A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (10 page)

Messalina’s marriage was the moral equivalent of Julia’s sex romp on the rostrum from which her father had pronounced his anti-adultery laws – a defiant act of sexual theatre. But it lacked Julia’s political motivation. Messalina was quickly found out and the list of her outrageous sexual misdemeanours handed over to Claudius by the emperor’s staff, who were growing concerned at her increasing license. She was ordered to commit suicide. But the young woman’s nerve failed her, and an officer of the Praetorian guard stabbed her to death.

For a more contemporary account of Rome’s first-century dynastic battles, we must turn to the dark, ironic genius of Tacitus, who broods over the years when the Julio-Claudian family was tightening its blood-stained grip on the administrative machinery that ran the vast Empire. He provides us with extraordinary portraits of the early Caesars and their women. There is none more evocative than that of the woman who succeeded Messalina as empress, Julia Agrippina, the mother of Nero. Agrippina came closer to power than any Roman woman before or after her.

Conservatives and misogynists used Agrippina’s extraordinary rise to power as proof that Cato the Elder had been right, when over 200 years earlier he had warned of the dangers of women’s emancipation and the fear of their taking political power: ‘Once they have achieved equality, they will be your masters . . .’

Agrippina was one of nine children of Germanicus, the emperor Tiberius’ popular nephew, and Agrippina the Elder, one of the children of the first Julia, Augustus’ doomed daughter. Six children, three boys and three girls, survived into adulthood. Only one, Agrippina’s younger sister Drusilla, died of natural causes. All the others were to die violently, victims of the dynastic struggles that shaped the early Empire. Agrippina would live to be the sister, wife and mother of
emperors. Malicious gossip has it that she was the lover of all three.

As the great-great-great granddaughter of Julius Caesar’s sister, Agrippina inherited an imperious tradition, one as fully realized in her ambitious character as it was in her mother’s. Agrippina the Elder, while accompanying her husband on a campaign in Germany, had stopped a panicky legion from abandoning its post by effectively seizing command, and holding an important Rhine crossing until Germanicus and his army returned from a dangerous expedition into the interior. Germanicus was the JFK of Rome, one of the great ‘What Ifs’ of history, cheated of absolute power by an untimely (and suspicious) death. Agrippina’s mother enjoyed the support of a powerful faction within Rome called by Tacitus ‘the party of Agrippina’, which sought to advance her and her children’s claims to supreme power. She had commanded troops, now she commanded a party; she earned herself the opprobrium of being called a ‘masculine’ woman. But more than that – her ‘masculine’ ambition inspired fear. Tiberius asked her, ‘My girl, do you think you are badly done by if you do not rule?’ It finally drove him to exiling her. She starved herself to death in protest and died in
AD
33. Her daughter Julia Agrippina was almost 18. She would live to provoke the same name-calling and inspire the same fears.

The younger Agrippina married Claudius, her uncle and third husband, in
AD
49, after a special law was passed making marriage between niece and uncle legal. ‘From this moment the country was transformed,’ wrote Tacitus. ‘Complete obedience was accorded to a woman – and not a woman like Messalina who toyed with national affairs to satisfy her appetites. This was a vigorous, almost masculine despotism.’
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Within a year, the new wife appeared on official coins alongside Claudius, with the title Augusta, marking the first
occasion on which the wife of a living emperor enjoyed this honour. ‘The significance of Agrippina’s elevation cannot be exaggerated,’ wrote one historian. ‘Perhaps more than anything else, it conveyed the notion of empress, not, of course, in the technical sense of a person having the formal authority to make legally binding decisions, but as someone who could lay equal claim to the majesty that the office of emperor conveyed.’
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In
AD
51, after a long war in the new province of Britain, the Celtic rebel Caratacus was brought to Rome in chains. Agrippina appeared with the emperor to meet the triumphant legions and their prisoners, some of whom were freed. Tacitus noted:

Released from their chains, they offered to Agrippina, conspicuously seated on another dais nearby, the same homage and gratitude as they had given to the emperor. That a woman should sit before Roman standards was an unprecedented novelty. She was asserting her partnership in the empire her ancestors had won.
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Her privileges continued to accrue, including the right to receive the supplications of the courtiers and clients who paid homage to Claudius each morning. The sculpted heads of Agrippina from this period show her wearing a diadem, an unheard of honour. At the same time as she was consolidating her power, she was advancing the interests of her son. Claudius formally adopted Nero as his own, thus placing him in front of his own son Britannicus, who was several years younger, in the line of succession. Agrippina’s rise to power, however, began to provoke fierce criticism and hostility. Eventually Claudius began to take note. But Agrippina pounced first. In
AD
54, Claudius died suddenly, almost
certainly poisoned, and Nero was emperor, just two months short of his seventeenth birthday. When the head of the palace guard asked the new emperor for a new password, he replied at once: ‘Optima mater’ – the Best of Mothers – a grimly ironic beginning for a reign that would be darkened by matricide.

At first Agrippina’s political position seemed stronger than ever. Early on in her son’s reign, imperial coins were issued in Rome, depicting mother and son facing one another, conveying the impression of joint rule, for which no precedent existed in Roman law. More shocking still to Roman custom, a contemporary relief of the two shows Agrippina placing a laurel wreath, the symbol of military victory, on her son’s head. Romans of course suspected that Nero was emperor thanks to his mother, but were appalled that it was so boldly acknowledged. Equally revolutionary was the decision to allow Agrippina to hear the proceedings of the Senate from behind a veiled enclosure specially constructed for the purpose. She had achieved ‘the unthinkable’.
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Public opposition to her was dangerous, but privately the muttering grew louder about her ‘female arrogance’.

Agrippina’s success in having her role publicly celebrated showed a character unable to accept the ‘power behind the throne’ destiny reserved for women. Nor did she conceal her rage at aspects of Nero’s private life. She no doubt hoped that he would be more like his grandfather Germanicus than his father Domitius, Agrippina’s first husband, who had been notorious for his coarseness and brutality. But Nero disappointed her and she made it known. Then he began to fear her. He murdered Britannicus (by poison) in front of her eyes to forestall any attempt she might make to follow through on her foolish threats to install Claudius’ son on the throne. Driven by dread, Nero concocted a series of elaborate plots to get rid of her. Mixing comedy with tragedy, he had a collapsible boat
built which precipitated her into the Bay of Naples. Agrippina was injured but she swam ashore. Terrified that the people would rally to her support, he dispatched one of his most reliable thugs. In one of the great dramatic scenes from history, Tacitus describes how the murderer and his helpers surrounded Agrippina in her bedroom, under the flickering lamp light. As the assassin raised his sword, she bared her belly and cried: ‘Strike here,’ pointing to the womb that bore Nero.
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The tragedy of Agrippina was in a sense unavoidable. Roman women could become doctors, run shops, practise law and even fight in the arena, but they could not take an overtly political role. Looking back, it seems as foolish and destructive a custom as those the Taliban enforced in Afghanistan in 1999 to exclude women from any sphere of activity outside the home. In both cases, misogyny wasted a potential source of talent. Who could now doubt that Agrippina and her mother would have made competent rulers? But it was unthinkable then, as it still is in many places today, that women should rule. As a result, the insistence on male heirs threw the Roman state into one series of destructive crises after another which drained men and resources.

There would be other powerful women during the four centuries that the Empire endured after Agrippina’s death, but none would ever dare directly challenge as she had the political constraints that bound them or the misogyny upon which they were based.

Increasingly, as the Empire first waxed and then waned, sensation-seeking became the key to the Roman imagination and its most misogynistic manifestations. Central to that sensation-seeking was the spectacle of slaughter provided on a regular basis by the gladiatorial games. Begun as private displays of valour and skill held at funerals in honour of the deceased, by the imperial period these displays had been
transformed into vast, expensive public spectacles of carnage and cruelty. The most famous venue for these contests was the Coliseum in Rome, which could hold up to 90,000 spectators. At its opening in
AD
80, 5,000 wild animals were slaughtered during 100 days of hunts and gladiatorial combats. Women occasionally took part in the gladiatorial contests – one relief shows two women combatants, who fought under the names Amazonia and Achillia, confronting each other; they are not wearing helmets because the spectators wanted to see their faces. A whole section of Juvenal’s
Sixth Satire
expresses the usual mixture of outrage and fascination at the spectacle of women training to fight:

How can a woman be decent

Sticking her head in a helmet, denying the sex she was born with? [. . .]

These are the women who sweat in the thinnest, most flimsy of garments;

Even the sheerest silks are too hot for their delicate bodies

Hear her grunt and groan as she works at it, parrying, thrusting . . .
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What is supposed to be an expression of disapproval conveys instead the lust for the woman who transgresses. But more often women in the arena were there as victims, not protagonists. Because of this, the Coliseum, while not known as a monument to misogyny, can lay claim to having played a role in the history of that hatred, however accidentally.

Convicted criminals were fed to wild animals in the arena during interludes between the more interesting gladiatorial contests. Special horrors were reserved for women convicted of murder. From the second century
AD
comes one fictional account that seems to be based on real events. A woman
convicted of murdering her husband and children was tied spread-eagled to a luxurious bed in the middle of the arena, ready to be raped by a jackass. Hungry lions waited in the wings to finish her off. This spectacle was put on by popular demand.
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Some women were raped to death in the arena during the recreation of mythological scenes, usually enacting one of Zeus’ numerous assaults in animal form on a mortal female.

Sexual fantasies about animals mating with women are common throughout human history. A battery of social, psychological and moral mechanisms usually keeps our fantasies, the unusual and the mundane, separate from our ability to realize them. But in Rome the border between even the most violent fantasy and reality was breached on such a regular basis that it became commonplace to enjoy the most sadistic spectacles imaginable. The immediate impact of this on the male psyche is well documented, at least anecdotally: prostitutes are said to have done a roaring trade under the arches of the Coliseum after the bloody games had concluded.

While the Roman mob satiated itself, the late Empire staggered from crisis to crisis. In the turmoil, a new religious movement was gathering strength. Christianity would dramatically change first the Empire, then the world and the lives of its inhabitants forever. In a corner of the ruined Coliseum, now one of the most popular tourist attractions in the world, stands a black cross, which millions of visitors gaze at each year. It is a memorial to the Christian martyrs who died there. Many, if not a majority of these, were women – ironically, the religion they were devoted to was to play a crucial role, unparalleled to this day, in the history of misogyny.

The rise of Christianity from an obscure sect to the world’s dominant religion is a phenomenon unprecedented in human history. So too is the power and complexity of its misogynistic vision, which derives, essentially, from three sources.

From the Jews, the early Christians took the Fall of Man myth, as well as the notion of sin and a profound sense of shame. Later, from the Greeks, they borrowed aspects of Plato’s dualistic philosophy and Aristotle’s ‘scientific’ proofs of women’s inherent inferiority. To this potent brew, Christianity itself contributed its central and unique tenet, that God has intervened in human history in the person of Jesus Christ to save mankind from death, sin and suffering, the evil effects of the fall from grace brought about by woman.

The Christians had inherited the Jewish attitude to history as
a preordained unfolding of God’s plan: the chosen Church replaced the chosen people, just as centuries later Karl Marx would pass the mantle of historical determinism on to the shoulders of the chosen class. But no other religion before or since has been so audacious as to claim that God was a historical person as real as Julius Caesar or Marilyn Monroe, and that salvation would come only to those who recognized him. It endowed Christian teaching with the power of Divine Revelation. When backed by an aggressive, crusading, and omnipotent institution, it proved a lethal combination, especially to heretics and women. The bitterest irony in this is that during Christianity’s first three centuries, women were a key to its remarkable success, thanks to the fact that it gave them a kind of liberation unheard of in the ancient world.