It began with a festival. Peoples from
neighboring communities had been invited
to the new city of Rome for a great
feast. As the night waned, they gradually
grew drunk on their hosts' hospitality. 
Unbeknownst to them, however, a plan was
being set in motion.
Whispers and the shuffling of feet were
drowned out by the lively music. Suddenly
the Romans fell upon their guests,
driving the men out of the city and
abducting the women, wrenching them from
their husbands' arms. Their screams echo
off the surrounding hills into the cool
Italian night. And so begins the myth of
the Rape of the Sabines. Rome, and by
extension the world, will never be the
same.
Three times the neighboring communities marched against the Romans, and three times the offending town
was defeated and colonized. Finally the
Sabines themselves marched to war against
Rome, led by their king Titus Tatius. It
is said that here with an enemy army
encamped before the city, a woman named
Tarpeia, a Vestal Virgin, betrays Rome.
The Vestal Virgins were the priestesses
of Vesta, the goddess of the eternal fire
of Rome. She and other vessels tended to
the sacred fire, which was considered
vital for the security of the city, and
took 30 years vows of chastity, with exemption
from the usual childbearing
responsibilities. A Vestal Virgin
betraying the city of Rome would surely
have been an unthinkable act.
Now, there's two versions to this story.
The army of the Sabines encamps on the Lacus Curtius, a low-lying plain
between the hills of the city and the future site of the Forum.
At this time, Rome didn't have one set of
fortifications, but rather multiple on
the separate hills. Actually, it's
debatable whether there were any
fortifications at this time at all, but
we'll go with it. The Sabines scouted
the citadel atop the Capitoline looking
for an easy way to storm the hill and
gain an advantage over the Romans.
They were observed from the roman positions by Tarpeia, daughter of the governor of
the Citadel. There's two versions of what
happens next,
both related by Dionysius of
Halicarnassus. The original story says
that Tarpeia
desired the golden bracelets worn by the
Sabines: "...for at that time the Sabines
wore ornaments of gold and were no
less luxurious in their habits than the
Tyrrhenians." The problem with this lies in
the traditional description of the
Sabines, also related by Dionysius in
the very same book, eleven chapters later.
Describing the Sabines, he writes: "...they
say, that many of the habits of the
Sabines are Spartan, particularly their
fondness for war and their frugality and
a severity in all the actions of
their lives." Needless to say this doesn't
jive well with Tarpeia's avarice and the
gold bracelets. However, Dionysius does
relate another version of events.
According to Lucius Piso, a Roman
statesman roughly contemporary with
Dionysius in the first century, Tarpeia meant
to demand the shields of the Sabines, not
the bracelets. The words specifically
used are: "...the things which all the
Sabines wore on their left arms.
According to Piso, Tarpeia also sent a
messenger to Romulus informing him of
the deal and urging him to: "...[take]
advantage of the ambiguity of the
expression in that agreement, to demand
their defensive arms, and asking him at
the same time to send reinforcement to
the fortress at night, so that the enemy
together with their commander, being
deprived of their arms, might be taking
prisoners." Then, according to Piso, the
messenger instead defected to the
Sabines, so Romulus never got the message.
Regardless of the truth, when Tarpeia
opened the gates and demanded
fulfillment of their oaths, the soldiers
obliged by burying her to death with
their shields.
It seems popular today to claim that the
Tarpeian rock, an outcropping of the
Capitoline hill, bears her name because
her body was flung off it following her
death, but that's not what the sources
say. Neither Livy nor Dionysius
mention this. In fact, according to
Lucius Piso the Romans buried her on the
Capitoline Hill and erected a monument,
performing yearly libations for her, 
hardly the burial of a traitor. Even if
this is true, the Tarpeian rock was
thereafter used for state executions, at
least up until the early Imperial period.
Regardless of how it came to be, the
Sabines were in control of the citadel
on the Capitoline and bloody skirmishing
now ensued. Eventually, both sides came to
the realization that the contest would
have to be decided in a pitched battle.
In the second and final of these battles,
the two armies met on the Lacus Curtius
and blood flowed the entire day.
Then the extraordinary happened.
"At this juncture, the Sabines women, from
the outrage on whom the war originated,
with hair disheveled and garments rent,
the timidity of their sex being overcome
by such dreadful scenes, had the courage
to throw themselves amid the flying
weapons and making a rush across to part
the incensed armies, and assuage their
fury... 'If you are dissatisfied with the
affinity between you, if with our
marriages, turn your resentment
against us, we are the cause of war, we
of wounds and of bloodshed to our
husbands and parents. It were better that
we perish than live widowed or
fatherless without one or other of you.' "
Relegated to mere objects at the start
of the myth the women began as the
spoils of war, essentially non-persons,
and yet here they are raised to the
level of statesmen in their own right,
conciliators and ambassadors. It is
through the actions of the women that a
lasting bond is formed between the
family and the state, as well as between
the Romans and the Sabines. The Sabine
women are thus commended for their
bravery and moral courage. There is one
more important element to the story: the
new wives of the Romans did not come
from Rome itself. The Sabine women are
foreigners, and only through assimilation
do the women become Roman.
Females are thus established in Roman
history as outsiders: the assimilated
other. In addition to establishing the
Roman conception of the female, this
foundational myth justifies Rome's
conquering future: how other peoples can
be made Roman through force of arms and
subjugation to the will of the Roman
state, and how defeated enemies can unify
honorably with Rome.
This myth also establishes marriage as
the mechanism through which conquered
peoples become culturally Roman.
Take a look at this portrait for a minute. Is this a
portrait of a young man, or of a young
woman?
The subject's thick eyebrows seem
masculine, but other features such as the
lips and the nose are far more delicate.
The large eyes and longish hair may
lead you to believe that this is a
portrayal of a young woman, but you would
in fact be mistaken. A contemporary of
the boy in Roman Egypt of the second
century would have noted that such a
lock of hair was worn behind the ears of
young men as a rite of initiation. Take a
look at this one. With such close cropped
hair and rounded face, you would be
forgiven for saying boy. This is in fact
the funerary altar of Julia Victorina and
here is the reverse of that same altar.
Julia lived 10 years and five months. This
mature woman we see on the altar's
reverse is the woman that Julia never
grew into, the matron that she was
destined to be but a responsibility she
never fulfilled. The fate of Julia: such a
death at a tragically young age, is
something that was not uncommon among
those who lived 2,000 years ago, even in
the supposedly "civilized" Roman Empire,
and especially among women.
The gender-bent portraits I just showed
you are meant to illustrate that modern
sensibilities and intuition about gender
generally do not and cannot apply when
discussing cultures as far removed as
ancient Rome. Though it can be easy to
draw direct lines of descent from Roman
institutions to those of today,
particularly when discussing marriage,
such parallels should be approached with
the little caution. There have been more
than a couple of upheavals and paradigm
shifts since the Romans left all their
shit lying around in the dirt for us to
dig up and commercialize. Let us now turn
our attention to our real subject matter:
all the Roman ladies.
Let's get the basics out of the way
first before we take a look at what the
Romans themselves have to say. Gender in
the Roman Empire, like many things in the
ancient world, was very hierarchical.
Women were subservient to and considered
inferior to males in basically all
aspects of society. In medical practice,
the virile male body was seen as
perfection, the antithesis of the female
which was in contrast an inherently
flawed and defective system, often
compared to untamable wild animals or
non-Romans: foreigners. In Roman society,
female sexual desire was seen as a
dangerous and antisocial force.
Young Roman girls required constant
supervision by male guardians to "control
their sexual desires" during their
budding adolescence. The stigma was even
worse for older unmarried women: their
behavior is attacked in scathing lyrical
fashion by writers like Horace. Lesbians
got their share of the hate, being
depicted as unnaturally male with toned
muscles and Greek names to sound foreign
to Roman ears. (Just a warning that both
of these sources are pretty
not-safe-for-work.) At the same time
female fertility was the cornerstone of
a society in which high death rates were
the norm due to warfare and disease.
Marriage was thus the "solution" to the
female "problem" in a way that benefitted
the state. The untamable woman was
"domesticated" by marriage. In Roman eyes,
the purpose of a woman was to get
married and have children:
Roman children. Young girls were reared
with that in mind, receiving little
education, and not even really much of a
childhood. They were forced to grow up
fast, married at 12 or 13 to a man
sometimes decades their senior.
In a letter to a friend, Pliny the
Younger expresses his sorrow at the
passing of a young girl named Minicia:
"She had not yet completed her thirteenth
year, and yet she had the judgment of a
mature woman and the dignity of a matron,
but the sweetness of a little girl and
the modesty of a young maiden... How rarely
and how did merely she played! With what
composure, with what patience, indeed with
what courage did she endure her final
illness!... She had already been engaged to
a fine young man, the day had now been
set for the wedding and we had just
received our invitations. Now our joy has
turned the sadness." What is deeply troubling
for Pliny is that the young girl was so
close to full womanhood before her death.
Not only was Minicia on the brink of
marriage, she was already in many ways
the ideal young Roman maiden, a "little
adult." Before we progress any further and
really dive into the primary sources,
let's take a little time to discuss the
sources themselves.
The women of Rome don't speak to us
directly. They were not the writers nor
the painters or sculptors. The sources we
do have about how women lived their lives
are necessarily passed down to us
through the lens of the perspectives of
others: in particular, of Roman men.
Therefore it is imperative that we
identify the motivations of the source
as well as their purpose, and bear that
in mind. The sources are varied and the
representations of reality they provide
are not straightforward renderings in
the past "as things were," but rather
reflect a particular social situation or
perspective that the author or artist
wishes to convey to his audience. In
literature, satires of women are common.
It seems, in spite of their status, Roman
men had much to complain about.
But again, satire was written for a
specific audience and purpose, usually
for other upper-class men, satires
demanded a rather broad target to attack:
transgressing social peers or characters
such as the overbearing wife or Horace's
insatiable old hag. We should be extra
careful when analyzing satire, as it is
notoriously hard to translate between
different cultures, let alone from a dead
one two millennia old. in contrast to satire are
epitaphs. These commemorations of women
were instead erected by loving husbands
and families
in remembrance of the virtues of a good
wife and mother. Paintings and other
artistic depictions of women such as
sculptures were exclusively commissioned
by and for the rich. Some works were
meant to be idealized depictions of a
subject and are not "realistic" in the
modern sense of photorealism. We should
keep in mind that all these
representations exclude women who did
not meet the criteria for such artwork:
those too poor, those middle-aged and
unmarried, those working in an "immoral"
industry such as prostitution, or even
just as a street vendor. Artistic works
can be useful, but do not cover the wide
range of lifestyles experienced by the
majority of Roman women. Male authors,
artists, and those commissioning such
works promoted standards of womanly
behavior that benefited patriarchy. Women
were depicted as weak, vain, immoral and
were constantly derided in the upper
class literary and social circles of
the day. Only occasionally did a woman rise
above the disdain to display supposedly
"masculine" character traits: those of
self-control, discipline, and devotion to
the state. The ideal Roman matron, the
Matrona, is presented in many of these
representations as a model that Roman
women were expected to emulate.
The sources we use today to piece together
the lives of Roman women thus also
served as the ideological and cultural
framework through which the behaviors of
Roman wives mothers and daughters were
controlled.
To conclude: although we don't have
direct accounts from the women of
ancient Rome, we can use extant literary
sources, invariably written by
upper-class Roman men, to piece together
not only their daily lives but also the
societal expectations and
responsibilities placed upon them. This
approach makes it necessary to
understand the context of these sources
and the motivations of the author or
artist. We also understand that attitudes
towards women in the ancient world
differed greatly from today and in
general it becomes problematic to apply
modern intuition to the realities of a
world 2,000 years removed from our own.
It therefore becomes necessary to also
examine the historical context
surrounding our subject matter so we can
make informed observations and enhance
our understanding of life in ancient Rome.
The most interesting part is yet to
come. In the next few videos, we will pay
close attention to the primary sources
themselves in order to understand what
the Romans thought, believed, and did, at
least according to the author in question.
I hope this gives you a better
understanding of the fundamentals and
origins of the Roman conception of what
it means to be a woman. Stay tuned for
more in my upcoming videos.
As will always be the case,
all of my sources are in the description below.
Until next time!
