Roman Wives, Roman Widows

by Bruce W Winter

  S. E. Wood begins her important book on Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 B.C.-A.D. 69 with this observation: `A woman living in any city or town in the Roman empire would have known the faces of most members of the ruling family, even if she had never seen them in person.' She goes on to comment that `the married women of the imperial family would provide her with examples of appropriate ways for a wife to behave. Works of the visual arts would show her how they dressed and how they wore their hair'. They were `models she should emulate, or exempla, to use the term that would come naturally to the mind of the Latin-speaking person '.80 Juvenal asks, `What woman will not follow when an empress leads the way? 181

  `At the same time, our hypothetical observer of these statues and coins might learn, either by word of mouth or some other means, in what sort of behaviour these women publicly engaged, and would understand that it was not inappropriate for a wife to present petitions to her husband about matters of public policy, to intercede with him on behalf of individuals, to lend money to people outside her own family, to make generous gifts of cash both to cities and individuals, to undertake building projects in her own name and at her own expense, and still to be presented in public as the embodiment of a wife's traditional virtues'.82 There were, of course, also negative lessons to be learned with the sudden disappearance of an imperial statue, or its public defacing if she was guilty of a criminal offence or had fallen from grace with her husband. (See pp. 51-52.) Roman imperial marriage values had spread rapidly to the East. It is important to realise that, unlike the Republican period, statue types played an important role in the imperial propaganda `war' against the trends of the new Roman wife. She was no straw woman that was being knocked down by such manipulation of the means of communication.

  A good example of traditional values is found in the statue of Regilla, the wife of the famous sophist of Athens, Herodes Atticus, around whom Philostratus wrote his Lives of the Sophists.83 The Council of Corinth had erected a statue in her honour, and the inscription which contained the resolution of the Council read -

  This is a statue of Regilla. An artist carved the figure which has translated `all [her] prudent moderation' (rtaaav aw4po6Gvgv). It was given to the city by the great Herodes Atticus, `pre-eminent above others, who has attained the peak of every kind of virtue, whom she took as her husband, Herodes famous among the Hellenes and furthermore a son (of Greece) greater than them all, the flower of Achaia. 0 Regilla, the City Council, as if hailing you Tyche (the goddess, Fortune) has set up this marble statue before Tyche's sanctuary.'84

  There are a number of important statements enshrined in the inscription on the statue base. Her famous husband is described as possessing all the great civic virtues (7ravzoigs &p5Tf c), while hers, on the other hand, are epitomised by the important term oco4pon6vq. Furthermore, the inscription boasts that the artist captured in stone all her prudent moderation. While the ruling Council of Corinth portrayed Regilla's features as divine, likening her to the goddess of Fortune, in her marriage relationship with her famous husband, she enshrines that virtue which epitomized a traditional Roman wife. It is of interest that her virtue had crossed the Greek and Roman divide, as indeed had many other characteristics, and became an `empire' virtue.85

  By contrast in the famous city of Epidaurus, south of Corinth, there was a `new' woman called Pamphile who lived in the time of Nero. It is recorded that she wrote `historical memoirs in thirty-three books, an epitome of Ctesias' history in three books, many epitomes of histories and other books about controversies'. The Suda also records that she wrote about `sex and many other things'.86 While her vast endeavours in the former genre would have commended her in literary circles, her latter output would certainly have indicated where she stood in terms of those seen as `new' women. Her influence had spread to the provinces.

  `We have the many testimonies to women in the eastern provinces going about veiled ... others in mosaics without exception showing women with their faces and generally with their heads, too, quite uncovered - perhaps the better to display the modish arrangement of their hair. Here may be the clue that resolves the conflict in evidence: women who imitated the changes in style that went on in the imperial court, changes depicted in the provinces by portraits of the ladies of the imperial house, were the richer ones, the more open to the new ways and the more likely to belong to families on the rise. Women of humbler class were veiled, but these others behaved exactly like their counterparts in Italy, fully visible, indeed making their existence felt very fully in public .187

  In his Euboean oration Dio Chrysostom provides important evidence of the lifestyle of the `new' woman at the end of the first century A.D. in the East. He noted -

  ... men condone even the matter of adultery in a somewhat magnificent fashion and the practice of it finds great and most charitable consideration, where husbands in their simplicity do not notice most things and do not admit knowledge of some things but suffer the adulterers to be called guests and friends and kinsmen, at times even entertaining these themselves and inviting them to their table at festivals ... and invite their bosom friends, and display but moderate anger at actions that are most glaring and open - where, I say, these intrigues of the married women are carried on with an air of respectability. •88

  D. A. Russell argues for an alternative translation for the last clause in this citation to that in the Loeb edition of the orations - `where, I say, in houses where such generous hospitality is given in relation to the wives, which implies that instead of prostitutes being provided, some actually supplied their wives.89 Hawley notes the sheer number of references that illustrate the problem and the concern of Dio on the issues of marriage fidelity and promiscuousness in the cities in the Roman East.90

  The concern of the Roman authorities is reflected even in constitutions set up for Roman colonies. One framed in Rome in 44 B.C. for Urso in Spain prescribed -

  Respecting all persons, who are or shall be colonists of the colonia Genetiva Julia, the wives of all such persons, being within the colony in accordance with this law, shall obey the laws of the colonia Genetiva Julia and of their husbands.9'

  Given that the reference elsewhere in this particular constitution is to `all the conditions and with all the rights in every colony', one is justified in drawing two conclusions. As Corinth was established in the same year that Urso's constitution was drawn up by Rome, that particular stipulation would be no different for Corinth. It is clear that by 44 B.C. there were concerns about appropriate conduct and possible misconduct on the part of Roman wives in the colonies; such concerns were not restricted to Rome.

  We have noted that first-century women, unlike their Greek sisters in Hellenistic and Classical Greek times, appeared in the public domain. The imperial wives appear to have set a precedent for wives of senatorial rank and others in the social hierarchy. Chapter 9 will show that women of substantial means could have the title of magistrates and exercise political influence.

  It has not been argued here that a stereotype of the `traditional' republican wife no longer existed in the first century or, on the other hand, that the conduct of most (or all) wives was promiscuous. What has been shown is that `new' women had emerged and they were supported by those who were themselves avant-garde, including some male literary figures of the early Roman Empire who were influential in promoting this lifestyle. These `new' women had an unsettling influence on the status quo.

  This chapter has not exhausted the extant evidence of the activities of first-century women or the `new' Roman wife. Specific aspects relevant to individual texts relating to the Pauline communities will be discussed in Part 2. There we will locate texts relating to the Pauline communities in the cultural matrix of Romanization in the East as their Sitz im Leben.

  We turn first to the legal responses to the `new' Roman women. The following chapter will be devoted to seeing how the philosophical schools coped with this new phenomenon. This will be followed by a consideration of relevant New Testam
ent texts and the possibility that this same phenomenon greatly influenced some of the first-century women in the Pauline communities.

  `We shall never know to what extent women of an established family endorsed the life of pleasure described by the elegists, or the degree to which the poets' own actions matched their profession of enslavement to love." With this statement Fantham affirms for Roman society that which would be true for any ancient society where one wished to draw conclusions about aspects of the social life of all or a particular class of society.2

  However, in the case of the conduct of women evidence exists from Augustus' legislative programme that he was seeking to curb the activities of those described in the last chapter as `new' women. It prescribed moral conduct, financial disadvantages in remaining single, the procreation of children with resulting career advantages, and dress codes for wives; it proscribed marriage between certain classes, and punished inactivity on the part of husbands who ignored their wife's extramarital liaisons. Bauman has summarized the ramifications of this wide-ranging legislation: it `regulated marriage, encouraged procreation by privileges and rewards, and penalized the unmarried and childless, in particular restricting their rights of inheritance'.' Among other things it was a negative move against `new' Roman women that sought to curb their activity with their young sexual partners and to encourage bachelors to enter marriage and create a stable family by means of incentives. There are good reasons for concluding from the content of this legisla tion that it reflects the mindset both of a `moral' reformer and a social engineer; this was not without precedence in Roman history. J. A. Crook cautions against concluding that this social intervention was revolutionary for the Romans and points out that there was a strong Republican tradition for interference in the behaviour of its citizens either through legislation, courts and, above all, censorship.4

  The purpose of this chapter will be: (I) to examine Augustus' earlier legislation of 17 B.C. as it related to the activities of `new' Roman women and the reasons for its introduction; (II) to explore the responses of contemporaries and near contemporaries to those laws; and (III) to investigate the extent of the amendments in A.D. 9 (inasmuch as they affected the new Roman wife) to his legislation brought forward in the name of others because of the necessary compromise they represented for Augustus.

  Suetonius records -

  He [Augustus] reformed the laws and completely overhauled some of them, such as the sumptuary law, that on adultery and chastity, that on bribery, and the encouragement of marriage in the Senatorial and Equestrian Orders.

  He enacted lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus and the lex Julia de adulteriis coercendis between 18 and 16 and most probably in 17 B.C.6

  The lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus dealt with the regulation of marriage, incentives for having children and penalties for refusing to do so.7 The lex Julia de adulteriis coercendis legislated on promiscuity, making it a public crime which came within the jurisdiction of a specially created court with a permanent jury adjudicating.

  According to Bauman, these reforms `applied both to adulterium, illicit intercourse by and with a respectable married woman, and to stuprum, fornication with a widow or unmarried free woman who was not a prostitute'. The former could be committed only by wives and lovers.' Men and women could be charged with stuprum but only women could be charged with adultery, the latter relating to all women regardless of their social class.' Roman marriage not only had to operate within the laws of affinity10 but it also had to take due cognizance of rank because of these new proscriptions.

  Raditsa succinctly summarised the effects of the intrusion of the lex Julia into what had been primarily within the purview of the family and not the domain of the state. He wrote, `the law on adultery threatened everyone ... the laws on marriage interfered with the lives of everyone, both in what they forbade and in what they encouraged. Their sanction applied to traditional areas of freedom in private life, for instance to the patria potestas, to the freedom to make stipulations of a certain sort in wills, to inheritance and bequests when not within the sixth degree of relation in a family, to the patronus' relation to his freedmen and women. More importantly, they specified who could marry whom within the body of citizens"'

  Under the legislation of Augustus a wife's adultery was liable to `public accusation' (accusatio publica) and was tried by a judge and jury. This represented a major change, for what were known as `honour' killings had traditionally applied in Republican Roman society. Aulus Gellius said that he

  `copied Cato's words from a speech called On the dowry, in which it is stated that husbands who caught wives in adultery could kill them. "The husband," he says, who divorces his wife is her judge, as though he were a censor; he has power if she has done something perverse and awful ... if she has done wrong with another man, she is condemned to death." It is also written, regarding the right to kill: "If you catch your wife in adultery, you can kill her with impunity; she, however, cannot dare to lay a finger on you if you commit adultery, nor is it the law"."2

  The new law expressly forbade the husband to kill his wife if caught in the act but did permit him to kill the offender if he was an actor, a freedman, a member of the immediate family, a pimp, or anyone condemned by a public court. The alleged adulterer could be brought to trial, suffer the loss of half of his property and be relegated to an island.

  Legal action on the charge of adultery could not commence until the accuser had actually divorced his wife which could be done on the witness of seven citizens.13 Once divorced and found guilty of adultery by a court, the wife lost half of her dowry, one third of any other property she owned, and was relegated to an island. A women so convicted could not thereafter enter into a fully valid marriage.

  While a husband could no longer act unilaterally against his wife, he was, however, required to initiate legal action against her within sixty days, otherwise he left himself open to the charge of `pimping'. So this legislation not only made a woman's adultery a criminal offence once she was divorced but, for the first time, it also made `the condoning of adultery by an "injured" husband an offence open to criminal prosecution and punishable by expulsion from society.' 14 The severe penalty of exile and loss of property for a husband unwilling to curb or punish his wife was meant to bring great pressure on him to take action against the profligate behaviour of a `new' Roman wife. This legislation had teeth, for it would severely penalise him for failing to divorce and prosecute his wife for her sexual misconduct.

  McGinn has drawn attention to another far-reaching effect of the legislative programme of Augustus, viz. the regulation of clothing which was originally designed to signal a woman's legal status and class.15 `Women [convicted of adultery] were also compelled to wear the toga as a symbol of their shame, and they were no longer eligible to wear the marriage veil. He also notes that `Clothing's role as a status maker receives repeated recognition from the jurists'.16 Augustus had taken upon himself to enact legislation for dress codes which would distinguish the modest wife from the adulteress and the prostitute.'7 'By law they [the latter two groups] were obliged to wear a kind of uniform - a short undergarment (tunica) without instita (the border, laid in several plaits) and a toga in a dark colour - by which they could be distinguished from respectable women, but quite often they cut a dashing figure by wearing a daring and often see-through dress."8

  Valerius Maximus, writing in the time of Tiberius, records `the frightful marital severity of Sulpicius Gallus' c. 190 B.C. who divorced his wife because he learned `she had gone about in public unveiled'. He justified his actions thus -

  To have your good looks approved, the law limits you to my eyes only. For them assemble the tools of beauty, for them look your best, trust to their closest familiarity. Any further sight of you, summoned by needless incitement, has to be mired in suspicion and crimination.19

  He indicates that there were other examples from Republican times where a wife found `in public talking tete-a-tete with a certain common freedwoman [a p
rostitute] was divorced for that reason'. P. Sempronius Sophus did the same to his spouse for watching the public Games without his knowledge. In citing these examples Valerius Maximus makes it clear that `While women were thus checked in the old days, their minds stayed away from wrongdoings '.20

  According to McGinn, `The lex Julia specified certain articles of clothing - such as the stola and vittae - as peculiar to matronae and forbade these to be worn by prostitutes: thus the leges in the passage drawn from the De Cultu Feminarum are simply the adultery statute itself. Matrons were not compelled by law to wear the stola and the other `matronal' articles of clothing' * 21 The veil however was worn to signify the woman was married. (See pp. 78-81.)

  It is interesting that Diodorus of Sicilia, who wrote c. 60-30 B.C., revived the legend that Zaleucus of Locri had enacted a law in the third century B.C. prescribing the behaviour of a married woman, where she was prohibited from wearing gold ornaments or clothes bordered with purple, unless she was a courtesan.22

  Social engineering by Augustus, the aim of which was to give the senatorial class a higher profile in society, depended upon their wives living up to expected standards. Culham noted, `Nor was it possible for Augustus to mark off a special elite and demand respect for them without including women of the senatorial class within the bounds. The public display of senatorial rank required that women who shared a family's status also behave in a way meriting respect. Augustan legislation also banned the daughters of senators from marrying freedmen, actors, or other disreputable people'.23

  It has been laid down in the Julian law: let no senator, senator's son, or grandson by a son, or great-grandson by a son and grandson knowingly and fraudulently have as betrothed or wife a freedwoman or a woman who herself or whose father or mother practices or has practised the stage profession. And let no daughter of a senator or granddaughter by a son or great-granddaughter by a son and grandson be knowingly and fraudulently betrothed or wife to a freedman or to a man who himself or whose father or mother practises or has practised the stage profession. And let not any of such people fraudulently and knowingly have such a woman as betrothed or wife .21