Fathers and Daughters in Roman Society: Women and the Elite Family

by Judith P. Hallett

Overview

Judith Hallett illuminates a paradox of elite Roman society of the classical period: its members extolled female domesticity and imposed numerous formal constraints on women's public activity, but many women in Rome's leading families wielded substantial political and social influence.

Originally published in 1984.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691640136
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #682
Pages:	444
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

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Fathers and Daughters in Roman Society

Women and the Elite Family

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By Judith P. Hallett

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-10160-6

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CHAPTER 1

The Paradox of Elite Roman Women: Patriarchal Society and Female Formidability

The women's movement of the 1970s has heightened a long-standing scholarly interest in the women of the Roman elite during the classical era — a period extending from the late third century B.C. through the early second century A.D. Yet this newly heightened interest has done little to connect the study of elite Roman women with the study of the elite Roman family during the same period. The separation of Roman women's history and Roman family history into two fairly discrete areas of research mirrors a separation between women's history and family history generally, a separation which the distinguished American historian Carl N. Degler has recently documented and attempted to explain in his own field. Degler refers to this separation as particularly surprising and regrettable. For, he asserts, "To any casual observer, it would seem natural that the two fields should be related if only because historically women have been active primarily in the family, and therefore might be thought to be of central importance in explaining the history of that institution."

To be sure, major studies of women's position in elite Roman society during the classical period tend to remark upon women's rights and activities within the upper-class family. Various discussions point out that by the mid-fifth century B.C. Roman law empowered women to inherit, own, and bequeath property (albeit under the tutelage of a male guardian, customarily a blood kinsman or a husband, who formally represented them and presumably protected their financial interests). So, too, scholars are fond of noting that well-born Roman women played a crucial part in their children's education and marriage arrangements. What is more, work on Roman women emphasizes that certain female members of Rome's most illustrious houses at times acted on their entire family's behalf and determined the outcomes of significant family matters. In fact, their active and important role in family affairs would establish elite Roman women as what anthropologists would call "structurally central" family members: that is, members having some degree of control over their family's economic resources and being critically involved in its decision-making processes. Women's extensive involvement in family affairs also marks the upper-class Roman family of the classical period as an unusual Roman institution, in integrating women as fully as it did men. Nevertheless, by merely noting that women were involved so extensively in the affairs of the elite Roman family, our studies imply that additional research on that institution might be of importance in illuminating the position of elite Roman women and render the separation between Roman women's history and Roman family history even more surprising.

A further and striking phenomenon of elite Roman female existence renders this separation between the history of Roman women and that of the Roman family more surprising still. Merely a superficial inquiry into the position of women among the Roman upper classes reveals what scholars appear to regard as a paradoxical fact: that many well-born women are remembered as possessing forceful personalities and exerting a substantial impact on men's public affairs, despite their society's extolling of domesticity as women's only proper concern, and despite their own legal disabilities and formal exclusion from political participation. This paradoxical formidability is imputed to well-born Roman women both as individuals and en masse; it is imputed as a result of both actual conduct by female members of Rome's classical elite and contemporary perceptions of how elite Roman women were capable of acting. Various aspects and effects of this formidability warrant immediate note in their own right before we consider the scholarly treatment and explanation of such a phenomenon.

Throughout Rome's history, its ideological literature glorified women's conscientious attendance to household responsibilities. Its laws required that all but a few exceptional women be legally subject to male guardians. Its government denied all women the right to take formal and active part — as voters, officeholders, and members of political assemblies — in civil life, although such participation was a right automatically claimed by its male citizens. Roman glorification of the upper-class woman wholly devoted to domestic duties appears most memorably at chapter 28 of Tacitus' Dialogus de Oratoribus, a work written in the early years of the second century A.D., but set in A.D. 75. Here Tacitus portrays Vipstanus Messala, an admirer of Rome's republican past, as fondly recalling the well-born women of the second and first centuries B.C. Such women, Messala says, deemed it a special source of praise to watch over their homes and dedicate themselves to their children (particularly their sons); with no less fondness Messala goes on to recall the virtuous elderly kinswomen who assisted such matrons in educating their offspring, and whose mere presence banished all unseemly talk and behavior from the household:

For the son of each citizen, child of a virtuous female parent as well, was from the start brought up not in the cubicle of a hired nurse, but in the lap and bosom of his mother, whose special praise it was to look after her home and devote herself to her children. What is more, there was an elder kinswoman appointed so that every child of this same family might be entrusted to her approved and admired character; in her presence it was not right to utter any seemingly shameful expression or commit any seemingly shameful act. And she, with a certain piety and modesty, regulated not only the endeavors and concerns, but also the relaxations and pastimes of boys. Thus we learn that Cornelia, mother of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, Aurelia, mother ofjulius Caesar, and Atia, mother of Augustus Caesar, took charge of their children's educations and produced sons who led the Roman state. This training and strictness brought it about that each man's nature — untainted and honest and warped by no perversions — would, with his total commitment, seize upon honorable undertakings at once. Be it an interest in military matters or legal learning, be it an interest in the pursuit of eloquence, he devoted himself exclusively to it, he steeped himself entirely in it.

The complete exclusion of Roman women from formal involvement and leadership in the political sphere ranked as a similarly long-lived and hallowed tradition. Not only do we find the later jurist Ulpian proclaiming matter-of-factly at Digest 50.17.2: "Women are debarred from all duties whether civil or public, and thus cannot be judges or hold magistracies." This exclusion even seems a traditional point of Roman male pride. Cicero, one of the greatest Roman statesmen of the first century B.C., reportedly contemplated with utter dismay a society which "included women in assemblies" and which allowed women "soldiery and magistracies and commands." His precise words bear quotation: "How great will be the misfortune of that city, in which women will assume the public duties of men."

Nevertheless, in the face of this popular ideal of female domesticity, and in the face of these prevailing constraints on female public activity, some Roman women of the upper classes proved formidable, politically influential figures in the late republic and early empire — Cicero's and Tacitus' own times. It is with such women, and the paradoxical nature of their formidability and political influence, that those who study women in the classical Roman elite chiefly concern themselves. Ancient sources report that several women from Rome's leading houses wielded substantial clout during the forties B.C., a decade rife with civil war and political turmoil. They encourage modern scholars to accord special attention to such females as Marcus Brutus' mother Servilia and Mark Antony's wife Fulvia, who are portrayed by classical authors as staging summit conferences, commanding armies, implementing political proscriptions, and thereby controlling men's affairs. Tacitus and Suetonius vividly document the powerful roles played by shrewd and redoubtable female kin in the reigns of Rome's Julio-Claudian emperors; their accounts have attracted, and deserve, no less notice. Ancient sources, moreover, regard politically powerful women as a time-honored element of Rome's heritage. Both the historian Livy, writing in the final quarter of the first century B.C., and the biographer Plutarch, a century and a half later, give serious consideration to a legend which credits a woman, the nymph Egeria, with advising Rome's second king, Numa Pompilius, on weighty matters of state: their assumptions about Rome in the eighth century B.C., may well derive from their observations of Roman politics in later, historical, eras.

Perhaps more importantly, even upper-class Roman women who did not possess special political influence nor concern themselves deeply with the workings of Roman government seem to have been perceived by politically experienced and aware Roman males as disturbances and even threats to Roman political order. Accounts summarizing an oration delivered in the early second century B.C. by the elder Cato serve as a case in point: in this oration, Cato is said to have justified the prohibition against young boys' attending the Roman senate as protecting young boys, and the senate, against the rapidly mobilized forces of their inquisitive and gossipy mothers. Livy, moreover, attributes to the elder Cato a speech expressing outrage at a group of wellborn women who demonstrated against inequitable legislation restricting their personal adornment. This rendition of Cato's supposed remarks characterizes these women as not merely riotous but actually in the process of overthrowing male rule. By Livy's time, however, other men had joined Cato in regarding women with the most minimal political involvements as nonetheless capable of having considerable political impact. Sallust, writing in the decade before Livy launched his lengthy history and in the years immediately following his own retirement from political life, assigned a character sketch of the aristocratic matron Sempronia a featured place when chronicling the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 B.C. Yet it is clear from all of our evidence, much of it supplied by Sallust himself, that Sempronia played no part in the conspiracy whatever and was at most deemed a possible influence on various men. By the first century A. D., apprehensions about the political potential of women altogether removed from public life had become more commonplace. During the emperor Nero's reign of terror in the early sixties A.D., the female relations of his male victims routinely suffered persecution at Nero's hands. Even Nero's adoptive half-sister Claudia Antonia, whom Tacitus pointedly depicts as a quiet and unassertive woman, appears to have met her death because Nero harbored political suspicions about her.

Indeed, the assumption that women, especially those of high birth, were instrumental in affecting the course of Roman republican and imperial politics manifests itself frequently and strongly enough in our ancient Roman male sources to render it impossible for scholars today to distinguish clearly between women's actual influence and women's imagined influence in political matters. Whatever the true extent of Roman women's political involvement, it is indisputable that the political impact attributed to certain of them reflects a general image of Roman women as socially significant and often highly visible individuals. Such an image of course differs radically from that of well-born women in the society to which later republican and early imperial Rome is sometimes likened, that of fifth century B.C. Athens. "Citizen women" of the classical Athenian era barely figure in accounts of political history and are not represented as integrally involved in male social concerns; their social invisibility has created difficulties for generations of scholars merely interested in determining their social status.

In the light of scholars' readiness to note Roman women's paradoxical, real and imagined, political influence and social significance during classical times and to acknowledge Roman women's structurally central, and hence influential and significant, position within the elite family, one might therefore expect scholarship to connect this familial structural centrality and this paradoxical formidability with one another. At the very least one would expect a strong scholarly interest in the dynamics of Roman women's involvement in the politically influential, socially significant, upper-class family itself. Yet the behavior thought appropriate to and the behavior actually evinced by women in their various roles within the elite Roman family — of mother, sister, wife, daughter — are only beginning to undergo examination; the same holds true for the patterns of bonding with and among female family members. Even in recent investigations into these matters, Anglo-American scholars have not made much of an effort to consider the relationship between the paradox of Roman women and women's conduct in their role, or roles, within the upper-class Roman family.

This lack of effort need not, however, be ascribed to scholarly obtuseness. For generations a theory of Roman social development based on the views of the nineteenth-century jurist Bachofen and his followers has been invoked, largely in European studies, to account for the paradox of Roman women. This theory pointedly assumes an impact of early Roman family structure and sentiment on women's position in much later elite Roman society. The theory and its explanation for the paradox of Roman women deserve special scrutiny and detailed refutation for two reasons. Most obviously, its understandable failure to convince most Anglo-American scholars may help elucidate the failure of recent studies to link upper-class Roman women's familial position to their social significance and political influence. More importantly, its shortcomings make clear various problems to be encountered in seeking to relate the paradox of Roman women to their structural centrality in the elite family of classical times.

Bachofen and more recent supporters of his theory such as G. D. Thomson maintain that a matriarchal or matrilineal order prevailed in Rome's monarchic era (which, by Roman reckoning, extended from 753 to 510 B.C.). They suppose as well that this matriarchal or matrilineal order was first associated with Rome's Sabine component and reached its peak during the Etruscan domination of Rome in the late seventh and sixth centuries B.C. According to such a view, therefore, the esteem granted and formidability attributed to so many well-born women of the republican and early imperial periods, the very opposite of what one might expect from their lack of formal civil rights, constitutes a survival of early "mother right," Sabine and Etruscan in provenance.

Yet the hypothesis that matriarchal or matrilineal elements in Sabine, and in particular Etruscan, culture were absorbed into Roman civilization, though a convenient means of accounting for certain seemingly incongruous features of later republican and early imperial Roman society, poses certain problems. In the first place, the identification and isolation of purely Sabine and Etruscan components in pre-republican Roman culture are not only difficult, but fraught with complications. Scholars differ strongly over when Sabine and Etruscan influence was felt in early, "Latin," Rome, and thus where a particular early Roman practice originated. One must also consider why many practices, if indeed non-Roman in origin, were adopted. For if Roman society of the monarchic period is to be attributed with its own, native, Latin, practices and institutions, which it gradually combined with those of non-Latin (Sabine) and non-Indo-European (Etruscan) peoples, it presumably incorporated solely those foreign elements which fitted its existing needs and adapted those elements to conform with its own pre-existing attitudes and usages. In fact, two of the so-called Sabine and Etruscan practices which Thomson himself remarks upon as significant "matriarchal" features of monarchic Rome as it is portrayed by classical authors such as Livy — royal succession by a son-in-law and by a daughter's son — are also said, by Livy himself, to have first obtained among the Latins. At 1.1.9-11 Livy depicts Rome's Trojan forefather Aeneas as able to claim the throne of Latium only after wedding the daughter of its king, Latinus; Livy later represents Aeneas' descendant Romulus and his twin brother Remus as claiming their monarchic rights to found a new city because their mother was daughter of Numitor, rightful king of the Latin city Alba Longa. Thus it would seem likely that if the social importance and political influence ascribed to Roman women of the classical period are survivals from the years of Sabine and especially Etruscan hegemony at Rome, then the Romans of those early eras must have found the general Sabine and Etruscan view of women as significant individuals compatible with their own. Furthermore, the fact that a practice based on widespread human familial sentiment (such as the respect for motherhood in monarchic Rome discerned by Bachofen and his adherents) "survives" from an earlier period should imply that the sentiment still obtains to some extent in the later period. Concern for the origins of women's social significance and political influence in classical Roman times does not, therefore, in itself suffice: the reasons why women continued to be regarded as socially significant and politically influential after the monarchic, and through the classical, era deserve equal attention.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Preface And Acknowledgments, pg. ix
• Abbreviations, pg. xviii
• I. The Paradox Of Elite Roman Women: Patriarchal Society and Female Formidability, pg. 1
• II. Women of Elite Families and Roman Society, pg. 35
• III. Filiae Familiae, pg. 62
• IV. Sorores Familiae, pg. 150
• V. Matres Familiae, pg. 211
• VI. Some Cultural Perspectives on Ancient Roman Filiafocality, pg. 263
• Selected Bibliography, pg. 347
• Appendix: Genealogical Tables, pg. 363
• Index of Ancient Sources, pg. 381
• Index of Historical and Legendary Persons, pg. 398
• Index of Subjects, pg. 413