On Blondes

by Joanna Pitman

  Sadly, all the historians, poets and satirists of the Roman Empire were men – few women wrote books, and of those written none has survived. But romantic men such as Catullus and Propertius composed reams of passionate prose to their women. Ovid and Horace, highly cultivated philanderers, also produced volumes of satirical and poetic erotica. These writers, whose works were crammed with erudite literary allusions, were naturally drawn to write for and about women who would appreciate their work. Not for them the chaste and dull wives, veiled and wilfully ignorant. These poets wrote for their witty and extrovert mistresses; and it is these elegant and cultured women of Rome, the elaborately blonded imitators of Venus, whom we have to thank for so much that is charming and exceptionally obscene in Roman poetry. Catullus referred to his mistress by the pseudonym Lesbia, and Ovid’s poems are often addressed to his mistress Corinna, a monumentally beautiful – if we are to believe him – blonde dame. It is clear that Ovid was obsessed with her physical beauty, and glorified with uncontrolled relish every possible pleasure of the flesh. He was fascinated, in particular, by hair, its uses and abuses.

  I told you to stop using rinses – and now just look at you!

  No hair worth mentioning left to dye.

  Why couldn’t you let it well alone? . . .

  No rival’s incantations

  Or tisanes have harmed you, no witch

  Has hexed your rinse, you haven’t – touch wood – had an illness;

  If your hair’s fallen out, it’s not

  Any envious tongue that’s to blame. You applied that concoction

  Yourself. It was you that did it. All your fault.

  Still, after our German conquests a wig is easily come

  by –

  A captive Madchen’s tresses will see you through.

  You’ll blush, it’s true, when your borrowed plumage elicits

  Admiration galore. You’ll feel that the praise (like the hair)

  Has been bought. Once you really deserved it. Now each compliment

  Belongs to some Rhine maiden, not to you.6

  There must have been thousands of German blondes taken captive only to find their hair being cut off to be made into wigs for the fashionable ladies of Rome. Successful wars were one source of supply of northern slaves because whole nations were often sold after a victory. But the piecemeal kidnapping of able-bodied men and women – particularly blonde ones – throughout the Empire went on for hundreds of years, the eagle-eyed dealers ever on the watch to seize a handsome boy or maiden for the Roman marketplace.

  One of the most notorious beneficiaries of the fruits of these kidnappings was the eccentric Empress Messalina, wife of the Emperor Claudius. She was a legendary lady of fantastically debauched pleasures and infamous public vices who enjoyed wearing blonde wigs. Juvenal, the satirical poet who gloried in the ugly little adulterous conflicts that breached class and convention, wrote his famous Sixth Satire warning men against women’s insatiable appetites for sexual gratification.

  Postumus, are you really

  Taking a wife? You used to be sane enough – what

  Fury’s got into you, what snake has stung you up?

  And as for your insistence on a wife with old-fashioned Moral virtues – man, you need your blood-pressure checked, you’re

  Crazy, you’re aiming over the moon.7

  He goes on to recount the tale of Messalina’s astonishing sexual drive. Bored by the traditional frolics on offer within the palace walls, she made regular nocturnal visits to a brothel, her black hair hidden beneath an ash-blonde wig. There she would strip off in a reserved whore’s cell and take in all visitors, for cash, until the brothel keeper finally closed his doors at dawn. Always the last to leave, she would trail away sadly, ‘retiring exhausted, yet still far from satisfied, cheeks begrimed with lamp smoke, filthy, carrying home to her imperial couch the stink of the whorehouse.’8

  It is clear that Messalina’s choice of a blonde wig was designed to attract attention rather than to disguise herself. She often came home, so the story goes, having forgotten it, and the next day publicly reclaimed the tousled mass when it was returned from the brothel. As Martial, who longed for such untoward behaviour to use in his verses, later wrote of this lethal woman, ‘Her toilet table contained a hundred lies; and while she was in Rome, her hair was blushing by the Rhine. A man was in no condition to say he loved her, for what he loved in her was not herself, and that which was herself was impossible to love.’

  From this is shaped the grand opera of Messalinian mythology. Jacques Roergas de Serviez, a seventeenth-century historian of Roman imperial life, gives a brief character sketch of the Empress Messalina: ‘It is hard to conceive the miserable conditions of an Empire that is governed by a woman, who has nothing at heart but the gratification of her appetites, whose violence, meeting with no resistance, spreads their indiscriminately fatal influence upon all those whom her caprice inclines her to persecute.’9

  When not busy flaunting her blonde wig in brothels, Messalina was conjuring up monstrous Borgia-like plots to have her rivals murdered. She was an imaginative woman, particularly in the ways of false accusation. Any foolish man who spurned her or refused to meet her demands was promptly accused of treason, sent to jail and then quietly put to death. Powerful men such as Vitellius, one of Claudius’ more corrupt courtiers, who had attracted Messalina’s roving eye, resorted to base flattery to stay alive. He always carried with him one of Messalina’s old shoes, which he kissed continuously and unashamedly in public as if it were a kind of sacred relic. This bizarre insurance policy worked and he survived her, but others were not so lucky.

  Messalina finally met her end, according to some accounts, after flouting convention unforgivably by publicly taking the handsome, wealthy and noble Silius as a second husband. This act startled even Emperor Claudius, accustomed as he was to her depravity and ruthlessness in the affairs of state. Soon afterwards, in AD 48, the imperial orders were issued which resulted in her death.

  Messalina was not alone in her imperial obsession with the dangerous sexual powers of blonde hair. Her rival in vice, extravagance and power-crazed lust was Poppaea, another infamous blonde. Poppaea was brutal, beautiful and ripe with the promise of intrigue. She used her beauty, her wit and her charms to persuade Emperor Nero to remove all barriers to her own ascendancy of the throne. The emperor, no stranger himself to gluttony, cruelty, murder and spectacular sexual abominations, was lured by Poppaea first into murdering his own mother, Agrippina, in AD 59, and then into killing his young wife, Octavia, as a punishment for her supposed adultery. Octavia died, according to Tacitus, in an overheated bath, smothered by the steam, leaving Poppaea triumphantly free of rivals as empress.

  Nero was captivated by Poppaea and, according to de Serviez, ‘admired her beauty as much as she valued it herself, and never omitted an opportunity of extolling it, which he did by the most delicate and studied praises. He went so far as to compose verses upon the delightful brilliancy of her hair, which he compared to amber.’10 Amber when new is bright yellow: Poppaea clearly went for the brassiest shade available, taking no chances in the business of captivating and keeping her emperor. She was a sensationally vain woman, her jealous rivals noted, who was observed peering into her looking-glass at every available moment. The haughty empress looked in her mirror one day and, according to de Serviez, found herself somewhat less handsome than usual. ‘Foreseeing with sorrowful heart the sad but inevitable decline of her charms, she wept bitterly and prayed to the gods that she might die before she grew old.’11

  It is clear that Poppaea was an accomplished beauty, but few spent such immoderate time, money and effort on preserving and heightening their charms and tricking time’s ravaging fingers. Lavish sums disappeared on washes and pomatums for Poppaea’s complexion as well as saffron tints for her hair. She had a herd of five hundred lactating she-asses kept at vast expense to provide the milk to fill her daily baths. Nothing, she believed, was comparable to this speci
al product for preserving the skin. Intoxicated with her own beauty and power, she wore magnificent gowns, precious jewels and gold chains, and had the mules attached to her litter shod with solid gold and their reins threaded with gold wires. Naturally, no good was to come of such unseemly displays. The citizens of Rome, far from blind to their empress’s malicious cunning, fed their anxieties on her blatant vanity and extravagance, and loudly ridiculed Nero for his stupidity. Poppaea met her particularly unpleasant end in about AD 65. Having berated Nero for his music and chariot-driving pleasures, she angered him to the extent that he turned and, so the story goes, gave her such a kick in her pregnant belly that she died immediately. The Romans were delighted. But when Nero recovered from his fury he was inconsolable. According to Pliny, Poppaea’s body was stuffed with Arabian spices, beautified and embalmed, oriental fashion, in clouds of incense. More perfumes were consumed on her funeral pile than Arabia was then able to produce in a year. In the end, the gods had answered Poppaea’s prayer to vanity.

  Poppaea’s story gives us some indication of the lengths to which Roman women – both members of the aristocracy and top-ranking courtesans – went to make themselves beautiful. We can safely assume that it was the goddess of beauty and love, Venus, whom these women had in mind when they put the elegant verses of Martial, Ovid and Lucian to practical effect. Martial, writing in the first century AD, advised those wishing to colour their hair blonde to use a dye known as ‘sapo’, made of goat’s fat mixed with beechwood ashes and rolled into balls. For those more squeamish than vain, he suggested the ‘spuma Batava’ or Batavian pomade, a form of dyeing soap which had been discovered in use in the Rhine district. Pliny, in his Natural History, advised the most ruthless bleachers to use the ‘lees’ or sediment of vinegar, an altogether more caustic and malodorous – method of achieving the blonde look. The outstandingly brave incorporated pigeon dung in the mix, for the bleaching powers of its ammonia. Martial reserved his most mordant wit for savaging the women who succumbed to such vanities.

  Although, yourself at home, you are arrayed in the middle of the Subura, and your tresses, Galla, are manufactured far away, and you lay aside your teeth at night, just as you do your silk dresses, and you lie stored away in a hundred caskets, and your face does not sleep with you – yet you wink with that eyebrow which has been brought out for you in the morning, and no respect moves you for your outworn carcass – which you may now count as one of your ancestors. Nevertheless you offer me an infinity of delights.12

  Merciless with their pens, these poets were at the same time entirely susceptible to the attractions of their blonde mistresses. Any shade of blonde, from ash to amber, would do, as long as it put them in mind of Venus and fed their fantasies. Some singled out particular shades as being reserved for particular purposes. The colour known as ‘carrot yellow’, for example, was said to be favoured by high-ranking courtesans and was probably achieved using saffron. This was the world’s costliest spice, at one time measured in carats and said to be worth more even than its weight in gold. It was derived from the stigma of the crocus flower and, used as a hair dye, it produced a rich yellow shade. Meanwhile, those described as having a ‘white head’, meaning heavily bleached blonde, marked themselves as women of ‘not very serious intentions’. Could these have been the world’s first recorded blonde bimbos? Propertius attacked all such female vanities in his elegies. ‘Do you still in your madness imitate the painted Britons and play the wanton with foreign dyes upon your cheeks? All beauty is best as nature made it . . . In hell below may many an ill befall that girl who stupidly dyes her hair with a false colour!’13

  Ovid’s gracefully erotic poetry was rather more flattering, and got its delicate little hooks into the soft flesh of society women. Soon they were lapping up long treatises on appearance and beauty in his Art of Love. ‘What attracts us is elegance,’ wrote the ever-attentive Ovid:

  so don’t neglect your hairstyle. Looks can be made or marred by a skilful touch . . . But a woman can use imported rinses to touch up those white streaks, produce a better than natural tint. A woman goes out in a built-up purchased postiche, replaces her own hair with a wig, cash down – and unblushingly boutiques display them under Hercules’ nose, right beside the Muses’ shrine . . . I was about to warn you against rank goatish armpits and bristling hair on your legs . . .14

  Nothing was left to chance by these men, who imposed every detail of a Roman woman’s most intimate beauty routine.a

  Dyed blonde hair or a blonde wig might have given away the profession of the prostitute in the early years of the Roman Republic. But by the late Republic and Empire periods, it was becoming more difficult, despite the carrot-yellow code, to distinguish the professional, beautifully coiffed courtesan from the increasingly liberated society lady. No doubt egged on by the provocative poems of Ovid, the austerely moral married matrons of former days, whose virtues had included frugality, modesty and simplicity of life, were beginning to transform themselves into frivolous and extravagant butterflies. No longer afraid to be seen publicly with their heads uncovered, they became ruthless beauties, desperate to compete – as did their men – in the daily contest for image and the social position that it brought.

  Elaborate hairstyles and clothes were the most effective way of demonstrating leisured wealth. During the first century AD, a period of sheer fantasy in feminine coiffure was ushered in by Julia, the beautiful daughter of the Emperor Titus, which easily competes with the eighteenth-century passion for wedding-cake hairstyles. Professional hairdressers were employed, devoted teams on whom powerful beauties depended utterly for their reputations. Touching epitaphs still survive, composed by ladies mourning the deaths of their most able and loyal hairdressers. These women, highly skilled in their intricate art, mixed the thick hair dye, slapped it on to the hair in a slick of shining slime, rubbed it vigorously into the scalp and then scraped it all off hours later when dry. They washed the hair, dried it, applied further colouring powders and then embarked on the tricky business of styling. This was a task in which success brought rich rewards, while failure sometimes resulted in stabbings with bone hairpins or worse by disgruntled mistresses. Piling the hair up wave upon wave, they arranged each layer on crescent-shaped wire frames until the whole concoction eventually soared up in frantic profusion to tower over the forehead. These splendidly coloured and curled edifices were designed to be viewed from the front only. Society ladies solemnly competed to manoeuvre themselves at important occasions so as to keep their polished facades in view and the complex scaffolding at the backs of their heads out of sight. Juvenal gleefully mocked the fashion in his Sixth Satire:

  See the tall edifice

  Rise up on her head in serried tiers and storeys!

  See her heroic stature – at least, that is, from the front:

  Her back view’s less impressive, you’d think it belonged

  To a different person.15

  Some women reached a joyful compromise by having a selection of wigs constructed for use on different days. Faustina the Elder, wife of Emperor Antoninus Pius, who reigned from about AD 138 to 161, is said to have got through three hundred wigs in nineteen years. The evidence, as seen from the fragment of a Roman statue now in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, is that portrait busts of women were made with detachable marble wigs, revealing the practical realities of life.

  Men, too, indulged in wig-wearing. Caligula wore a full wig to disguise himself while prowling around the brothels at night. For parties and special occasions he fixed a false gold beard on his chin, his choice of colour presumably designed to display his wealth as well as his sense of style. Nero, a finicky connoisseur of fashion who never appeared in public without his hair artfully styled, wore gold dust and coloured powders in his hair. Emperor Commodus wore an oiled wig auspiciously powdered with scrapings of gold to give the impression of a glowing halo – all the better to persuade the public of his divinity. Caracalla wore a blond wig to ingratiate himself during a visit to a
settlement of German tribesmen. Hadrian had his hair curled and dyed, as did his adopted heirs, Lucius Caesar and Lucius Verus. Hadrian latterly wore a wig to conceal his baldness and had his beard dyed to match.

  The growing appeal of blonde hair, on both men and women, may have been linked to the rise in numbers and social status of Germans, some of whom had gained considerable power in the last few hundred years of the Roman Empire. Ever since the first century AD, blonde German prisoners had been pouring into the Empire, following successful northern military campaigns, to work on agricultural estates all over Italy. Each successive victory admitted more northerners into the households of Rome as slaves. During the reigns of the last Roman emperors, Germans rose to hold military command, becoming consuls and chiefs, and some of them were admitted into the inner circle of the Roman aristocracy. Many of these German officers, such as the consul Richomer, were men of brilliant talents and noble bearing. As polished men of the world, they may have had considerable social influence. Three edicts of Honorius, for example, issued between 397 and 416, banned the wearing of trousers, long hair and fur coats in the ‘barbarian’ (German) style within the precincts of the city. Clearly, the rage for radical German fashions had become widespread. And as more and more Roman ladies discovered that their husbands were attracted to the exoticism of blonde slave girls, they, too, turned themselves blonde. Then they trumped the slave girls with their extravagant hairstyles, dress and jewellery.

  The swagger and glitter of these lifestyles, the common riot of gluttony, the vanity, effeminacy and advanced moral laxity, quite apart from the political decadence, were of course exactly the kinds of profligate behaviour most deplored by the early moralists and preachers of Christianity, which was in due course to gain universal appeal and become the official religion of the Roman Empire. This addiction to opulence was a contagion, the preachers raged, an outrageous degeneracy which could lead only to the material and moral wasting of the Empire.