Roman Women

Author(s): Gillian Clark

Source: Greece & Rome, Second Series, Vol. 28, No. 2, Jubilee Year (Oct., 1981), pp. 193-212
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association
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 ROMAN WOMEN*

By GILLIAN CLARK

I
Times have changed for Roman women. To an undergraduate - even
a woman undergraduate - reading Greats some fifteen years ago, they
were obviously a fringe topic, worth at most a question on the General
Paper. There were pictures of dresses and hairstyles, in most of which
it looked impossible to move. There were snippets of anthropology
from Plutarch, as that a bride had her hair parted with a spear
(Moralia 285b): entertaining, but about as relevant to the views of a
bride in the late Republic as are wearing a veil (to symbolize being
under authority) and being pelted with confetti (in hopes of many
children) to a bride in the 1980s. There was an account of forms of
marriage, with, usually, a panegyric of a Roman matron and a denuncia-
tion of the laxity of the late Republic and immorality of the early
Empire; and a handful of brief biographies: Cornelia, Sempronia, Arria.
This information would be found somewhere around chapter 15 of
a general handbook, once the author had dealt with the serious business
of life, like the constitution and the courts and education and the army
and the provinces. J. P. V. D. Balsdon's book made a difference, since
he never forgot that he was writing about human beings, who worried
about their children and ran their households and had long days to
fill. But the real change came in the 70s, as the Women's Movement
- a decade late - got through to the classics. First there was the new
perspective offered by general feminist histories, though their scholar-
ship was second-hand and often wild; then articles and books, though
still only a few, trying to answer the sort of questions it now seems
so odd we did not ask.' What did Roman women do all day, besides
getting dressed? How did they feel about it? What else could they have
done? Were they oppressed, and did they notice? Why do we know
so little about half the human race?
The perspective has shifted, and that may bring different pieces of
evidence into focus; some of the questions are different too. But it is
still not easy to answer them. We are still working with evidence
strongly biassed towards the upper classes and the city of Rome. The
lives of women not in, or in contact with, the senatorial class, can only
be guessed at from inscriptions, if someone troubled to put one up.
And even within the senatorial class, it was not the women who wrote.
They wrote, as always, letters, their conversation might be admirable
and their language reflect the purer Latin of a bygone age.2 There

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194 ROMAN WOMEN

survive two letters of Cornelia to her sons, if they are genuine, and
an item from Agrippina's memoirs, which Tacitus consulted (Annales
4.53); but the only extended work of literature to survive from the
period I shall concentrate on, that of the late Republic and early Empire,
is the elegies of Sulpicia, and they are not so much a revelation of the
inner experience of womankind as a demonstration that women can
write conventional elegiacs too.3 Moreover, there is little Roman
literature which is concerned with the daily life and experience of
particular people: the lives of women tend to be incidental to oratory
or history or philosophy or agriculture, or to the emotions of an elegiac
poet.
II
What then can be said? There is an obvious temptation to generalize,
and to apply pieces of information regardless of time, class, or place.
But sometimes the generalizations hold for a wide range of society,
and sometimes they can be made more precise. To begin at the
beginning: a girl's chances of being reared were less than her brother's.
Patria Potestas, as the jurist Gaius observed (Institutes 1.55) was
uniquely strong in Rome, and if a father decided that his new-born
child was not to be reared there was no law (before the time of the
Severi) to prevent him.4 The foundling girls of Plautus' (Casina 39 ff.,
Cist. 124) and Terence's (Heaut. 627 ff.) standard plots may not be
evidence for Roman practice, for they may have been taken over from
Greek models which had to find some way of getting well-born girls
out of their seclusion to meet well-born boys. But Cicero (de legibus
3.19) and Seneca (de ira 1.15.2) reveal that deformed babies were
exposed (as they still are, though less obtrusively, if the handicap is
bad enough), and it was part of a midwife's training to decide which
babies were worth rearing.' Healthy but inconvenient babies might
also be left to die. Musonius Rufus (p. 80 ff. Hense) in the mid-first
century A.D. devoted one of his lectures on ethics to the question
whether one should rear all one's children. The rich do not, he says,
so that there shall be fewer children to share the family property;
Petronius (Sat. 116) and Tacitus (Ger. 19, Hist. 5.5) echo the complaint.
Since the law required property to be shared among sui heredes,it must
have been a temptation. Among the poor, there was no question of
splitting up an estate. Pliny (Pan. 26.5) praises Trajan's extension of
the grain-dole to children:
'There are great rewards to encourage the rich to rear their children,
and great penalties if they do not. The only way the poor can rear
their children is through the goodness of the princeps.'
If a family did, from greed or necessity, expose a child, it would

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 ROMAN WOMEN 195

probably be a girl. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing his Antiquities

of Rome (2.15) under Augustus, included a 'constitution of Romulus'
which has strong links with first-century thought.6 It provides that
citizens must rear all male children (except those who are acknowledged
by five neighbours to be deformed) - and the first girl. Apuleius (Met.
10.23) has a prospective father instruct his wife: 'si sexus sequioris
edidisset fetum, protinus quod esset editum necaretur.' (This father,
like those who speak now of 'the product of conception', is not prepared
to acknowledge the child's humanity.) Some odd facts about sex-ratios
make it likely that Dionysius and Apuleius reflect a general tendency.
We simply do not hear of spinsters, except the Vestals - and Augustus
found it difficult enough to recruit them. (Even they could marry at
the end of their term of office, aged 36-40, though they tended not
to.)7 There is not even a normal word for a spinster. Livy (1.46.7) once
used vidua as a female equivalent of caelebs, and the jurist Labeo
(Digest 1.16.242.3) claimed that vidua can mean 'unmarried woman'
as well as 'widow', but it is evidently a forced usage. Unmarried women
were young virgines - and there were no nunneries for the women who
did not marry.
Some families did, of course, raise more than one daughter. The
daughter of L. Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus had three daughters and
three sons; Appius Claudius Pulcher, cos. 79 B.C., also had three
daughters. There is even a Septuma on a tombstone (but it may be
a nomen, not an indication that she was the seventh daughter). But
tombstones in general record many more men than women, and this
again suggests that either more males were reared or they mattered
more to their families.8 Sometimes there is information about a specific
group. A list of aqueduct maintenance men and their families (CIL
14.3649), found at Tibur, includes two families with two daughters
each, but shows a very low proportion of daughters to sons overall.
Trajan's alimentary scheme at Veleia supported only 36 girls out of
300 places: this cannot be used straightforwardly as evidence for sex-
ratios, since girls got a smaller food-allowance and a family would
obviously claim for a boy if it could, but does suggest that there were
few families satisfied with daughters alone.9 Most impressive, if Dio
interpreted it correctly, is Augustus' concession that 'well-born' men,
other than senators and senators' sons, might marry libertinae. Dio
(54.16.2) says there were just not enough women of good family to
go round - and if this is true, after several decades of bloody civil war,
then people must have been choosing not to rear daughters. But is
Dio guessing? The senate, according to him, said that young men were
not marrying because of their akosmia, their failure to settle down, not
because they could not find wives.

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196 ROMAN WOMEN
There are, of course, other causes than selective infanticide for a
relative shortage of women. Many must have died in childbirth, from
infection or difficult births, or because they were just too young.
Soranus (1.9.34), the second-century A.D. physician whose work was
the basis of gynaecology until well on in the nineteenth century, thought
fifteen was the earliest suitable age for conception: most gynaecologists
now would add three years to that. Child mortality too was alarmingly
high, as it has been at all times and places except for some privileged
Western countries in the twentieth century. The Augustan laws of
inheritance (Ulpian 16) allowed spouses to inherit from each other if
they had a child living, or had lost one after puberty, two after age
three or three after naming. Girls are usually tougher than boys, but
some societies undernourish them, either because they value girls less
or because they think (wrongly) that girls need less. Roman govern-
mental schemes like that at Veleia, and several private schemes, gave
girls a smaller food-allowance.'0 But these factors have affected other
societies which do not show the same apparent shortage of women:
so perhaps we do have to come back to parents not rearing girls.
How could they bear it? Even abortion, in this society, is tolerable
only so far as we can avoid seeing the foetus as a baby: once the child
is born, even for some time before birth, her rights are protected. But
the father's right to decide the fate of his own infant probably seemed
as obvious as, now, a woman's right to decide about her own body:
so infanticide was not made criminal, even though low birth-rate was
a persistent anxiety. Besides, Roman parents could not plan their
families with much success. Contraceptives varied from quite effective
spermicides and pessaries (some are still recommended, faute de mieux)
to decoctions of herbs (and worse), faith in douches and wriggling,
and entirely magical beliefs. The ovum was undiscovered and the
relation between menstruation and fertile periods was misunderstood;
this is less surprising in that conception can occur before the first
menstruation if a girl marries before she reaches puberty. Observers
may also have been confused by amenorrhea (failure to menstruate),
which is a common reaction to stress and poor diet and which gets
a lot of space in ancient medical text-books. Soranus (1.10, 1.19.61)
held that the best time for conception was at the end of a menstrual
period, when (he says) a women's desire is strongest, and suggested
a rhythm method based on this belief." No wonder Augustus' daughter
played safe, and never took a lover unless she was legitimately pregnant
(Macrobius, Sat. 3.5). And no wonder abortion was also practised.
Doctors used herbal baths, suppositories, and potions first; then
purges, diuretics, massage, violent exercise, and hot baths after drink-
ing wine. If these ancient equivalents of gin, hot baths, and jumping

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 ROMAN WOMEN 197

off the kitchen table failed, there seem to have been back-street
abortionists using the knitting-needle technique.12
Abortion, like infanticide, was not a crime before the time of the
Severi, and then the crime was not against the foetus, who was not
a person in law, but against the defrauded husband.13 Why was it not
made illegal before? There was strong feeling against abortion, which
was taken to be proof of vanity (Seneca, ad Helviam 16.1) or, worse,
of adultery (Juvenal 6.592 ff.) on the part of the mother. Perhaps it
was simply too difficult to prove deliberate as against spontaneous
abortion: Soranus' (1.14) list of causes for the latter make one wonder
how anyone ever managed to have a baby.'4
An unwanted pregnancy may yet produce a wanted child, but there
were some practices which may have prevented, at least among the
upper classes, the emotional bonding of mother and baby. Many
mothers did not breast-feed, because it is tiring, but expected to use
a wet-nurse.'5sThe wet-nurse's own baby had perhaps died, or been
exposed, or was expected to manage on some substitute for breast-milk
- which last was a major cause of child mortality in the nineteenth
century. If Soranus' instructions (2.11.17, 2.12.19 ff.) reflect general
practice, the new-born was washed, swaddled, and then put somewhere
to be quiet, and to be fed, if at all, the equivalent of glucose (boiled
honey and water): Soranus advocated breast-feeding but thought
colostrum was bad for babies. So the mother might scarcely have seen
the child before the decision to expose it. Poorer people could not afford
luxuries of feeling. It may have seemed better to expose the child and
hope for the fairy-story to come true and the child to be rescued by
some wealthy childless couple. Just occasionally it did. Slavery or a
brothel (Plautus, Cist. 124) were more likely fates, but even that may
have seemed more like putting a child to be raised 'in service', where
the chances were better and at least there was food.'6
III
If, then, a Roman girl survived her parents' possible indifference, or
resignation, to her death, and if she did not despite their best efforts
die anyway, what would her life be like?
If she were a slave, she might have little time with her parents: she,
or they, could be sold at any time, and there are epitaphs of very young
children who had been freed by someone other than the master who
freed either parent. But it may have been a relative who bought out
the child, since at least the family was united enough for the epitaph
to be made. Some slave families did manage gradually to buy the
freedom of spouses and children."7 What a slave girl did depended on
the size and type of household to which she belonged. She was most

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198 ROMAN WOMEN

likely to be an ancilla, which may mean anything from a maid-of-all-

work to a lady's maid - obviously the second was a better chance, since
she could collect tips and win her mistress' (or master's) favour. She
might have special skills: some slave-girls were dressers, hairdressers,
dressmakers, woolworkers, and some perhaps worked in small factories
rather than for the household stores.'8 Some were childminders
(Tacitus, Dialogus 29.1), which was a job not regarded as needing skill,
or, if they were lactating, wet-nurses.
Some households were brothels, and so in effect were some eating-
and drinking-places (Digest 23.2.43). A few slave-girls, who had other
abilities for entertaining, were trained to dance, sing, and act: there
is an epitaph of one, Eucharis, 'docta erodita omnes artes virgo' (CIL
1.1214). The most famous was Cytheris, who rose to be Antonius'
mistress and to dine with Cicero (ad fam. 9.26; Phil. 2.69), who was
pleasantly shocked.
If a slave-girl were freed, it did not much enlarge the possibilities:
she might be a prostitute, a mima, or, if she were lucky, a housewife,
doing much the same work as an ancilla did but in her own home.19
If she had caught the fancy of someone of high social status, she would
be his concubinanot his wife: it was not respectable to marry a libertina,
though it had been known to happen even before Augustus allowed
it for non-senators.20 Housework was hard: there was spinning and
weaving and sewing and mending, cooking and cleaning, and water-
carrying and baby-minding. Doubtless one reason for child mortality
was the impossibility of keeping a swaddled baby clean on the fourth
floor of a tenement with the water-supply at the end of the street.
Soranus (2.9.14) said babies should be bathed and massaged once a
day; the undersheets should often be aired and changed and one should
watch for insect bites and ulceration. It sounds optimistic. If the house-
wife had learnt a trade before she married - baking, brickmaking, selling
vegetables - she would probably go on with it, often working with
her husband. The nearest approach to a professional woman would
be a woman doctor, or the midwife who was called in for female
complaints, though their social status was not high.21
Rich girls had to learn to run a household rather than doing its work,
but they too had spinning and weaving. By the first century B.C.there
were ready-made fabrics for those who could afford them (Columella
12 pr. 9), but lanificium was part of traditional devotion to the home
and was still, for most women, an essential part of household economy.
A bride carried a spindle and distaff (Plutarch, Moralia 271f): this
is one marriage custom with an obvious relevance. Whether lanificium
was an enjoyable craft skill or an exhausting chore depended on how
much one had to do. Livy's picture (1.57.9) of the virtuous Lucretia,

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 ROMAN WOMEN 199

sitting up with her maids doing wool-work by lamplight, needs to be

supplemented by Tibullus' (1.3.83 ff., 1.6.77) of the weary slave falling
asleep over her work, and the neglected old woman who has no other
resource. Too much woolwork, despite the lanolin in the wool, hard-
ened the hands - a point to bear in mind when choosing a midwife
(Soranus 1.2.4). But the custom was kept up by ladies of old-fashioned
virtue. There were looms in the atrium of M. Aemilius Lepidus when
thugs broke in on his admirable wife; Augustus' womenfolk kept him
in homespun, though Livia had a large staff of skilled workers.22
Lanificium, for ladies, perhaps took the place of the 'accomplishments'
- music, drawing, fine sewing - which young ladies of the nineteenth
century learnt before marriage and used to fill idle hours after. There
were refinements of skill. Cynthia, waiting up for Propertius (1.3.41-2),
tried first her 'purple thread' and then her music; Varro (ap. Nonius
239L) said that girls should learn embroidery so as to be better judges
of home furnishings. Not everyone had these resources. Ummidia
Quadratilla, a formidable old lady, told the younger Pliny (Letters,
7.24.5) that, ut femina in illo otio sexus, she passed the time playing
draughts or watching her mime-troupe.
Little is heard of more intellectual pursuits. There was a chance of
picking up some education from parents, brothers, even a sympathetic
husband. The younger Pliny and his friend Pompeius Saturninus, who
were civilized people, both continued the literary education of their
wives (Pliny, Letters 1.6, 4.19). Pompeius' wife wrote letters which
sounded like prose Plautus or Terence, so pure was their Latin (Pliny
was inclined to give Pompeius the credit). Pliny's wife set his verses
to music with no tutor but Love, which sounds less promising. Atticus'
daughter was still being tutored, by his freedman Caecilius Epirota,
when she was a married woman (Suet. degramm. 16). An unsympathetic
husband, on the other hand, could make difficulties. Seneca's father
(ad Helviam 17.3) refused to allow his intelligent wife any more than
a superficial study of philosophy - but this, Seneca says, was antiquus
rigor.
Some girls may have gone to school, at least for primary schooling,
and some had private tutors. Pompeius' wife Cornelia had been taught
literature, music, and geometry, and had 'listened with profit' to
lectures on philosophy - which may mean ethics or physics. She was,
Plutarch (Pompeius55.1) reassures the reader, 'free from the distasteful
pedantry which such studies confer on young women'. Pompeius'
daughter had a tutor for Greek (Plutarch, Moralia 737b). Pliny's friend
Fundanius had praeceptoresfor his daughter, but he was a progressive:
a philosopher, a friend of Plutarch who wrote on the education of
women, a pupil of Musonius who argued for equal education for girls.24

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200 ROMAN WOMEN
These people may be exceptions. Ovid (Ars Am. 2.281-2) reckoned
that there were some women who could appreciate poetry, but very
few (far fewer than would like to).
Some girls learnt music and singing, and the dramatic recitations
which rose to a form of ballet and could be very strenuous, but it was
not proper for them to aim at a professional standard. Scipio Aemilianus
had been shocked, as early as 129 B.c., to find well-born boys and girls
at a dancing class; Sallust's Sempronia was far better than she should
be; and Horace thought it was part of the rot that grown girls should
learn lonicos motus.25
Some women, then, were reasonably well-educated: Quintilian
(1.1.6) cites as shining examples Cornelia (mother of the Gracchi), and
Hortensia and Laelia who were daughters of orators. Much of the
evidence, unfortunately, comes in the complaints of Juvenal (6.434 ff.)
and the admiration of Catullus (35) and Propertius (2.13.11), none of
whom was chiefly concerned with accurate reporting. But at the age
when a boy was going on to the secondary education which trained
him in the use of language and prepared him for public life, a girl
was entering her first marriage. Fundanius' daughter, so carefully
taught, died when she was not yet fourteen: the wedding invitations
had already been sent out.26

IV
Fourteen was evidently a proper age for marriage. It was assumed to
be the age of menarche, though if a girl had not reached puberty the
marriage might well be arranged anyway, and menstruation encouraged
by massage, gentle exercise, good food, and diversion.27 The legal
minimum age of marriage, as fixed by Augustan legislation which
followed Republican precedent, was 12: earlier marriage was not
penalized, but was not valid until the girl reached 12. (It followed that
she could not be prosecuted for adultery.)28 Some marriages were
certainly pre-pubertal. Augustus' own first wife was vixdum nubilis,
and Suetonius (Divus Aug. 62.1) found it worth recording that he sent
her back intacta. One girl (ILLRP 793) was 'taken to her husband's
bosom' at 7: perhaps the marriage was not consummated, though
Petronius (Sat. 25-6) relates (in order to shock?) the defloration of
a seven-year-old. By contrast, the daughters of Germanicus were
almost on the shelf - instabat virginum aetas - when they married. They
were 15 and 17 (Tacitus, Ann. 6.15).29
Plutarch, not surprisingly, thought that Roman girls married too
young, and that Lycurgus was right in ensuring that brides should
be ready for childbearing. Romans, he says, were more concerned to
ensure an undefiled body and mind (Moralia 138e). Evidently they

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 ROMAN WOMEN 201

thought they had to catch the girls young to be sure. Doctors supposed
that sexual desires began at puberty, especially in girls who ate a lot
and did not have to work;30 society made provision for such desires
instead of trying to sublimate them. Epictetus (Enchiridion40) remarks
sadly that when girls are fourteen they begin to be called kuria, the
address of a grown woman: then they see that there is nothing for it
but to go to bed with men, and begin to make themselves pretty in
hopes. (His solution is for them to learn that men really admire them
for modesty and chastity - and then, one supposes, they may go to
bed with philosophers.) So marriage at fourteen was, in one sense,
practical. But were girls in any sense ready for it? Physically, no:
teenage pregnancies were known to be dangerous, and Soranus (1.7,
1.9.42) stoutly disagrees with the school of thought which held that
conception is good for you. Emotionally, Roman girls were better pre-
pared than the innocent bride envisaged by Xenophon in the Oeconomi-
cus (3.11 ff., 4.7 ff.) who had spent fifteen years seeing, hearing, and
saying as little as possible, and whose mother's advice on marriage was
simply sophronein, 'be good'. Nepos (pr. 6) remarks on one striking
contrast between Roman and Greek mores: the materfamilias was at
the centre of the household's social life. Visitors found her in the atrium
(maybe even doing her woolwork) and conversed with her; she went
out shopping, to visit friends, to temples, theatres, and games. Decorum
might require her to be suitably dressed and chaperoned, and restrained
to the point of discourtesy in returning a greeting, but decorum is not
always observed. Probably she had her daughters with her on some
of these occasions; she may even have taken them to dinner-parties,
though some people thought that girls learnt rather too much when
out to dinner.31 A society which did not segregate women, and which
praised wives for being pleasant company, gave married life a far better
chance than did the conventions of classical Athens.32 A fourteen-year-
old who had grown up in it, expecting to be grown up at fourteen,
might well be reasonably mature. And where the expectation of life
was nearer 30 + than 70 +, there was no use in delaying recognized
adulthood to 16 or 18.
The pressure of mortality was the underlying reason for early
marriage. Tullia, Cicero's cherished daughter, was engaged at 12, and
married at 16, to an excellent young man. She was widowed at 22,
remarried at 23, divorced at 28; married again at 29, divorced at 33
- and dead, soon after childbirth, at 34. The evidence of inscriptions
shows that she was not untypical.33 So the fathers who arranged the
marriages had good reason to start making alliances, and getting grand-
children, fast.
Fathers arranged marriages: but that was not all there was to it. A

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202 ROMAN WOMEN
father's consent was necessary to the marriage of a daughter in his
potestas, though he was presumed to have given it unless he explicitly
refused. The mother's consent was not relevant. The daughter's con-
sent was necessary, but could be refused only if her father's choice
were morally unfit - and, in practice, if she could get relatives and
neighbours to back her up (Digest 23.2.2.). But, in practice, mothers
and daughters might well have a say in the matter. Cicero, admittedly
an indulgent father, wondered whether Tullia would accept the suitor
suggested by Atticus (ad Att. 5.4.1, 6.6.1); Tullia and Terentia
presented him with a fait accompli and her engagement to Dolabella,
though indeed Cicero was out of Italy at the time, and Tullia was a
woman entering her third marriage, not a girl of twelve (adfam. 3.12.2).
Anyone who reads Victorian novels will have a picture in mind of the
complexities of family feeling and economic necessity which affect the
choice of a husband - and of how much can be achieved by helpless
young ladies and wives without civil rights. But it seems fair to ask
whether the character of a jeune fille got much consideration. Pliny
(Letters 1.14) was delighted to find the ideal husband for the niece
of Junius Mauricus - or rather, as he puts it, a young man worthy
to father the grandchildren of Arulenus Rusticus. Minicius, he says,
is of a most respectable family, worthy of that into which he will marry.
He has already held office, so they will not have the bother of canvassing
for him. He is good-looking: Pliny thinks this deserves a mention (other
people evidently would not) as a sort of reward for the bride's virginity.
He is also rather well off. A very proper display of feeling, which makes
no mention of the girl: she had not met her future husband. Another
letter (6.26) congratulates a friend on his choice of son-in-law and
his future grandchildren, but says nothing about the expected happi-
ness of the friend's daughter. It may be relevant that nowhere in the
Aeneid are Lavinia's views on her future husband considered: she does,
once, blush (12.64 ff.). A suitable connection for the family is what
mattered: in the absence of social mobility and Social Security, a family
is too much affected by the marriages of its members to leave them
to romance.
An arranged marriage, with goodwill and similar expectations on
both sides, may have as good a chance of happiness as a romantic
marriage (the divorce rate has now reached one in five). Roman
marriages were expected to be happy. Musonius (p. 14) rates the mutual
affection of husband and wife above all other ties; Epictetus (Enchir.
3.14) constantly uses 'wife and child' as an example of what the wise
man would hate to lose (though he should not). In the proscription,
according to Velleius (2.67), wives showed greater loyalty than sons
or slaves. The husband of the lady known as Turia recorded (ILS

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 ROMAN WOMEN 203

8393.50 ff.) his acute distress when she offered him a divorce (they
were childless), though he said that marriages as happy and long-lasting
as theirs, uninterrupted by death or divorce, were a rarity. Augustus
and Livia had one (Suetonius, Divus Aug. 99.1). The ideal was long-
lived, harmonious, fertile marriage." But the death rate was not the
only impediment.
Marriages were in the interest of the family rather than the indi-
vidual, and Roman naming customs seem to reflect the underlying
feeling. A British girl has a personal name (or names) and a family
name; when she marries she may take her husband's surname, since
a wife belongs with her husband not her father, or retain her maiden
name to show that she is not a dependent wife. A Roman woman, in
a system apparently unique in Italy,"3had only one name, the feminine
form of her father's gentilicium; she shared it with her sisters and her
cousins and her aunts on the father's side, and kept it unchanged
through life no matter how many marriages she went through. Of course
there had to be devices to stop everyone getting muddled: pet-names
(Livilla), public-school systems (Antonia Major and Minor, Claudia
Prima, Secunda, and Tertia), sometimes a husband's name (Octavia
Marcelli): but we still do not know for certain which of three sisters
called Clodia was Catullus' love. We do not know whether it occurred
to any such woman to feel more like a token Octavia, a female of the
Octavii, than like Octavia who was someone in her own right: but some
of the more ruthless divorces, and the general approach to choosing
a marriage-partner, do give that impression.
A woman who married cum manu did indeed pass out of her father's
potestas and into her husband's, on a par with his daughter - with two
major exceptions. A daughter could not compel her father to anything,
but a wife could compel her husband to divorce; and although a
husband with manus over his wife controlled all that she possessed and
inherited, and need surrender only her dowry if they divorced, wives
do seem to have kept control over some property (perhaps by sheer
force of character or connections).36 A woman married sine manu, as
seems to have been the norm by the mid-first century B.C., remained
in her father's potestas, needed his consent to any major financial trans-
action, and might have her marriage ended by him even against her
wish. Spouses had once been exempted from the ban (in the lex Cincia
of 204 B.C.) on making gifts of property above a certain limit: they
came to be forbidden to give each other property except where the
wife's gift would enable her husband to reach a required census.
Plutarch (Moralia 265e) hopefully says that the point of this was to
encourage spouses to think of all property in common, not as his or
hers; the Digest, with more frankness, that it was ne mutuo amore invicem

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204 ROMAN WOMEN

spoliarentur. But who, in a bene concordans matrimonium, was being

despoiled, except the spouses' families? Marriage sine manu allowed
a father to keep a close eye on the family money that went with his
daughter; and the Augustan adultery laws recognized that his interest
in her was stronger than her husband's.37
Divorce could in fact end the commitment of wife to husband very
easily. There was no need to prove breakdown of marriage; guilty
parties needed to be established only in so far as there might be a
financial penalty in the divorce settlement (apparently for an adulterous
wife or for the spouse who took the initiative in divorcing). There
would, of course, be financial tangles over the repayment of dowry
and in sorting out the assets which the couple had managed in common,
and these might well be enough to ensure that, among poorer people,
marriage contracts would be respected: it is difficult to find clear
evidence of divorce at that economic level.38 But legal tangles and
massive debts seldom discouraged upper-class Romans, and the finan-
cial patterns of marriage sine manu suggest that (like some holders of
separate bank accounts) they were prepared for a break-up.
It is often suggested that the move from marriage cum manu to
marriage sine manu was prompted by the demands of late Republican
women for greater freedom. 'Women of wealth, birth, charm and talent,
unfettered by any moral restraint, hungry for animal pleasure or hungry
for power - hungry, perhaps, for both.'39 (It is not clear who, besides
Sempronia, Clodia Metelli, and Fulvia, comes into this category.) The
marriage law of the late Republic is said to have given women ex-
ceptional freedom and dignity: 'for the first time in human civili-
zation.... a law founded on a purely humanistic idea of marriage, as
being a free and freely dissoluble union of two equal partners for life.'40
Now marriage either cum manu or sine manu gave women more hope
of release, if the marriage was unhappy, than indissoluble marriage,
which was believed to have been the rule in the early Republic. (As
always, there were those who thought it was still the best solution to
marital problems - especially the problem of how to stop women
causing trouble.)41 And if one's object was to be sui iuris, independent
but for the nominal control of a guardian,42one's father was likely to
release one from his potestas by dying sooner than one's husband
was, so marriage sine manu was a better bet. But it does not appear
that women were in a position to make a free choice. A filiafamilias
could not choose her husband unless she could get round her father;
could not divorce him without her father's economic support; and could
not prevent herself from being divorced at the instigation of her
husband, her father, or his father. She was, indeed, almost her
husband's equal in this: he too was subject, at least in theory, to his

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 ROMAN WOMEN 205

father's financial control, required his consent to marry (but could

refuse his own) and perhaps to divorce, and could be made to divorce:
but sons had, in practice, more scope.43 A woman sui iuris, like a man,
could make independent decisions, allowing for family and financial
constraints. But she had one major disadvantage. If she decided for
divorce, she would lose her children, for they belonged to the father's
family. Women cannot adopt, says the jurist Gaius (Institutes 1.104,
1.155), for not even the children of their own bodies are in their
potestas.
The father presumably decided who actually looked after the chil-
dren of broken marriages. Scribonia, divorced by Octavian on the day
of her daughter's birth, did not rejoin her until her exile 37 years later.
Had they seen each other in the meantime? Livia's children by her
first marriage did not come to live with her until their father died and
left Augustus as guardian, even though one of them had been born
after the marriage ended. Octavia, on the other hand, took both her
own and Antonius' children when she was expelled from his house;
but then he was at the other end of the Mediterranean and had evidently
not made arrangements for them.44 But even the possibility of losing
the children must have been hard enough to bear: especially, perhaps,
in a culture where women had to rely on their sons for the achievement
and status impossible for themselves.
It was one of the standard vices of women (as described by men)
to gratify their ambitions through their sons. Seneca (ad Helviam 14.2)
congratulates his exceptional mother:
'You are an example to those mothers who exercise their influence
over their children with all a woman's lack of restraint. Women may
not hold office, so they gratify their ambition through their sons; they
take over their sons' inheritance, exhaust their sons' eloquence in their
own interest....'
Livia was perhaps an example of this: indulgent towards her
husband, she dominated her sons. (Tacitus, Ann. 5.1). Admittedly
Seneca (de prov. 2.5) also describes the reverse problem, mothers who
cannot bear to have their children exposed to the hardships of life,
but that too can be put down to a determination to gratify maternal
feelings. Augustus' half-sister Octavia, a woman who could justly pride
herself on her own conduct and her brother's success, and who had
other children dependent on her, collapsed utterly when her firstborn
Marcellus died (Seneca, ad Marciam 2). That was an extreme case,
and not to be emulated, but it was nevertheless one of the standard
virtues of women (as described by men) to be devoted to their sons.
The classic exempla were Cornelia mother of the Gracchi, Aurelia
mother of Caesar, and Atia mother of Augustus. All had taken unusual

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206 ROMAN WOMEN

pains over the upbringing of their sons, from breast-feeding and super-
vised education to (in the case of Atia) fending off lustful older women.
The letters of Cornelia reveal just how to put pressure on a son.45
Roman moralists, praising these women, did not remark that the result
of their devotion was sons with a marked sense of their own import-
ance, even at the expense of the Roman commonwealth. But what other
outlet could such women find for their talents and energies?
V
a
Running great household might, in fact, be as challenging as many
executive jobs, especially if the materfamilias concerned herself with
investments and clientes. The lex Voconia of 169 B.C. had tried to prevent
women from being left in control of large inheritances, but it applied
only where a man entered on the census list for the first class had an
only daughter, and even then could be circumvented by leaving the
money to a trusted friend who would pass it on.46 Many women were
extremely wealthy, though families of course differed in the extent to
which women managed their own wealth. 'Turia' ran the house and
left investments to her husband (ILS 8393.38 ff.); Terentia, to judge
from Cicero's grumbles about her and her agent, managed her own:
they included silvae, rented agerpublicus, a vicus, and some tenements.47
Sometimes it is not possible to tell whether a woman - for instance,
Eumachia (CIL 10.810-2), patroness of the fullers and donor of public
buildings at Pompeii - was a manager or just an owner. Women could
make wills; though technically they were required to 'change family'
(a legal formality) before doing so, but the sources never suggest any
difficulty.48A widow sui iuris, managing her own affairs with only token
reference to her guardian and her agnates (or free from tutela altogether
if she had borne enough children), and old enough (that is, fifty) to
escape the obligation to remarry and have more children, was Rome's
nearest approach to a legally independent woman.49 There cannot have
been many such; and there were no career women. What career, after
all, was open?
Women did not vote, did not serve as iudices, were not senators or
magistrates or holders of major priesthoods. They did not, as a rule,
speak in the courts: Valerius Maximus (8.3) found only three instances,
and becomes quite apoplectic about the one who enjoyed herself and
did it again. She seems to have provoked a praetorian ruling that no
woman should usurp the masculine role of advocate.50 As a rule, women
took no part in public life, except on the rare occasions when they
were angry enough to demonstrate, which was startling and shocking.
Before the debate on the lex Oppia, says Livy (34.1.5), 'the married
women could not be kept at home by respect for authority, sense of

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 ROMAN WOMEN 207

shame, or the orders of their husbands ... they even dared to go up

to consuls and praetors and other magistrates and ask for their support.'
Another demonstration, against the attempt of the second triumvirate
to confiscate women's property, was a great success (Appian B.C. 4.33).
But in general women worked through private influence. On one
famous occasion Servilia, in a family conclave which included her
daughter and daughter-in-law, claimed that she could get a corn-
commission altered so that Brutus and Cassius did not actually have
to supply any corn (Cicero, ad Att. 15.11). It is not known whether
this claim proved true; but this sort of private influence was expected
and feared. Governors' wives, if they went out with their husbands,
could 'make another Government House' (Tacitus, Ann. 3.33); Sene-
ca's aunt deserved praise for having remained in seclusion while her
husband was praefectus Aegypti (ad Helviam 19.6). Trajan's womenfolk
were also laudably restrained (Pliny, Pan. 83), but the wife of Pontius
Pilatus tried (and failed) to influence a judicial decision (Matthew
27.19). Livia claimed that she never interfered in Augustus' concerns,
but her scope for action was such that the senate honoured her on her
death 'because she had saved the lives of many senators, brought up
the children of many, and helped many to pay their daughters' dowries'
(Dio 58.2.5).
Women might, then, have considerable influence and interests out-
side their homes and families, but they were acting from within their
families to affect a social system managed by men: their influence was
not to be publicly acknowledged. Why were women excluded from
public life? The division between arms-bearers and child-bearers was
doubtless one historical cause, but the reasons publicly given were
different. Women were alleged to be fragile and fickle, and therefore
in need of protection;if they were not kept in their properplace they
would (fragility and fickleness notwithstanding) take over. As the elder
Cato, in a speech expanded, or invented, by Livy (34.1 ff.; ORF I.p.
14), said in defence of the lex Oppia:
'Our ancestors decided that women should not handle anything, even
a private matter, without the advice of a guardian; that they should
always be in the power of fathers, brothers, husbands. ... Call to mind
all those laws on women by which your ancestors restrained their
licence and made them subject to men: you can only just keep them
under by using the whole range of laws. If you let them niggle away
at one law after another until they have worked it out of your grasp,
until at last you let them make themselves equal to men, do you suppose
that you'll be able to stand them? If once they get equality, they'll
be on top.'
This naked appeal to male dominance offended the liberals. Livy

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208 ROMAN WOMEN

composed an answering speech for the tribune Valerius (34.7.7 ff.).

Even men, it says, might mind seeing Rome's allies going about better
dressed than they are: what then should poor dear little women,
mulierculae, feel? That is their world, the mundus muliebris; they have
no magistracies, priesthoods, triumphs, insignia, spoils of war. And
there is no danger of their getting out of hand. 'While a woman's
relatives are alive, she is never free from slavery, and women themselves
detest the freedom conferred by widowhood or bereavement. You
should protect them, not enslave them: you should prefer the name
of father or husband to that of master.'
Women - touching or menacing - were basically unreliable. They
were physically weak and nervous, well-suited for watching over
possessions (Columella pr. 12). They were emotional, irrational, and
intellectually less capable than men: this levitas animi and infirmitas
consilii made guardians necessary.5s This argument came to look very
silly as more and more women managed their own affairs (Gaius, Inst.
1.190), and Stoic philosophers began to challenge its basis. Musonius
(p. 8 ff.) declared that women had reason, senses, bodily parts, like
men; they too had a natural bent towards virtue; they too would need
virtue, and the same virtues as men, to lead decent lives. Women need
courage and endurance as much as men do; men should have as high
a standard of sexual virtue as women. Musonius makes an interesting
comparison here, revealing that the double standard was not just a fear
of illegitimate children. A man who goes to bed with a prostitute, he
says, need not fear that he is depriving a husband of the hope of
offspring - nor was he liable to prosecution - but should consider the
horror that is felt when a woman goes to bed with a slave.52 Seneca
(ad Marciam 16.1, ad Helviam 16.3) agreed in principle about women's
natural abilities: and if he regards his mother only as an exception to
the vices of her sex (which were, it seems, unchastity, love of riches,
shame at pregnancy, and wearing make-up and see-through dresses),
it is equally clear that a male philosopher is an exception to the vices
of his.53
Stoic radicalism went only so far. It followed from Musonius' princi-
ples that girls should be educated on the same pattern as boys - but
not so as to make them unfeminine or give them undue skill in logic-
chopping (which was also undesirable for men). They will philosophize
as women: the assumption is that they will exercise their virtues in
the home, the men as citizens. Boys should not be taught woolwork,
nor girls gymnastics, but each sex should do the job for which it is
naturally fitted. In principle Musonius (p. 13 ff.) went impressively
far:
'Some men, sometimes, might reasonably do the lighter tasks which

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 ROMAN WOMEN 209

are thought suitable for women, and women might do the heavier tasks
which are thought more appropriate for men: it depends on physical
strength, necessity, or the demands of the time. All human tasks, I
think, are common to men and women, and nothing is necessarily
exclusive to one or the other sex. But some tasks, obviously, are more
suited to one nature, and some to the other.'
Musonius was perhaps influenced by the prospect of exile, in which
the Stoic sage and his wife might have unexpected tasks. But public
opinion was not with him. People feared, he says (as perhaps Seneca's
father feared), that women who did philosophy would get over-
confident, leaving the house to mix with men and talk logic (or worse)
when they should be at home getting on with the woolwork. Musonius
answered (p. 12) that philosophy would not make women neglect their
duties, but ensure that they did them better: though Epictetus (ap.
Arrian fr. 15) claimed that some women used Plato's Republicto justify
their promiscuity. One may doubt whether an exceptional women who
did go outside traditional sex-r6les would have got a better reception
than Fulvia, who was reported as a masculinized monster - and subject
to female gusts of passion just the same.54 The answer to Musonius
might well be Juvenal's sixth satire.
A social system which restricted women to domestic life, and prevail-
ing attitudes which assumed their inferiority, must seem to us oppress-
ive. I know of no evidence that it seemed so at the time. The legal
and social constraints detailed above may have frustrated the abilities
of many women and caused much ordinary human unhappiness. But
there evidently were, also, many ordinarily happy families where
knowledge of real live women took precedence over the theories, and
women themselves enjoyed home, children, and friends. There were
some women who enjoyed the political game, and who found an
emotional life outside their necessary marriages.55 And there were
certainly women who found satisfaction in living up to the standards
of the time. They were, as they should be, chaste, dutiful, submissive,
and domestic; they took pride in the family of their birth and the family
they had produced; and probably their resolution to maintain these
standards gave them the support which women in all ages have found
in religious faith. But the religious feelings of Roman women, as
opposed to the acts of worship in which they might take part, are
something of which we know very little. A woman whose child was
ill might make, and gladly pay, a vow for his safety: but did she pray
for strength and patience while nursing him, and feel that some divine
power was sustaining her, or was she supposed to rely on her virtutes?56
The empress Livia put on a performance of Augustan perfection.
Dio (58.2.5 ff.) professes to record her explanation of how she kept

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210 ROMAN WOMEN

Augustus' love so long. She never had lovers; she went amiably along
with what Augustus wanted; she never interfered; and she pretended
not to notice his mistresses. Horace (Odes 3.14.5) got as near as he
dared (since everyone knew she had left her first husband while
pregnant with his child) to calling her univira, a one-man woman. The
senate gave her the privileges of a mother of three children, though
her marriage to Augustus produced only a stillborn son. She made
her husband's clothes; she combined traditional chastity with modern
charm; and she was, within the limits she herself accepted, a woman
of great power.57 This, presumably, is one picture of the ideal Roman
women: and it might be a woman's ideal as well as a man's. The most
moving expression of the ideal is in the elegy for Cornelia written by
Propertius (4.11), a poem sometimes (though without evidence) re-
garded as a recantation, since he portrayed his own love as a subverter
of standards. Propertius' Cynthia is independent, probably adulter-
ous,58 concerned not about house and children but about love-affairs
and literature. His Cornelia claims that she has followed the tradition
of her family, and her mother (who was Scribonia, Augustus' divorced
wife) must approve her. She is univira, chaste, and fertile. She is an
example to her own children. Her children have survived her, and she
has seen her brother consul. She does not say, though it was true, that
she has seen her husband consul and censor: perhaps that was not part
of her pride in what she was as a representative of her family. But
she thinks, though she puts it tentatively, that he will grieve for her
and care for their children. It had been a good life.
The son of Murdia, in the age of Augustus, made her a public eulogy.
Some of what he said has happened to survive (ILS 8394), and, since
we should not otherwise know of her existence, may make the best
epitaph for the women who did not make the history books.
'What is said in praise of all good women is the same, and straight-
forward. There is no need of elaborate phrases to tell of natural good
qualities and of trust maintained. It is enough that all alike have the
same reward: a good reputation. It is hard to find new things to praise
in a woman, for their lives lack incident. We must look for what they
have in common, lest something be left out to spoil the example they
offer us. My beloved mother, then, deserves all the more praise, for
in modesty, integrity, chastity, submission, woolwork, industry, and
trustworthiness she was just like other women.'

NOTES
* I am grateful to undergraduates, sixth-formers, and their teachers in and around Glasgow
who raised questions about earlier versions of this paper; to Dr Jane Gardner for a paper which
made me rethink several answers; and to Mrs. M. T. Griffin for many helpful suggestions.

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 ROMAN WOMEN 211
1. J. P. V. D. Balsdon, Roman Women (London, 1962); Arethusa 6 (1973) and 11 (1978);
Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves (New York, 1975); Mary F. Lefkowitz
and Maureen B. Fant, Women in Greece and Rome (Toronto, 1977), a source-collection.
2. Cicero, Brutus 211; Quintilian 1.1.6; Pliny, Letters 1.16.
3. Cornelia, Schanz-Hosius 1. p. 219; Sulpicia, ibid. 2. p. 189.
4. Mommsen, Strafrecht, p. 636 n. 3.
5. Soranus 2.6.10 (ed. Ilberg, Teubner 1927 = Corpus Medicorum Graecorum4).
6. J. P. V. D. Balsdon, JRS 61 (1971), 18 ff.
7. Dio 55.22.5; Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 1.12.9; Suetonius, Divus Augustus31.3; Plutarch,
Numa 10.2.
8. Miinzer p. 351-2; CIL 1.2 27881; K. M. Hopkins, Population Studies 18 (1964-5), 309 ff.
9. Richard Duncan-Jones, The Economy of the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 1974), p. 288 ff.
10. Child mortality: J. P. V. D. Balsdon, Life and Leisure in Ancient Rome (London, 1969),
pp. 85 ff. Girl babies tougher: Soranus 2.21.48. Food schemes: A. R. Hands, Charities and Social
Aid in Greeceand Rome(London, 1968), pp. 113 ff. See the discussion of infanticide by P. A. Brunt,
Italian Manpower (Oxford, 1971) pp. 148 ff.
11. K. M. Hopkins, Comparative Studies in Society and History 8 (1965), 124 ff.; John T.
Noonan, Jr., Contraception(Harvard, 1965), ch. 1. On conception before the first menstruation,
compare Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew (London, 1973), p. 218; on amenorrhea, E. LeRoy Ladurie,
The Territory of the Historian (English translation, Hassocks, 1979). On the time of conception,
even Marie Stopes agreed with Soranus: present-day belief is that conception in the paramen-
struum is possible but unlikely.
12. Soranus, 1.19.64; Ovid, Amores 2.14.27, Fasti 1.621-4.
13. Digest 48.19.38.5, 47.11.4; foetus not a person, 35.2.9.1, 25.4.1.1. Tacitus, Annales 14.63
does not (pace P. A. Brunt, Italian Manpower, p. 147) suggest that abortion was a crime against
the husband in Nero's time: Octavia was accused of aborting someone else's child, i.e. of adultery.
Cicero, pro Cluentio 31-2 has to fall back on a law from Miletus.
14. Cf. Pliny, Natural History 7.42-3.
15. Gellius 12.1; Tacitus, Dialogus 28, Germania 20.1. Musonius p. 11, and ILS 8541, count
breastfeeding a virtue.
16. The fairy-story, Juvenal 6.602 ff.; in real life, Suetonius, de grammaticis 7 and 21;
inscriptions by grateful foster-children, Balsdon, Life and Leisure, pp. 86-7.
17. Beryl Rawson, CPh 61 (1966) 71 ff. The lex Aelia Sentia (A.D. 4) allowed slaves under
30 to be freed without appeal to a consilium if, among other reasons, they were about to die,
or a relative wished to free them: Gaius, Institutes 1.19.
18. CIL 6.3926 ff. (Livia's household), 6213 ff. (the household of the Statilii Tauri). Factories,
Columella 12 pr. 1.
19. Susan Treggiari, Roman Freedmen in the late Republic (Oxford, 1969), p. 88.
20. Digest 25.7.1 pr., 23.2.44; Ulpian 13.1; Cicero, pro Sestio 110. See F. Schulz, Roman
Classical Law (Oxford, 1951), p. 138.
21. J. LeGall, REL 47 bis (1970), 123 f. Doctors, ILS 7802-5; midwives, Soranus 3.1.3.
22. Asconius, in Milonianam 43C; Suetonius, Divus Augustus 64.2.
23. S. F. Bonner, Education in Ancient Rome (London, 1977), pp. 136 ff.
24. Pliny, Letters 5.16; Plutarch, Moralia 453d; Musonius pp. 13 ff.
25. Statius, Silvae 3.5.63 ff.; Soranus 1.4.23. Dancing; ORF I p. 133; Sallust, Catiline 25.2;
Horace, Odes 3.6.21-2, with Nisbet and Hubbard, A Commentary on Horace Odes 2 (Oxford,
1978), pp. 181-2.
26. Pliny, Letters 5.16. The epitaph, ILS 1030 says she lived ann.XII men.XI d. VII; Pliny
that she died just before her fourteenth birthday, which seems to me a more likely time for
her wedding (see below).
27. Amundsen and Diels, Human Biology 41 (1969), 125 ff.; Soranus 1.4.20, 1.5.25.
28. Digest 23.2.4; cf. Dio 54.6.7; Digest 23.1.9. Republican precedent, Digest 12.4.8; adultery,
48.5.14.8.
29. On the age of Octavia, daughter of Claudius, who is sometimes cited as a pre-pubertal
bride, see R. M. Geer, TAPhA 62 (1931), 65-7.
30. Rufus ap. Oribasius (ed. Bussemaker-Daremberg), 3. p. 87.
31. Places to go: Ovid, Amores 3.633 ff., Tibullus 1.6.15 ff., Martial 11.7. Decorum: Seneca,

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212 ROMAN WOMEN
Controversiae2.7.3. Dinner-parties: Ovid, Ars Am. 1.565 ff., Amores 1.4; Horace, Odes 3.6.21 ff.,
Varro ap. Nonius p. 372L; Suetonius, Divus Claudius 32.
32. ILLRP 973; ILS 8393 line 30; Tacitus, Annales 5.1.
33. RE Tullius 60; K. M. Hopkins, Population Studies 20 (1966), 245 ff.
34. Gordon Williams, JRS 48 (1958), 16 ff.; Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry
(Oxford, 1968), pp. 370 ff.
35. I. Kajanto, Arctos 7 (1972), 13 ff.
36. Marriage-law, J. A. Crook, Law and Life of Rome (London, 1967), pp. 100 ff. Divorce
by women married cum manu, Gaius, Institutes 1.137a (against, Alan Watson, The Law of Persons
in the later Roman Republic (Oxford, 1967), ch. 6); control of property, Gellius 17.6.
37. Digest 24.1.1, 24.1.40 and 42; 48.5.23-4. On changing patterns of marriage and parental
control, see S. B. Pomeroy, Ancient Society 7 (1976), 215 ff.
38. Dowry problems, Cic. Att. 14.14.1, Fam. 6.18.5; penalties, Cic. Topica 4.19 ff., Seneca
Controversiae 2.7.1. Divorce at a lower economic level, I. Kajanto, REL 47 bis (1970), 99 ff.
39. Balsdon, Roman Women, p. 55.
40. F. Schulz, Roman Classical Law, p. 103. The then state of English divorce law does much
to explain this remark.
41. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 2.25.4.
42. Tutela mulierum:Gaius, Institutes 1.190, Cicero, pro Murena 27; Schulz, op. cit., pp. 188 ff.
43. J. A. Crook, CQ 17 (1967), 113 ff.; Watson, op. cit., chs. 5 and 6.
44. Dio 48.34.3, 55.10.4; 48.44.4-5. Plutarch, Antonius 54.2, 57.3.
45. Tacitus, Dialogus 28.8-9; Plutarch, TiberiusGracchus 1.4-5, Gaius Gracchus4.3-4; Pliny,
Natural History 34.31. Suetonius, Divus Augustus 61.2; Nicolaus of Damascus, FGH 70 fr. 127.
46. Jolowicz and Nicholas, Roman Law3 (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 246 ff.; Alan Watson, The
Law of Succession in the later Roman Republic (Oxford, 1971), pp. 29 ff.
47. Elizabeth Rawson, Studies in Roman Property (ed. M. I. Finley, Cambridge, 1976),
p. 97.
48. Cicero, Topica 4.18; Digest 4.5.
49. Fifty was taken to be the age of menopause: Amundsen and Diels, Human Biology 42
(1970), 79 ff. Whether the ius trium liberorum(FIRA p. 457 ff., A.D. 9) was a real incentive to
bear enough children to earn freedom from tutela would vary with character and circumstances.
50. Digest 3.1.5; Quintilian 1.1.6, Appian, Bellum Civile 4.33.
51. Gaius, Institutes 1.144; Cicero, pro Murena 27; Seneca, Controversiae 1.6.5; Seneca, ad
Marciam 1.1; Valerius Maximus 9.1.3.
52. Compare the provisions of the senatusconsultumClaudianum, which went against the ius
gentium by reducing the status of the freeborn mother of a slave's child instead of letting her
status determine that of the child. P. R. C. Weaver, Familia Caesaris (Cambridge, 1972),
pp. 162 ff. argues that its motive was financial.
53. A. Motto, Classical Weekly 65 (1972), 155 ff.
54. E. Gabba (ed.), Appiani Bellorum Civilium Liber Quintus (Florence, 1969), pp. xliii ff.
On women at war, cf. Tacitus, Ann. 1.69, 2.55.5.
55. R. Syme, TAPhA 104 (1960), 323 ff. = Roman Papers, ed. E. Badian (Oxford, 1979),
vol. 2 pp. 510 ff.
56. On cults, J. Gage, Matronalia (Paris, 1963); on the appeal of worship other than the
established religion, Averil Cameron, Greece & Rome 27 (1980), 60 ff.
57. Suetonius, Divus Augustus 63.1, 64.2; Tacitus, Ann. 5.1. The ius trium liberorum, Dio
55.2. Scribonia was less tactful than Livia: Suetonius, Divus Augustus 62.1, 69.1. On univirae,
see Niall Rudd, Lines of Enquiry (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 42 ff.: but I do not think the main
point (p. 44) was that the univira was never divorced. A remarried widow would not be univira
(see the instances in Seneca, de matrimonio 74-7, fr. 13 Haase).
58. Gordon Williams, Tradition and Originality, pp. 525 ff.

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