Dear Spartan girl with a delightful face,
Washed with the rosy spring, how fresh you look,
In the easy stride of your sleek slenderness.
Why, you could strangle a bull.38
Much to the outrage of Aristotle and other conventional moralists, Spartan women even wore short, revealing tunics. They were able to inherit their husband’s property and manage it. By the fourth century BC they possessed two-fifths of all Spartan land. The result was a seeming paradox – a militaristic society where women enjoyed greater freedoms and higher status than in Athens, the home of democracy.
Sparta faded into oblivion, its treatment of women cited only as an unnatural folly. Plato and Aristotle, on the other hand, survived to become the twin pillars of philosophic and scientific thinking in the Western world, supporting the massive edifice of Christianity. Plato’s Theory of Forms, with its inherent contempt for the physical world, and Aristotle’s biological dualism, in which females were seen as failed males, provided the intellectual apparatus for the centuries of misogyny that were to follow.
WOMEN AT THE GATES:
MISOGYNY IN ANCIENT ROME
Roman women were the Greek male nightmare come true. They defied the misogynistic dictate (attributed to the Athenian statesman Pericles) that a good woman is one who is not talked about, even in praise. Obeying this had consigned the good women of fifth-century BC Athens to complete oblivion; today, not a single one is known by name. But the women of Rome made themselves known; a few have been talked about ever since. Messalina, whose name became synonymous with sexual excess; Agrippina, the woman of ruthless, ‘unnatural’ ambition who murdered her way to the top; Sempronia, the intellectual who abandoned the female sphere to enter the dangerous male world of conspiracy and revolution; Cleopatra, the brilliant seductress who plotted to rule the Empire and plunged it into civil war; and Julia, the emperor’s rebellious daughter who defied her father’s plans and threw the state into crisis. They emerge from the pages of Rome’s historians and poets as flesh-and-blood examples of how men viewed women. Much of what is said about them is far from flattering. But men’s vitriol proves as powerful a historical preservative for women as does their desire. These recorded sentiments are an indication of the impact women made and the obstacles they overcame, including some of the most fearsome misogynistic laws ever codified.
The Romans were not original thinkers. They did not produce a new theory or philosophy to justify the oppression and dehumanization of women. The stereotypes that evolved in Greek culture were good enough for them (as they have been for many succeeding cultures, including our own). But Roman writers allow us to see behind them. In the literary and historical portraits of the handful of extraordinary women who helped shape one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever seen, we get a glimpse of their struggle to assert themselves.
A difference quickly emerges between the misogyny of the Greeks and that found in Rome. Greek misogyny is based on fears of what women might do if they were free to do it. However, as far as is known, if women challenged men, these actions were confined to their private world and only made public through the realm of the Greek imagination. But from the start, Roman women openly challenged the prevailing misogyny and made public their feelings and demands. Roman women protested their fate and took to the streets. In Rome, the veil of their anonymity was lifted. Women entered the public sphere, and made history. They intervened in wars and stopped them; they took to the streets in protest at government policy and changed it; they murdered their husbands; a few trained and fought as gladiators in the arena (evoking worrying images of Amazons); they subverted the authority of their fathers; they even sought personal satisfaction in their relationships, and rejected their role as breeders of rulers; and, perhaps most disturbingly of all, they came tantalizingly close to political power. They provoked a backlash which mustered some of the biggest guns that literature and history have ever aimed at them.
The context in which this battle was waged was the greatest and most successful empire the world has ever produced, an empire of some sixty million people that at its peak stretched from Scotland to Iraq and embraced a bewildering variety of cultures and peoples. Rome, its capital, was the largest city that had ever existed, with a population in the first century AD of between one and two million. It was the New York of its day, a city of savage spectacles and immense grandeur, teeming with people of different races from every corner of the vast, sprawling Empire.
Of those millions, only a comparatively few names have been preserved. They are, overwhelmingly, the names of those who made up society’s upper echelons, contending for honour, power and wealth in a theatre every bit as dangerous and bloody as that of the arena, where gladiators fought to their deaths under the burning Roman sun to the cheers and howls of the Roman mob.
It is in this arena of the ruling class that, over 2,000 years later, we find the names of nearly all of the Roman women still known to us. They were defined by their relationships to men: as daughters, sisters, mistresses, wives, and mothers. Like the heroines of the Greek tragedies, they fought to promote the interests of their kith and kin. But this was no play. In Rome, it was a matter of life and death.
As in Greece, the first major obstacle that a woman faced in life was the threat of being deprived of it at birth. In Rome, this threat was codified in a way that encouraged female infanticide. Laws attributed to Romulus, the city’s mythological founder, decreed that only ‘every male child and the first-born female’ be reared – an invitation to expose other daughters born afterwards.
Marriage was the next hurdle for women, which they faced upon reaching puberty. In early Rome, circa the seventh century BC, they were subject to some of the most oppressive marriage laws imaginable. As a wife, a woman was placed under the absolute rule of her husband, who had the power of life or death over her. Sitting in judgement with his wife’s relatives, a husband was ‘given power to pass sentence in cases of adultery and . . . if any wife was found drinking wine Romulus allowed the death penalty for both crimes.’39 If ever there was a law that actively encouraged wife battering, this was it. Egnatius Metellus, the bearer of one of the great aristocratic names in Roman history, was held up as a sterling example of how a man should act in a good marriage. Once, he arrived home to find his wife drinking wine. He promptly took a cudgel and bludgeoned her to death. According to the historian Valerius Maximus:
Not only did no one charge him with a crime, but no one even blamed him. Everyone considered this an excellent example of one who had justly paid the penalty for violating the laws of sobriety. Indeed, any woman who immoderately seeks the use of wine closes the door on all virtues and opens it to vices.40
Valerius Maximus also quotes with approval Gaius Sulpicius Gallus, who divorced his wife because he caught her with her hair uncovered in public. In words that could have been uttered by a twenty-first century Saudi Arabian prince, he explained: ‘The law prescribes for you my eyes alone to which you may prove your beauty. For these eyes you should provide the ornaments of beauty, for these be lovely . . .’41
Another example is given of the man who divorced his wife when he saw her talking to a woman friend who was an ex-slave on the grounds that such female liaisons nourished potential wrongdoing and it was better to prevent the sin from being committed than to punish it afterwards.42 The laws also allowed the death penalty to be imposed on a daughter-in-law for striking her father-in-law. Needless to say, the power of divorce was granted only to the husband.
The Romans inherited the Greek preoccupation with female virtue, and linked it to the honour of the family and the welfare of the state. The most famous example of an early Roman matron’s virtue in action was that of Lucretia, a model of female behaviour much alluded to by moralists in the later, ‘decadent’ years of the Empire. She remains an example of the dangers women faced when expected to live up to moral standards based on the misogynistic notion which equates sexual purity in women with
goodness. Lucretia’s husband Collatinus made the mistake of boasting about her goodness to the lustful king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus. Reverence for something is frequently accompanied by the urge to defile it: symbols of sexual purity probably arouse lust more often than pornographic images. Driven by the urge to profane this example of matronly virtue, Tarquinius threatens Lucretia that if she does not sleep with him, he will murder both her and her slave and leave their naked corpses in the same bed. Knowing the humiliation and horror that would fall upon her husband and family if it were thought she had made love to a slave, Lucretia chooses the lesser of the two evils. Even though clearly forced to endure Tarquinius’ lust, under Roman law she is still guilty of adultery. After telling her story to her husband and her family, she stabs herself to death. Like so many women who have suffered rape, Lucretia blamed herself, and (as St Augustine so wisely pointed out) punished herself for the wrongs inflicted by others.43 Misogyny always confronts women with the same dilemma. Whether they are ‘good’ girls or ‘bad’ girls, they are forced into the same conundrum: they still arouse lust in men for which they, not those who desire them, are held responsible.
The story had a happy ending for Rome, if not for poor Lucretia. Enraged, Romans overthrew Tarquinius and ended the rule of kings. They established the Republic, which was to last nearly five centuries before it gave way to imperial autocracy. But Lucretia has continued to be used as an example throughout the centuries to bully women into accepting that they are worth nothing more than their virtue.
Early Rome also presents us, on a massive scale, with the first example of date rape in human history. Moreover, the ‘rape of the Sabine women’ set the precedent for future acts of political intervention by women. Short of women, the founders of Rome invited people from the neighbouring Sabine tribe to a party. At a given signal from Romulus, the Romans seized the best-looking young women and carried them off. According to the historian Livy, the Romans treated the captive women with delicacy. Romulus persuaded them to stay and marry their captors. The most unbelievable part of the entire story is that he did so by reading them the Roman marriage laws to show how superior their laws were to those of the Sabines. A war ensued between the Sabines, intent on revenge, and the Romans. At one point in the battle, not wishing to see their new husbands fighting with their brothers and fathers, the Sabine women thrust themselves between the ranks and brought hostilities to a halt.
The Romans accepted this tale as part of the city’s early history, crediting the women with achieving in reality what Aristophanes portrayed only as fantasy in his comedy Lysistrata, where he tells how the women of Greece went on a sex strike to stop the Peloponnesian War.
Until the time of Julius Caesar, a temple dedicated to the fortune of women stood on the Via Latina that runs south out of Rome. It commemorated women’s intervention in another war, after Rome had banished one of its most successful generals, Coriolanus, because of his overweening arrogance. In revenge, he led an army of the city’s enemies against his home. As he approached the city, ready to shed the blood of his fellow citizens, all seemed lost until a delegation of Roman women (including his mother and wife) blocked his path and persuaded him to turn back. The city was saved, and thanks to women, again a costly war was ended.
Though they lived under oppressive laws, Roman women were never kept in the Oriental-style seclusion to which Greek women were subjected. Greek visitors to Rome commented with some amazement on the differences. One such was Cornelius Nepos, who journeyed to Rome in the first century BC and observed:
Much that in Rome we hold to be correct is thought shocking in Greece. No Roman thinks it an embarrassment to take his wife to a dinner party. At home the wife holds first place in the house and is the centre of its social life. Things are very different in Greece, where the wife is never present at dinner, unless it is a family party, and spends all her time in a remote part of the house called The Women’s Quarter, which is never entered by a man unless he is a very close relation.44
In an even more shocking display of their freedom, Roman women extended their tradition of public intervention to protesting on the streets. They launched the first recorded public protest movement ever organized by women. In 205 BC, during a war with the Carthaginian general Hannibal, Rome passed the Oppian Laws, legislation curtailing the amount of gold women could possess and restricting public displays of decoration and luxury in women’s dress. Ten years later, with Carthage safely vanquished, Roman upper-class women demanded to know why the Oppian Laws were still on the statute books. After much agitation to abolish them, the Senate decided to debate the issue. On the day of the debate, the women flocked into the Forum, where the senate house – the ancient seat of government – still stands, to lobby for their demands.
The main opponent to the repeal was Cato the Elder, the most formidable orator of his time. Cato was a nouveau riche, but he identified with Rome’s founding fathers and old aristocracy, expounding the ancient virtues of hard work, abstemiousness, and plain living which, he claimed, had made Rome great. Like many a professional puritan, he paraded his simple life style with great ostentation. According to the historian Livy, as recorded in The Early History of Rome, in a misogynistic tour de force Cato declared:
If every married man had been concerned to ensure that his own wife looked up to him and respected his rightful position as her husband, we should not have half this trouble with women en masse. Instead, women have become so powerful that our independence has been lost in our own homes and is now being trampled and stamped underfoot in public. We have failed to retrain them as individuals, and now they have combined to reduce us to our present panic . . . It made me blush to push my way through a positive regiment of women a few minutes ago in order to get here. My respect for the position and modesty of them as individuals – a respect which I do not feel for them as a mob – prevented my doing anything as consul which would suggest the use of force. Otherwise I should have said to them, ‘What do you mean by rushing out in public in this unprecedented fashion, blocking the streets and shouting out to men who are not your husbands? Could you not have asked your questions at home, and have asked them of your husbands?’ [. . .]
Woman is a violent and uncontrolled animal, and it is no good giving her the reins and expecting her not to kick over the traces. No, you have got to keep the reins firmly in your own hands . . . Suppose you allow them to acquire or to extort one right after another, and in the end to achieve complete equality with men, do you think that you will find them bearable? Nonsense. Once they have achieved equality, they will be your masters . . .45
Cato’s speech failed. The Senate voted to overturn the Oppian Laws. But the same basic argument has been used ever since to deny women everything from the vote to access to birth control. Cato states it with startling clarity: give women freedom in one sphere, and the floodgates of immorality will open in all the others.
Within a decade of the repeal of the Oppian Laws, an extraordinary scandal rocked Rome, which Livy, writing at a later, more ‘decadent’ period, uses as proof that Cato was right. It led to a ferocious crackdown on unorthodox religious practices, foreshadowing the witch-hunts of the Middle Ages.
Roman state religion was a very masculine affair. It involved the appeasement of dominant gods through prescribed ritual and sacrifice. Cults were divided along class lines; practices that allowed patricians and plebeians to mix socially were frowned upon. Several cults were in the care of women: the goddess Fortuna, for example, was meant to bring women luck in their sex lives. There was an altar dedicated to Plebeian Chastity, which Livy laments was much neglected. The most famous women’s cult was that of the Vestal Virgins. Vesta was the goddess of the hearth. She guarded the sacred eternal flame of Rome that burned in the deepest recesses of her temple, one of the most beautiful in the Forum. Six Vestals, selected from the noblest families, tended the flame. According to an ancient and deeply rooted belief, should it go out, Rome would fall. Any Vestal who allo
wed this to occur was scourged; any who lost her virginity during her tenure (which lasted 30 years), was buried alive. Freud has suggested that women were entrusted to protect the eternal flame because, given their anatomy, they were less likely to urinate on it to extinguish it!46 Whether or not this was the case, by 186 BC the traditional Roman cults were tempting fewer women. Increasingly, Eastern mystery religions and such cults as that of Bacchus, were attracting devotees and becoming especially appealing to women, offering an emotional release from the stifling moral regime under which they lived.
As recounted by Livy, in 186 BC a former slave girl confessed to the authorities that she had been involved in the cult of Bacchus, the wine god, whose worship had spread to Rome from Greece. Prompted by fears for her lover, who was under pressure from his mother to join the cult, the freedwoman painted a lurid picture of Roman matrons gathering by night to indulge in wine binges and orgiastic sex. ‘Unnatural’ sex acts had become normal and, she claimed, were part of the initiation rites. Anyone who resisted the cult’s sexual demands was killed, and their bodies secretly buried. Women from the most distinguished families, dressed up in animal skins as devotees of Bacchus, got drunk, became possessed, and with loose hair flowing wildly behind them, went racing through the night, crying and screaming gibberish. The cult followers came from all social classes, including slaves. For the Romans, always on the look-out for slave rebellion, such a gathering would have seemed socially as well as sexually subversive, a threat to the prevailing order.
A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice Page 5