesses officiated at these rituals. Some of the goddesses especially
worshiped by girls and women were Fortuna Virginalis or Virgo, Venus, Vesta, Juno, Cybele,
Isis, and Minerva. Virgo was the patroness of young girls as they came of age. These adolescent
girls would dedicate their girlhood togas to this goddess, and then don a stola, the dress of a
woman.
Perhaps the most unusual tradition practiced by the Romans was the worship of Vesta.
She was one of the oldest Roman deities, going back to the time when Rome was made up of
small villages. When the city of Rome grew, in the most prominent place was the Temple of
Vestal, a round columned edifice to symbolize the roundness of earth. Six young virgins were
chosen to be priestesses to Vesta. Their main duty was to keep Vesta’s sacred fire burning, and it
must never be allowed to go out. These girls were to remain virgins for thirty years, and then they
were free to leave, marry, or stay. Most of the girls after these three decades chose to remain with
Vesta. In the early centuries, being chosen by lot was indeed an honor, but in time the great
families did not want their daughters to be Vestal Virgins. In exchange for this unusual
assignment, the virgins were allowed to publicly ride in carriages to festivals, did not have to take
an oath when testifying, and could annul the death sentence of a prisoner encountered accidently.
Over time, the Vestal Temple housed leading citizens’ wills. If a Vestal Virgin lost her virginity,
then she was buried alive. About ten girls suffered this fate. This nearly life-long celibacy will be
the role model for nuns in the Christian world.
When the Sibylline books foretold that Hannibal and the Phoenicians were going to attack
Rome in 205 b.c.e. by marching their elephants over the Alps, the great black stone that
represented the Anatolian Mother Goddess, Cybele, was brought to Rome because this is what
the Sibylline books said was necessary to defeat Hannibal. Ceremonies centering around the
stone were performed and Hannibal left Italy. Great festivals to Cybele were celebrated at Rome
until 268 c.e. Eunuchs in ecstatic ritual castrated themselves in order to become priests of
Cybele. Various versions of the story of the dying son/lover of Cybele, Attis, were related. In
one, her son Attis was tied to a tree, died and then was buried. Three days later a light appeared
in his burial tomb, and he arose from the dead, bringing salvation with him.
Isis, the mother goddess of ancient Egypt, became the most widely worshiped goddess in
the Greco-Roman world. Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Middle East and Egypt in the
mid-fourth century facilitated this. In ancient Egypt, Isis, whose tears caused the life-giving
flooding of the Nile, was also the Goddess of marriage, the healing arts, and agriculture. Now as
the worship of Isis spread, Isis’ attributes multiplied greatly. She was now the creator who
divided earth from heaven, assigned languages to the nations, invented the alphabets and
astronomy, and was the sky goddess. If you worshiped her, you would have eternal life, as Isis
promised resurrection to her devotees after their death. We do not have a lot of knowledge
concerning the methodology of worship of Isis, but we do know that as Christianity developed,
the worship of Isis was its major competitor, not only among women, but among men too In
Apuleius novel, The Golden Ass, written in the second century a.c.e., Isis figures prominently.
According to this Roman writer, when man succumbs to his lusts he becomes a brute animal like
the lowliest ass, but when man turns towards spirituality, as represented by Isis, he achieves his
truly human form. As Rome conquered northward in Europe, then Isis temples were erected. Isis
nursing her baby son Horus will become the iconography for Mary and her holding the infant
Jesus.