Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius. Dill Samuel

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СКАЧАТЬ born. The old Roman matron was, by legal theory, in the power of her husband, yet assured by religion and sentiment a dignified position in the family, and treated with profound, if somewhat cold, respect; she was busied with household cares, [pg 79]and wanting in the lighter graces and charms, austere, self-contained, and self-controlled. But this severe ideal had begun to fade even in the days of the elder Cato.468 And there is hardly a fault or vice attributed by Juvenal to the women of Domitian’s reign, which may not find parallel in the nine or ten generations before Juvenal penned his great indictment against the womanhood of his age. The Roman lady’s irritable pride of birth is at least as old as the rivalry of the two Fabiae in the fourth century.469 The elder Cato dreaded a rich wife as much as Juvenal,470 and satirised as bitterly the pride and gossip and luxury of the women of his time. Their love of gems and gold ornaments and many-coloured robes and richly adorned carriages, is attested by Plautus and the impotent legislation of C. Oppius.471 Divorce and ghastly crime in the noblest families were becoming common in the days of the Second Punic War. About the same time began that emancipation of women from the jealous restraints of Roman law, which was to be carried further in the Antonine age.472 The strict forms of marriage, which placed the wife in the power of her husband, fell more and more into desuetude. Women attained more absolute control over their property, and so much capital became concentrated in their hands that, about the middle of the second century B.C., the Voconian law was passed to prohibit bequests to them, with the usual futile result of such legislation.473 Yet the old ideal of the industrious housewife never died out, and Roman epitaphs for ages record that the model matron was a wool-worker and a keeper at home. A senator of the reign of Honorius praises his daughter for the same homely virtues.474 But from the second century B.C. the education of the Roman girl of the higher classes underwent a great change.475 Dancing, music, and the higher accomplishments were no longer under a ban, although they were still suspected by people of the old-fashioned school. Boys and girls received the same training from the grammarian, and read their Homer and Ennius together.476 There were women in the time of [pg 80]Lucretius, as in the time of Juvenal, who interlarded their conversation with Greek phrases.477 Cornelia, the wife of Pompey, was trained in literature and mathematics, and even had some tincture of philosophy.478 The daughter of Atticus, who became the wife of Agrippa, was placed under the tuition of a freedman, who, as too often happened, seems to have abused his trust.479 Even in the gay circle of Ovid, there were learned ladies, or ladies who wished to be thought so.480 Even Martial reckons culture among the charms of a woman. Seneca maintained that women have an equal capacity for cultivation with men.481 Thus the blue-stocking of Juvenal, for whom he has so much contempt, had many an ancestress for three centuries, as she will have many a daughter till the end of the Western Empire.482 Even in philosophy, usually the last study to attract the female mind, Roman ladies were asserting an equal interest. Great ladies of the Augustan court, even the empress herself, had their philosophic directors,483 and the fashion perhaps became still more general under M. Aurelius. Epictetus had met ladies who were enthusiastic admirers of the Platonic Utopia, but the philosopher rather slyly attributes their enthusiasm to the absence of rigorous conjugal relations in the Ideal Society.484 Even in the field of authorship, women were claiming equal rights. The Memoirs of Agrippina was one of the authorities of Tacitus.485 The poems of Sulpicia, mentioned by Martial,486 were read in Gaul in the days of Sidonius.487 Greek verses, of some merit in spite of a pedantic affectation, by Balbilla, a friend of the wife of Hadrian, can still be read on the Colossus of Memnon.488 Calpurnia, the wife of Pliny, may not have been an author; but she shared all Pliny’s literary tastes; she set his poems to music, and gave him the admiration of a good wife, if not of an impartial critic.

      Juvenal feels as much scorn for the woman who is interested in public affairs and the events on the frontier,489 as he feels for the woman who presumes to balance the merits of Virgil and Homer. And here he is once more at war with a [pg 81]great movement towards the equality of the sexes. From the days of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, to the days of Placidia, the sister of Honorius, Roman women exercised, from time to time, a powerful, and not always wholesome, influence on public affairs. The politic Augustus discussed high matters of state with Livia.490 The reign of Claudius was a reign of women and freedmen. Tacitus records, with a certain distaste for the innovation, that Agrippina sat enthroned beside Claudius on a lofty tribunal, to receive the homage of the captive Caractacus.491 Nero emancipated himself from the grasping ambition of his mother only by a ghastly crime. The influence of Caenis on Vespasian in his later days tarnished his fame.492 The influence of women in provincial administration was also becoming a serious force. In the reign of Tiberius, Caecina Severus, with the weight of forty years’ experience of camps, in a speech before the Senate, denounced the new-fangled custom of the wives of generals and governors accompanying them abroad, attending reviews of troops, mingling freely with the soldiers, and taking an active part in business, which was not always favourable to pure administration.493 In the inscriptions of the first and second centuries, women appear in a more wholesome character as “mothers of the camp,” or patronesses of municipal towns and corporations.494 They have statues dedicated to them for liberality in erecting porticoes or adorning theatres or providing civic games or feasts.495 And on one of these tablets we read of a Curia mulierum at Lanuvium.496 We are reminded of the “chapter of matrons” who visited Agrippina with their censure,497 and another female senate, under Elagabalus, which dealt with minute questions of precedence and graded etiquette.498 On the walls of Pompeii female admirers posted up their election placards in support of their favourite candidates.499 Thus Juvenal was fighting a lost battle, lost long before he wrote. For good or evil, women in the first and second centuries were making themselves a power.

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      Although he was probably a very light believer in the old mythology,500 and treated its greatest figures with scant respect, Juvenal had all the old Roman prejudice against those eastern worships which captivated so many women of his day. And, here again, the satirist is assailing a movement which had set in long before he wrote, and which was destined to gain immense impetus and popularity in the two following centuries. The eunuch priests of the Great Mother, with their cymbals and Phrygian tiaras, had appeared in Italy in the last years of the Hannibalic War.501 The early years of the second century B.C. were convulsed by the scandals and horrors of the Dionysiac orgies, which fell on Rome like a pestilence.502 The purity of women and the peace of families were in serious danger, till the mischief was stamped out in blood. The worship of Isis found its way into the capital at least as early as Sulla, and defied the hesitating exclusion of Augustus.503 At this distance, we can see the raison d’être of what the satirist regarded as religious aberrations, the full treatment of which must be reserved for another chapter. The world was in the throes of a religious revolution, and eagerly in quest of some fresh vision of the Divine, from whatever quarter it might dawn. The cults of the East seemed to satisfy cravings and emotions, which found no resting-place in the national religion. Their ritual appealed to the senses and imagination, while their mysteries seemed to promise a revelation of God and immortality. Their strange mixture of the sensuous and the ascetic was specially adapted to fascinate weak women who had deeply sinned, and yet occasionally longed to repent. The repentance indeed was often shallow enough; the fasting and mortification were compatible with very light morals.504 There were the gravest moral abuses connected with such worships as that of Magna Mater. It is well known that the temples of Isis often became places of assignation and guilty intrigue.505 An infatuated Roman lady in the reign of Tiberius had been seduced by her lover in the pretended guise of the god Anubis.506 The Chaldaean seer or the Jewish hag might often [pg 83]arouse dangerous hopes, or fan a guilty passion by casting a horoscope or reading a dream.507 But Juvenal’s scorn seems to fall quite as heavily on the innocent votary who was striving to appease a burdened conscience, as on one who made her superstition a screen for vice.

      In spite of the political extinction of the Jewish race, its numbers and influence grew in Italy. The very destruction of the Holy Place and the external symbols of Jewish worship threw a more impressive air of mystery around the dogmas of the Jewish faith, of which even the most cultivated Romans had only vague conceptions.508 The Jews, from the time of the first Caesar, had worked their way into every class of society.509 A Jewish prince had inspired Caligula with an oriental ideal of monarchy.510 There were adherents of Judaism in the household of the great freedmen of Claudius, and their СКАЧАТЬ