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Roman Women: Their History and Habits

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`Always, be it noticed, in ancient sources, it was the wife who was in danger of getting on her husband's nerves. You might think there were no irritating husbands...In the surviving literature of antiquity social criticism is a male preserve.'

Except for a little by the poetess Sulpicia, all classical Latin literature that I can call to mind offhand is by men. Romans were not slow to criticism, and the super-articulate Ovid and Juvenal in particular did not spare women. The women have not been able to answer back, and this book does not try to do it for them, but it does a lot to promote understanding of how it was for women over the long centuries of Rome's ascendancy. Dacre Balsdon was fellow and tutor in ancient history at one of Oxford's oldest colleges, and Roman Women first saw the light in 1962. Here and there in the book an occasional remark by this fair-minded scholar shows how much attitudes have changed in 40 years, but there should be nothing in the book that jars on any other fair-minded person. It splits neatly into two parts called respectively History and (quaintly) Habits, the latter a long essay on the living (and dying) conditions of the women of Rome and its empire. Balsdon modestly deplores this abrupt split, putting it down to his own lack of ingenuity that he could not integrate the themes better. Thank goodness he failed at that - it is all quite complicated enough as it is.

This is a scholarly work, not a popularising one. However the author hopes very reasonably that he can interest a wider audience than just students and other scholars. Marriage in general, and specific marriages in particular, are every bit as interesting in Roman times as in any other times. So is divorce, so is child-rearing. Childbirth itself, in an era before any proper midwifery or obstetrics, is discussed briefly with a proper focus on the risks; and the discussion of abortion, seemingly quite common and unquestionably legal until the end of the second century AD, has a startlingly contemporary feel in 2004. Naturally there are sections on prostitutes, concubines, slave-women and freedwomen, and there are absolutely fascinating short chapters on women's dress, hair-styling, jewellery and other make-up, plus of course the female participation in those specially Roman public institutions the baths.

The first section `History' is unavoidably a history of government for the most part. For me this scholarly account is really more interesting than Graves managed to make it. Balsdon's focus is also on the period of the Julio-Claudian emperors, (up to and including Nero). He actually continues until the end of the reign of Constantine in the 4th century, but his narrative has a slightly detached feel in its latter stages, whether because that period and particularly the women of that period were genuinely less interesting or whether they were just less interesting to Balsdon. Rome never produced a really first-class historian to rival Herodotus and Thucydides. Tacitus is of course brilliant, but a historian needs to be more fastidious and self-disciplined than Tacitus was. Balsdon finds it necessary to say more than once that Roman tittle-tattle was of a particularly gross and vulgar kind, and he rightly takes Tacitus to task for irresponsibility in repeating stories that it was his duty to examine critically. This was true in two particular respects, both reflecting intensely on women. In the first place women had a particular role as poisoners. A Gaulish woman called Locusta was kept in jail, under permanent but always deferred sentence of death, as a kind of imperial poisoner-by-appointment. She it was who prepared, according to Tacitus among others, the first poison by which Agrippina tried to murder Claudius. It might be true, of course, but Roman gossip was always quick to equate any gastric trouble with poisoning. Similarly Balsdon is quite right in protesting against the sheer tediousness and predictability with which the Roman gossip-mill alleged incest. Did they never get bored with it? From right back in republican times Roman women had had to put up with this insinuation, as in the cheap jibes Cicero made at Clodia in his speech Pro Caelio. Even so early, allegations of sexual deviation seemed to have lost some of their potency through repetition - Sir Ronald Syme caustically points out that for Cicero they were obviously of lesser turpitude than association with trade or the stage, to say nothing of provincial origin.

One particular Roman woman stays in my mind. It is an empress, but not Messalina, nor Poppaea Sabina, nor Agrippina, but Nero's first empress, Octavia daughter of Claudius. In his infatuation with Poppaea Sabina Nero had Octavia framed as some sort of enemy of the state, banished and murdered in exile. The poor creature had been treated as a bit of furniture since she was only a year old and betrothed to a seeming high-flier. She enjoyed popular support where Poppaea Sabina did not, but Nero simply ratcheted up the allegations, and tears literally started to my eyes at Balsdon's description of her as `a timid and friendless little mouse'. Most of the Roman women here were of another character altogether. They seemed as ready as their menfolk to treat marriage as a market and themselves as breeding-engines to further the national objectives in supplying soldiers. In the more notorious cases of sexual excess, particularly of course Messalina, Balsdon is neither sensationalist nor coy, but even after making all allowance for the rumour-machine these stories in general, and that one in particular, show every sign of having been true. Rome was founded by the son of one goddess, Venus, in the face of the wrath of another, Juno. It almost feels as if a hyperbolic super-woman gene was implanted in the national character as a consequence.

Those looking for a feminist approach will be disappointed. What we have here is a survey of the private and public life of Roman women up to the time of Constantine, together with many interesting anecdotes of particular women and their families. Balsdon, as always, writes intelligently and engagingly.