Roman Women

Abstract

Times have changed for Roman women. To an undergraduate – even a woman undergraduate – reading Greats some fifteen years ago, they were obviously a fringe topic, worth at most a question on the General Paper. There were pictures of dresses and hairstyles, in most of which it looked impossible to move. There were snippets of anthropology from Plutarch, as that a bride had her hair parted with a spear ( Moralia 285b): entertaining, but about as relevant to the views of a bride in the late Republic as are wearing a veil (to symbolize being under authority) and being pelted with confetti (in hopes of many children) to a bride in the 1980s. There was an account of forms of marriage, with, usually, a panegyric of a Roman matron and a denunciation of the laxity of the late Republic and immorality of the early Empire; and a handful of brief biographies: Cornelia, Sempronia, Arria. This information would be found somewhere around chapter 15 of a general handbook, once the author had dealt with the serious business of life, like the constitution and the courts and education and the army and the provinces. J. P. V. D. Balsdon's book made a difference, since he never forgot that he was writing about human beings, who worried about their children and ran their households and had long days to fill. But the real change came in the 70s, as the Women's Movement – a decade late – got through to the classics. First there was the new perspective offered by general feminist histories, though their scholarship was second-hand and often wild; then articles and books, though still only a few, trying to answer the sort of questions it now seems so odd we did not ask. What did Roman women do all day, besides getting dressed? How did they feel about it? What else could they have done? Were they oppressed, and did they notice? Why do we know so little about half the human race?