Roman Women and the Oppian Law
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
‘Would you in your refusal to revoke this law’, the question was put to the Senate, ‘allow the trappings of your own horse to be more splendid than the dress of your wife?’
This explains that other laws had been repealed following the conclusion of war 20 years prior. Women took to the streets in protest and filled the senate. As a result the lex Oppia was revoked.
Interesting event. Let's not engage in presentism while we consider the implications of it today.
The commenter could also have said: "Let's remember we're viewing this through the looking glass of today's values."
Lewis Carroll’s use of “Through the Looking-Glass” in the title of one of his books is an explicit joke in this regard. I don’t think you meant that same joke.
"Through the looking glass" involves physical movement via a mirror and that is science fiction or fantasy or both (pick your genre or hit the drugs!) When I want to verify I have shaved fully, I look through a mirror, which is not a sight for the nervous ... first thing in the morning!
There are half silvered mirrors and you can get a similar effect with a window, where you can see yourself and what lies beyond at the same time.
The image of yourself that you see "in" the mirror isn't actually "in" the mirror. The rulers are showing you that the mirror is doing something that causes an image of you to appear exactly twice the distance from you to the mirror.
The mirror image of yourself is actually on your own retina, which is exactly the distance from you to the mirror and from the mirror to you.
We can debate semantics and to be fair, most people will use your terminology. It's bloody hard to ignore the "evidence" of your own eyes!
As a modern example, almost everyone sees Epstein as a purveyor unmitigated corruption. Imagine in 200 years people defended him because in 200 years sex trafficking is also horrible.
The root of the "presentism" complaint is just weak attempt to prevent actual engagement with history whereas you try to look at situation from more then one point of view.
See page 3:
https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/server/api/core/...
> Christianity swung between the Augustinian view that women had souls only to have Aquinas take up Aristotle’s position that women were incapable of reason and therefore had no souls
> The question of women having Souls was only resolved for the Church in 1950 with the promulgation of “The Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven” and the Papal Bull (De munificentissimus Deus 1950) which accompanied the creation of a special feast to commemorate this event
Pope Pius IX died in 1878. Did he proclaim that Mary was born without sin but she still didn't have a soul?
So, how many errors do we have to find in the paper before we just dismiss the paper as nonsense?
Here's a simple example out of many I could draw on: if women didn't have souls they wouldn't be able to receive the sacraments. That means no baptism, no chrismation, no Eucharist, no marriage, no reconciliation, and no extreme unction. It would be metaphysically impossible to be sacramentally married to a woman. C'mon. There would be no need to distinguish between sacramental and natural marriages if women were soulless because they'd be unable to confect the sacrament with their espoused.
The misreading of St. Augustine here has to do with a distinction he was making regarding Imago Dei. He pretty clearly believes women and men are spiritually/metaphysically equal, including as it relates to their spiritual dignity deriving from being made in the image and likeness of God. The passage that gets misread has to do with physical nature and its derivation from Imago Dei. I don't think it was a particularly important point and it's not something I've seen repeated elsewhere.
This is a notorious enough myth about Christian belief that First Things has a multiple articles addressing it: https://www.firstthings.com/article/1997/04/the-myth-of-soul...
Written by Paul, generally regarded as pretty sexist when it came to women.
I guess astrophysicists have to deal with people who read Steven Hawking and think they’re brilliant physicists.
But Hawking is generally right.
It’s so insane how serious scholars are allowed to treat this area like it’s crap, ignoring the work done by serious philosophers and historians.
I guess I’m a bit sore because one of the most respected faculties of medieval history in America replaced their “Medieval History” courses with “Modern Conceptions of the Middle Ages” - which is the Middle Ages according to Shakespeare , Chaucer, and Tolkien.
There’s still good work being done here, but the stupidity is alive and well and being passed off as reality.
For example, every extension needs to be vetted by an independent court and by default it is revoked immediately upon failing to renew.
The trouble is that perhaps our societies are now so polarised we’d never be able to agree to pass uncontroversial legislation without partisan horse trading.
Horse trading is an aspect of compromise: you want A, I would rather not; I want B, you would rather not; so we agree on A & B.
I think it's a good idea for all laws to have sunsets, though some could be longer than others.
In the US, I see federal laws renewed every few years with little public debate, sometimes released to the legislature with little opportunity for them to debate, let alone read and verify changes.
> The trouble is that perhaps our societies are now so polarised we’d never be able to agree to pass uncontroversial legislation without partisan horse trading.
Again, some things may be more controversial than they appear.
When things are uncontroversial, I think there's usually broad agreement to pass it without horse trading. More often, I see something (very) controversial is packaged with the uncontroversial, and the reporting of the situation is biased.
Medicare is incomplete, complex, confusing, expensive to the patient, and outsources much of itself to for-profit insurance companies. And Medicaid is terrible, offering only sometimes temporary and limited coverage for very poor people during emergencies and minimal care because few doctors accept it.
I mostly just watch [toldinstone](https://toldinstone.com/) and [Historia Civilis](https://www.historiacivilis.com/) on Youtube. I'm not really that interested in roman history, it's just nice infotainment to put on in the background, so it's not like I am going out of my way to learn about roman history, so it may also be that the presenters are glossing over the role of women in roman society. But I also watch a lot of ancient roman cooking videos, and again, the role of women is often absent in the historical texts that these videos quote from.
I find it odd that I can only name a single roman woman, when I can name at least a few dozen women in other historical time periods that were very patriarchal. medeival, renaissance, and colonial era European history has many famous women, and Chinese and Japanese history has many named women, many in the courts of nobles, but they were still written about. I also don't read into these eras of history deeply, I just consume infotainment about them.
It makes me wonder how much worse roman civilization must have been for women that they apparently didn't even bother to write down anything about them. Or is it that pop-history about ancient rome tends to be more male-oriented than history about other historical eras, and so women are just not talked about?
That doesn't sound at all right and it might be just a quirk of your sources? Just cracking open Tacitus
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Tacitus/A...
Don't need to get farther than 3 paragraphs in and a Roman woman is politicking in high Roman politics:
Adopted as son, as colleague in the empire, as consort of the tribunician power, he was paraded through all the armies, not as before by the secret diplomacy of his mother, but openly at her injunction. For so firmly had she riveted her chains upon the aged Augustus that he banished to the isle of Planasia
Oddly the most famous women of the Roman Empire were commoners in Roman Judea: Mary, Anne, and Mary Magdalene.
The point that I'm replying to and that I quoted is 'Romans didn't write about women'. I don't see how it stands when you can open a Roman chronicler and right away he's writing about women.
The only woman I could think of
I mean, you have 'suspect' and 'think of', I've got a link to a big pile of Roman writing. It's not hard to check if women are in fact represented in Roman writing.
"When Agrippa gave up the ghost, untimely fate, or the treachery of their stepmother Livia, cut off both Lucius and Caiusº Caesar, Lucius on his road to the Spanish armies, Caiusº — wounded and sick — on his return from Armenia. Drusus had long been dead, and of the stepsons Nero survived alone. On him all centred. Adopted as son, as colleague in the empire, as consort of the tribunician power, he was paraded through all the armies, not as before by the secret diplomacy of his mother, but openly at her injunction"
That's Livia Drusilla, also Iulia Augusta, wife of Emperor Augustus and mother of Emperor Tiberius.
Augusta was the honorific title of Roman Empresses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Augustae
An Empress is kind of a special case :-)
For instance, looking at the art from Minoan Crete, there's abundant examples of works where women are portrayed in the ways that in other cultures of the region were how the rulers were portrayed, but since we're assuming they were a patriarchy, the assumption has been that these were gods being portrayed, and not rulers, because rulers are men and these were women, so they couldn't have been rulers.
You see similar where we'll find grave sites where the skeleton seems female, but they're buried with the trappings and in the fashion of a ruler, and a shocking amount of effort is spent trying to reconcile that contradiction.
(This is not to argue that Rome was actually a matriarchy or anything silly like that, rather that the blindness of history to the role of women reaches almost comical levels in other places, so it's not surprising to find a blank spot in Roman history in pop culture, at least.)
Who assumes that? For over 40 years I've been reading conjectures about Minoan Crete being a matriarchy or substantially less patriarchical from all kinds of sources, it's quite a common theory. Even Wikipedia: "While historians and archaeologists have long been skeptical of an outright matriarchy, the predominance of female figures in authoritative roles over male ones seems to indicate that Minoan society was matriarchal, and among the most well-supported examples known."
Given 100% of present societies and all examples from recorded history can you blame them for this baseline? That's literally what a baseline is supposed to be!
This is literally the thing we're talking about. Remember the Minoans?
100% of present societies are not patriarchies. Not even close to 100%.
But they don't seem to have scaled in the same way for one reason or another.
If you count by membership the number of people who live in patriarchal societies vs not, I think you would come up with an answer very very close to 100% patriarchal.
Culturally is a different question, obviously.
Like, you're adding say USA (350M), China (1.4B), France (80M), etc with say, some Amazonian tribe of 5K people (which you don't count as part of the 99.999% patriarchical Brazil)?
I guess in that way it's enough that 200 tribal villages (more than the UN nations iirc) to be matriarchical for the world to be "predominantly matriarchical" or at least 50%-50%.
It's pretty amazing how much labor was done by women that was crucial to society. Beer, medicine, weaving, braiding, bowstringing, raising livestock, etc.
Last thing, there is a anecdote by Richard Feynman I think where he is in a room with his friend's wife who is crocheting. He explains to her that topologically, the knot she is making can be made six other ways. She goes "yes, the such-and-such and such-and-such knot. Do you crochet?". It's interesting how much knowledge humans were about to collect about the world before the scientific method.
There is a book "1000 Years of Women's work" that is on my reading list now but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
There is a very rich strain of feminist literature on this very point!
> He explains to her that topologically, the knot she is making can be made six other ways. She goes "yes, the such-and-such and such-and-such knot. Do you crochet?".
This is fantastic.
I'll have to take a look at "1000 Years of Women's work." Another one to add to the reading list, just for sheer pique, is "Bitch: On the Female of the Species" by Lucy Cooke - https://bookshop.org/p/books/bitch-on-the-female-of-the-spec...
If you are a fan, be prepared for quite some unpleasantness. Turns out, the story isn't even about topology. No, Feynman was, in his own words, "flabbergasted" that women were able to grasp and explain to each other rather basic matters of analytical geometry.
[Edit] oh, also Calpurnia, and Incontinetia Buttocks
So basically it’s pretty easy to come up with an unlimited number of Roman women if you just know a few Roman family names. Of course for boys it was only marginally better since each family just reused 3-4 first names (and eventually just started using numbers instead of names as well..)
A starting point to learn about specific Roman women: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distinguished_Roman_wo...
One thing to note is that freeborn women in Ancient Rome were citizens but could not vote and could not hold public office, severely limiting their public role and hence reference by historians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_Rome
When it comes to women rights the Romans were relatively progressive (possibly unintentionally) by historical standards. I think certainly an improvement over the Taliban style treatment of women in classical Athens..
By the mid/late Republican period they switched to a form of marriage which allowed women in practice to retain their legal personhood and wealth to some extent after marriage (legally she remained under the protection of her father/family while living in her husband’s household, meaning that he had very limited authority over her or her personal property).
In the Imperial period https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_trium_liberorum while far from universal (but from what I understand it was possible to get it without having 3 children in some cases) granted women comparable rights to those they possessed in pre-1800s Europe.
Also their mythology was full of powerful women, why would an oppressive and patriarcal society would tolerate having a woman as the goddess of knowledge or hunting?
Probably women were happy in their housewife role, so were my grandmothers.
...
> The events that it set in motion on the streets of Rome created a precedent which saw Roman women stand up for their rights and make their voices heard.
Recognizing that yes, women and men should have the same legal rights, I find it hilarious that the tipping point that year was that women had to limit their wardrobe in public.
From [wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Oppia) because I find the phrasing interesting:
"Cato argued that the law removed the shame of poverty because it made all women dress in an equal fashion. Cato insisted that if women could engage in a clothes-contest, they would either feel shame in the presence of other women, or on the contrary, they would delight in a rather base victory as a result of extending themselves beyond their means."
Again, men and women should be equal under the law, but it isn't an antiquated notion that women would engage in a "clothes-contest", particularly among economic classes.
(Men, to be clear, are socially permitted far less peacocking with clothing, so there isn't anywhere near the same contest.)
Im not an expert in that time period, but my guess would be that was the one thing women had of their own and it was being taken away.
Men did their peacocking with their more tangible possessions. With both women and men equally wanting to participate in the timeless human condition of wanting to show off and one-up their peers. Take that away from either men or women and I would guess it causes a tipping point of rebellion.
Various points in history beg to disagree.
Doublets, ruffs, codpieces, high heeled shoes, etc didn't come cheap.
[0] the difference between men and boys is how many people are on the payroll for taking care of their toys.
[1] for patina, rings beat timepieces, but those families aren't exactly a growth market, now are they?
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alBm88ZjMrc