Roman Cities

Roman Cities

The Roman idea of a city is civilisation; the civilised person (cives, plural civites) lives in a city (civitas), a constructed place for a human to live in. Aristotle said that those who live outside the city are gods or monsters; Romulus allegedly offered his followers a deal: follow my laws and you will be protected by me and free of all previous obligations.

We think we know what a Roman city looks like: a grid of streets, with the cardo and decumanus crossing at the place where the temple and law court denote a central square. By that token, the one city which fails that is, of course Rome. It had grown up long before the idea of planning a town had reached Italy and around several cores.

Three groups, two of them incomers, had settled on the seven hills above the marsh. The incomers were the Rhames, a bunch of runaways and malcontents led by a small core group of young men who’d recently left the village of Alba Longa to prevent overpopulation; the second group was a contingent of Sabines looking to populate the coastal region. They both kept themselves to themselves away from those who’d settled there, the so-called ‘aborigines’. Where they had to work in common, the three groups voted by threes, tribus; that ablative plural became a noun, giving us ‘tribe’.

As Andrew Wallace-Hadrill has recently pointed out, few Romans lived in villas or even town houses which presented a blank face to the street, but which surrounded a beautiful atrium in the centre. The vast majority lived in an insula, a multi-storey block of flats, often hundreds of years old. There would be shops on the ground floor, including cook shops for those who had no ability to cook for themselves. The poor maintenance led to innumerable court cases and to several spectacular collapses. Don’t think of a modern western block, but more of the jerry-built blocks still being out up in places like Bangladesh and Nepal with poor building standards and backhanders to officials to turn a blind eye. Fourth century estimates cite up to 46,000 insulae and only 1790 houses. This must mean that, even though the city of Rome had a declining population, everyone who was not a senator or senior member of the imperial or city bureaucracy must have lived in one.

Remains of insulae from Ostia Antica, second century AD

Pliny the Younger brought a case to the attention of Trajan in Book 10 of his collected letters: the city of Nikapolis in Bithynia-Pontus had erected an arena as a showpiece for the city, hoping to raise its status in Asia Minor. But they had built it without foundations and it soon collapsed, prompting Pliny to ask Trajan to endorse an official investigation as to how this had happened.

The truth about the layout of cities and towns in the Roman era is that the central concept of a regular planned urban space was perhaps an ideal, but many cities already existed and had to be accommodated. Nevertheless, the ideal was that the city you were born in was your citizenship: they used the same word: civitas. We might call this a city-district, since it comprised an urban core in which a number of higher-function activities took place (justice, religion, politics) along with different types of industrial activity. Dirty and noxious industry was often moved to the outskirts, downstream from the places where people drew water to drink, cook and clean themselves and their clothes, and ideally down the prevailing wind from the city is foul-smelling (rendering animal fats and fulling cloth being good examples).

People who lived in dependent communities outside the city would come there in the spring to bring animals to sell, and again in early autumn with grain. The political control of the city would extended to their journey inbound and going home, with the laws and gods invoked to depend the honesty of the market. Mis-selling goods and short measure were forbidden and the safety of all was protected. While in the city, the area’s farmers would look for any additional farmhands in a hiring fair, hear the latest news and gossip, eye up potential spouses for their children, ask the elders to settle any local disputes and perform for the gods what they had promised in the event of good fortune.

Such things have happened in many sorts of cities all over the world from the earliest days and still do. Rome’s rising cities fulfilled the traditional function.

When Augustus rebuilt Rome and other cities, he filled in the democratic spaces some had made use of. At Rome, he built a memorialised quarter over the Field of Mars; the Campus Martius had been the mustering place for the citizen army each spring; many places had a March field. It was also the area where citizens went to vote, through stalls like those used for some horse races. Now Rome’s wars were elsewhere, the legions stationed for hundreds of years in provicial cities, and democracy was dead. So how better to obliterate that apace than by building over it.

In Athens, the historic agora, where citizens had voted, was filled up with temples transferred their from across Greece. The democratic space in Athens was killed, as in Rome, by religion.

Around each city was a dead zone. It was considered unhygienic in a hot climate to bury the dead within the urban area; the idea of burying the dead near a sacred place only arrives with Christianity, so the burial of early Christians are the Vatican (Mons Vaticanus) is possible because it was ‘trans Tiber’; to this day the area is called ‘Trastevere’; curiously, this was a place where vates, Gaulish priests, performed their rituals. Circling the zones of the living and dead at Rome was a sacred belt, the pomerium, where religious and legal restrictions were enforced. These included forbidding the use of arms within the urbs under Augustus’s’s law (lex julia de vi privata).

Rome was divided into a number of districts, each named for a notable feature such as a monumental fountain, a particular temple or a theatre. Modern cities often do this (Charing Cross, Unter den Linden, Temple Bar, Opéra, Tivoli Gardens, etc.).  We also know that different districts had different status levels; the Subura at Rome is described as a red light district, a working class district (not that Romans had class structures as we would understand the term)

Surviving structures from Rome’s Subura district

However, areas then as now changed over time and it should be noted that Julius Caesar was born in a house in this district. The district lies in a dip between the Viminal and Esquiline Hills at the north side of the city. Then as now, the higher the altitude, the higher the status; the imperial palace was on top of Palatine, one of Rome’s seven hills; the Italian royal palace was atop the Quirinal Hill; today the Italian President lives there.

Walls set boundaries and were obviously available for defence. Rome’s original wall dates back only to the fourth century BC, but was credited to Servius Tullius, Rome’s penultimate king. Clearly, this wall, which survives in places, was not extant when the Gauls seized Rome in c380BC, so the name may have been traditional, or maybe the plans for it were approved by Servius but it was never built.

A section of the Servian Wall, near to Rome’s railway station

The much larger Aurelian Wall, the one which survives today, is built completely outside the Servian Wall, and encloses an area some three times as large. This was built c270–5 for utterly changed political circumstances. Before that, the outer parts of the city must have been entirely extramural.

Aurelian Wall section near Via Veneto

The wall was improved by Maxentius by improvements to forts and again by Stilicho in AD401. This shows that it was in fine condition when Alaric’s Gothic Army turned up in AD410 and that they must have been invited in, as they could hardly have broken through.

It is well known that eventually Constantinople developed a triple ring of walls, which is why it survived till AD1453, when the cannon of Sultan Mehmet II, known as The Prophet and built for him by the Venetians, blew a hole in it.

However, walls could be decorative, and as such might be part of civic eurgetism by social competing citizens. Those of Le Mans in France (Cenomanum) are particularly pretty, with at least four rows of contrasting designs.

The third century AD walls of Le Mans, Maine, France

These are walls designed for display more than four defence. By contrast, the walls of Arverna (modern Clermont-Ferrand) were ruinous in the fifth century when they needed to be strong; they fell down through great age and the city’s bishop, the celebrated letter writer Sidonius Apollinaris, conducted Christian rogations, beating the bounds of the city in a hope that magical thinking would stop the forces of King Euric from seizing it.

Le Vasso Galate, a surviving section of the imperial city wall of Arverna (Clermont-Ferrand)

It the later parts of the empire, cities everywhere shrank and became less multi-functional.

It would be useful to consider the link between cities and early Christianity. In every town where there was a Roman presence, there was a priest; in every city with a governor, a bishop; in cities which were seats of vicarii, there was a metropolitan, what we’d call an archbishop. In imperial capitals and cities of high standing, there were senior metropolitans with overarching authority; some were termed patriarchs, great fathers, a term used civicly for men of high authority just below the emperor: Stilicho, Aetius and Theodoric held such a title. Thus it can be seen that the Christians shadowed the urban authority of the empire. Once legal, the network of clergy stepped forward. Constantine allowed bishops to run their own law courts in parallel with the civic ones. In the late empire, towns generally survived if the bishop stayed; if he left, the city was eventually abandoned, such was his network of patronage. There were no rural clergy at that time, so Christianity was professed as an urban religion and those who had no priest to instruct them were termed pagani – country people.

We discussed before the straight Roman streets of many cities; these remained while there was a city authority of decurions to prosecute anyone who impinged his shop or house onto the public highway. In the earlier empire and before, local nobles had wanted to be on the city council. Latterly, however, they had to be compelled. The praetorian prefect and governor set the tax expectations of the emperor as a precept and it was the job of the decurions to collect it; they therefore were loaned the money by a tax farmer, who then forced locals to pay, skimming off the surplus collected.

In the countryside taxes were harder to collect and there were no Christian clergy to demand a tithe and attendance at church. The fact that being outside the walls with the gods and monsters and at risk of seizures by brigands (Bacaudae) did not stop removal from the city to a country retreat suggests that there was an impetus to leave the city.

The fifth century comic play Querolus (the Complainer) refers to a man fed up with paying taxes is offered a chance to join the ‘free men of the Loire’ who live under the trees and pay no taxes. He refuses because he is civilised.

Research on the city of Antioch shows that the straight, Romanised streets were becoming deviated in the 300s AD, centuries before the Islamic conquest of Syria in the 630s. Shop owners had built out into the city streets, possibly with shaded awnings, narrowing the road and making it crooked.

In Britain, there was a forced removal of skilled artisans after the regime of Carausius and Allectus was defeated. A Latin panegyric poem to Constantius Chlorus from the people of Autun (Augustodunum) in Gaul refers to such people being transported to repair Autun because they were so numerous in Britain. It should be recalled that by the time of St Wilfrid the Anglo-Saxons had to import glass-makers from the kingdom of the Franks because nobody in Britain knew how to make glass. Archaeologists tell us that for a while watermills, a common sight in the Roman world ceased to exist in Britain.

There are curious burials associated with urban buildings at Wroxeter, Shropshire (Viroconium), where high-status buildings were turned into forges and city houses were partly demolished to be turned into cattle pens. However, a change in function need not be read as a social collapse; today we find people living in oast houses, old windmills, maltings, converted stables and barns, even old factories and warehouses, as in the US, and we don’t consider any of that to be a sign of social collapse; if anything some may think it cool.

Climate change in Britain may have exacerbated many other problems. We read in Gildas about severe famines, which would have hastened departures from cities. A typical small town like Ixworth, Suffolk (Sitomagus) may have suffered from earthquakes; in the 19^th century the town underwent severe quakes, and people may  have left the Roman town of Sitomagus for similar reasons. It is quite clear across Britain that there were no resources to repair dilapidated buildings, that urban life with its high taxes, controlled labour, nosy clergy and the possibility of being transported to Gaul on a whim would not have been attractive to building workers. The rise of rural villa life in Britain in the fourth century, something that is well attested, may have been a way for pagans and discontented people to supply skilled labour to others who had opted out of the Roman system.

In some places, cities retreated back into their cores, with a barrier built across exit roads. Populations shrank away, but as long as the priest stayed there and the ruler at least went there to administer ritual and justice, the community might survive. The Anglo Saxon Chronicle records kings with British names losing the Battle of Dyrham in AD577; their kingdoms were the towns of Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath, which suggests highly local rule, based solely on a town.

Did the Roman Speak Classical Latin?

Did the Romans Speak Classical Latin?

We take it for granted that the Romans spoke Latin, by which we mean the sort of Latin many of us learnt in school or through courses like those offered by universities, staffed by classicists.

It won’t have escaped your attention that the language is not called Roman, but Latin. It was the language spoken by people who identified as Latini in Latium, modern Lazio, a single area within Italy. In other words, it was spoken before there was a Rome by other people. Rome is on the north western boundary of the Latin-speaking area; when Camillus conquered the city of Veii, a dozen miles away, the Romans took over a city which spoke Etruscan. The Latini seem to take their name from the broad plain they lived on (Latin latus, broad).

Rome always recognised an affinity with the other Latini, establishing early on ‘Latin Rights’ at Rome – commercium (trade), connubium (marriage to a Roman so that offspring became Roman) and ius migrationis (the right to settle at Rome) – with those people, seen no doubt as a source of additional citizens. The same rights were later offered to people who didn’t speak Latin, termed ‘Junian Latins’, so the rights had become detached from the language spoken.

What can we say about Latin in Italy? Like all Indo-European languages, it seems to have entered Europe during the Bronze Age and to have established itself between the Tiber, the sea, the Apennine Mountains and the Pontine Marshes. This is quite a small part of Italy, and Latin is only one of numerous languages spoken.

 Some, like Etruscan, arrived about the same time, while others, such as Oscan-Umbrian, much used in ritual literature, seem to be related languages which arose elsewhere and arrived in Italy later. Oscan-Umbrian was spoken over a wider area than Latin, although much of it was mountain and sparsely populated. Etruscan, long thought of as an isolate, a language related to no known other, is now considered by many experts to be a very extreme form of Indo-European, originating in Anatolia and related to Lemnian, a language formerly spoken on the island of Lemnos.

Latin has a different word for iron from all other languages, which suggests the term arose in Italy and hence Latin was already in Italy. (Most use variants on iron or isen (Persian and Hindi aahan, Hindi iohaa)). Ferrum may be connected to the word ferro (I carry). The significance of this is that if Latin’s word for iron is unique to Latin, it must have arisen in situ, because there would be no word for iron in a society which did not know about it. So by that token, Latin was in Italy during the early Bronze Age.

There was in imperial times an antiquarian interest in the origins and development of Latin, as can be seen in Varro’s book De Lingua Latina, ‘On the Latin Language’, published in Latin and English by Loeb. It was believed that Latin was derived from Greek, because the official story stated that the Romans were descended from Trojans. They weren’t and in any case the Trojans didn’t speak Greek. Varro explains the differences by saying that time, distance and lack of contact impacted on Aeneas’s Trojans. This is indeed how languages change, but Latin is not descended from Greek. Both are in fact members of the Aryan on Indo-European language family, but Latin is closer to Germanic and Celtic languages. However,

Although it is claimed by Livy, also in the reign of Augustus, that the earliest Romans were literate in 753BC, there is no written evidence from that time, which was in any case the same decade as the earliest Greek works by Homer, so this is probably untrue. The earliest inscriptions to be found date to around 500BC.

Old Latin

There is a marked change visible in Latin at about 75BC. The forms of Latin before that are referred to as ‘Old Latin’. Like all abstractions, it needs to be viewed with caution. We certainly find authors writing in classical Latin who were born and educated before then: Julius Caesar and Cicero immediately spring to mind. So there was no sudden change, but possibly a cementing of older changes which first become visible to us. This may arise from the very much larger number and type of sources.

There are Roman texts in Old Latin which are claimed to date back to c.500BC, but anything not on stone would probably have been destroyed when the Gauls burnt Rome in c.380BC. The Conflict of the Orders in c.360BC would have put paid to anything which survived it. But Plautus, Terence and Cato the Elder wrote in this variety.

Latin probably developed fast. Polybius, writing in c.140BC (in Greek) tell of the discovery of a column carrying the text of a trade treaty with Carthage and the names of the first consuls, dated to 509BC. Even Rome’s top antiquarians could not read the text,  which was only 370 years old. Sadly, this no longer exists. Nor can we know if the column said what it was purported to say. This may have happened, but for political reasons, since Rome had just burnt Carthage to the ground, the experts purported not to understand it in the way that tour guides in extremist countries usher tourists away from controversy. Shakespeare’s first folio plays are from as far back as that, so if not even experts could understand it, Latin must have changed at a considerable pace.

But it should be noted that when the Romans banned the cult of Bacchus in 186BC, the senates consultum of which survives, Latin still looked very different to that of the later classical period. There may have been a lag between speech and writing, so that many words continued to be spelt in older ways, so that there could be no legal dispute. For example the ablative case still has a D at the end, which does not exist in classical Latin, but this may have been a silent letter by then. English and French are fully of textual anachronisms of this sort.

The biggest differences seem to be in the vowels used in words, suggesting that Latin underwent a Great Vowel Shift, not unlike the one English went through around AD1450. One thing that had happened around that time in the Roman world is the very large increase in the number and type of people speaking Latin, with all sorts of backgrounds. The social war ended with citizenship extended to cities all over Italy, many of whom spoke related languages such as Oscan, whose pronunciation may have influenced Latin.

Something I have always pointed out is that, after Julius Caesar, there is no major Roman writer actually from Rome until Boethius in the early sixth century. From Cicero onwards, nearly all Latin authors were provincials.

Several well-known authors of the Golden and Silver ages were actually from what had hitherto been Cisalpine Gaul. The trend may have started with Virgil. Certainly Tacitus and Pliny the Younger were both Gauls; Tacitus tells of a story of himself pronouncing on matters to followers in the arena between events and someone coming up to him and asking ‘Are you Tacitus or Pliny?’ suggesting that both had a marked Gaulish accent.

Vulgar Latin

There was nothing vulgar about Vulgar Latin; it was the normal speech of ordinary people. The term comes from Latin vulgus ‘crowd’ (cf French ‘foule’). The highly rhetorical Latin of classical authors was never likely to be the common speech in the streets. In consequence, we don’t get much of it in the classical texts.

A number of works existed to correct unacceptable Latin. One of these is the Appendix Probi, the Appendix of Probus. This lists over 200 words and short phrases often given wrongly, together with the correct Latin of the day. Many of them correct the mistaken omission of  terminal M in words like numqua(m) and passi(m), indicating they were no longer spoken as they had once been said nasally (as in French words like ‘bon’) and with denial changes the terminal M had been lost. We can see the terminal M in the accusative case being lost too.

Vulgar Latin was sometimes used in classical texts to represent the speech of low, often slave, characters in works of Plautus, Terence and Petronius. It can also be found in graffiti, curses (defixiones) and other informal writings.

Many soldiers were not of Italian ancestry and in some cases made significant mistakes, such as those noted at Bu Njem in north Africa. By contrast, the Latin of the Vindolanda Tablets found near Hadrian’s Wall contains very few non-classical ‘mistakes’, and it seem probable that the authors were not Latin speakers. When people speak a languages they often make mistakes, but if the soldiers’ Latin was minimal and limited to military matters, they would be less prone to make mistakes.

St Patrick’s Latin is odd, but he was only semi-educated, having been abducted to Ireland at sixteen, before he had completed his quadrivium. One of his authentic documents in an open letter to the soldiers of the king of Strathclyde, whose Latin would have been even worse. Gregory of Tours (fl. C. AD580 )comments at the opening of his Histories that no one understands a rhetorician, but everyone understands a plain speaker. In AD722, St Boniface could hardly understand the Latin of Pope Gregory II. In AD813, the Council of Tours ordered priests to preach in the rustica lingua Romana, because nobody in the laity could understand formal Latin.

Could Slaves Speak Latin?

It would depend on the origin and function of the slave. All slaves were of non-citizen origin, mainly foreigners. Those who were body servants or teachers, those who ran a senator’s business for him in a city, or had close or frequent contact with urban Romans, would have spoken Latin and some would have needed to be able to write. However, those who were kept as field hands on latifundia farms needed to know no Latin and it would have been in the interest of a master that they shouldn’t; if they ever escaped, they would have no idea where they were and would not have been able to enlist help if they spoke no Latin or Greek. As long as there was an overseer who spoke their language and some Latin, no more would have been needed.

Other Languages of the Empire

The eastern half of the Empire spoke Greek widely in Greece, Asia Minor and Egypt. Coptic was spoken in Egypt, Syriac in Syria, where it became a major language for Christian literature. The language spoken across the southern Asiatic provinces was Aramaic (still spoken in rural Jordan) and this would have been the language that Jesus spoke. Hebrew was by them a ‘temple language’ only. Latin was not much spoken outside the courts and the army. When Justinian (a Latin speaker from the Danubian provinces) compiled his great Roman Law collection, the Codex (the laws) and the Institutes (jurisprudence) were in Latin, but his new laws (the novels) were in Greek. Since areas such as Armenia and Crimea were within the Empire, there were plenty of other languages spoken, while Arabic was within the ambit of the east.

In the west, the spread of Latin was patchy. There are relatively few Latin texts on Sardinia, which continued to speak Punic. Septimius Severus was a Punic speaker, and the Historia Augusta tells how his sisters spoke Latin so little that they returned home to Africa. Basque clearly survived; Gaulish seems to be patchy.

Despite the special pleading for Britain, Brythonic gives little evidence of survival to the end of its imperial phase. There are lots of Latin words in Old Welsh, lots of non-religious Latin words in Old English, but very few Welsh words in English. This suggests that Welsh is a revival of rural isolated speech (not only from Wales but from the Scottish Borders, Strathclyde, Yorkshire and the Peaks and of course Cornwall) rather than a universal tongue continuing from antiquity. As there now seem to have been significant numbers of Germanic speakers in Roman Britain, so old English may predate the end of Roman Britain.

Conclusion

Since the east, which was much more populated than the west, spoke little Latin, the African lands spoke little enough, and many other languages survived from pre-Roman times, the impact of Latin outside the towns seems limited. Even in Italy, Latin was a minority language for much of its history, while a lot of the population, slaves, spoke Latin only in certain contexts and most of the population spoke Vulgar Latin, while Classical Latin was spoken only from about 75BC to about 200AD, so the impact of Classical Latin is a matter for debate. 

Breaking the Roman Empire (Part 1)

Breaking the Roman Empire (Part 1)

On 31 December 192, members of the Praetorian Guard assassinated the Emperor Commodus. He was the first ruler to be killed in 96 years, Before the end of 193, two more emperors had died and Rome had split into three states fighting a vicious three way civil war. Money, ambition, politics and religion broke the Roman Empire again and again over the following centuries. Rome itself no longer counted. The temples of the classical gods were ransacked, Roman armies were mainly filled with foreigners till there was little difference between the two. People who held Roman citizenship sacked Rome.

The first crack:

In the second half of the second century, the Roman Empire suddenly lost half of its population to plague, probably smallpox (165-180AD). Even the emperor’s brother died of it. The plague had arrived from Persia with a returning army, coming back to fight the rising Germanic problem to the north.

Commodus (reigned 180–192) was faced with a slump in tax money just when he needed more. He doubled taxes. Naturally people objected, so he made his rule fiercer to prevent an uprising. The more he oppressed people, the more they wanted him gone.

If ever there was an example of ‘be careful of what you wish for’, the murder of Commodus was it; a spate of short-term emperors were murdered and Rome fell into three states, west, middle and east, and it took years to put back together.

Didius Julianus, the billionaire who bought the Empire, AD193 (for two months!)

The second crack:

Over fifty years from 235 to 284AD, twenty emperors ruled, which makes the average reign two and a half years. In addition, about thirty others tried to become emperor, and the only difference between legitimate emperors and usurpers was that the former won and the latter lost.

Each emperor withdrew the silver coinage of the previous one, replacing it with his own, each in turn reducing the silver content, so eventually what had once been almost pure silver became a coin of base metal with a thin silver wash. Shopkeepers could see this, so they put their prices up, leading to massive inflation.

Of those twenty emperors, seventeen were assassinated within five years, some within weeks. One died of plague, one vanished into the marshes in enemy territory never to be seen again, and one was captured by the Persians and used as the shah’s footstool for years. To try and hold Rome together, the emperors decided to persecute Christians for the first time in a century, but the more they martyred, the more were inspired to join so they could be martyred too.

 Claudius II, who died of plague

In the middle of this second crisis period, plague returned (c.250–70), either smallpox again or possibly rinderpest, a relative of measles. The Empire was again devastated, as were external enemies who attacked it.

It wasn’t a happy time.

The third crack:

In 260AD, the leaders of the western section, the Prefecture of the Gauls, declared independence, and maintained it for fourteen years. At its height, the Gallic Empire included Britain, Gaul (France, the Low Countries, parts of Germany and Switzerland), Hispania (Spain and Portugal) and Tingis (Tangiers). We do know, however, that they saw themselves as the ‘real’ Roman Empire, as one emperors was Domitian II, and Domitian I was a ‘real’ emperor of the first century AD. The breakaway state survived to AD274 under Tetricus as emperor. The state had consuls and a senate of its own.

Zenobia

At the other end of the empire in AD267, the Roman governor of Palmyra and local king was murdered, which provoked his wife Zenobia (a Romanised version of Zainab) who proclaimed independence of Palmyra, rapidly expanding a Palmyrene empire across Syria, the Levant, Egypt and eastern Anatolia. She was defeated in AD274, taken to Rome, but pardoned and married a senator. She claimed descent from Dido, mythical queen of Carthage, and Cleopatra VII (the famous one) of Egypt, which suggests she was well aware of Roman culture.

Coin showing Aurelian, with captive on reverse 

The ruler who defeated both Zenobia and Tetricus was Aurelian (reigned 270-275). He did a lot to reunify and stabilise the empire. He spared both Tetricus and Zenobia, showing wisdom, and built the wall around Rome that survives to this day. He successfully defended the core empire from numerous Germanic attacks and sensibly abandoned the undefendable province of Dacia (modern Romania). He was strict in fighting corruption and improved the quality of coinage. He executed corrupt mint officials who were stealing the empire’s silver. His anti-corruption measures caused him to be assassinated on his way to fight the Persians.

The oddness of these third century times can be seen in the rising authority of women. Beside Zenobia, we see the Victoria, mother of one Gallic emperor, who ruled in her own name after his death (even issuing her own coins), and Ulpia Severina, who ruled on her own as ‘mother of the camps, the senate and fatherland’, after the murder of her husband Aurelian. The pragmatic use of women in leadership roles in the third century follows on from their cultural impact, seen in the case of Julia Domna, the wife of Septimius Severus; she commissioned literary works and provided a literary salon for authors. She was a Syrian, like Zenobia.

Emperor Probus (foreground) accompanied by the god Sol Invictus 

Probus (reigned 276–283) in six years repaired a lot of the damage, building on the good work of Aurelian. His major contribution was in defeating Germanic incursions and setting some Germans in Britain as guards. The improved stability he created is one reason why Rome survived.

Women in Antiquity: Greece and Rome

Women In Antiquity

 Greece and Rome

The position of women in antiquity varies from era to era, so this is by way of an attempt to map some of the issues.

Greek Women

There is no single situation for women in Greece or Rome. Everything depends on time, location and status. There was no ‘Greece’ throughout the historical period, so what might be normal in Athens might be utterly different fifty miles away in Thebes. Certainly Spartan women and Athenian women would have looked askance at each other.

In Bronze-Age inscriptions from Mycenae, it can be noted that women’s food allocation was 40% that of men, which suggests at the very least different types of work. Related inscriptions show jobs such as cooking, clearing and making clothes were allocated to women, so little has really changed over time.

Homer uses  the epithet ‘white armed’ to described women of superior status, and women on pots are often depicted in white alongside tanned men, suggesting that status for women was tied to indoor activity and men were usually outside in the hot sun. Fashionable suntans were only invented in the 1920s, and before that any woman with a tanned would be assumed to undertake low-level agricultural work. Certainly Victorian women did all they could to seem ‘pale and interesting’.

Research has shown that the average age at death for a Greek women of the early period was 36, men at 44.

In early Greek literature, women are depicted as having a different status and role to men, but not one that is wholly subservient. It should always be remembered that no women in antiquity had ever come upon a better life than that lived in her own society, so it is wrong to import modern ideas of female equality, many of which do not predate 1970.

The first limitation in trying to read women’s status from surviving literature is that we do not have all the literature nor all the authors. The second is that literature is not life. The third is that that many female figures in myth are queens, princesses or their close female servants. Elite status confers many privileges, as do family connections and close contact.

It has been suggested that royal inheritance may have passed down the female line (as it did in many other societies). This is not the same thing as matriarchy. In many myths, the hero marries the king’s daughter and becomes the next king (e.g. Perseus, Oedipus, Jason). This is not about favouring daughters over sons, but rather a way of guaranteeing the next king is adult, kin, battle-hardened and worthy, as well as establishing close ties to other Greek states.

Most of our Greek literature is from Athens, and while Athenian authors wrote about kings, they lived in a republic, having expelled their last king in 753, around the time that Homer was writing. So they could write all they liked in myth about queens and it is hard to demonstrate that you can read anything from myth about women.

The position of women in fifth century BC Athens is notorious. Under the Citizenship Law of Pericles (451BC), women do not have citizenship in their own right, but only as a residual of having had a father who was an Athenian citizen. A (male) Athenian had to have an Athenian citizen father and a mother who was the legitimate daughter of one. Under laws introduced by Solon in the 6^th century BC, an Athenian citizen woman would generally stay at home, and leave outdoor work to a non-citizen (metic) servant or slave. She would live in women’s quarters in the house, and it was considered impolite to speak her name in public. This seems very odd to us, but would have been normal to Athenian women. In Sparta, by contrast, citizen women raised matters in public debates, raised the children and ran the state when the men were at war.

There are many interpretations as to why such laws were introduced, and presumably they mainly codified what was already normal practice. The current consensus is that they were nor fuelled by antagonism towards women, but more to do with protecting and respecting them. But a consensus can change.

It has been noted too that while there are nine known women poets in early Greek antiquity (as well as many women teachers), not one of them was from Athens.

My guess is that Athens became part of the culture of Ionia, the confederation of cities bordering onto the Aegean Sea, the rest of which are in Asia Minor or eastern islands. The culture of the east may have become a strong influence on Athens.

Another possibility is maintaining property within the kin-group. Men who had daughters but no sons might have the daughter inherit, but the nearest male family member then had to marry her. Oedipus marrying Jocasta might be indicative of that.

Many of the women in the myths are not only queens and princesses, they are also foreigners. Medea, Phaedra and several other figures are of course not Greek at all, so how they behave is understood in that context.

Is it possible to read from the myth to a historical reality at any time? Possibly not.

Roman Women

It must be remembered that Roman women (or at least those we can sensibly say much about) date from a much later time.  Rather than the sixth or fifth centuries BC, we are talking mainly about the second century BC onwards.

The very distinctive feature of Roman women is that they don’t have their own names, which may seem bizarre to us. Their name, such as it was, was the female form of their father’s family name, so Gaius Julius Caesar might have a daughter Julia. Two sisters at home might be termed Julia Senior and Julia Junior, three or more might be Julia Prima, Secunda, Tertia, and so on.

It seems odd to us, but the stress is on the daughter as a member of a clan which might be powerful and influential; women usually remained a member of their clan (gens) for life, never joining that of their husband.

Sons didn’t do much better; while they had personal names, there were only fourteen pre-names (praenomina) and many of those (Tertius, Quintus, Sextus, etc.) are only numbers anyway.

Women never had a vote in Roman elections, but by the time of Augustus those had largely ceased anyway. This did not mean that women lacked power and influence.

Roman women were not kept secluded, but they did have a certain requirement, known as tutela. This was a lifelong legal standing which put them under the tutelage of their father, then another kin member and then maybe a brother or son. There was no requirement of the tutor to do any specific thing. A citizen woman who had borne two children which had lived up to the age of one year was freed forever from tutela (if a patrician; plebeians must have had four), suggesting an incentive to beat Roman low birth rates. Ex-Vestals were excused tutela, but they were hardly commonplace.

Roman women had complete freedom of movement, lived their own lives, ran businesses, operated as capitalists, invested in imperial schemes, such as one of Claudius to fund trading ships. They were often involved in traditionally female activities as nurses, weavers, cooks, etc., but were also able to work as full doctors, teachers and a number of other professions.

We know of four Roman women writers, all in the AD period, although one, Proba, wrote centos, poems made up of lines from other poems. Women painters may have been more commonplace as Pliny the Elder provides a list of them (§147-8, p.336), including the famous and successful Ialia in the later republic, whose paintings fetched large sums.

The lot of most women was to marry, which they did at a relatively early age; since their husband had to be independent, so he might be twenty years older than her. Military and provincial affairs might take him far away, so we can imagine the difficulty of a teenage wife trying to supervise a farming estate.

Divorce was always possible in normal marriage and women could instigate it. A divorced woman received her dowry back with interest. Remarriage was straightforward – Rome generally considered marriage a private matter.

The exception to that was the aristocracy, in a form of marriage called manus (literally ‘the hand’), which was restricted to patricians, the oldest clans. A special ritual confarreatio involved sharing a cake made of spelt wheat. This usually prohibited divorce, since this was the same cake used in religious rituals. The vast majority married sine manu, without the hand, and this was a legal but private matter. Many just lived together.

Suggested Reading:

Gardner, JF (1987) Women in Roman Law and Society, London: Routledge.

Pomeroy, S.B. (1994) Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves, London: Pimlico.