CLAS / HIST 4091 / 5091: The Roman Empire

Reading (6) for Friday October 19, 2007. Women and Society, Women and Power

Reading (in Lewis and Reinhold collection)

LR sections 91-103 (pp. 338-71)

In the late Republic, a Roman woman, a wife and mother, died and left a funeral epitaph in Rome which was rediscovered in modern times near the Bridge of St. Bartholomew.

Stranger, I have little to say: Stop and read.

This is the unbeautiful tomb of a beautiful woman.

Her parents called her Claudia by name.

She loved her husband with her heart.

She bore two children: one of these

She leaves on the earth, the other she buries under the earth.

Her speech was delightful, her gait graceful.

She kept house, she made wool. I have finished. Go.

The epitaph is neither earth-shattering nor profound, yet it gives us the tiniest glimpse into the entire world of a typical Roman woman. Using the material we are reading for today, we will attempt to reconstruct a broader view of the life of Roman women, their values and ideals, their limitations and opportunities, their aspirations and achievements.

As we investigate women’s history in Rome, the problems we face are legion. Most of the evidence we have for ancient Rome deals with men: wars, politics, the law courts, philosophical discourses, tales of heroes and gods. Although women enter into all of these areas, the Roman world was by any standard a man’s world. More importantly, almost all of the literary material which survives was written by men. With a few brilliant exceptions, we have little evidence from which to reconstruct the woman’s perspective. Even so, we need not despair. Though the Roman world was a man’s world, it was by no means as oppressive for women as most pre-modern societies. Some women enjoyed considerable freedom, the right to own property, the opportunity for education, windows into political influence, and the chance to exert some power over a restrictive but not entirely oppressive society. Moreover, the evidence, though scanty, is hardly lacking. Our readings today demonstrate that we can say a good deal about women in general and even about the lives of specific women. We can even look at some of the rare fragments of literature written by women (LR 97).[1] As we do so, we should compare the ideals and achievements of Roman women with those of women from other ages. Above all, we should attempt to interpret Roman women within their own context and ask what we can learn from them about the modern world.

Questions

1. What were the traditional values of Roman women? Were these values constructed by males or by females? Were they always upheld?

2. What legal and social strictures controlled women? Why might these have been put in place and who worked to enforce them? How effective were they?

3. How did Roman women fit into the family? Was the Roman family restrictive with regard to marriage, divorce, childbearing, freedom of movement, control of property?

4. What avenues did women have for employment? What about education? What role did social status and class play in determining the professions a woman could chose?

5. How did women express themselves on the literary and cultural level? On the political level? On the religious level? On the emotional level? Were their forms of expression different from those of the men we have seen?

6. How much influence would you attribute to women of high status (LR 95, 98)? What sorts of stereotypes were likely to be applied to them?

7. Would you say that women were relatively oppressed or relatively free in the Roman world? Compare with other pre-modern societies you know of (west, east, north, south)? Compare with modern societies and especially with contemporary American society?

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[1] In a few weeks we will read what is arguably the best surviving source written by a woman in antiquity, the Martyrdom of Perpetua.