The Roman Lady

All men rule over women, we Homans rule over all men, and our wives rule over us. — CATO THE CENSOR.

I

THE Romans, who were notoriously willing to consider their genius lor conquest as compensation for some sorts of genius that were denied them, were nevertheless unable completely to conquer their women. With the best will in the world, they never succeeded in simplifying the problem as the Greeks had done. Though the Roman lady was theoretically in the same position as the Greek lady, she was in practice a different species. Ordinary usage speaks of ‘the women of Greece and Rome’ as if they were interchangeable. In this regard, as in too many others, it is popular to dwell on certain formal points of likeness between the two great rival races rather than on essential points of difference. Greece and Rome have in fact suffered the fate that, according to Madame Cardinal, has overtaken Voltaire and Rousseau: ‘Il parait que, de leur vivant, ils ne pouvaient pas se sentir, qu’ils out passé leur existence à se dire des sottises. Ce n’est que depuis leur mort que les deux font la paired

In regard to the present question, the formal likeness which they have in common with other patriarchal societies is that both held women to be perpetual minors. In Rome as in Athens, a woman was subject to her father or his representative until she became subject to her husband. But

while at Athens the spirit of the law prevailed and harmonized with the general social sentiment, in Rome it was in opposition to social sentiment, and was gradually modified by legal fictions and other compromises until it bloomed into one of those complete anomalies that make us feel how similar ancient society was to our own.

This feeling is much more frequently evoked by the history of Rome than by that of Greece. The Greek is, after all, too exceptional and too uncompromising to be quite companionable. But with the Roman there come into history many of the limitations, the crosspurposes, the makeshift substitutes for high intelligence; the feeling, for instance, that it is more gentlemanly to be able to buy pictures than to be able to paint them; the Philistinism, in a word, that makes the world seem homelike.

Apart from the tendency to blend her with the Greek lady, another historical fallacy has been at work to obscure the features of the lady of Rome. She has suffered more than most from representation by types. In thinking of her one recalls chiefly extreme cases. The imagination flits bewildered from Lucretia to Messalina; from Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, to Agrippina, mother of Nero. Tradition and the partisan have done their best to fix upon her a rather inhuman character, whether for virtue or for vice. It is a study of some interest to try to discover the human meaning of her various presentations, and to form a picture of her out of more reconcilable elements than mere antitheses.

Although the documents for early Greek history carry us much further back in time than do those for Roman history, the rising curtain nevertheless reveals the Roman in an earlier social stage than the Greek, for he is apparently still marrying by capture. While women have to be stolen by a community, their numbers will be relatively small; there will probably not be enough to go around. Among the Romans the natural results seem to have comprised a certain social importance for women, and a strict monogamy for men as well as for women. Under these conditions it was apparently not necessary to seclude a wife; at any rate the Roman matron of all periods enjoyed personal freedom, entertained her husband’s guests, had a voice in his affairs, managed his house, and came and went as she pleased. In early days she shared the labors and the dangers of the insecure life of a weak people among hostile neighbors. It may not be fanciful to say that the liberty of the Roman woman of classical times was the inherited reward of the prowess of her pioneer ancestress, in the same way as the social freedom of the American woman to-day comes to her from the brave colonial housemother, able to work and, when need was, to fight. It would have been as difficult to find the lady in early Italy as in early Massachusetts. There were no courtesans for her to be distinguished from, and there were relatively but few slaves; nor was there so much wealth as to fix a gulf between rich and poor.

There is nothing in Roman traditions that corresponds in the least with Homer’s lady. The lady came fast enough upon the Roman with all his other troubles, but before that time the strong woman of the plain old days had become a fixed tradition, endowed with heroic attributes, and invoked to shame the singular product of wealth and cosmopolitanism that took her place. The historic Roman idealized the virtues of early society as shown by his ancestors, precisely as he idealized them when he encountered them again among the Germans. The reverence for women, their chastity, and their physical courage, seemed in each case a wonderful deviation from human nature as he knew it. The conditions that produced the lady, as well as most of the other complexities of his life, were in general the result of his contact with alien civilizations.

One creative act, however, which he accomplished independently, helped to produce the lady: the early organization, namely, of Roman society on an aristocratic basis. As the group of tribal elders hardened into the Roman senate, it gave rise to the patrician class with the characteristic of hereditary privilege. Thus the Roman introduced pride of birth as a social motive. While he was still poor and illiterate he became ‘noble,’ and his wife became, in the most artificial sense possible, a lady. We see her, of course, through the softening medium of literary treatment; her industry, her physical courage, her self-devotion to the family and the clan, her appreciation of honor from the man’s point of view, were traits that grouped themselves harmoniously about the great names of Hersilia and Lucretia and Valeria and Volumnia. Shakespeare’s vision of her is hardly more enthusiastic than Plutarch’s, — from which indeed it was derived. Plutarch roundly declared that he could not subscribe to Thucydides’ famous definition of the virtue of women — that it should consist in their being spoken of as little as possible, whether for praise or blame. ‘The Roman practice is best,’ he said, ‘by which the funeral eulogy is publicly pronounced over a dead woman as freely as over a dead man.' And his pages are full of references to the excellences of the dead women of old.

This early Roman lady, shining with tribal virtues, survived only sporadically in history. We may almost say that Cornelia supports unaided the weight of the majestic tradition. The fragments of her letters to her surviving son after the murder of his brother, may easily be genuine; and they bear out the view of her character taken by posterity. Unquestionably Cornelia proves something for the existence of the old type, but it must not be forgotten that she would be an exceptional person in any age. Single episodes are reported in which other ladies behaved as the theoretical domina should; Porcia and Arria hand on the torch. Rut they excite among their contemporaries the wonder always roused by an anachronism. Just as the Western world stood aghast at the prodigies of Japanese warfare, in which the most modern science was used as the weapon of a tribal psychology long outgrown elsewhere, so the Rome of Claudius’s time marveled at Arria’s smoking dagger. In general, it must be confessed that when the Roman lady comes upon the historic stage she has already developed some of the characteristics that were to make her a perplexing element of society. Her force of character, and the freedom to which she had been accustomed, were certain to play havoc with the patriarchal system as soon as circumstances should give opportunity, — and opportunity was given almost as soon as history begins.

From the beginning of Roman expansion in the third century before Christ, the Roman husband was frequently and for long periods away from home. The wars with Carthage, the wars in the East and in Spain, the wars in northern Europe, drew the patrician abroad as systematically as the Crusades drew the knights of later Europe. In each case profound changes resulted in the character, or at any rate in the demeanor, of the lady. The first breaking down of her old social status seems to have been in the direction of allowing her to hold property. The marriage ceremony, which passed her as a ward from the hand of her father to that of her husband, was so modified as to leave a married woman theoretically subject to the patria potestas, and therefore to prevent her property from passing to her husband. The effect of this arrangement appears on the whole to have been her financial independence. She could evidently receive legacies, for speciaI legislation was needed at the end of the Punic wars to prevent women of the wealthiest class from doing so.

The feeling of patriarchal society is always strongly against the economic independence of women. Aristotle believed its prevalence in Sparta to be one of the causes of decadence. The ancient lady could in no wise create property for herself, and the men who had acquired it by labor or conquest felt the unfairness of allowing it to be controlled by a parasite. Just after the close of the Second Punic War, in which Rome’s economic sufferings were very great, the Roman ladies rebelled against certain sumptuary legislation which specifically curtailed their expenditure. The famous speech of Cato, opposing the repeal of the Oppian law, is, as reported by Livy, an expression of the ever-recurrent uneasiness of the male in the presence of the insurgent female, and in particular of the dislike of women, which we shall find a pretty constant factor in the Roman’s temperament.

‘ If, Romans,’ said he, ‘every individual among us had made it a rule to maintain the prerogative and authority of a husband with respect to his own wife, we should have less trouble with the whole sex. It was not without painful emotions of shame that I just now made my way into the Forum through a crowd of women. Had I not been restrained by respect for the modesty and dignity of some individuals among them, I should have said to them, “ What sort of practice is this, of running out into public, besetting the streets, and addressing other women’s husbands? Could not each have made the same request to her husband at home? Are your blandishments more seductive in public than in private, and with other women’s husbands than your own? ”

‘Our ancestors thought it not proper that women should transact any, even private business, without a director. We, it seems, suffer them now to interfere in the management of state affairs. Will you give the reins to their untractable nature and their uncontrolled passions? This is the smallest of the injunctions laid on them by usage or the laws, all of which women bear with impatience; they Jong for liberty, or rather for license. What will they not attempt if they win this victory? The moment they have arrived at an equality with you, they will become your superiors.’

The love of excitement, which was a temperamental trait of the Roman lady of history, became a dangerous matter. It was natural that strongwilled women, exceedingly like the men of their race in body and mind, should seek for some equivalent of the adventures their husbands were engaged in, the world over. They had not been tamed, as had the ladies of Athens, by the slow action of long ages of masculine encroachment. They were much nearer the soil and freedom. The men had not had time to bring them thoroughly into subjection, and yet were both unable and unwilling to set them free.

Both sexes were in a false position, and overt acts of warfare became common. Livy reports three cases of husband-murder in noble families in thirty years. Divorce became a general practice. Not only the frivolous used it, but the staid. Men had to be persuaded into matrimony as a duty. The excellent Metellus Macedonicus started a propaganda of marriage on patriotic grounds, and his pessimistic argument became a classic: ‘If we could get along without wives,’ he is reported to have said, ‘we should all dispense with the nuisance. But since Nature has decreed that we can neither live very comfortably with them, nor at all without them, we should consult rather our permanent good than our temporary happiness.’

All these things were table-talk while Cornelia was still living. All about her was a welter of feminine discontent. Gradual amelioration of the marriage law was accompanied by an invention whereby even an unmarried woman might hold property and control it; she could contract a fictitious marriage, dissolve it at once, choose a guardian to suit herself, and through him as a dummy administer her own estate. These changes, however, while enlarging the lady’s power, gave her nothing to satisfy her ambition and keep her out of mischief. Ethically, her situation was a dangerous one, and many elements of safety were withdrawn when wealth, culture, exciting new religions, diseases, slaves, and philosophy, were brought to Rome as spoils of war.

II

The unfortunate reaction upon the Romans of their achievements is a commonplace of history. The best of them were reduced in numbers by centuries of constant warfare, and the survivors were assailed by those bacilli of civilization which always ravage a fresh race with a virulence unknown among the peoples that have become adapted to them. And the conditions that proved in the long run fatal to the noble Roman worked rapidly and perniciously upon his wife. With the introduction of slavery, what occupation the lady had was gone. She resigned the care of her house, the care of her children, the care of her person, to Greek slaves who understood all these matters a great deal better than she did. The time that was left on her hands she filled with the pseudo-activities of the nouveau riche. Through her efforts, ‘society’ was organized for the first time in Europe. What people wore, what they ate and drank, what sort of furniture they had, and how much their horses cost, were questions that then for the first time acquired the importance they have ever since retained.

The Greeks, who, to be sure, had nothing in their dwellings that was not beautiful, had still supposed that great works of art were for public places. With the Romans began the private collection of chefs-d’œuvre in its most snobbish aspect. The parts played by the sexes in this enterprise sometimes showed the same division of labor that prevails very largely in a certain great nation of our own day that shall be nameless: the husband paid for the best art that money could buy, and the wife learned to talk about it and to entertain the artist. It is true that the Roman lady began also to improve her mind. She studied Greek, and hired Greek masters to teach her history and philosophy. Ladies flocked to hear lectures on all sorts of subjects, originating the odd connection between scholarship and fashion which still persists. Their annexation of the field of letters was exceedingly annoying to their husbands. ‘I hate the woman,’ says Juvenal, ‘who is always turning back to the grammatical rules of Pakemon and consulting them; the feminine antiquary who recalls verses unknown to me, and corrects the words of an unpolished friend which even a man would not observe. Let a husband be allowed to make a solecism in peace.’ A husband naturally preferred in woman the kind of cult ure attained by the amiable Calpurnia, Pliny’s wife. He says of her that she delighted to read and read again her husband’s works, having no other schoolmaster than love. Like Rousseau’s Sophie, the Roman lady should have had ‘du goût sans étude, des talents sans art, du jugement sans connaissanee.’

A woman of fashion, we are told, reckoned it among her ornaments if it were said of her that she was well-read and a thinker, and that she wrote lyrics almost worthy of Sappho. She too must have her hired escort of teachers, and listen to them now and then, at table or while she was having her hair dressed, — at other times she was too busy. And often while the philosopher was discussing high ethical themes her maid would come in with a love-letter, and the argument must wait till it was answered.

Nothing very important in the way of production resulted from all the lady’s literary activity. The verses of Sulpicia, if Sulpicia’s they be, are the sole surviving evidence of creative effort among her kind; and, respectable as they are, they need not disturb Sappho’s repose. It was indirectly that the Roman lady affected literature, since kinds began to be produced to her special taste; for it is hardly an accident that the vers de société should expand, and the novel originate, in periods when for the first time women were a large element in the reading public. If, however, we consider the main body of Latin literature with an eye to the reflection in it of the lady, we find at once one of the profound diff erences that contrast it with the literature of Greece. The feminism of the Greek is not here.

Beyond any other literat ure we have, that of Rome is masculine. As Cornelia is pretty nearly an isolated case in Roman history, selected for a type because she is so far from typical, so Dido stands practically alone in Latin literature as a woman sympathetically drawn. Virgil, the most Hellenized of Romans, owes a very considerable part of his great prestige to the fact that he achieved the solitary love-story of Latin poetry. But even Virgil did not venture to make his heroine a Roman lady; and her regrettable lack of self-control served but to emphasize t he hard core of Roman temperament in the hero. Lavinia was what a Roman always felt a woman should be: a somewhat cold embodiment of the virtues most serviceable to men, and devoid of that charm which he deemed in early days unnecessary, and in later days pernicious. Apart from Dido, there is nothing in Latin letters that corresponds with the women of Greek tragedy, or even with Homer’s women. The comedians, beginning where Greek comedy left off, deal with ‘little’ women; the few ladies of their scenes are but indifferent ly rendered. The lyrists sing of light loves, humorous and sensual loves, and of disillusion and fatigue. The husband appears as the conventional mari of literature, the somewhat fatuous government against which the wife and the lover are perpetually in brilliant opposition.

The smouldering hostility between male and female of this strong-willed race breaks now and then into flame. Juvenal’s nerves are set on edge by the ‘new woman’ of his day, just as Cato’s had been three hundred years before. His indictment of her vices loses its effect by including her foibles, and even her good points. He couples homicide with a taste for literature, superstition with an interest in public affairs, as alike reprehensible. Cicero’s attack on Clodia, Catullus’s simultaneous love and hate, Martial’s sinister epigrams, are the most powerful expressions the Roman knew of his feelings toward woman. Imaginatively, she did not touch him; practically she was a disturbing element.

The writers of Rome have defamed the Roman lady as the French novelists have defamed the lady of France. Just as honest Frenchmen to-day tell an incredulous Anglo-Saxon world that there are French ladies of high degree who are pure and devoted, so the careful historian of Rome must constantly remind his reader that the city never lacked for blameless ladies. The two true inferences to be made from the prevailing literary tone are that the women of Rome were active-minded, impulsive, and passionate; and that the men of Rome had a certain hardness of fibre that made them very generally anti-feminist.

Cicero was a kindly man, cultivated and thoughtful; his modest fort une and social position excused him from many of the faults of greater men, while the respect justly entertained for his talents and for his character (since all things are relative) gave him a wide range of acquaintance. It is interesting to note in the letters of such a man his reaction against feminism. Cicero was no contemner of women. He disapproved the seclusion of the Greek lady, and had no wish to see it introduced at Rome, but he would have been glad to see a censor established who should teach men how to govern their wives properly. His own wife, Terentia, presented few problems. She seems to have been a rather uninteresting person with a fort une of her own, and uncertain health. The bulk of her husband’s letters to her, however, are full of confidence and pet-names. He lived with her without substantial differencefor nearly thirty years, and then his tone began to change. The later letters are merely formal notes, and the last of them is such, it has been said, as no gentleman would write to his housekeeper. His next step was to divorce his old wife, on what ground we do not know, and to marry the youthful Publilia, to whom he was not much more civil.

There was at no time at Rome anything that could be called a feministic movement. No solidarity existed in a sex split by caste into classes that had no motive in common. The ladies from time to time organized to obtain legislation in their interests; but so far as we know, such legislation dealt only with pecuniary questions. We have no record of any attempt on their part to improve the lot of women in general. Women in general were in fact submerged. An inspection of the literature and the inscript ions of the late Republic and the early Empire gives the odd impression that the Roman women of the lower classes had pretty nearly ceased to exist.. The professional woman, if we may so call her, the doctor, the accoucheuse, the masseuse, the actress, the dancer, the courtesan, the dressmaker, was almost always a Greek. In trade and industry, the same was true; according to the inscriptions, Greek women were the fishmongers, the barmaids, and the laundresses of Rome. No one can doubt that hundreds of thousands of hard-working, god-fearing Roman women lived silent, unrecorded lives, and bore children to carry on the state. Rut the lady had nothing to do with them. Her struggles were directed to the strengthening of her own position. It was to this end that Hortensia and her ladies came down to the Forum to argue that taxation without representation is tyranny.

When the Second Triumvirate were driven to every expedient to find money for the war with Brutus and Cassius, they published an edict requiring fourteen hundred of the richest women to make a valuation of their property, and to furnish for the war such portion as the triumvirs should require from each. A body of the women concerned forced their way to the tribunal of the triumvirs in the Forum, a thing no man durst do in those days. Hortensia (daughter of the great Hortensius, a leader of the bar, Cicero’s rival, Verres’s counsel) was their spokesman. Appian gives us her speech: —

' As is befitting women of our rank addressing a petition to you, we had recourse to your female relatives. Having suffered unseemly treatment on the part of Fulvia, we have been compelled to visit the Forum. You have deprived us of our fathers, our sons, our husbands and our brothers, whom you accuse of having wronged you. If you take away our property also, you reduce us to a condition unbecoming our birth. If we women have not voted you public enemies, have not torn down your houses or led an army against you, why do you visit upon us the same punishment as upon the guilty, whose offenses we have not shared? Why should we pay taxes when we have no part in the honors, the commands, the statecraft, for which you contend? “Because this is a time of war,” do you say? Let war with the Gauls or the Parthians come, and we shall not be inferior to our mothers in zeal for the common safety; but for civil wars may we never contribute.’

‘When Hortensia had thus spoken,’ says Appian, ‘the triumvirs were angry that women should dare to hold a public meeting when the men were silent. They ordered the lictors to drive them away from the tribunal, which they proceeded to do until cries were raised by the multitude outside, when the lictors desisted, and the triumvirs said they would postpone till the next day the consideration of the matter. On the following day they reduced the number of women from fourteen hundred to four hundred.'

Public speaking had no terrors for the Roman lady. We read of women of litigious temperament who were constantly at law, and argued their own cases in the prætor’s court and in the Forum. The practice was prevalent enough to need an edict to suppress it. Business on a large scale sometimes provided an outlet for the energies of the restless, able, and idle domina. The manufacture of bricks seems to have been largely in her hands, for almost every Roman brick is stamped with the name of its maker, and the names of many great ladies, including even empresses, are handed down to us on the remnants of their product.

III

The great field, however, for the activity of the Roman lady was the exertion of her personal influence, and the development of her power in political and social intrigue. The amorous intrigue, for which she is perhaps most famous, should be subordinated to the other two, for it was apparently in many cases their handmaid. Like the male of her kind, the Roman lady was possessed of great sexual excitability, and she indulged it as freely as he. In her case as in his, love turned easily to hate, and even more easily to ennui. Like him, while indulging passion she despised its object. Like him, she judged power and money to be the great goods. Clodia and Sempronia are men in petticoats; they have the hot blood and the cool heads of men; their loveliness is the poisoned weapon with which they carry on the sex war.

The tendency toward concentration of power in the hands of two or three men gave the Roman lady a more dazzling opportunity. Nero wished that the people had but one neck; the lady’s more reasonable desire was attained when the governing power had but one heart. The women of the Triumvirates are hardly less striking figures than the men. The Empire saw a succession of masterful women, indistinguishable psychologically from the male. Augustus caused public honors to be accorded to his wife and to his sister. Tacitus was struck by the significant novelty of a woman enthroned, when Agrippina was seated near Claudius to review a Roman army. With the Antonincs, titles for women began to develop: ‘mother of the legions,’ ‘mother of the senate and the people.’ It was debated in the senate whether magistrates sent to govern the provinces should be permitted to take their wives with them, and in the course of the discussion conservative opinion declared that the official ladies were altogether too active in political matters. The governor’s wife was a force. All the intrigues of the province centred in her; she had her finger in every pie; even military discipline got into her department. She would appear on horseback beside her husband, inspect, drill, and harangue the troops. Many a sturdy Roman seems to have felt toward this efficient lady as the Rev. Mr. Crawley felt toward Mrs. Proudy, and to have said, as he did, ‘Woman, the distaff were more fitting for you!’

The great, lady of the Empire was aware that the splendor of her position placed her above criticism, or at any rate above any painful results from it; and this consciousness reënforced the tendency she had always had to let herself go. Very far indeed she went. As in the case of the man of her kind, very brutal pleasures and very crude vice were necessary to stimulate her nerves. It was an extraordinary age, and produced many phenomena that belong to the department of pathology. Its moralists delighted to paint its blackness; but in more cases than one the moralists knew by hearsay only of the wickedness of great ladies, being themselves surrounded by pure and gentle women.

It is very plain that the Roman resented and dreaded the development, in his womankind, of the desire to please. The old Roman lady, according to tradition, had entertained no such desire. She rested, like a man, on her sterling qualities. To be charming was, in Roman eyes, an admission both of weakness and of ambition. Unless a woman wanted something she ought not to have, she had no need of charm; and if she stooped to its use, it must be because she had not the force of brains and character to reach her end by more manly means. Why did an honest woman wish to be attractive? Whom should she attract but her husband, who, by hypothesis, was sufficiently attracted already? Tacitus says of Li via that she was ‘more gracious in manners than would have been approved in a woman of the olden timed The rhetor Porcius Latro declared that a lady who wished to be safe from insulting advances should bestow only so much care on her toilet as not to be dirty. She should be accompanied by elderly maid-servants whose respectability would warn off the enterprising. She should walk with downcast eyes, and if she met a pertinacious admirer, she should be rude rather than encouraging. But such (said he) was not the conduct of women of the world. They ran to meet temptation. Their faces were arranged for seduction, their bodies were just covered and that was all, their talk was charming and witty, and their manner was so caressing that any man dared approach them.

The Roman lady had in fact discovered the smokeless powder that put her on a somewhat less unequal military footing with the enemy. Social changes in Rome had brought her from the privacy of her own house into the world of society. She found herself at the head of a great establishment, with town-house and countryhouse, with a round of magnificent entertainments to offer and to receive, and with more money to spend than Europe had ever seen collected before, or would see again for many centuries. Supposing her to be singly devoted to her husband, she found that she could be of immense assistance to his career. Often, too, she found that she must compete with other women for his admiration. An attractive demi-monde, chiefly Greek, had become an institution in Rome. It behooved a wife to be as charming and intelligent as the ladies without the pale. The art of fascination once learned, it was difficult not to keep it in practice at the expense of the first comer.

And when a woman had discovered that she counted for something in her husband’s career, she not unnaturally aspired to a career of her own. Seneca expressed succinctly the dilemma in which the Roman found himself: it is hard, said he, to keep a wife whom every one admires; and if no one admires her it is hard to have to live with her yourself.

We have a great deal of detailed information about the ladies of Rome. Many are known to us by name, and we are aware of the impression they made on their contemporaries. We should not be helped in differentiating them from other ladies by opening a ledger and setting down the good against the bad, Calpnrnia against Faustina, and A lemone against Trimalehio’s wife. The trait that is interesting for our purpose is present in good and bad alike. The Roman lady was a person; indeed, she was often what we call a ‘character.’ She is distinguished from the Athenian lady as a statue in the round is distinguished from a relief. Once for all, she was detached from the background of family life and, not supported throughout her height by the fabric of society, must see to it that her personal centre of gravity should not lie without her base. She committed her own sins and bore her own punishment. Her virtues were her own, and did not often take the direction of self-effacement. The strong men among whom she lived, who broke everything else, could not break her.