Role of the Woman in Ancient Rome

Women in Ancient Rome

What was the role -- or roles -- of women in ancient Rome? There are a number of sources in the literature that point to a wide variety of interesting and sometimes humiliating roles and positions that women were linked to in Ancient Rome, and this paper reviews several of those.

Women in Ancient Rome -- The Literature

has researched and reported on a number of interesting instances of women's positions and activities in ancient Rome. In his book, McKeown quotes from Cicero's work, In Defense of Murena 27): "Our ancestors wanted all women to be under the control of guardians because of their feeble powers of judgment" (McKeown, 2010, p. 8).

Certainly there was rampant chauvinism in ancient Rome, and any chance that male power figures had to continue on the path of bias against women, they seemed to be able to succeed. However, there are examples in ancient Rome of women having power over men. In McKeown's book he quotes from Plutarch's Life of Anthony 10 (that is Mark Anthony); Plutarch explained that Fulvia, Mark Anthony's wife, "totally ignored the traditional wifely activities of spinning and housekeeping" (McKeown, 9-10). Fulvia also believed it was "beneath her dignity to control an ordinary man," and instead she wanted to "rule a ruler and command a commander," Plutarch explains.

Hence, Plutarch continues in McKeown's book, Cleopatra actually ended up owing a "teacher's fee" to Fulvia for teaching Anthony how to be submissive to a woman. When Cleopatra took on Mark Anthony he was well broken in, "trained from the start in obeying a woman" (McKeown, 10). Obviously Fulvia was a very powerful woman in ancient Rome, and she was described by Velleius Paterculus as "a women in body alone" (McKeown, 11).

Meanwhile, McKeown explains that under the Julian Law on adultery (of 18 B.C.) a woman that was caught in the act of adultery "…could be killed by her father" as long as her lover was also killed (12). Her husband did not have the authority to kill her, only her father. But if a husband was caught in an adulterous moment, there was no law that punished him at all (McKeown, 12).

McKeown (13) explains that when a vestal virgin in ancient Rome was caught and convicted of "sexual misconduct," that was rare, but it was "momentous." During times of military crises, some vestal virgins were caught in sexually compromising circumstances, McKeown explains. The punishment could not be death, because a vestal virgin's person was "sacrosanct"; hence instead of being executed, she was "…entombed in an underground chamber with a bed, a lamp, and some foot and water, and left to die" (McKeown, 13). The male that was caught in a sexual liaison with a vestal virgin was "publicly flogged to death," McKeown reports.

The author writes that about 170 women from "leading [Roman] families" were convicted in the year 331 B.C. Of "…poisoning their husbands" (8). On that subject, author Richard A. Bauman (1994) explains that according to Roman historian Titus Livius -- known as the respected Livy -- this conspiracy by Roman women was uncovered by a slave woman in 331. It was called "The Poisoning Trials of 331 B.C." During the year 331 B.C., there were many deaths of "leading citizens" and those deaths were not caused by pestilence but rather "by poison" (Bauman, 13). That slave woman approached the government and said she would reveal the source of the deaths (e.g., the source of the poison) if she could be protected from prosecution.

She then led authorities (Fabius in particular) to a place where "some matrons were brewing noxious concoctions" and so twenty of those females were summoned to the forum. Cornelia and Sergia, "both patricians, claimed the substances had curative properties" and so they were challenged to drink in front of authorities to prove their innocence. They did drink the liquids "…and all were killed by their own wickedness" (Bauman, 14). As a result, 170 women were rounded up and put on trial as a group -- under "public criminal law" not by the "family courts" that would normally handle this kind of case -- found guilty, and "punished" (albeit, Bauman doesn't say what the punishment was).

What was the reason for the mass poisonings in ancient Rome? There has been speculation that a group of patrician women were trying to achieve "equality of civil and political rights" -- this group was on the "progressive wing" of the patrician order -- that resorted to violence (poisoning) to make its point (Bauman, 14-15).