SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

  Even when he returned from those inglorious few months on the front line, he still faced the personal ruptures, uncertainties and spill-over violence that were part and parcel, day-to-day, of the big story of civil war. There were quarrels with his brother, Quintus, who seemed to be trying to make his own peace with Caesar by bad-mouthing Cicero. There were suspicions about the killing in Greece of one of his friends, a prominent adversary of Caesar, who in an after-dinner fight had been fatally stabbed in the stomach and behind the ear. Was this just a personal quarrel about money, as Cicero suspected, for the killer was known to be short of cash? Or was Caesar somehow behind the death? Violence apart, even playing his cards right and maintaining good personal relations with the winning side could prove irksome.

  It was never more irksome than when a couple of years later Cicero ended up entertaining Caesar to dinner in one of his seaside estates on the Bay of Naples, where many wealthy Romans from the city had luxury getaways. He gives a wry description of all the trouble it involved in a letter to his friend Atticus from the end of 45 BCE, which is also one of the most vivid pictures to survive of Caesar off duty (and a particularly favourite moment in Cicero’s career for Gore Vidal centuries later). Caesar was travelling with a battalion of no fewer than 2,000 soldiers as a guard and escort, which was an awful burden for even the most generous and tolerant host: ‘a billeting rather than a visit’, as Cicero puts it. And that was in addition to Caesar’s large civilian following of slaves and ex-slaves. Cicero explains that he had three dining rooms laid up for visiting senior staff alone and made appropriate arrangements for those further down the social pecking order, while Caesar took a bath and had a massage before he reclined to dine, in the formal Roman fashion. He turned out to have a large appetite, partly because he had been following a course of emetics, which was a popular regime of detoxification among wealthy Romans involving regular vomiting; and he enjoyed urbane conversation more about literature than about ‘anything serious’ (see plate 14).

  How his own slaves and staff coped with this invasion, Cicero does not stop to say, or perhaps did not notice, but he congratulated himself that the evening had passed off well, even though he did not relish a repeat: ‘My guest was not the sort to whom you would say, “Please drop by again when you are next around”. Once is enough.’ The best one can observe is that entertaining a victorious Pompey would almost certainly have been just as much bother.

  Cicero’s letters also reveal that the trials of war and the demands of receiving a dictator were only one part of his troubles at the time. Between Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon and his assassination on the Ides of March, 44 BCE, Cicero’s family and household fell apart. In those five years, he divorced Terentia, his wife of thirty years, and quickly remarried. He was aged sixty, his new bride, Publilia, was about fifteen years old and the relationship lasted only a few weeks before he sent her back to her mother. Meanwhile, his daughter Tullia was divorced from her third husband, Publius Cornelius Dolabella, an enthusiastic supporter of Caesar. Tullia was pregnant at the time of the divorce and died early in 45 BCE, shortly after giving birth to a son, who only briefly survived her. Her previous child by Dolabella had been born prematurely and had also died, just a couple of weeks old. Cicero was engulfed in grief, which did not help his relationship with his new bride, as he retreated to be alone on one of his more isolated estates and to plan how to commemorate his daughter; he was soon busy reflecting on how to give her some kind of divine status. As he put it, he wanted to ensure her ‘apotheosis’.

  Husbands and wives

  Roman marriage was, in essence, a simple and private business. Unlike in the modern world, the state played little part in it. In most cases a man and a woman were assumed to be married if they claimed that they were married, and they ceased to be married if they (or if one of them) claimed they no longer were. That, plus a party or two to celebrate the union, was probably all there was to it for the majority of ordinary Roman citizens. For the wealthier, there were often more formal and more expensive wedding ceremonies, featuring a relatively familiar line-up for such a rite of passage: special clothes (brides traditionally wore yellow), songs and processions and the new wife being carried over the threshold of the marital home. Considerations of property bulked larger for the rich too, in particular a dowry that the father of the bride provided, to be returned in the event of divorce. One of Cicero’s problems in the 40s BCE was that he had been forced to repay Terentia’s dowry, while the cash-strapped Dolabella seems not to have repaid Tullia’s, or at least not in full. Marriage to young Publilia would have held out the prospect of a substantial fortune to compensate.

  The main purpose of marriage at Rome, as in all past cultures, was the production of legitimate children, who automatically inherited Roman citizen status if both parents were citizens or if they satisfied various conditions governing ‘intermarriage’ with outsiders. That is what lies at the heart of the story of the Sabine Women, which depicts the first marriage in the new city as a process of ‘legitimate rape’ for the purpose of procreation. The same message was paraded repeatedly on the tombstones of wives and mothers throughout Roman history.

  One epitaph written sometime in the mid second century BCE, commemorating a certain Claudia, perfectly captures the traditional image: ‘Here is the unlovely grave of a lovely woman,’ it reads. ‘… She loved her husband with her heart. She bore two sons. One of these she leaves on earth, the other under the earth. She was graceful in her speech and elegant in her step. She kept the home. She made wool. That’s what there is to say.’ The proper role of the woman, in other words, was to be devoted to her husband, to produce the next generation, to be an adornment, to be a household manager and to contribute to the domestic economy, by spinning and weaving. Other commemorations single out for praise women who had remained faithful wives to only one husband throughout their lives, and emphasise ‘female’ virtues of chastity and fidelity. Contrast the epitaphs of Scipio Barbatus and his male descendants, where it is military action, political office holding and prominence in public life that capture the headlines.

  49. A Roman wall-painting depicts an idealised scene of an ancient wedding, mixing gods and humans. The veiled bride sits at the centre, on her new marital bed, being encouraged by the goddess Venus sitting with her. Against the bed leans a louche figure of the god Hymen, one of the deities supposed to protect marriage. On the far left, human figures make preparations for bathing the bride.

  To what extent this image of the Roman wife was, at any period, more wishful thinking than an accurate reflection of social reality is impossible to know. There was undoubtedly a lot of vociferous nostalgia in Rome for the tough old days, when wives were kept in their place. ‘Egnatius Metellus took a cudgel and beat his wife to death because she had drunk some wine,’ insisted one first-century CE writer, with apparent approval, referring to an entirely mythical incident in the reign of Romulus. Even the emperor Augustus took advantage of the traditional associations of wool working, in what was something like the ancient equivalent of a photo opportunity, by having his wife Livia pose at her loom in their front hall in full public view. But the chances are that those tough old days were in part the product of the imagination of later moralists, as well as a useful theme for later Romans to exploit in establishing their old-fashioned credentials.

  No less problematic is the competing image, prominent in the first century BCE, of a new style of liberated woman, who supposedly enjoyed a free social, sexual, often adulterous life, without much constraint from husband, family or the law. Some of these characters were conveniently dismissed as part of the demi-monde of actresses, showgirls, escorts and prostitutes, including one celebrity ex-slave, Volumnia Cytheris, who was said to have been the mistress at one time or another of both Brutus and Mark Antony, so sleeping with both Caesar’s assassin and his greatest supporter. But many of them were the wives or widows of high-ranking Roman senators.

  The most notorious of all was Clodi
a, the sister of Cicero’s great enemy Clodius, the wife of a senator who died in 59 BCE, and the lover of the poet Catullus, among a string of others. Terentia is rumoured to have had her suspicions about even Cicero’s relations with Clodius’ sister. She was alternately attacked and admired as a promiscuous temptress, scheming manipulator, idolised goddess and borderline criminal. For Cicero she was ‘the Medea of the Palatine’, a clever coinage linking the passionate, child-murdering witch of Greek tragedy with Clodia’s place of residence in Rome. Catullus gave her the soubriquet Lesbia in his poetry, not only as camouflage but in order to gesture back to the Greek poet Sappho, from the island of Lesbos: ‘Let’s live, my Lesbia, and let’s love / And the mutterings of stern old men / Let’s value them at a single penny … / Give me a thousand kisses’, as one poem starts.

  Colourful as this material is, it cannot be taken at face value. Part of it is not much more than erotic fantasy. Part of it is a classic reflection of common patriarchal anxieties. Throughout history, some men have justified their domination of women by simultaneously relishing and deploring an image of the dangerous and transgressive female, whose largely imaginary crimes, sexual promiscuity (with the uncomfortable question marks this poses over any child’s paternity) and irresponsible drunkenness demonstrate the need for tight male control. The story of Egnatius Metellus’ uncompromising line with his tipsy wife and the rumours of Clodia’s wild parties are two sides of the same ideological coin. Besides, in many cases the lurid descriptions of female criminality, power and excess are often not really about the women they purport to describe at all but vehicles for a debate about something quite different.

  When Sallust focuses on a couple of women supposedly prominent in Catiline’s conspiracy, he is using them as terrible symbols of the decadent immorality of the society that produced Catiline. ‘Whether she was keener to squander her money or her reputation, it would have been hard to decide,’ he jibes about one senator’s wife, and the mother of one of Caesar’s assassins, capturing what he saw as the spirit of the age. Cicero, for his part, used Clodia as a successful deflecting tactic in a tricky court case where he was defending one of his dodgier young friends, who was also one of Clodia’s ex-lovers, on a charge of murder. It is from the speech he delivered then that the vast majority of the disreputable details of her behaviour come: from the serial adulteries to the wild beach-parties-turned-orgies. Cicero’s aim was to shift the blame from his client by discrediting a jealous Clodia, making her a laughing stock, a bad influence on his client and the principal villain. It is hard to imagine that Clodia was an entirely celibate, stay-at-home wife and widow, but if she read Cicero’s depiction of her in the comfort of her elegant Palatine home, whether she would have recognised herself is quite another matter.

  It is clear, however, that Roman women in general had much greater independence than women in most parts of the classical Greek or Near Eastern world, limited as it must seem in modern terms. The contrast is particularly striking with classical Athens, where women of wealthy families were supposed to live secluded lives, out of the public eye, largely segregated from men and male social life (the poor, needless to say, did not have the cash or the space to enforce any such divisions). There were, to be sure, uncomfortable restrictions on women in Rome too: the emperor Augustus, for example, relegated them to the back rows of the theatres and gladiatorial arenas; the suites for women in public baths were usually markedly more cramped than those for men; and in practice male activities probably dominated the swankier areas of a Roman house. But women were not meant to be publicly invisible, and domestic life does not seem to have been formally divided into male and female spaces, with gendered no-go areas.

  Women also regularly dined with men, and not only the sex workers, escorts and entertainers who provided the female company at classical Athenian parties. In fact, one of the early misdeeds of Verres turned on this difference between Greek and Roman dining practices. In the 80s BCE, when he was serving in Asia Minor, more than a decade before his stint in Sicily, Verres and some of his staff engineered an invitation to dinner with an unfortunate Greek, and after a considerable quantity of alcohol had been consumed they asked the host if his daughter could join them. When the man explained that respectable Greek women did not dine in male company, the Romans refused to believe him and set out to find her. A brawl followed in which one of Verres’ bodyguards was killed and the host was drenched with boiling water; he was later executed for murder. Cicero paints the whole incident in extravagant terms, almost as a rerun of the rape of Lucretia. But it also involved a series of drunken misunderstandings about the conventions of female behaviour across the cultural boundaries of the empire.

  Some of the legal rules that governed marriage and women’s rights at this period reflect this relative freedom. There were, it is true, some hard lines claimed on paper. It may have been a nostalgic myth that once upon a time a man had the right to cudgel to death his wife for the ‘crime’ of drinking a glass of wine. But there is some evidence that the execution of a wife who was caught in adultery was technically within the husband’s legal power. There is, however, not a single known example of this ever happening, and most evidence points in a different direction. A woman did not take her husband’s name or fall entirely under his legal authority. After the death of her father, an adult woman could own property in her own right, buy and sell, inherit or make a will and free slaves – many of the rights that women in Britain did not gain till the 1870s.

  The only restriction was the need for an appointed guardian (tutor) to approve whatever decision or transaction she made. Whether Cicero was being patronising or misogynistic or (as some critics generously think) having a joke when he put this rule down to women’s natural ‘weakness in judgement’ is impossible to tell. But there is certainly no sign that for his wife it was much of a handicap: whether she was selling a row of houses to raise funds for Cicero in exile or raking in the rents from her estates, no tutor is ever mentioned. In fact, one of the reforms of Augustus towards the end of the first century BCE or early in the next was to allow freeborn citizen women who had borne three children to be released from the requirement to have a guardian; ex-slaves had to have four to qualify. It was a clever piece of radical traditionalism: it allowed women new freedoms, provided they fulfilled their traditional role.

  Oddly, women had much less freedom when it came to the act of marriage itself. For a start, they had no real option whether to marry or not. The basic rule was that all freeborn women were to be married. There were no maiden aunts, and it was only special groups, such as the Vestal Virgins, who opted, or were compelled, to remain single. What is more, the freedom a woman enjoyed in the choice of husband could be very limited, certainly among the rich and powerful, whose marriages were regularly arranged to cement alliances, whether political, social or financial. But it would be naive to imagine that the daughter of a peasant farmer who wanted to do a deal with his neighbour, or the slave girl who was to be freed in order to marry her owner (a not uncommon occurrence), had much more say in the decision.

  Marriage alliances underpinned some major developments in Roman politics in the late Republic. In 82 BCE, for example, Sulla attempted to secure Pompey’s loyalty by ‘giving’ him his stepdaughter as a wife, although she was married to someone else at the time and pregnant by him; the gamble did not pay off, because the poor woman almost immediately died in childbirth. Twenty years later, Pompey sealed his agreement with Caesar in the Gang of Three by marrying Caesar’s daughter, Julia. The stakes were not quite so high for Cicero and his daughter Tullia, but it is clear that family advancement and good connections were always in Cicero’s mind, even if things did not necessarily go his way.

  How to find a husband for Tullia was, he admitted, the thing that was worrying him most as he left Rome for the province of Cilicia in 51 BCE. After her two brief and childless marriages to men from distinguished families – one ending in the man’s death, the other in divorce – a third ma
tch had to be arranged for her. On this occasion Cicero’s letters offer a glimpse of the negotiations, as he canvassed a variety of suitable, and less suitable, candidates. One did not seem to be a serious proposition; another had nice manners; of another he reluctantly wrote, ‘I doubt that our girl could be prevailed upon’, acknowledging that Tullia had some say in the matter. But communications were a problem. As it took roughly three months for a letter to go from Cilicia to Rome and a reply to get back, it was hard for Cicero to keep control of the process, and he was more or less forced to leave the final decision to Terentia and Tullia. They picked none of his top choices but the recently divorced Dolabella instead, another man with unimpeachable aristocratic credentials and, by Roman accounts, an engaging rogue, inveterate seducer and unusually short. ‘Who has tied my son-in-law to his sword?’ is one of Cicero’s best-remembered jokes.

  Arranged marriages of this kind were not necessarily grey and emotionless unions. It was always said that Pompey and Julia were devoted to each other, that he was devastated when she died in childbirth in 54 BCE and that her death contributed to the political breakdown between Pompey and Caesar. The marriage, in other words, proved rather too successful for its intended purpose. And several of Cicero’s earliest surviving letters to Terentia, whom he presumably married after some similar arrangement, are full of expressions of intense devotion and love, whatever emotions lay underneath: ‘Light of my life, my heart’s desire. To think that you, darling Terentia, are so tormented, when everyone used to go to you for help,’ he wrote to her from exile in 58 BCE.

  Equally, there are plenty of signs of marital squabbles, discontents and disappointments. Tullia soon found Dolabella more rogue than engaging, and within three years the pair were living apart. But the most persistently miserable marriage in Cicero’s circle was that of his brother, Quintus, and Pomponia, the sister of Cicero’s friend Atticus. Predictably, and maybe unfairly, Cicero’s letters throw most of the blame at the wife, but they also capture some of the arguments in uncannily modern terms. On one occasion, when Pomponia snapped, ‘I feel like a stranger in my own house’, in front of guests, Quintus came out with the classic complaint ‘There, you see what I have to put up with every day!’ After twenty-five years of this, they eventually divorced. Quintus is supposed to have remarked, ‘Nothing is better than not having to share a bed.’ Pomponia’s reaction is unknown.