50 Roman Mistresses
Scandal, virtue and womanhood in Ancient Rome
By Tansy Rayner Roberts
Published by FableCroft Publishing
Smashwords Edition
This book © Tansy Rayner Roberts (2006, 2011, 2014)
Cover image © Tansy Rayner Roberts & Andrew Finch
ISBN: 9780992284473 (ebook)
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book was first published as a series of articles on http://cassiphone.livejournal.com/ and http://tansyrr.com in 2006 and 2011 respectively, first as The Matrons of Awesome celebrating Women’s History Month and then as part of Rock The Romanpunk week in celebration of Tansy’s short story collection, Love and Romanpunk (Twelfth Planet Press).
Also by Tansy Rayner Roberts…
Love and Romanpunk (Twelfth Planet Press)
Siren Beat (Twelfth Planet Press)
The Mocklore Chronicles (FableCroft Publishing)
Splashdance Silver
Liquid Gold
Ink Black Magic
Creature Court (Harper Voyager)
Power and Majesty
The Shattered City
Reign of Beasts
Pratchett’s Women (FableCroft Publishing)
Contents
Introduction
1. The wife of Romulus
2. Lucretia
3. Cornelia Mother of the Gracchi
4. Aurelia
5. Pompeia
6. Clodia
7. Fulvia
Interlude: What Caesar did
8. Octavia
9. Cleopatra
10. Livia Drusilla
11. Antonia
12. Julia
13. Livilla
14. Agrippina Major
15. Drusilla
16. Messalina
17. Calpurnia
18. Agrippina Minor
19. Claudia Octavia
20. Claudia Antonia
21. Poppaea
22. Claudia Augusta
Interlude: Enter the Flavians
23. Sextilia
24. Caenis
25. Berenice
26. Flavia Domitilla
27. Julia Titi
28. Domitia Longina
Interlude: Trajan’s Matrons
29. Plotina
30. Marciana
31. Matidia
32. Sabina
33. Faustina Major
34. Faustina Minor
35. Lucilla
36. Crispina
37. Marcia
38. Manlia Scantilla
39. Didia Clara
40. Titiana
41. Julia Domna
42. Plautilla
43. Julia Maesa
44. Julia Soaemias
45. Julia Paula
46. Aquilia Severa
47. Annia Faustina
48. Julia Mamaea
49. Orbiana
50. Helena
So, what have we learned about Ancient Roman ladies?
Image Attributions
About Tansy Rayner Roberts…
Also from FableCroft Publishing…
Introduction
If you believe the texts that survive to tell the story of Ancient Rome, then that fascinating civilisation was pretty much all about the men. Men went to war, men played politics, and men stabbed each other in the course of said politics. Even the great love stories of the era often turn out to be all about what the men saw, desired and took.
But history is always more interesting than you think it is, and no matter how public the works of men were in Ancient Rome, there were always women living and working alongside them. Their status was very different, and few ladies were allowed any kind of public honour (except when those honours were really useful to the politics of men), but that doesn’t mean they weren’t a vital part of Roman daily life and culture.
Then there were the women we do hear about—those who made a mark on the writers of the day, and were immortalised as ambitious mothers, sultry and wicked temptresses, or perfect marble wives to be placed upon pedestals like the goddess Venus herself.
While the ordinary women fell through the cracks of history and were lost to us, the most famous became so largely by accident, because they were connected in some way to the powerful men who were seen as appropriate subjects of scholarship. But the story of those women is an important one, however hard it is to sift through the hyperbole and wild stories to find some kind of truth as to the lives they lived.
Here are fifty extraordinary women of Ancient Rome—virtuous wives and adulterous vixens, abductees and viragos, imperial mothers and mortals who became goddesses, all taking their place in history.
1. The Wife of Romulus
In order to understand the social role of women in Ancient Rome, you have to start at the beginning, and it’s not all that cheerful. In the early myths of the city, women were seen as irrelevant to most matters beyond the bearing of children, and I think it’s significant that the first woman in this list doesn’t have a name.
Romulus was the founder of Rome, a man who killed his brother for challenging his position as king (or, possibly, for mocking his half-built city walls, the myths vary on that one). He dealt with the ‘oops I founded a city with no women in it’ problem by inviting his neighbours, the Sabines, over to the newly built Rome for a dinner and a show, then attacking them and stealing their women.
The ‘rape’ in in the phrase ‘Rape of the Sabine Women’ is intended in the original Latin to mean ‘capture’ rather than ‘sexual assault’ though frankly we can assume there was plenty of that as well. The Sabine women were captured by the Romans, and forcibly married to them in one of those charming historical rituals. Once they became pregnant, they made the best of it and accepted the Romans as their husbands. So the story goes.
When the Sabine men went to war against the Romans in retaliation, the un-named wife of Romulus (now a queen) and her compatriots ran on to the battlefield bearing their babies aloft and demanded that the fathers and grandfathers of their children make peace with each other.
The story pretty much illustrates the saying ‘to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’, and has served as the inspiration for some amazing artwork over the years. But it’s problematic, no matter which way you look at it—and is not the only rape myth that forms an essential part of Rome’s early history. Romulus himself had been conceived when his mother Rhea Silvia/Ilia lay down by the side of a river to nap, was ‘visited’ by the god Mars, and woke up pregnant.
And then, most famously, there’s…
2. Lucretia
The kingdom begun by Romulus under such violent circumstances came to an end because of an assault on another virtuous wife.
The seventh king of Rome was one of the Tarquin family, and his sons were a pack of loutish young yobs. One night over wine on yet another battlefield, they started boasting as to who had the best wife. A quiet young cousin of theirs insisted that his wife, Lucretia, was more virtuous than any of them.
Fully soused, the princes and their pals decided to bet on the matter, and rode home to see whose wives were best behaving themselves. They spied on the wives of the Tarquin princes who were (shock, horror) dining with each other, chatting and generally having a merry time. Not shagging the slaves, not indulging in naughty par
lour games with each other, not even drinking wine (a capital crime for women at this time)—simply hanging out and having fun. This was still seen as an embarrassment to their drunken husbands.
Lucretia, on the other hand, was quietly at home with no company but her maidservants (read: slaves), working in wool by candlelight. Her husband promptly won the bet.
All well and good, but one of the Tarquin princes was so affected by this experience that he became obsessed with Lucretia. One evening, he slipped away from camp by himself and went to visit her. As he was a kinsman of her husband, it was Lucretia’s duty to offer him hospitality—dinner and a bed for the night—and she did so. When the household was asleep, Tarquin slid into Lucretia’s room and held a sword to her throat.
The charming prince gave Lucretia a choice: submit to him, or he would kill her and a male slave, and leave them in bed together so she looked like an adulteress. Faced with these options, she did not struggle.
Tarquin thought he was safe, because no woman would sully her reputation by admitting to being one of the raptae (Latin for snatched woman/stolen woman/rape victim). He didn’t realise that Lucretia was braver than he gave her credit for. She called her father and her husband to her the next day, and told them exactly what Tarquin had done to her. Then, before they could stop her, she stabbed herself and died.
Enter Brutus, a friend of the family. Outraged that the crown prince had caused the death of such a chaste and modest Roman matron, he used the death of Lucretia as an excuse to kick out the Tarquin monarchy and usher in a Republic. (The poet Ovid, in a neat play on words, refers to Brutus ‘snatching’, yep, there’s that word raptae again, the knife from Lucretia’s body)
What is most interesting about this story (apart from the continuing ramifications of the Roman ideals of womanhood) is that, whether or not it was true, it was the accepted story five hundred years later, the official explanation of the beginning of the Republic. No Roman batted an eyelash at the idea that a king could be deposed and an entire political system overturned because the heir to the throne assaulted a woman, and the men of the city took the woman’s accusation seriously.
Whatever crappiness the Romans were responsible for, especially in matters of gender, I like to remember that about them.
3. Cornelia Mother of the Gracchi
There is a club of Roman mothers who are acclaimed for being strong, influential figures in their sons’ lives. The more prominent a male citizen, the more likely it is that his mother will be praised for her virtues.
The interesting thing about Cornelia Mother of the Gracchi is that, while she is primarily remembered for being the mother of famous Romans, they were not Roman heroes, nor people in a position to design their own propaganda. Her reputation as the ideal Roman mother was not, as with the mothers of Julius and Augustus Caesar, established to bolster the propaganda of her sons; if anything, their reputations are saved through an association with her.
The brothers Gracchi were political hotheads: Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus. They managed to get themselves killed in street riots, several years apart, due to revolutionary activities against the Republic.
Despite the less than heroic reputations of her sons, Cornelia’s public image was set up as if they were princes. She was referred to by at least six of the major literary sources, always as an example of a great Roman matrona (married woman) and mother. To understand how impressive this is, you should know that references to non-imperial women in any Roman historical sources are scarce. Women are generally regarded as being irrelevant to politics and war, and almost all surviving historical texts about ancient Rome survived because they had to do with politics or war.
Cornelia had a statue set up to her during the Republic, at a time when women had almost no public presence at all—unlike a dynastic form of government like a monarchy, a Republic can quite easily be run without involving women, and the Roman Republic very firmly kept women in the house, away from the Important Deeds of Men. Statues were politically relevant, so statues of women were almost non-existent.
Here are some of the things that the literary sources tell us about Cornelia, the Ideal Roman Mother:
She was chaste, and loyal to the memory of her dead husband, refusing an offer of marriage from Ptolemy, the King of Egypt. A univira (wife of only one husband) had a special sacred status among women in Rome, and Cornelia embodied this.
She was intelligent and educated, and used these skills to educate her sons.
She was tough with her sons, standing in for their father (who died young).
She socialised with men on their own terms, hosting the Roman equivalent of literary salons, and was prized for her conversation in these spheres.
She had enough political smarts to learn from her eldest son’s death; we have evidence of a letter she wrote to her younger son, warning of the danger he was in.
Working in wool? Pfft.
I love Cornelia.
Motherhood was all-important to her. As you might have guessed by the ‘refusing the King of Egypt’ story, she wasn’t interested in conspicuous wealth. It is for this reason that Cornelia continued to be held up as the feminine ideal long after her death, during the new puritanism brought in by the first Emperor Augustus.
When a woman asked Cornelia where her jewels were (imagine a catty comment at a house party), Cornelia pointed to her children and said, ‘These are my jewels.’
4. Aurelia
Aurelia is another mother in the style of Cornelia. Aristocratic, but modest. Widowed young, and refused to remarry. Tough, but fair. When her husband died, Aurelia was left with a bevy of daughters (well, two, but who doesn’t love the word ‘bevy’?) and one very talented son: Gaius Julius Caesar. Yes, that Julius Caesar. Single mother Aurelia took responsibility for her son’s education, and by all accounts was ‘as strict as a father’ in discipline.
Aurelia was a valued advisor to her son as he rose through the ranks, and unlike the Gracchi, he did listen to his mother’s advice. When he became pontifex maximus, high priest of Rome, he was given a house of his own and parental responsibility for the Vestal priestesses; he gave the running of this household over to his mother, not his young wife.
Had Aurelia still been alive when Caesar brought Cleopatra home, she would have turfed the foreign wench out of Rome without breaking a fingernail.
Aurelia was of noble blood, but married a younger brother (not his family’s heir) and they found it difficult to make ends meet. So she ran an insula (apartment building) in the Subura, the roughest neighbourhood in Rome and the one with the highest percentage of foreign immigrants. She raised her family there. Considering that her husband (when still alive) was off on military service most of the time, it was an extraordinary lifestyle to choose, and shows that she was of stronger mettle than most aristocratic ladies.
Because he was raised in such an environment, Caesar is said to have spoken many languages, and been on friendly terms with people of all walks of life. This is why he was so beloved of ‘the people’, not just his own class. His mother raised him to be a person first, and an aristocrat second.
5. Pompeia
I’m sure you’re good and sick of Roman matronal and maternal virtues by now, so let’s have a bit of scandal and vice for balance.
Pompeia was the second of Caesar’s three wives, the first being Cornelia (a child bride, mother of his only legitimate child, Julia) and the third being Calpurnia (the one he cheated on with Cleopatra, who would count as his fourth wife if she had been Roman). Pompeia is memorable because she was married to Caesar during the first years of his career as pontifex maximus, high priest of Rome. It was a political marriage; she was the daughter of Pompey the Great, an ally and rival of Caesar’s
(Pompey also married Caesar’s daughter, which adds a whole layer of ick to the proceedings).
This is a story about the Bona Dea. Bona Dea means ‘good goddess’, and she was a goddess without name or image. Men and women alike worshipped her, but th
ere was one festival of the year that was only for women—or, to be specific, respectable married women (matronae). Every year, the wife of a public official would host the festival. All the men of the house would be turned out for the night (even male slaves were not allowed to remain) and the matronae of the city would come visiting.
No man knew what went on at this festival, though it was the subject of salacious speculation. Snakes were rumoured to be involved. The women (possibly) drank wine and called it ‘milk’ or ‘honey’. Myrtle (the plant sacred to saucy goddess Venus) was banned from the house. Some years later, the poet Juvenal described the Bona Dea in his Satires as a psychotic orgy of madwomen, who tore around the city afterwards, pissing on statues and raping male slaves. Far too often, this is taken as historical fact rather than the comedy it was intended to be.
The point is that men were not allowed to know what went on at this festival, and (most) men respected that because the festival was an integral part of the Roman calendar. Romans were very superstitious about festivals and gods.
But one man—Publius Clodius, political hellraiser and troublemaker—risked the wrath of the goddess because he wanted to get into the knickers of Caesar’s wife Pompeia, and she (as wife of the pontifex maximus) happened to be hosting the Bona Dea festival that year. He disguised himself as a flute girl and crashed the party.
He never got near Pompeia. Her canny mother-in-law Aurelia spotted Clodius for a fraud a mile off. She and the Vestals covered up the sacred things, and they hauled Clodius out of there before he could say ‘drag act’.
Here’s the twist: the men of the city were furious, and tried to prosecute Clodius for sacrilege. The women of the city, however, refused to speak against him. This is particularly interesting because the Vestal Virgins were present, and they had the same legal rights to testify as men. But the women were uninterested in the (politically driven) public vilification of Clodius. They simply said, ‘The Bona Dea will do as she pleases with him.’
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