Husbands and wives

Roman marriage was, in essence, a simple and private business. Unlike in the modern world, the state played little part in it. In most cases a man and a woman were assumed to be married if they claimed that they were married, and they ceased to be married if they (or if one of them) claimed they no longer were. That, plus a party or two to celebrate the union, was probably all there was to it for the majority of ordinary Roman citizens. For the wealthier, there were often more formal and more expensive wedding ceremonies, featuring a relatively familiar line-up for such a rite of passage: special clothes (brides traditionally wore yellow), songs and processions and the new wife being carried over the threshold of the marital home. Considerations of property bulked larger for the rich too, in particular a dowry that the father of the bride provided, to be returned in the event of divorce. One of Cicero’s problems in the 40s BCE was that he had been forced to repay Terentia’s dowry, while the cash-strapped Dolabella seems not to have repaid Tullia’s, or at least not in full. Marriage to young Publilia would have held out the prospect of a substantial fortune to compensate.

The main purpose of marriage at Rome, as in all past cultures, was the production of legitimate children, who automatically inherited Roman citizen status if both parents were citizens or if they satisfied various conditions governing ‘intermarriage’ with outsiders. That is what lies at the heart of the story of the Sabine Women, which depicts the first marriage in the new city as a process of ‘legitimate rape’ for the purpose of procreation. The same message was paraded repeatedly on the tombstones of wives and mothers throughout Roman history.

One epitaph written sometime in the mid second century BCE, commemorating a certain Claudia, perfectly captures the traditional image: ‘Here is the unlovely grave of a lovely woman,’ it reads. ‘… She loved her husband with her heart. She bore two sons. One of these she leaves on earth, the other under the earth. She was graceful in her speech and elegant in her step. She kept the home. She made wool. That’s what there is to say.’ The proper role of the woman, in other words, was to be devoted to her husband, to produce the next generation, to be an adornment, to be a household manager and to contribute to the domestic economy, by spinning and weaving. Other commemorations single out for praise women who had remained faithful wives to only one husband throughout their lives, and emphasise ‘female’ virtues of chastity and fidelity. Contrast the epitaphs of Scipio Barbatus and his male descendants, where it is military action, political office holding and prominence in public life that capture the headlines.

49. A Roman wall-painting depicts an idealised scene of an ancient wedding, mixing gods and humans. The veiled bride sits at the centre, on her new marital bed, being encouraged by the goddess Venus sitting with her. Against the bed leans a louche figure of the god Hymen, one of the deities supposed to protect marriage. On the far left, human figures make preparations for bathing the bride.

To what extent this image of the Roman wife was, at any period, more wishful thinking than an accurate reflection of social reality is impossible to know. There was undoubtedly a lot of vociferous nostalgia in Rome for the tough old days, when wives were kept in their place. ‘Egnatius Metellus took a cudgel and beat his wife to death because she had drunk some wine,’ insisted one first-century CE writer, with apparent approval, referring to an entirely mythical incident in the reign of Romulus. Even the emperor Augustus took advantage of the traditional associations of wool working, in what was something like the ancient equivalent of a photo opportunity, by having his wife Livia pose at her loom in their front hall in full public view. But the chances are that those tough old days were in part the product of the imagination of later moralists, as well as a useful theme for later Romans to exploit in establishing their old-fashioned credentials.

No less problematic is the competing image, prominent in the first century BCE, of a new style of liberated woman, who supposedly enjoyed a free social, sexual, often adulterous life, without much constraint from husband, family or the law. Some of these characters were conveniently dismissed as part of the demi-monde of actresses, showgirls, escorts and prostitutes, including one celebrity ex-slave, Volumnia Cytheris, who was said to have been the mistress at one time or another of both Brutus and Mark Antony, so sleeping with both Caesar’s assassin and his greatest supporter. But many of them were the wives or widows of high-ranking Roman senators.

The most notorious of all was Clodia, the sister of Cicero’s great enemy Clodius, the wife of a senator who died in 59 BCE, and the lover of the poet Catullus, among a string of others. Terentia is rumoured to have had her suspicions about even Cicero’s relations with Clodius’ sister. She was alternately attacked and admired as a promiscuous temptress, scheming manipulator, idolised goddess and borderline criminal. For Cicero she was ‘the Medea of the Palatine’, a clever coinage linking the passionate, child-murdering witch of Greek tragedy with Clodia’s place of residence in Rome. Catullus gave her the soubriquet Lesbia in his poetry, not only as camouflage but in order to gesture back to the Greek poet Sappho, from the island of Lesbos: ‘Let’s live, my Lesbia, and let’s love / And the mutterings of stern old men / Let’s value them at a single penny … / Give me a thousand kisses’, as one poem starts.

Colourful as this material is, it cannot be taken at face value. Part of it is not much more than erotic fantasy. Part of it is a classic reflection of common patriarchal anxieties. Throughout history, some men have justified their domination of women by simultaneously relishing and deploring an image of the dangerous and transgressive female, whose largely imaginary crimes, sexual promiscuity (with the uncomfortable question marks this poses over any child’s paternity) and irresponsible drunkenness demonstrate the need for tight male control. The story of Egnatius Metellus’ uncompromising line with his tipsy wife and the rumours of Clodia’s wild parties are two sides of the same ideological coin. Besides, in many cases the lurid descriptions of female criminality, power and excess are often not really about the women they purport to describe at all but vehicles for a debate about something quite different.

When Sallust focuses on a couple of women supposedly prominent in Catiline’s conspiracy, he is using them as terrible symbols of the decadent immorality of the society that produced Catiline. ‘Whether she was keener to squander her money or her reputation, it would have been hard to decide,’ he jibes about one senator’s wife, and the mother of one of Caesar’s assassins, capturing what he saw as the spirit of the age. Cicero, for his part, used Clodia as a successful deflecting tactic in a tricky court case where he was defending one of his dodgier young friends, who was also one of Clodia’s ex-lovers, on a charge of murder. It is from the speech he delivered then that the vast majority of the disreputable details of her behaviour come: from the serial adulteries to the wild beach-parties-turned-orgies. Cicero’s aim was to shift the blame from his client by discrediting a jealous Clodia, making her a laughing stock, a bad influence on his client and the principal villain. It is hard to imagine that Clodia was an entirely celibate, stay-at-home wife and widow, but if she read Cicero’s depiction of her in the comfort of her elegant Palatine home, whether she would have recognised herself is quite another matter.

It is clear, however, that Roman women in general had much greater independence than women in most parts of the classical Greek or Near Eastern world, limited as it must seem in modern terms. The contrast is particularly striking with classical Athens, where women of wealthy families were supposed to live secluded lives, out of the public eye, largely segregated from men and male social life (the poor, needless to say, did not have the cash or the space to enforce any such divisions). There were, to be sure, uncomfortable restrictions on women in Rome too: the emperor Augustus, for example, relegated them to the back rows of the theatres and gladiatorial arenas; the suites for women in public baths were usually markedly more cramped than those for men; and in practice male activities probably dominated the swankier areas of a Roman house. But women were not meant to be publicly invisible, and domestic life does not seem to have been formally divided into male and female spaces, with gendered no-go areas.

Women also regularly dined with men, and not only the sex workers, escorts and entertainers who provided the female company at classical Athenian parties. In fact, one of the early misdeeds of Verres turned on this difference between Greek and Roman dining practices. In the 80s BCE, when he was serving in Asia Minor, more than a decade before his stint in Sicily, Verres and some of his staff engineered an invitation to dinner with an unfortunate Greek, and after a considerable quantity of alcohol had been consumed they asked the host if his daughter could join them. When the man explained that respectable Greek women did not dine in male company, the Romans refused to believe him and set out to find her. A brawl followed in which one of Verres’ bodyguards was killed and the host was drenched with boiling water; he was later executed for murder. Cicero paints the whole incident in extravagant terms, almost as a rerun of the rape of Lucretia. But it also involved a series of drunken misunderstandings about the conventions of female behaviour across the cultural boundaries of the empire.

Some of the legal rules that governed marriage and women’s rights at this period reflect this relative freedom. There were, it is true, some hard lines claimed on paper. It may have been a nostalgic myth that once upon a time a man had the right to cudgel to death his wife for the ‘crime’ of drinking a glass of wine. But there is some evidence that the execution of a wife who was caught in adultery was technically within the husband’s legal power. There is, however, not a single known example of this ever happening, and most evidence points in a different direction. A woman did not take her husband’s name or fall entirely under his legal authority. After the death of her father, an adult woman could own property in her own right, buy and sell, inherit or make a will and free slaves – many of the rights that women in Britain did not gain till the 1870s.

The only restriction was the need for an appointed guardian (tutor) to approve whatever decision or transaction she made. Whether Cicero was being patronising or misogynistic or (as some critics generously think) having a joke when he put this rule down to women’s natural ‘weakness in judgement’ is impossible to tell. But there is certainly no sign that for his wife it was much of a handicap: whether she was selling a row of houses to raise funds for Cicero in exile or raking in the rents from her estates, no tutor is ever mentioned. In fact, one of the reforms of Augustus towards the end of the first century BCE or early in the next was to allow freeborn citizen women who had borne three children to be released from the requirement to have a guardian; ex-slaves had to have four to qualify. It was a clever piece of radical traditionalism: it allowed women new freedoms, provided they fulfilled their traditional role.

Oddly, women had much less freedom when it came to the act of marriage itself. For a start, they had no real option whether to marry or not. The basic rule was that all freeborn women were to be married. There were no maiden aunts, and it was only special groups, such as the Vestal Virgins, who opted, or were compelled, to remain single. What is more, the freedom a woman enjoyed in the choice of husband could be very limited, certainly among the rich and powerful, whose marriages were regularly arranged to cement alliances, whether political, social or financial. But it would be naive to imagine that the daughter of a peasant farmer who wanted to do a deal with his neighbour, or the slave girl who was to be freed in order to marry her owner (a not uncommon occurrence), had much more say in the decision.

Marriage alliances underpinned some major developments in Roman politics in the late Republic. In 82 BCE, for example, Sulla attempted to secure Pompey’s loyalty by ‘giving’ him his stepdaughter as a wife, although she was married to someone else at the time and pregnant by him; the gamble did not pay off, because the poor woman almost immediately died in childbirth. Twenty years later, Pompey sealed his agreement with Caesar in the Gang of Three by marrying Caesar’s daughter, Julia. The stakes were not quite so high for Cicero and his daughter Tullia, but it is clear that family advancement and good connections were always in Cicero’s mind, even if things did not necessarily go his way.

How to find a husband for Tullia was, he admitted, the thing that was worrying him most as he left Rome for the province of Cilicia in 51 BCE. After her two brief and childless marriages to men from distinguished families – one ending in the man’s death, the other in divorce – a third match had to be arranged for her. On this occasion Cicero’s letters offer a glimpse of the negotiations, as he canvassed a variety of suitable, and less suitable, candidates. One did not seem to be a serious proposition; another had nice manners; of another he reluctantly wrote, ‘I doubt that our girl could be prevailed upon’, acknowledging that Tullia had some say in the matter. But communications were a problem. As it took roughly three months for a letter to go from Cilicia to Rome and a reply to get back, it was hard for Cicero to keep control of the process, and he was more or less forced to leave the final decision to Terentia and Tullia. They picked none of his top choices but the recently divorced Dolabella instead, another man with unimpeachable aristocratic credentials and, by Roman accounts, an engaging rogue, inveterate seducer and unusually short. ‘Who has tied my son-in-law to his sword?’ is one of Cicero’s best-remembered jokes.

Arranged marriages of this kind were not necessarily grey and emotionless unions. It was always said that Pompey and Julia were devoted to each other, that he was devastated when she died in childbirth in 54 BCE and that her death contributed to the political breakdown between Pompey and Caesar. The marriage, in other words, proved rather too successful for its intended purpose. And several of Cicero’s earliest surviving letters to Terentia, whom he presumably married after some similar arrangement, are full of expressions of intense devotion and love, whatever emotions lay underneath: ‘Light of my life, my heart’s desire. To think that you, darling Terentia, are so tormented, when everyone used to go to you for help,’ he wrote to her from exile in 58 BCE.

Equally, there are plenty of signs of marital squabbles, discontents and disappointments. Tullia soon found Dolabella more rogue than engaging, and within three years the pair were living apart. But the most persistently miserable marriage in Cicero’s circle was that of his brother, Quintus, and Pomponia, the sister of Cicero’s friend Atticus. Predictably, and maybe unfairly, Cicero’s letters throw most of the blame at the wife, but they also capture some of the arguments in uncannily modern terms. On one occasion, when Pomponia snapped, ‘I feel like a stranger in my own house’, in front of guests, Quintus came out with the classic complaint ‘There, you see what I have to put up with every day!’ After twenty-five years of this, they eventually divorced. Quintus is supposed to have remarked, ‘Nothing is better than not having to share a bed.’ Pomponia’s reaction is unknown.

It is, however, Cicero’s short-lived second marriage to Publilia, then in her early to mid teens, that sticks out from the all other stories. Cicero and Terentia had divorced, probably at the beginning of 46 BCE. Whatever the main reasons for the split – and Roman writers came out with plenty of unreliable speculation on the subject – the latest surviving letter from him to her, written in October 47 BCE, suggests that relations between the two had changed. Just a few curt lines to a wife he had not seen for two years (partly because he had been away with Pompey’s forces in Greece), it amounts to a couple of instructions for his imminent arrival. ‘If there is no basin in the bathhouse, have one installed’ is the basic gist. Just over a year later, after considering other possibilities – including Pompey’s daughter and a woman he deemed ‘the ugliest I have ever seen’ – Cicero married a girl at least forty-five years his junior. Was this usual?

A first marriage at around fourteen or fifteen was not remarkable for a Roman girl. Tullia was betrothed to her first husband when she was eleven and married by fifteen; when Cicero in 67 BCE refers to betrothing ‘dear little Tullia to Gaius Calpurnius Piso’, he means exactly that, little. Atticus was already considering future husbands when his daughter was just six. The elite might be expected to have arranged such alliances early. But there is plenty of evidence in the epitaphs of ordinary people for girls being married in their mid teens and occasionally as young as ten or eleven. Whether or not these marriages were consummated is an awkward and unanswerable question. By the same token, men seem generally to have married for the first time in their mid to late twenties, with a standard age gap in a first marriage of something like ten years, and some young brides would have found themselves married to an even older man on his second or third time around. Whatever the relative freedoms of Roman women, their subordination was surely grounded in that disequilibrium between an adult male and what we would call a child bride.

That said, the age gap of forty-five years caused puzzlement even at Rome. Why had Cicero done it? Was it just for the money? Or, as Terentia claimed, was it the silly infatuation of an old man? In fact, he faced some direct questions about why on earth, at his age, he was marrying a young virgin. On the day of the marriage he is supposed to have replied to one of these, ‘Don’t worry, she’ll be a grown-up woman [mulier] tomorrow’. The ancient critic who quoted this response thought that it was a brilliantly witty way of deflecting criticism and held it up for admiration. We are likely to put it somewhere on the spectrum between uncomfortably coarse and painfully bleak – one powerful marker of the distance between the Roman world and our own.

50. A Roman tombstone for husband and wife (first century BCE). Both are ex-slaves: the husband on the left, Aurelius Hermia, is identified as a butcher from the Viminal hill in Rome; on the right, his wife, Aurelia Philematium, is described as ‘chaste, modest and not gossiped about’. More disturbing for us is the timescale of their relationship. They had met when she was seven and, as the text says, ‘he took her on his knee’.