The Women of the Caesars

Part 1

Produced by Al Haines

THE WOMEN OF THE CAESARS

GUGLIELMO FERRERO

NEW YORK

THE CENTURY CO.

MCMXI

Copyright, 1911, by

THE CENTURY CO.

Published, October, 1911

THE DEVINNE PRESS

CONTENTS

I WOMAN AND MARRIAGE IN ANCIENT ROME

II LIVIA AND JULIA

III THE DAUGHTERS OF AGRIPPA

IV TIBERIUS AND AGRIPPINA

V THE SISTERS OF CALIGULA AND THE MARRIAGE OF MESSALINA

VI AGRIPPINA, THE MOTHER OF NERO

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Livia, the Wife of Augustus, Superintending the Weaving of Robes for her Family . . . Frontispiece

A Roman Marriage Custom

Eumachia, a Public Priestess of Ancient Rome

The Forum under the Caesars

The So-called Bust of Cicero

Julius Caesar

The Sister of M. Nonius Balbus

Livia, the Mother of Tiberius, in the Costume of a Priestess

The Young Augustus

The Emperor Augustus

Part 2

A Silver Denarius of the Second Triumvirate

Silver Coin Bearing the Head of Julius Caesar

The Great Paris Cameo

Octavia, the Sister of Augustus

A Reception at Livia's Villa

Mark Antony

Antony and Cleopatra

Tiberius, Elder Son of Livia and Stepson of Augustus

Drusus, the Younger Brother of Tiberius

Statue of a Young Roman Woman

A Roman Girl of the Time of the Caesars

Costumes of Roman Men, Women, and Children in the Procession of a Peace Festival

Bust of Tiberius in the Museo Nazionale, Naples

Types of Head-dresses Worn in the Time of the Women of the Caesars

A Roman Feast in the Time of the Caesars

Depositing the Ashes of a Member of the Imperial Family in a Roman Columbarium

The Starving Livilla Refusing Food

Costume of a Chief Vestal (Virgo Vestalis Maxima)

Remains of the House of the Vestal Virgins

Bust, Supposed to be of Antonia, Daughter of Mark Antony and Octavia, and Mother of Germanicus, in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence

Caligula

A Bronze Sestertius (Slightly Enlarged), Showing the Sisters of Caligula (Agrippina, Drusilla, and Julia Livilla) on One Side and Germanicus on the Other Side

A Bronze Sestertius with the Head of Agrippina the Elder, Daughter of Agrippa and Julia, the Daughter of Augustus

Claudius, Messalina, and Their Two Children in What is Known as the "Hague Cameo"

Remains of the Bridge of Caligula in the Palace of the Caesars

The Emperor Caligula

Claudius

The Emperor Claudius

Part 3

Messalina, Third Wife of Claudius

The Philosopher Seneca

The Emperor Nero

Agrippina the Younger, Sister of Caligula and Mother of Nero

Britannicus

Statue of Agrippina the Younger, in the Capitoline Museum, Rome

Agrippina the Younger

The Emperor Nero

The Death of Agrippina

WOMEN OF THE CAESARS

WOMAN AND MARRIAGE IN ANCIENT ROME

"Many things that among the Greeks are considered improper and unfitting," wrote Cornelius Nepos in the preface to his "Lives," "are permitted by our customs. Is there by chance a Roman who is ashamed to take his wife to a dinner away from home? Does it happen that the mistress of the house in any family does not enter the anterooms frequented by strangers and show herself among them? Not so in Greece: there the woman accepts invitations only among families to which she is related, and she remains withdrawn in that inner part of the house which is called the gynaeceum, where only the nearest relatives are admitted."

This passage, one of the most significant in all the little work of Nepos, draws in a few, clear, telling strokes one of the most marked distinctions between the Greco-Asiatic world and the Roman. Among ancient societies, the Roman was probably that in which, at least among the better classes, woman enjoyed the greatest social liberty and the greatest legal and economic autonomy. There she most nearly approached that condition of moral and civil equality with man which makes her his comrade, and not his slave--that equality in which modern civilization sees one of the supreme ends of moral progress.

The doctrine held by some philosophers and sociologists, that military peoples subordinate woman to a tyrannical regime of domestic servitude, is wholly disproved by the history of Rome. If there was ever a time when the Roman woman lived in a state of perennial tutelage, under the authority of man from birth to death--of the husband, if not of the father, or, if not of father or husband, of the guardian--that time belongs to remote antiquity.

When Rome became the master state of the Mediterranean world, and especially during the last century of the republic, woman, aside from a few slight limitations of form rather than of substance, had already acquired legal and economic independence, the condition necessary for social and moral equality. As to marriage, the affianced pair could at that time choose between two different legal family regimes: marriage with manus, the older form, in which all the goods of the wife passed to the ownership of the husband, so that she could no longer possess anything in her own name; or marriage without manus, in which only the dower became the property of the husband, and the wife remained mistress of all her other belongings and all that she might acquire. Except in some cases, and for special reasons, in all the families of the aristocracy, by common consent, marriages, during the last centuries of the republic, were contracted in the later form; so that at that time married women directly and openly had gained economic independence.

During the same period, indirectly, and by means of juridical evasions, this independence was also won by unmarried women, who, according to ancient laws, ought to have remained all their lives under a guardian, either selected by the father in his will or appointed by the law in default of such selection. To get around this difficulty, the fertile and subtle imagination of the jurists invented first the tutor optivus, permitting the father, instead of naming his daughter's guardian in his will, to leave her free to choose one general guardian or several, according to the business in hand, or even to change that official as many times as she wished.

To give the woman means to change her legitimate guardian at pleasure, if her father had provided none by will, there was invented the tutor cessicius, thereby allowing the transmission of a legal guardianship. However, though all restrictions imposed upon the liberty of the unmarried woman by the institution of tutelage disappeared, one limitation continued in force--she could not make a will. Yet even this was provided for, either by fictitious marriage or by the invention of the tutor fiduciarius. The woman, without contracting matrimony, gave herself by coemptio (purchase) into the manus of a person of her trust, on the agreement that the coemptionator would free her: he became her guardian in the eyes of the law.

There was, then, at the close of the republic little disparity in legal condition between the man and the woman. As is natural, to this almost complete legal equality there was united an analogous moral and social equality. The Romans never had the idea that between the mundus muliebris (woman's world) and that of men they must raise walls, dig ditches, put up barricades, either material or moral. They never willed, for example, to divide women from men by placing between them the ditch of ignorance. To be sure, the Roman dames of high society were for a long time little instructed, but this was because, moreover, the men distrusted Greek culture. When literature, science, and Hellenic philosophy were admitted into the great Roman families as desired and welcome guests, neither the authority, nor the egoism, nor yet the prejudices of the men, sought to deprive women of the joy, the comfort, the light, that might come to them from these new studies. We know that many ladies in the last two centuries of the republic not only learned to dance and to sing,--common feminine studies, these,--but even learned Greek, loved literature, and dabbled in philosophy, reading its books or meeting with the famous philosophers of the Orient.

Moreover, in the home the woman was mistress, at the side of and on equality with her husband. The passage I have quoted from Nepos proves that she was not segregated, like the Greek woman: she received and enjoyed the friends of her husband, was present with them at festivals and banquets in the houses of families with whom she had friendly relations, although at such banquets she might not, like the man, recline, but must, for the sake of greater modesty, sit at table. In short, she was not, like the Greek woman, shut up at home, a veritable prisoner.

She might go out freely; this she did generally in a litter. She was never excluded from theaters, even though the Roman government tried as best it could for a long period to temper in its people the passion for spectacular entertainments. She could frequent public places and have recourse directly to the magistrates. We have record of the assembling and of demonstrations made by the richest women of Rome in the Forum and other public places, to obtain laws and other provisions from the magistrates, like that famous demonstration of women that Livy describes as having occurred in the year 195 B.C., to secure the abolition of the Oppian Law against luxury.

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