Women in Roman Life and Letters

Extract

The infant community of Rome grew up with neighbours who conceded a fairly high place to women. Etruscan sepulchral art suggests as much; the tomb paintings of early Campania show the womenfolk spruce, dignified, and house-proud; the authoritarian rule of the Sabine mother was traditional. Granted that in certain places and at certain times women were taboo, in a sense ‘infectious’, to use Warde Fowler's word, yet in the home the Roman wife had never been banished to a gynaeceum. The Atrium, the heart of the Roman house, was the wife's territory as much as the husband's. Though every Roman household was a monarchy with the paterfamilias as king, the womenfolk were no more, if no less, his subjects than the sons. When the Roman husband carried his wife into the Atrium, and she spoke the sacramental words ‘ubi tu Gaius ibi ego Gaia’, she made a claim that, in its due sphere, was admitted. In this sphere the Roman husband was more at home than the Greek, who hated not to be out of doors in the daytime. In a speech which Tacitus writes for Valerius Messalinus there is the truly Roman phrase ‘revertentibus post laborem quod honestius quam uxorium levamentum?’—‘the relief of a wife's society’—a society, that is, to quote another phrase from the same passage, ‘consortium rerum secundarum adversarumque’. When Lucretius writes:

iam iam non domus accipiet te laeta, neque uxor optima nee dulces occurrent oscula nati praeripere et tacita pectus dulcedine tangent the adjectives carry a weight of feeling.