A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (8 page)

As recounted by Livy, in 186
BC
a former slave girl confessed to the authorities that she had been involved in the cult of Bacchus, the wine god, whose worship had spread to Rome from Greece. Prompted by fears for her lover, who was under pressure from his mother to join the cult, the freedwoman painted a lurid picture of Roman matrons gathering by night to indulge in wine binges and orgiastic sex. ‘Unnatural’ sex acts had become normal and, she claimed, were part of the initiation rites. Anyone who resisted the cult’s sexual demands was killed, and their bodies secretly buried. Women from the most distinguished families, dressed up in animal skins as devotees of Bacchus, got drunk, became possessed, and with loose hair flowing wildly behind them, went racing through the night, crying and screaming gibberish. The cult followers came from all social classes, including slaves. For the Romans, always on the look-out for slave rebellion, such a gathering would have seemed socially as well as sexually subversive, a threat to the prevailing order.

The former slave’s frightening tale strikingly resembles the accusations of sexual abandonment and promiscuity brought against medieval women thought to be witches. The female Bacchae, like the later women accused of witchcraft, were accused of murdering anyone who defied them, including their children. Some were said to perform black magic. We see the portrait of the medieval witch taking shape: women, young
and beautiful, or hags with serpents entwined in their hair, abandoning themselves in drunken orgies, making hellish concoctions at the dead of night out of the blood of frogs, bones and the remains of children they have murdered. This misogynistic portrait of female wickedness was born some twelve centuries before the first witch was burned in Europe. The Roman authorities arrested and executed the men and handed over the women cultists to their families where the
pater familias
administered the death penalty. As many as 7,000 people were arrested and executed.

The association of upper-class women with plots and conspiracies preoccupied another Roman historian Sallust (86–35
BC).
In 63
BC
a gang of reckless patricians, driven to desperation by debt, conspired to overthrow the state and seize power. At their head was Lucius Catiline a man whom Sallust in his account of the plot describes as being of ‘powerful intellect and great physical strength’, but having a vicious and depraved nature.
⁴⁷
Sallust, himself a failed revolutionary, singled out one aspect of the conspiracy as especially worrying:

About this time, Catiline is said to have gained many adherents of every condition, including a number of women who in their earlier days had lived extravagantly on money by prostituting themselves, and then, when advancing age reduced their incomes without changing their luxurious tastes, had run headlong into debt. These women, he thought, would do good service by acting as agitators among the city slaves and organizing acts of incendiarism; their husbands, too, could be either induced to join his cause, or murdered.
⁴⁸

Only one of these upper-class prostitutes turned revolutionaries is named – Sempronia. Descended from one of the most renowned families in Rome she was:

a woman who had committed many crimes that showed her to have the reckless daring of a man. Fortune had favoured her abundantly, not only with birth and beauty, but with a good husband and children. Well educated in Greek and Latin literature, she had greater skill in lyre-playing and dancing than there is any need for a respectable woman to acquire . . . There was nothing that she set a smaller value on than seemliness and chastity . . . Her passions were so ardent that she more often made advances to men than they did to her. Many times already she had broken a solemn promise, repudiated a debt by perjury, and been an accessory to murder . . . Yet, her abilities were not to be despised. She could write poetry, crack a joke, and converse at will with decorum, tender feeling, or wantonness; she was in fact a woman of ready wit and considerable charm.
⁴⁹

Sempronia was for a time Julius Caesar’s mistress, and one of her children, Decimus Brutus, was widely rumoured to be Caesar’s. (Brutus was more successful as a conspirator than his mother, being one of the group of assassins who murdered Caesar in 44
BC
).

Catiline’s plot was betrayed, and the conspirators executed. However, Sempronia escaped unscathed, and later historians have questioned Sallust’s allegations of her complicity. What is not in doubt is the mixture of disapproval and powerful fascination with which the historian rendered Sempronia’s portrait. Dancing, writing poetry, having affairs, plotting with revolutionaries, stirring up slaves; it is certain that had there been marijuana in Rome, Sempronia would have smoked it. She is the prototype of the bohemian intellectual woman against whom in all her many manifestations moralists for centuries will rant and rail. In Sallust’s eyes, her real fault was that she was a ‘modern’ woman. His account is meant to be a
warning of what happens when women pursue pleasure as openly as do men. Women’s taste for extravagance leads them into sexual misbehaviour which in turn transforms them into desperate revolutionaries, prepared even to consort with slaves. No more anxious and worrisome association was imaginable for Roman rulers than that between rebellious women and restless slaves.

In the years following the failed conspiracy, Rome was convulsed by the horrors of a civil war which finally brought down the republican form of government and replaced it with the one-family rule of the Caesars. As a handful of powerful families began to struggle for dominance over the growing Empire, and political action in the public arena became more dangerous, women were forced back into a more familiar area of competition. Access to power meant access to the ruler or a likely prospect; it meant the struggle to promote the prospects of their offspring, especially the males. The closer to the source of power they were, the deadlier the struggle became, providing the moralizing misogynists of imperial Rome with an entire gallery of female rogues who defied the standards of modesty, restraint and passivity expected of the traditional matron.

The most notable of these women who cast a long shadow over the twilight years of the Republic could not be expected to be an icon of matronly values. Indeed, Cleopatra (69–30
BC
) was not even a Roman, but an Egyptian pharaoh who was a direct descendant of one of Alexander the Great’s Macedonian generals. Romans seized on her as dramatic proof of the evils of allowing women to have an influence on matters of state and of public policy. They helped make Cleopatra one of perhaps the two women from the ancient world – the other being Helen of Troy – whose name is still recognizable to ordinary people today. The deep impression that Cleopatra made on Roman and Greek historians, poets and chroniclers
was passed on to Shakespeare, Bernard Shaw and Hollywood, where as portrayed by Elizabeth Taylor she was the subject of one of the biggest flops in the history of film-making.

Cleopatra was the descendant of Ptolemy, one of the Macedonian generals who inherited parts of the vast empire of Alexander the Great upon his death in 323
BC.
She was the product of the Hellenistic period, which begins with Alexander’s death and ends in 30
BC
with her suicide and the absorption of Egypt into the Roman Empire. During the intervening three centuries, Greek women had escaped from many of the suffocating restrictions of the Classical period and enjoyed improvements in their status, including more liberal marriage contracts and educational opportunities. They also took a more prominent role in political affairs. Cleopatra was the last and most famous of a line of Hellenistic queens who took part in the dynastic battles which raged for control of the remains of Alexander’s empire.

Her affairs with Julius Caesar and, after his assassination, with his lieutenant Mark Antony, have become the stuff of tragedy, high romance and Hollywood kitsch. Both men were charmed more by her wit and intelligence than by her beauty. According to the biographer Plutarch, she could speak ten languages, converse with Caesar into the small hours of the morning, and respond in kind to the bawdy banter of Antony. She was the only one of the long line of Ptolemies who could speak the native language of Egypt. Her lively intellect extended into many spheres – she even penned a treatise on hairdressing and cosmetics.
⁵⁰
But to her contemporaries in Rome, she was a devious, bewitching, and overweeningly ambitious seductress, who had to be stopped at all costs. In the contest between Octavian and Antony for absolute imperial power, his enemies portrayed the latter as a gormless soldier. The accusation that she was using Antony to gain
control of the Empire became a vital part of Octavian’s propaganda. As with Sempronia, Cleopatra’s enemies linked her intellectual independence to her wanton sexuality. It was typical of the age-old campaign to prove that women who are smart enough to think for themselves have no morals; or if they have, will surely lose them. So Horace and other Roman poets of the period directed their invective at her alleged promiscuity. She was nicknamed in Greek ‘Meriochane’, which means, ‘she who parts for a thousand men’. In a pornographic fantasy that eclipses
Debbie Does Dallas
, her detractors have her performing fellatio on a hundred Roman nobles in one day.

Antony was clearly comfortable with accomplished and intelligent women. His wife Fulvia was the daughter of Sempronia, and has been described by one modern historian as an ‘Amazon’.
⁵¹
His political enemies used this as proof that he had been ‘unmanned’ by such women and therefore was not fit to rule the Empire. After Antony’s defeat in 31
BC
, Cleopatra tried to seduce Octavian, but he stayed away from her. Rather than be dragged to Rome in chains to grace his triumph, she committed suicide.

However, Cleopatra lives on, while the obscenities intended to insult her are seen now for what they were and instead demean the men who made them. It is her wit and charm that triumphed in the end, as celebrated by Shakespeare in some of the most famous lines ever written about a woman:

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetite they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies. For vilest things
Become themselves in her, that the holy priests
Bless her for when she is riggish.
⁵²

As the Roman Republic passed into history, a few women made their voices heard publicly as speakers and advocates, much to the outrage of the historian Valerius Maximus. ‘We must be silent no longer about these women whom neither the condition of their nature nor the cloak of modesty could keep silent in the Forum and the courts,’ he wrote.
⁵³
Thanks to his determination to register his disapproval, we know they existed. Most notable among them was Hortensia, the daughter of one of Rome’s greatest orators Quintus Hortensius. In an incident that has gone into the history books as a mere footnote, she used her eloquence to directly intervene in political affairs. By 42
BC
in Rome, the powerful triumvirate of Mark Antony, Octavian (later to become the emperor Augustus), and Marcus Lepidus ruled as a three-man dictatorship, mercilessly purging their political opponents, 2,300 of whom were arrested and executed. Starved for cash, the triumvirate imposed a heavy tax on 1,400 upper-class women. The women marched in protest, and tried to speak to the womenfolk of the three rulers, hoping for a sympathetic hearing. They were only partially successful, but managed to force their way into the Forum to the speaker’s rostrum.

According to Valerius Maximus, ‘no man dared take their case.’ Hortensia stepped forward and ‘pleaded their case before the triumvirs, both firmly and successfully.’ Something remarkable then happened, both in the history of misogyny and in the history of women (which to a large extent is the story of the struggle against misogyny). For the first time the question of franchise was raised, if only by implication. During her powerful speech, which focuses on the sufferings of women during war, Hortensia asks, ‘Why should we pay taxes when we have no part in the honours, the commands, the statecraft, for which you contend against each other with such harmful results?’
⁵⁴

Though there is no outright demand for extending the vote to women, Hortensia’s words come very close to the demand the American revolutionaries voiced many centuries later: no taxation without representation.
⁵⁵

The women’s protest of 42
BC
is the high point of their public activism in Rome and the last such demonstration they ever undertook in this era. It is also the last public protest by women aimed at political change that we know about in the history of Western civilization until the nineteenth century. Then the rise of the suffragette movement made the demand for the vote central to the campaign for women’s rights.

Out of the turmoil that destroyed the Republic and replaced it with one-family rule came the conservative backlash against women. Fretting at women’s freedoms, moralists took up the refrain, ‘less lust and bigger families’. No sooner had Octavian become the Emperor Augustus in 27
BC
than the historian Livy began to write his history of Rome (as seen from the winner’s point of view) and expressed clearly the new regime’s moral intentions: