Invisible Romans (9 page)

The dice gamblers urge for Gnaeus Helvius Sabinus.
(CIL
4.3485)

Economic groups supported candidates:

The united fruit mongers with Helvius Vestalis urge you to make Marcus Holconius Priscus duumvir with judiciary powers.
(CIL
4.202 =
ILS
6411a)

The millers ask you to vote for Gnaeus Helvius Sabinus for Aedile; the people who live nearby want this too!
(CIL
4.7273)

As did religious groups:

All the worshippers of Isis urge you to vote for Gnaeus Helvius Sabinus for Aedile.
(CIL
4.787 =
ILS
6420b)

Geographically related persons banded together:

His neighbors urge you to vote for Marcus Lucretius Fronto as Aedile.
(CIL
4.6625)

I urge you, O neighbors, to elect Lucius Statius Receptus Chief Magistrate with Judicial Powers, a man worthy of your votes. Aemilius Celer wrote this, your neighbor. Whoever hatefully destroys this, a pox on you!
(CIL
4.3775 =
ILS
6409)

The people living around the Forum ask that you vote for … (
CIL
4.783)

Even women, although they could not vote, put in their word:

Elect Gnaeus Helvius Sabinus Aedile. Junia asks this. (
CIL
4.1168)

It is hard to tell how many graffiti represent actual popular sentiment, because large numbers seem to be professionally written; since elections were yearly, graffiti needed to be put up regularly, and clearly there were hired electoral gangs set to work for each new campaign. But still it is fair to say that at the very least men were aware of the elections and talked about them in baths and bars; many probably participated both in the electioneering and in the actual voting, which itself was a festive occasion, with food and drink handed out. As time went on, this
political activity probably waned, but although varying from place to place throughout the empire, it was an important thing for men to think about, especially since the elected officials could influence their daily lives. While political activity lasted, the street was an important venue for discussion and advertisement.

Conclusion

The ordinary lives of ordinary men in Rome and its empire were filled with family, business, socializing, and cares and concerns common to much of humanity. The poet Horace, son of a freedman father, captures this:

His name is Volteius Mena, an auctioneer, quite poor, free from scandal, hardworking when that’s called for, easy going when it’s not, knows both how to make money and how to spend it, taking pleasure in his inconsequential club-mates, his own humble home, and the games in the Campus Martius after concluding his business.
(Letters
1.7.55–9)

In many ways, life for ordinary men was different in degree or kind from the lives of the elite. The two could not help interacting and they did, engaging in business and legal issues and voicing their concerns through violence if necessary. But their world and their attitudes reflected the reality of their own existence in close relationship to freed-men, slaves, and ordinary women. They forged their way, following their own moral compasses, fearing and hoping, and putting their trust in superstition, magic, and religion to help make sense of and control their challenging world.

2
LIVES OF THEIR OWN: ORDINARY WOMEN

ROMANO-GRECIAN WOMEN LIVED IN A WORLD
dominated by a very clear male view of them and their place, a view formulated by the elite for themselves, but shared widely by ordinary men as well. However it worked itself out in real life, the ideal is well expressed by John Chrysostom, who in describing the division of male and female focus in the community reflects thinking throughout classical antiquity:

A woman’s whole role is to care for children, for her husband, and for her home … For human activity is divided into two spheres, one pertaining to life outside the home, and one to life within it; as we might say, ‘public,’ and ‘private.’ God assigned a role to each sex; women have the care of the home, men of public affairs, business, legal and military activities – indeed, all life outside the home. For a woman cannot let loose a spear, or shoot an arrow; rather she can do the spinning, weave fabric, take on all the other domestic tasks – and do them splendidly. She is not able to speak in the town council, but can speak her piece regarding household matters. In fact, she often has a better grasp of the needs of the home than the husband does. Although she can’t perform public duties, it is a beautiful thing to raise up fine children, who are the light of our lives. She is able to discipline female slaves who need it, and to keep the entire household on the right track. She removes all concerns and frees her husband from all worries as she takes care of the larder, wool spinning, cooking and clothing needs, and all the other tasks unsuitable for husbands. In fact, she can do these better than a husband could, even if he tried to take over these tasks.
(The Kind of Women Who Ought to be Taken as Wives,
4)

Within this ideal, the Romano-Grecian world inserted the affirmation of the physical and mental inferiority of women into every possible interstice of life. Few males would have disagreed with Plautus when he wrote in his play
The Bacchae
(41),
Miserius nihil est quam mulier
(‘Nothing is more miserable than a woman’). So deep was the feeling that only men were worthy that it could generate a scene such as that in the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas, where Mary the mother of Jesus must become a man in order to succeed:

Simon Peter says to them: ‘Let Mary go away from us, for women are not worthy of The Life. To this Jesus replies: Behold, I myself shall fill her with the Spirit and so make her male, in order that she shall also become a Living Spirit like you males. For every female who becomes male shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’ (Thomas 114)

In Artemidorus, there is often misogyny, such as the male being associated with the right, female with the left
(Dreams
1.21); or dreams of changing from male to female being bad
(Dreams
1.50). In general, the dream interpretations and astrological charts are steadfastly male-oriented and referenced. Men pervasively assumed that women were weak and needed protection from financial or physical manipulation. They were thought to be physically weak; to be disabled by child-bearing; to be inexperienced (which of course they were, in ‘men’ things); dependent on male relatives or guardians for actions regarding property, law, etc.; gossipy, emotionally unstable, fickle, vulnerable, and libidinous.

Nonetheless, within this male analysis, women’s actions and attitudes are also praised. The exchange between Aurelia and her husband Aurelius is one of the most touching in Latin epigraphy. The husband speaks:

I am Lucius Aurelius Hermia, freedman of Lucius, a butcher working on the Viminal Hill. This woman, Aurelia Philematio, freedwoman of Lucius, who went before me in death, my one and only wife, chaste of body, faithfully loving a faithful husband, lived equal in devotion with no selfishness taking her from her duty.

There is an image of Aurelia looking lovingly at Aurelius. Aurelia answers:

This is Aurelia Philematio, freedwoman of Lucius. I alive was called Aurelia Philematio, chaste, modest, ignorant of the foul ways of the crowd, faithful to my husband. He was my fellow freedman, the same now torn from me – alas! He was in truth and indeed like and more than a father to me. He took me on his lap a mere 7 years old – now after 40 years I am dead. He flourished in all his doings among men on account of my faithful and firm devotion. (
CIL
1.01221 =
CIL
6.9499 =
ILS
7472, Rome)

Aurelia Philematio exemplifies an ideal woman when she is praised for her modesty, excellence, moral uprightness, and loyalty; she expresses these ideals herself, but since her husband outlived her and set up the gravestone we can assume the sentiments are his, although she may well have shared them. In Richmond Lattimore’s collection of Greek and Roman epitaphs, women are most often typified as beautiful, lovable (dear, sweet, lacking in quarrelsomeness), fertile, chaste, and keeping the house well. The core values of women in epitaphs are thus loyalty, chastity, and hard work. And certainly they must know their place; they are not to be uppity in the presence of men. Rather they should ‘learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent’ (1 Timothy 2:11).

A woman was a means to an end, and she probably thought of herself in this way. The end was a family unit that would provide heirs and thus a way to pass on property. Although there were ancillary possibilities for activity (in commerce, for example), any woman who would have and could have chosen one of these as her primary goal in life was a
rara avis
indeed. As I move into the world of women it is well to recall
that their outlooks as expressed in their own words – their individual subjectivity – is lacking in almost all of our literary and archaeological sources. Epitaphs (if we allow ourselves to believe that some are actually composed by women themselves) and papyrological material are the main exceptions. But even in these I do not find opposition to the male views or alternatives to the male positioning of women in society and culture. Although our modern sensitivities find this situation somewhat unsettling, the response should not be speculation about secret desires and aspirations to liberation which lie forever hidden from us, but rather consideration that there were no such secret desires or aspirations at all. So far as we know or, on comparative evidence, can even readily imagine, there were no alternative lifestyles and aspirations either offered or considered – no inkling that Romano-Grecian women ever conceived of a world different from the one they were born into, ever had a thought-basis from which to consider alternative arrangements. The prudent way to proceed is to assume that women accepted their what to us might seem oppressed condition and sought to live it out in the most satisfying way possible, sometimes pushing the limits, most often living within them, sometimes rebelling against them, but never overthrowing them. Within this conceptual framework we can construct a useful and realistic picture of ordinary women and their mind worlds.

It is true that women did not participate in the classic elements of public life. They did not have legal standing; they could not vote and were excluded de facto from advanced education. But on the other hand, as we look at women living according to the elite and male model, but in their own realities, we will see women functioning well in a much wider world than the elite picture presents. Their letters from Egypt show women in charge and women with strong minds. They do not show women as shrinking violets or left to house management, cooped up in a women’s quarter. Indeed it is regrettable that these letters actually tell little of many things such as ‘secret’ thoughts might reveal. Their often elliptical nature gives the sense that the authors do not want others who might read the letter to know what exactly is being talked about. There is little of the ‘sharing’ that goes on in the letters of Cicero, for example. But the general impression is one of women in charge of their lives in a positive, proactive way.

Women appear outside the house on a routine basis. They shop. They run errands. They participate in public religious ceremonies. They also make their presence known in the fairly frequent public disturbances. Philo in railing against just such activity testifies to women taking part in street riots:

If any woman, hearing that her husband is being assaulted, being out of her affection for him carried away by love for her husband, should yield to the feelings which overpower her and rush forth to aid him, still let her not be so audacious as to behave like a man, outrunning the nature of a woman; but even while aiding him let her continue a woman. For it would be a very terrible thing if a woman, being desirous to deliver her husband from an insult, should expose herself to insult, by exhibiting human life as full of shamelessness and liable to great reproaches for her incurable boldness; for shall a woman utter abuse in the marketplace and give vent to unlawful language? … But as it is now, some women are advanced to such a pitch of shameless-ness as not only, though they are women, to give vent to intemperate language and abuse among a crowd of men, but even to strike men and insult them, with hands practiced rather in works of the loom and spinning than in blows and assaults, like competitors in the
pancratium
or wrestlers. And other things, indeed, may be tolerable, and what any one might easily bear, but that is a shocking thing if a woman were to proceed to such a degree of boldness as to seize hold of the genitals of one of the men quarreling. For let not such a woman be let go on the ground that she appears to have done this action in order to assist her own husband; but let her be impeached and suffer the punishment due to her excessive audacity, so that if she should ever be inclined to commit the same offence again she may not have an opportunity of doing so; and other women, also, who might be inclined to be precipitate, may be taught by fear to be moderate and to restrain themselves. (Philo,
Special Laws
172–5/Yonge)