HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/tag/roman-women Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:06:17 GMT en hourly 1 Friends, Romans, citizens: why Rome opened its doors to people across the empire https://www.historyextra.com/membership/friends-romans-citizens-why-rome-opened-its-doors-to-people-across-the-empire/ Sun, 19 Apr 2026 11:30:48 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/friends-romans-citizens-why-rome-opened-its-doors-to-people-across-the-empire/ From Romulus’s open-city policy to Claudius’s reforms, citizenship was used by Rome as both a reward and a weapon. And, as Shushma Malik explains, it enabled the burgeoning empire to build power and define identity What made Rome so powerful? Writing in the early 16th century in his Discourses on Livy, Niccolò Machiavelli (best known for The Prince) argued that the secret lay not in geography or luck, but in people – and in a ruthless flexibility in acquiring them.
“Those who design a city to create a great empire must strive with great diligence to fill it full of inhabitants,” he wrote (as translated in 1997 by JC and P Bondanella). “This may be done in two ways: either through love or through force. It is done through love by keeping the pathways open and safe for foreigners who wish to come there to live… it is done through force, after nearby cities are destroyed, by sending their inhabitants to live in your city.”
Rome enlarged its population through both of those two methods, enabling it to build enormous fighting forces – Machiavelli cited a figure of 80,000 men, compared with just 20,000 for Athens or Sparta at their peak. Rome flourished, said Machiavelli, not because it had an advantageous location but because of one simple but powerful policy: it made outsiders into Romans.
This concept was integral to the city’s founding story. Romans were not from Rome – as Athenians were thought to be born from the earth of Athens – but travelled and settled there as refugees. According to myth – specifically, Virgil’s epic Aeneid – Aeneas came to Italy after fleeing from a burning Troy. Romulus and Remus, twins supposedly descended from the line of kings that traced back to Aeneas’s son Ascanius, were rescued from certain death at the hands of their great uncle, and sent floating down the Tiber in a basket. Rescued and suckled by a she-wolf, they were then raised by the herdsman Faustulus and his wife, Acca Larentia.
The twins founded Rome but, after an episode of brutal fratricide, Romulus became the sole ruler. One of his first acts, according to the historian Livy, was to offer asylum to all those – free or enslaved – from surrounding areas who wanted a fresh start, recruiting them to join his new city. The first Roman senators were selected from among these early Romans.
Becoming Roman
This origin myth was created in part to highlight the fact that citizenship could be transferred: you did not need to be born a Roman to become a Roman. As Machiavelli observed, this was also a deeply pragmatic strategy for accumulating the manpower needed to build an empire. However, it is not the case that all of those who entered into the empire – in particular, those conquered by the Romans – became citizens. Rome’s was an empire of citizens – but not necessarily Roman citizens.
When Rome was expanding into Italy, especially in the fourth and third centuries BC, grants of citizenship could be offered as reward or imposed as punishment for those unwilling to comply with its demands. Gifts of citizenship could also, on occasion, be refused if the proposed grantees did not see the benefits.
This was the case for a group of soldiers from Praeneste – now Palestrina in central Italy – who helped the Romans to defend Casilinum (now part of Capua) from attack by the Carthaginian general Hannibal. Livy describes how the soldiers were rewarded with double pay and an extraordinary five-year exemption from military service. However, when they were offered citizenship, the men refused, preferring instead to keep their status as citizens of Praeneste. This story reminds us that we should not take for granted the desirability of Roman citizenship over others when Rome was expanding as a Republic or, later, when it was under the control of emperors.
During the Republic, citizenship was technically in the gift of the Roman citizen body. However, this changed in the late Republic, when generals such as Pompey and Caesar – and, later, Octavian and Antony – could grant citizenship on the basis of military merit. One such law that allowed this was the lex Gellia Cornelia of 72 BC, which we know about because a political opponent of Pompey’s tried to attack him by claiming that he had no right to grant citizenship, which he had offered to one Lucius Cornelius Balbus.
Balbus, born in Gades (now Cádiz in Spain), had fought with the Romans in various battles against the rebel general Sertorius. Cicero, one of Balbus’s team of defenders, had a seemingly clear-cut case that not only did Balbus deserve citizenship but that Pompey unquestionably had the authority to grant it. What the trial reveals, however, are the political stakes of citizenship grants in the changing landscape of the Roman Republic. In the later period of the first century BC, citizenship – like many other aspects of a Roman’s status – had become a tool of political attack.
Rights and responsibilities
What did citizenship get you? The first thing to remember is that both men and women were Roman citizens. This is underlined by the right of conubium – of Roman women and men to marry and have citizen children. Roman citizens also had the right of commercium: to enter into contracts, such as trade, with other Romans and with the protection of the Roman courts.
In addition, Romans had the right to appeal if they were being mistreated. Perhaps the most famous example of this is an episode in the New Testament book of Acts (22:25), in which Paul – affirming his status as a Roman citizen – insisted on being taken to Rome.
The story goes that the apostle was arrested in Jerusalem for creating a disturbance. The barracks commander ordered him to be flogged, but the centurion had to stop when Paul declared himself a Roman citizen. Even more pointedly, it’s observed that Paul had been born a Roman citizen, whereas the centurion had bought his citizenship. Ultimately, Paul declared to Festus, the procurator of Judaea, his right to go to Rome to plead his case. “You have appealed to Caesar. To Caesar you will go!” was Festus’s response, recounted in Acts 25:12.
In political terms, during the Republic and early imperial period, men who held Roman citizenship had the right to vote in Rome’s assemblies and to run for magistracies if they could afford it. But this did not extend to women or, in the main, to citizens who had been manumitted from enslavement. It also did not extend to men from communities who had been granted civitas sine suffragio – citizenship without voting rights, a status first recorded in the fourth century BC. As well as rights, citizens also had duties, which included taxation and military service.
There were a number of ways to become a Roman citizen, other than being born to parents who possessed the right of conubium. If an enslaved person was manumitted by a Roman citizen in one of the three legally defined ways, that person would be granted citizenship. Those who held a magistracy (political office) in a Latin community – a colony that was subject to Latin law, with some of the rights of Roman citizenship, but not all – were granted the status. Citizenship could also be granted to individuals or groups by the senate and people of Rome or, later, by the emperor for extraordinary activity or by serving in the Roman army as an auxiliary (non-citizen soldier) for 25 years.
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Positions of power
There were periods in Rome’s history when citizenship expanded particularly rapidly. One was during the Social War (91–88 BC), the result of which was the extension of citizenship to more or less all free Italians. This had been a long time in coming: Italian allies had been fighting in Rome’s wars and striving for political inclusion, but had not received any formal political rights. Eventually, Rome recognised the value of other Italians to its continued imperial success.
The Social War was followed by lengthy periods of military activity by Pompey in the east and by Caesar in Gaul, and individual or group grants of citizenship were made in those places. Gaul makes a particularly interesting case study. In AD 48, some 100 years after those campaigns, the question was raised whether some of those Gauls conquered by Caesar should be let into the senate. Notably, the then-emperor Claudius (ruled AD 41–54) was himself born in Lyon while his father Drusus held a post in Gaul. Claudius argued – in the face of senatorial opposition – that the Gallo-Romans had become so interchangeable with Italian Romans in their manners and characteristics that they deserved to sit in the empire’s most prestigious political body.
Two copies of Claudius’s speech survive: one in the Annals of Tacitus, writing in the early second century AD, and another as an inscription in Lyon from AD 48 recording Claudius’s success. Tacitus gives us some sense of the senators’ objections: how can the same people who were once such fierce enemies now be put in a position of such power? In reply, Claudius contended (as translated by AJ Woodman in 2004): “Our founder Romulus… was so effective in his wisdom that he regarded many peoples as enemies and then as citizens on the same day! Immigrants have reigned over us… [no other war] was concluded in a shorter space of time than against the Gauls. Thereafter there has been a constant and trusting peace. Now, merged as they are with us by conventions, attainments, and relationships, let them bring in their gold and wealth rather than keep them to themselves.”
Claudius made a winning case for the ease with which the Gauls conquered by Caesar had embraced the elements of Roman citizenship, observing that this prepared them for leading roles in the Roman government. However, from the same emperor’s reign, we also see the other side of this approach. Claudius is recorded by another ancient historian – Cassius Dio, writing in the early third century AD – as having stripped someone of their citizenship for not behaving in a way that the emperor considered appropriate for a person who had been granted that status. As Earnest Cary’s 1924 translation has it:
“[Claudius] reduced the Lycians to servitude because they had revolted and slain some Romans… During the investigation of this affair, which was conducted in the senate, he put a question in Latin to one of the envoys who had originally been a Lycian, but had been made a Roman citizen; and when the man failed to understand what was said, he took away his citizenship, saying that it was not proper for a man to be a Roman who had no knowledge of the Romans’ language.”
This story highlights an important aspect of citizenship. Acting like a citizen seems, for some emperors at least, to have been as important as the grant itself.
Acting Roman
Roman identity was performed in several ways. Speaking Latin was one of them; another was donning the correct attire. In the second century AD, Pliny the Younger wrote a letter recounting the story of Valerius Licinianus, who was exiled by the emperor Domitian for raping the chief priest of Vesta, Cornelia. (She, in contrast, was sentenced to burial while still alive – a punishment available to the emperor for a Vestal who had ‘committed’ incestum, a violation of a religious law.) Exile included a loss of citizen status, which meant losing the right to wear elite male Roman dress – the toga.
“Have you heard that Valerius Licinianus is teaching rhetoric in Sicily?” wrote Pliny, as translated by Betty Radice in 1969. “It is not long since this senator of praetorian rank was considered one of the best advocates in Rome. Now he has sunk to his present position – the senator is an exile and the orator a teacher of rhetoric… Then, when he had made his entry [into his new classroom] clad in a Greek cloak (those who have been ritually banished are not allowed to wear the toga), he made himself ready, looked down at his dress, and announced that he would deliver his speech in Latin.”
Licinianus attempted to cling onto Latin, despite the fact that as a non-citizen he was strictly prohibited from wearing Roman dress. In a similar way, the stola – a garment worn by Roman citizen women – was strictly reserved for respectable
daughters of Rome.
During most of the Republic, it wasn’t possible to hold more than one citizenship at one time – becoming Roman meant losing something else. However, in the last years of the Republic, that changed, even if extant sources do not provide many examples. A grant of Roman citizenship then did not automatically mean relinquishing local citizenship – both could be held at once.
For some people, Roman citizenship would have held little value in day-to-day life. Working on a local farm or operating in local trade networks did not necessarily require access to the grand operating mechanisms of empire. And a local politician with his own established networks and elite status in his community did not invariably need to be eligible for the senate in Rome to fulfil his own ambitions.
In AD 212, the emperor Caracalla extended Roman citizenship to almost all of the free population of the Roman empire. However, scholars suggest that before Caracalla made the grant, no more than 33 per cent of the inhabitants of empire held Roman citizenship. Previously, the majority had operated for centuries without it.
Later in history, Roman citizenship was held up as a model to be studied and in some ways emulated. During the Victorian and Edwardian periods, children of wealthy and prominent Britons – future leaders in the British empire – were educated in the citizenship strategies of ancient Greek states and Rome. However, newer ideas – of nationality, for example – made the transferral of ancient models difficult, as the debates of the era show. Principles of jus soli – the idea that British people are subjects by virtue of where they are born – or jus sanguinis (nationality by right of bloodline) play with ideas of antiquity, but are fundamentally different, adapted and readapted for new national and imperial contexts.
Carrot and stick
Returning to Machiavelli, his model obscures the number of people who lived under Roman control without assuming citizenship. What an analysis of Rome’s tactics also reveals is the extent to which citizenship could be used as either the carrot or the stick – reward or punishment.
But what of the Lycian who was stripped of his citizenship simply because his language skills weren’t deemed up to scratch? What does it mean not to be a Roman citizen in the Roman empire? In practice, the man probably reverted back to the citizenship he had held in Lycia (now south-west Anatolia) before Roman annexation. As we’ve already seen, many regional citizenships existed – and continued to exist – within the Roman empire at the same time.
Rome provides a variety of examples, lessons, and warnings about attitudes to and mechanisms of citizenship. A state that pins its own history on inclusivity can, at the same time, punish and restrict. In other words, the long history of the Roman empire tells many stories of multiple and varied citizenships.
This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> The ultimate Romans quiz https://www.historyextra.com/membership/ultimate-romans-quiz/ Fri, 15 Nov 2024 07:30:17 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/ultimate-romans-quiz/ From emperors to toilet practices, how well do you actually know the Romans? Put your history knowledge to the test with our quiz… View Riddle on the source website]]> The people of Roman Britain https://www.historyextra.com/membership/historyextra-academy-video-lecture-the-humble-and-the-proud/ Mon, 24 Jun 2024 15:07:15 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/historyextra-academy-video-lecture-the-humble-and-the-proud/ In the second week of the HistoryExtra Academy course on Roman Britain, Professor Rob Collins takes a closer look at the people of Roman Britain – from the men and women living around Hadrian's Wall, to the lives of Roman slaves View Green Video on the source website
Discover more learning from week two of the HistoryExtra Academy Roman Britain course
Roman Britain: what six objects can reveal about life for women at Hadrian's Wall – reading time 9 mins Black Britannia: the African people who lived in Roman Britain – reading time 5 mins Ancient Roman slavery: what was life like as an enslaved person? – reading time 7 mins How ethnically diverse was Roman Britain? – reading time 3 mins
]]> Reviving Roman voices: Mary Beard on the remarkable life of one woman https://www.historyextra.com/membership/reviving-roman-voices-mary-beard-on-the-remarkable-life-of-one-woman/ Wed, 27 Dec 2023 09:00:05 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/reviving-roman-voices-mary-beard-on-the-remarkable-life-of-one-woman/ The remarkable story of one Roman woman, pieced together from fragments over many centuries, reveals insights into family life more than 2,000 years ago. Mary Beard gives voice to the long-silent Turia During the civil wars that tore the Roman Republic in the middle of the first century BC, leading to the birth of the empire, one Roman woman was facing her own crises – both public and private.
Usually known to us as ‘Turia’, she was born into a high-ranking family and by the late 50s BC had become engaged to be married. It was obviously a ‘good match’ with a man of prospects.
But before the wedding could take place, not only had her fiancé suddenly quit Rome to fight under Pompey the Great – in other words, on the losing side in the war against Julius Caesar – but, tragically, her mother and father had also been murdered in their remote house in the country.
Turia moved in with her future mother-in-law, but seems to have been largely left to cope with her problems alone, or with the help of just her sister. She managed to take vengeance on her parents’ murderers and successfully fought off some of her own relations who contested her inheritance. At the same time, she sent supplies to her absent fiancé, selling off some of her own jewellery to do so.
Things looked up, albeit briefly. Although Julius Caesar was victorious in the war against Pompey, he pardoned his enemies and allowed them to return to Rome, so Turia and her fiancé were eventually able to get married. But worse was to come.
Just a few years later, after Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, the junta who ruled the city put a price on her husband’s head, and he was forced to leave the city again. It was only thanks to Turia’s intervention on his behalf with Lepidus, one of Rome’s so-called ‘ruling three’ (alongside Mark Antony and Octavian, the future emperor Augustus), that he was allowed back – but not before she had been horribly insulted and beaten black and blue by some of the regime’s apparatchiks.
Peace finally came to Rome more than a decade later, under its first emperor, Augustus – who by then had cannily reinvented himself as a responsible elder statesman. The marriage of Turia and her husband lasted 41 years, with only one major disappointment: they did not have any children.
Eventually, in despair, Turia suggested that her husband divorce her, so that she herself could find him another wife who might be able to produce an heir. Her idea seems to have been for a curious ménage à trois in which all their property remained jointly held, managed by her, and they would share the children of the new wife between the three of them.
But the husband would hear nothing of this scheme. Turia, after all, had remained faithful to him when he was in exile – why would he forsake her now?
Pieces of the puzzle
This is a rare story of a real woman’s life in ancient Rome. We know of it only thanks to the speech of praise given by the husband at Turia’s funeral, which he then had inscribed on two marble panels, almost certainly displayed on the facade of what must have been a vast tomb. All we can say about her comes from there.
We do not know exactly where the monument originally stood, because it was later broken up and the material recycled into other buildings. Fragments of the inscription have been discovered over the past few centuries all across the city: a couple of pieces in a Christian catacomb, one in an abbey wall, another unearthed during works on the sewers near modern Trastevere, yet another languishing unrecognised in a museum storeroom.
Other parts have come down to us only in manuscript copies made in the 17th century, recording fragments of the inscrip- tion that were then known but have since been lost again.
Reconstructing the text and, thus, the story of Turia’s life has been like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle. We have so far – there may be more pieces to come, if we are lucky – discovered slightly more than half of what was once written. The original text ran to almost 200 lines, covering the panels that were originally 2.5 metres tall and just under 1 metre wide – making it the longest Latin inscription created by a private individual to have survived anywhere in the Roman world.
Sadly, missing elements include the actual names of the couple, both husband and wife. ‘Turia’ is a conjecture by an 18th-century antiquarian. It is almost certainly wrong, but the name has stuck – and the whole document is generally known as the Laudatio Turiae, or Praise of Turia.
Of course, none of this gives us the woman’s own view of her life. What we have is what the husband chose to say about Turia at her funeral, and how he chose to have her permanently commemorated on the tomb, which he no doubt paid for. It was almost bound to be laudatory: funeral speeches, then as now, are not the place for criticism and complaint.
As well as the more striking and unusual episodes in her life mentioned above, there is plenty of praise for the stereotypical qualities that were the clichés of Roman womanhood – the kind of thing that almost any Roman husband would have wanted to be said about his wife.
“Why should I list your private qualities?” he remarks at one point: “Your modesty, your obedience, your kindness, your good nature, your devotion to weaving, your honouring of the gods without a trace of superstition, your inconspicuous dress, your restrained appearance.”
Taking the initiative
All this is very much in line with another famous Roman tombstone made a few hundred years earlier, which summed up the qualities of another dead woman more succinctly: “She was charming in her conversation, elegant in her bearing. She kept house; she wove wool.” The same sentiments can be found on many more memorials erected from one end of the Roman empire to the other.
But even if the Praise of Turia doesn’t give us Turia’s own perspective, some parts of it do challenge the standard view of how a woman in ancient Rome was supposed to behave. The scheming exploits of such larger-than-life characters as Augustus’s wife Livia are one thing, memorably reimagined in Robert Graves’ 1934 novel I, Claudius and probably fictional.
But here is a rich but relatively ordinary woman who is actually praised for taking the initiative, in the public world, to bring the murderers of her parents to justice. (That crime alone is a chilling glimpse of the lawlessness of Italy at the period – though, to be fair, we don’t know anything of the circumstances of the crime or of its perpetrators: gangland brigands, exploited servants or those with a private grudge?) And she receives even more praise for taking on her own relatives in the inher- itance dispute, then pleading in person for her own husband’s return before one of the junta – even getting beaten up in the process.
How typical was this? We cannot be sure. In one famous case, a female orator of the same period, Hortensia, is said to have addressed the junta publicly to protest against a tax imposed on women’s wealth during the civil wars after Caesar’s assassination. She was partially successful, and the number of women liable to the tax was reduced.
In these cases involving Hortensia and Turia, though, such an act was probably very much a wartime phenomenon. It is quite common, even in societies where women are usually confined to the home, for women to take the initiative or be forced into the limelight in periods of crisis, especially when men are absent on campaign.
That power does not usually last: for example, most of the women in Britain who found jobs driving buses or lorries during the Second World War lost them again in peacetime. So too, Turia – after filling the power vacuum while her husband was fighting overseas or was in exile – almost certainly returned to domes- ticity when ‘normality’ was restored.
And there are all kinds of puzzles about the story told in the Praise of Turia that go far beyond the tantalising anonymity of the couple concerned.
It is not clear, for example, how she took ‘vengeance’ (or secured ‘justice’ – the exact word is lost from the stone) for the murder of her parents. It is hard to imagine, bearing in mind Roman rules, that she stood up and publicly pleaded in a courtroom – though that is close to what Hortensia did.
Maybe it was something much closer to paying a private hit squad: that was probably how, in practice, most Roman disputes and vendettas were settled. Despite the fame of Roman law, such ‘self-help’, as it might euphemistically be called, would have been more common.
For me the most puzzling and memorable part of the Praise is the section on the couple’s infertility. It is no surprise that the husband puts that down entirely to his wife. Most Roman men assumed that, if a couple failed to have a baby, it was due to some deficiency in the woman, not the man. But why did he make such an issue of it in his speech, with all the details of the proposed divorce and ménage à trois? Rather than sheer clumsiness, it was very likely a sign of the times.
Augustus was still on the throne when Turia died. As part of his personal reinvention from bellicose warlord to elder states- man, he placed enormous emphasis on promoting the family and the Roman birth rate, and gave specific financial and legal privileges to those with at least three children.
Augustus, in other words, made this ‘private’ aspect of domestic life part of ‘public’ business. And that is what we see reflected here – as well as the husband’s implication, in refusing the divorce, that his love for Turia surpassed any such state pressure.
Being Roman
Turia is just one of the characters we spotlight in a series of six BBC Radio 4 programmes and podcasts that explore what it was to be Roman. In them, we look far beyond the standard image of upper-class men in togas or battledress spouting Latin.
To be fair, we do include one of those – the emperor Marcus Aurelius (reigned AD 161–180). But we give more time to the little-known surviving letters between him and his tutor, Marcus Cornelius Fronto, than to his better-known Meditations – still bestsellers among well-being handbooks after almost 2,000 years.
However, we range much more widely across the population of the Roman empire. In one programme we meet Galen, a celebrity doctor of the second century AD. He’s not really a household name today, yet we can still read more than 3 million words he wrote on medicine, philosophy and himself.
Another introduces a young boy by the name of Quintus Sulpicius Maximus, who died when he was only 11 years old – though not before he had won a ‘highly commended’ prize in an international poetry competition. His parents had his poem inscribed alongside his portrait on his tombstone.
Then there is Regina (‘Queenie’), a girl who was originally from somewhere near St Albans. Enslaved and later freed, she then married her former master, who was a Syrian from Palymra. The pair lived and died near Hadrian’s Wall in a textbook example of diversity, Roman-style – one of many that reveal how people from all across the Roman world mingled and interacted.
But perhaps my favourite of the six is a long-suffering and slightly bad-tempered middle manager from Roman Egypt. He usually refers to himself only by his job title: strategos (assistant governor). But a series of his letters, preserved on papyrus, allows us to trace the problems he encountered while attempting to organise a visit to Egypt by the emperor Diocletian in the late third century AD. Local mayors proved decidedly uncooperative: “I have told you two or three times,” he writes to one of them, “to get the bakery repaired so we can feed his majesty’s soldiers.”
He also had to cover his back with his own superiors, reporting that: “I have told them that they have to get the bakery repaired.” His letters provide a wonderful glimpse into a Roman office and a Roman filing cabinet over a couple of weeks in AD 298 – and into the burden placed on the locals ahead of “the auspiciously impending visit of our ruler”, as the strategos puts it in his formal bureaucratese. It all makes a visit from King Charles and Queen Camilla look quite low maintenance.
Scattered evidence
One of our aims in the series is to show just how varied the ‘Romans’ were. But we also look to lift the lid on some of the surprising stories of rediscovery that have allowed us to get to know these ancient characters.
The tombstone of little Quintus Sulpicius Maximus, for instance, was discovered only after Garibaldi’s forces destroyed Rome’s ancient wall after capturing the city in 1870: it had been recycled as a building block in the defences just a couple of hundred years after the boy’s death.
Some of Galen’s works, meanwhile, are known only in Arabic versions: his medical writings were influential in the Arab world, and some translations have been preserved in Arabic long after the original Greek texts were lost.
The letters between Fronto and Marcus Aurelius were rediscovered in even stranger circumstances. The parchment on which a copy of them had once been transcribed was later washed down and, for the sake of economy, reused by some monks in the seventh century to record the minutes of an early Christian council.
The more ancient correspondence would have disappeared forever, had an ingenious 19th-century scholar not realised that an earlier text lay underneath the Christian minutes, and used a chemical compound to reveal the traces.
The fate of the stone on which the Praise of Turia was inscribed – smashed up and scattered across Rome, only to be rediscovered in sewerage works and abbey walls, then pieced together again – is therefore not as unusual as it might at first seem.
It is a perfect reminder not only of how fragile the evidence from the Roman past can be, but also of how chance and serendipity can sometimes still bring that past back to us, with all those stories of real Romans and their real lives. Long may that serendipity continue.
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Mary Beard is honorary fellow at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, and an author and broadcaster. Her new book, Emperor of Rome, is out now from Profile Books.
]]> Fulvia: the maligned wife of politicians who made herself the power broker of ancient Rome https://www.historyextra.com/membership/fulvia-wife-roman-politicians-mark-antony-life-legacy-reputation/ Tue, 08 Aug 2023 13:26:06 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/fulvia-wife-roman-politicians-mark-antony-life-legacy-reputation/ As the wife of three successive political heavyweights, Fulvia attained a level of influence that few Roman women could have dreamed of. But, asks Danny Bird, is her legacy as a cruel opportunist (as well as someone willing to mutilate the severed enemy of a fallen enemy) entirely fair? After Marcus Tullius Cicero, the great orator and defender of Roman republicanism, was murdered in 43 BC by agents loyal to Mark Antony, his killers delivered his severed head and hands to Rome. There, they were displayed on the speaker’s rostrum in the Forum after Antony’s wife, Fulvia, came to gloat over the gruesome spectacle.
Removing the pins from her hair, she repeatedly stabbed Cicero’s now-still tongue – symbolically silencing the man whose eloquence had done so much damage to her husband’s standing, as well as her own honour. Or so the story goes...
Fulvia’s life has become entwined in the story of Rome’s transition to one-man rule. Born to Marcus Fulvius Bambalio and Sempronia during the twilight years of the Roman Republic, she was a scion of two of the city’s most respected and wealthiest plebeian families – part of the general citizenry, as opposed to the privileged patrician class. At a time when politics was a male vocation, Fulvia’s innate political instincts distinguished her as an outlier during some of the Republic’s most climactic events.
Fulvia’s short-lived marriages #1 and #2
Fulvia initially gained prominence through her marriage to Publius Clodius Pulcher, an ambitious demagogue who appealed to the plebeians. When he was killed in 52 BC by associates of his political rival, Titus Annius Milo, Fulvia had his bloodied corpse displayed in the street, whipping up a mob of his supporters and sparking Milo’s exile.
After the customary 10-month mourning period, Fulvia marred Gaius Scribonius Curio. Having maintained the loyalty of her first husband’s plebeian support base, she soon mobilised it around Curio’s own political aspirations. But it was amid the geopolitical turmoil unleashed by Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BC that Curio’s – and thus Fulvia’s – fortunes soared as the couple aligned their ambitions with Caesar’s.
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However, Curio’s death during the battle of Bagradas in North Africa later that year stymied Fulvia’s machinations. Widowed once more, she likely remained in Rome with her children. Fulvia’s status as a wealthy widow and power broker in the capital made her both a force to be reckoned with and an object of desire.
Within five years of Curio’s death, she married Mark Antony, Caesar’s right-hand man. Hot-headed Antony’s fortunes were boosted by Fulvia’s aptitude for political intrigue. However, their relationship soon became the subject of scurrilous gossip among Caesar’s adversaries.
Fulvia and Antony: Roman power couple
In the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination by a group of senators in 44 BC, Cicero’s dismay over the survival of Antony – who had been discussed as another target on the fateful Ides of March – turned polemical. Within the 14 speeches known as the Philippics, Cicero excoriated Antony and accused him of having conducted an affair with Fulvia that had begun during her first marriage.
Despite Cicero’s campaign, Antony’s closeness to Caesar – coupled with the financial and populist clout that Fulvia lent him – had made them Rome’s ultimate power couple. In 43 BC, General Marcus Aemilius Lepidus and Caesar’s named heir, Octavian, formed a triumvirate with Antony. To cement the alliance, Claudia – Fulvia’s daughter by Clodius – was married to Octavian.
- On the podcast | Peter Stothard reveals how Julius Caesar’s assassination triggered a brutal power struggle, one that would transform ancient Rome
While Antony and Octavian stalked Caesar’s assassins in Greece, Fulvia was left to preside over the day-to-day politics of Rome. Then once Caesar’s assassins had been vanquished, the triumvirs partitioned the Roman world between themselves.
Antony claimed dominion over the eastern Mediterranean, launching a passionate affair with Egypt’s queen, Cleopatra VII. Meanwhile, Fulvia became rankled by Octavian’s control of Italy. Recognising his monstrous ambitions as a direct threat to her own – and perhaps seeking to lure Antony back from Alexandria – in 41 BC she helped foment civil war.
Was Fulvia a victim of misogynistic propaganda?
In league with her brother-in-law, Lucius Antonius, Fulvia rallied legions to seize Perusia (now Perugia) and Praeneste (Palestrina). Octavian besieged Perusia, which surrendered after sling projectiles engraved with scornful words aimed at Fulvia were hurled at the city.
Absconding to Greece, she reunited with a furious Antony, who soon departed to deal with Octavian. Abandoned in Sicyon, near Corinth, Fulvia died in 40 BC of an unknown illness. Antony reconciled with Octavian and married his sister, Octavia Minor, the two men conspiring to scapegoat Fulvia as the cause of their quarrel.
Both in life and death, Fulvia faced relentless criticism, painted as an androgynous interloper who defied Roman norms. Like Cleopatra after her, the sway she held over men such as Antony fuelled misogynistic propaganda. The fact that Fulvia was the first living woman (albeit depicted as the goddess, Libertas) to appear on Roman coinage is an enduring testament to her influence on the city’s political life.
This article was first published in the June 2023 issue of BBC History Revealed
]]> Blood, sweat & marble: examining ancient bodies https://www.historyextra.com/membership/examining-ancient-bodies-podcast-caroline-vout/ Wed, 25 Jan 2023 09:24:25 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/examining-ancient-bodies-podcast-caroline-vout/ Caroline Vout takes us under the dust covers and presents the flesh and blood realities of life in ancient bodies Imagine an ancient Greek or Roman body, and the first picture that pops into your head is probably made of marble or stone – perhaps an austere bust, or a gleaming, musclebound sculpture, polished, cold and pale. But what about the experience of living in a real body, in all its pleasure, pain and flaws, during antiquity? Speaking with Elinor Evans, Caroline Vout presents the flesh and blood realities of life – and death – in ancient Greece and Rome.
Caroline Vout is the author of Exposed: The Greek and Roman Body (Profile Books, 2022)
]]> Roman Britain: what six objects can reveal about life for women at Hadrian’s Wall https://www.historyextra.com/membership/hadrians-wall-what-life-like-roman-women-britain-artefacts/ Wed, 24 Aug 2022 08:19:31 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/hadrians-wall-what-life-like-roman-women-britain-artefacts/ The soldiers who garrisoned Hadrian’s Wall were all men, but what of the many women of diverse backgrounds who lived on and around the frontier? Bronwen Riley selects six objects that offer precious insights into women’s lives at the edge of the empire... As is so often the case when exploring the past, we have a clearer picture of the lives of men – particularly Roman soldiers – on Hadrian’s Wall than of the women who lived alongside them. Yet artefacts found on the frontier reveal much about the varied experiences and backgrounds of women in the society that emerged in Britain’s military zone.
Here, Bronwen Riley highlights six such objects...
The tombstone of a slave who married her master
An intriguing example of what an artefact can reveal about the lives of women at Hadrian’ Wall is an elaborate gravestone of the mid-to-late second century AD, from the cemetery outside the Roman fort of Arbeia (South Shields). It depicts a woman, dressed in all her finery, sitting with her spindle on her lap. The Latin inscription beneath this picture of domestic comfort and industry tells us this is Regina, a freedwoman, wife of Barates from Palmyra (Syria) and a member of the Catuvellauni tribe, who died at the age of 30.
Beneath, a line in Palmyrene laments: “Regina, freed woman of Barates, alas!” This tombstone reveals the complex and ambiguous nature of relationships in the Roman world, particularly in Britain, on the empire’s north-western frontier.
Here is a woman from the peaceful south of Britain – the Catuvellauni tribe were based around Verulamium, near modern-day St Albans – who was enslaved, and bought by a man from Syria. At the time of her death, he had granted her freedom and regarded her (in Latin, at least) as his wife. However, neither Regina nor Barates was a Roman citizen, so any form of marriage they may have contracted would not have been recognised under Roman law.
Barates may have been a merchant, and the style of the gravestone suggests that it was the work of a Palmyrene craftsman, implying the existence of a Syrian community in Arbeia. How did this enslaved southern British woman end up on Hadrian’s Wall? She may have been born into slavery or sold into slavery by her family, or was perhaps an orphan or foundling.
Regina is Latin for “queen”, so hers is likely a slave’s nickname – ironic or admiring, perhaps a mixture of both. Did the trader who sold her call her that, or was it Barates’ name for her? Perhaps 10,000 men were stationed in the military zone on and around Hadrian’s Wall. It may have been thought politic to take women from outside the local area rather than from tribes nearby. What is left of Regina? Her face is lost and we cannot tell how she wore her hair. She wears a Gallic coat over a tunic – fashionable in both Britain and Gaul. One possible mark of a British identity is the torc around her neck. Regarded as typically Celtic, torcs were worn under Roman occupation, but designed in new styles and materials.
There is a tendency to see in this tomb stone a love story – that woeful “Alas!” of Barates who freed and married his “Queenie”. But the Palmyrene text is no more than the equivalent of “RIP” and reinforces Barates’ identity rather than Regina’s.
- Read more | What was life like on Hadrian's Wall?
An altar that reveals the only priestess known by name in Britain
Diodora was a priestess in Corbridge, a busy Roman town on the banks of the Tyne 2.5 miles south of Hadrian’s Wall, situated at an important crossing point over the river at the intersection of key roads. Diodora’s name – and the Greek inscription she wrote on the altar that she dedicated to Herakles of Tyre – suggests that she came from the eastern part of the empire, where Greek was the predominant language.
The cult she served as priestess was rather niche, originating in the port city of Tyre in the province of Syria, and was one of several eastern religions for which there is evidence at Corbridge. Worship of the cult may have been brought to northern Britain by soldiers or merchants (such as Barates of Syria, husband of Regina, discussed above), or by troops who had become devotees of the god while serving in the eastern part of the empire in the 160s AD during the Parthian Wars.
The earliest known temples at Corbridge date from this period, when the fort became a supply base for the northern frontier, with detachments of legionaries stationed here. Naturally, such a depot attracted traders and merchants of all sorts.
How, from where and for what reason Diodora arrived in Corbridge and became a devotee of the god remains a mystery. Nor is it clear if she served the cult as a career priestess, or if her title was honorary – a sort of social distinction with a few light ceremonial duties attached. Priests and priestesses could be elected or sometimes inherited their roles; in some regions, they could buy their offices.
Women likely had a limited role in traditional Roman religion. They were largely excluded from playing any significant part in religious public life, with very few exceptions – for example, the Vestal Virgins (priestesses of the goddess Vesta) or in supporting roles to their husbands. They seem to have been forbidden to butcher animals or handle undiluted wine, both key components in animal sacrifice. Nor could they invoke prayers on behalf of a community.
By contrast, in Greek religion priestesses sometimes had key public responsibilities and were given honours and duties on a par with priests. So the appeal of many eastern or fringe cults that offered women more scope for participation – Christianity included – is understandable.
On the podcast | Rob Collins answers listener questions on Britain’s most famous Roman fortification, from its creation and purpose to everyday life on the wall
A discarded sandal: fast fashion for the elite
Among other extraordinary organic material found at Vindolanda is a rather exquisitely decorated sandal, stamped with the name of its Gallic maker, Lucius Aebutius Thales. It would have been worn as a house shoe, over a bare foot or with a slotted sock. It seems to have been discarded after the toe thong snapped, with no sign of any attempts at repair – indicating that its owner had access to other fine footwear.
We do not know who it belonged to but, because it was found in the commanding officer’s house, it is tempting to imagine Lepidina wearing it as she read one of Severa’s letters.
An invitation to a birthday party on Hadrian’s Wall
Claudia Severa’s letters to her friend Sulpicia Lepidina are among the most personal of more than 2,000 found at Vindolanda, where Lepidina’s husband was the prefect of the ninth cohort of Batavians.
In her letters, Severa invites her friend to celebrate her birthday, eagerly plans visits, and exchanges news about her husband and children. Severa dictated her letters to a secretary but wrote the affectionate endings herself: “I will hope for you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail.” In another fragment she describes Lepidina as her desideratissima (most longed-for) soul.
Written at the beginning of the second century, Severa’s letters represent the earliest known examples of a woman’s hand writing in Latin. Her sign-offs may express the warmth and exuberance of her character but perhaps also reflect the intimate way women of her background customarily addressed each other (“sister” does not necessarily imply they were related). One also detects in them a sense of isolation, and Severa’s longing for the company of other women of her own age and background.
Severa appears to have had an affectionate relationship with her husband. However, as wives the women were subject to their husbands, and clearly needed their permission to travel. Living at a military base on the empire’s remote north-western frontier added numerous other constraints to these women’s lives. The roads would have been in a terrible state at certain times of the year, and there may have been restrictions in place for travelling around the frontier zone; in any case, the women would have needed some sort of escort.
Until AD 197, rank-and-file soldiers could not contract legal marriages. This did not preclude soldiers from having relationships or families in the settlements that inevitably grew up around the forts. Inside the forts, though, only the prefects and centurions could officially have their families with them, which must have greatly constrained the women’s social lives.
WATCH: Professor Rob Collins explores Claudia Sevara's letter to Sulpicia Lepidina in more detail Watch the full video here
View Green Video on the source website
A spindle whorl to remind us of women’s labour
Spinning wool was seen as women’s work – the essence of female domesticity. Even women of the highest status were expected at least to supervise their household in the task. Spinning was a crucial domestic task for women, because a constant supply of thread was needed to be woven into cloth.
Beyond the immediate requirements of the individual household, there were also thousands of soldiers on the wall to be clothed. Britain was highly prized for the quality of its wool, and its blankets and cloaks were also exported.
Wooden spindles rarely survive, but spindle whorls – made from stone, bone, jet, lead or ceramics – are commonly found on archaeological sites. Acting as weights on the spindle, adding momentum to the spinning, their size varied depending on the type of wool and form of yarn required. This amber spindle whorl was found in the settlement that grew up around Old Penrith, a fort at the centre of key trade routes on the road to Carlisle.
How a young girl’s gravestone is evidence of the persistence of indigenous beliefs along the frontier
How sad Sudrenus must have been as he commissioned the gravestone for his daughter Ertola, “properly called Vellibia”, who “led the happiest of lives for four years and 60 days”.
Having died in the late third or early fourth century, Ertola was buried at Corbridge, a town that seems to have attracted a sizeable indigenous population: more Celtic stone heads have been found here than at any other site in the north. The little girl is depicted on the gravestone clutching a round object, commonly interpreted as a ball. The names Sudrenus and Ertola are Celtic, as is the decoration of the gravestone, far removed in style from the classical tradition.
A Roman girl would often take a feminine form of her father’s name (so a daughter of Claudius Severus could be called Claudia Severa), but Celtic girls’ names seem to have been less rigidly prescribed. The name Cartimandua (queen of the northern Brigantes tribes), for example, means “white filly”.
Before the occupation, British women seem to have enjoyed greater freedom than their Roman counterparts. Though we hear about the British queens Cartimandua and Boudicca only through a deeply prejudiced Roman filter, accounts show that they were independent rulers who owned property, led armies into battle and divorced their husbands.
Under Roman law, girls could be legally married from the age of 12, but there is evidence that in Britain girls married later. There are also persistent reports that British women had much freer sexual relationships with men. Outside the immediate Roman sphere of the towns and forts, British women may have remained subject to local rather than Roman law in terms of marriage or inheritance. The Romans often thought it would be too inflammatory to meddle with such rules unless absolutely necessary.
Ertola’s gravestone provides an intimate insight into the grief of a father for his young daughter. It’s also a poignant reminder that women of all ages and backgrounds – and from all parts of Britain and the empire – lived, loved, worked and died along Hadrian’s Wall.
Bronwen Riley is a classicist and author, whose latest book is Journey to Britannia: From the Heart of Rome to Hadrian’s Wall, AD 130 (Head of Zeus, 2022)
This article was first published in the August 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
Discover more learning from week two of the HistoryExtra Academy Roman Britain course
Video lecture: The Humble and the Proud – watching time 18 mins Black Britannia: the African people who lived in Roman Britain – reading time 5 mins Ancient Roman slavery: what was life like as an enslaved person? – reading time 7 mins How ethnically diverse was Roman Britain? – reading time 3 mins
]]> In bed with the Romans: a brief history of sex in Ancient Rome https://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/in-bed-with-the-romans-a-brief-history-of-sex-in-ancient-rome/ Thu, 26 Mar 2020 03:30:00 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/in-bed-with-the-romans-a-brief-history-of-sex-in-ancient-rome/ What is known about the sexual predilections of the men and women of ancient Rome? What were their attitudes to extra-marital sex and same-sex relationships? And how scandalous were the Roman emperors? Author Paul Chrystal steps inside the Roman bedroom and reveals how, right from the start, sex was linked to momentous constitutional development for the Roman state... According to Philip Larkin's best-known poem, Annus Mirabilis, 1963 is the year in which sex was invented in Britain. For the Romans it would have been 750 BC.
Of course, like us, Romans and Latins had been having sex forever but, according to Roman historian Titus Livius Patavinus (aka ‘Livy’), soon after the founding of Rome (in 753 BC), sex attained indelible and inextricable political and historical importance in the annals of Rome.
Right from the start, sex was linked to momentous constitutional development for the Roman state. The first instance was the 750 BC rape of the Sabine women – a carefully executed example of nation building in which the Romans replenished their dwindling supply of fertile women by carrying off the wives and daughters of the neighbouring Sabines.
Soon after, sex was implicated first in the overthrow of the tyrannical monarchy and the establishment of the republic, and then in the restoration of that republic so pivotal to Roman democracy. During the former, virtuous Lucretia [a legendary Roman matron whose fate played a key role in the transition from a Roman Kingdom into a Roman Republic] took her own life in 510 BC after being raped by Sextus Tarquinius, son of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, last king of Rome.
In the latter, virginal Verginia was stabbed to death in 449 BC by her own father to avoid the shame of violation (stuprum) by Appius Claudius, one of the decemviri [an official commission of 10 men].
Preservation of sexual virtue – pudicitia – cost Lucretia and Verginia their lives; so important was pudicitia to Roman values, history and society. Later, Roman historians like Livy embellished the legendary women of the past with the sexual mores they insisted their contemporary women should enshrine.
A sense of duty
Sex for most Romans was undoubtedly gratifying, but it was also a duty: largely speaking, it was probably more gratifying for the men and more a duty for their women. Men delighted in displaying their vir – manhood and sexual prowess – while women obliged by submitting to serial childbirth – a production line of babies, ideally boys, to maintain the family line and keep the battlefield and farm-land stocked with recruits. Baby girls, on the other hand, were costly and contributed little or nothing to the family income; moreover, they would require an expensive dowry one day.
Indeed, marriage itself was a lopsided affair. According to the men, women who married should not expect any pleasure or enjoyment – they tied the knot simply to procreate. Moreover, the silent, compliant and subservient wife was expected to turn a blind eye to her husband’s sexual infelicities, while the man could philander as much as he liked so long as the mistress was unmarried, or, if with a boy, he was over a certain age. Brothels, prostitutes and dancing girls were considered ‘fair game’, as were older males – with the one crucial proviso that it was you who did the penetrating. Being passive and being penetrated was considered women’s work: men who submitted were considered deficient in vir and in virtus (virtue): they were denounced and reviled as effeminate.
So same-sex in Ancient Rome was thought to be fine for a man (albeit with conditions), but same-sex between women was unconditionally execrated. ‘Lesbian’ sex often assumed penetration, which was considered man’s work, so a woman adopting this role (and her submissive recipient) were castigated in equal measure. The Latin for ‘Lesbian’ women was tribades or fricatores – “those (women) that rubbed”.
Changing views
By the end the Republic, however, illicit and extra-marital sex was seen to be damaging and rampant. Augustus, as first emperor, noticed this and, although he himself was not averse to whisking off other men’s wives at the odd dinner party for a spot of hors d’oeuvre, he tried to restore some good old-fashioned family values with (largely unsuccessful) legislation relating to marriage, divorce and birth rate boosting.
Augustus’s sexual activity was, however, easily eclipsed by his wayward daughter Julia, who is said to have fornicated on the very podium from which her father had delivered his moralistic legislation. To Julia, life was a beach – her analogy that she never took a lover on board unless her boat was full (that is, she was pregnant) rebounded badly: her father eventually exiled her to the remote (and man-free) island of Pandataria, off the coast of Campania.
Cross-dressing
In some ways, Julia set the sexual benchmark for the early decades of the Roman empire. Years earlier, Julius Caesar had popularised the rage for celebrity cross-dressing when, aged 20, he lived the life of a girl in the court of King Nicomedes IV, and was later referred to as ‘Queen of Bithynia’, “every woman’s man and every man’s woman”.
Tiberius, meanwhile, dressed as a woman for his debaucheries on Capri, and Caligula sometimes showed up at banquets dressed as Venus. Nero, full of remorse after kicking to death his pregnant wife, Poppaea Sabina, sought out a surrogate who resembled her – and found Sporus: not a woman, but a young man. Nero’s people castrated the ex-slave, and the couple married. Sporus joined Nero in bed with Pythagoras (another freedman Nero had married), who nightly played the role of husband in their troilism. Sporus routinely accompanied Nero decked out as his empress.
Nero, who is said to have enjoyed incest with his mother, Agrippina the Younger, starred in the notorious banquets of Tigellinus: draped in the skins of wild animals, he would be released from a cage to ‘mutilate’ orally the genitals of men and women bound to stakes.
Brothels
Let us turn now to Messalina, empress to Claudius: queen of the imperial whores, she is said to have regularly snuck out of bed while Claudius slept to visit a fetid brothel, using the working name ‘Lycisca’ (‘Wolf Bitch’). Roman author Pliny the Elder tells the distasteful story of Messalina’s epic orgy, in which she challenged a veteran prostitute to a 24-hour sex marathon. The empress won with 25 partners – one client per hour.
On a more mundane level, the poet Ovid insisted that some elite women were partial to ‘a bit of rough’ – a sentiment echoed by Petronius in his Satyricon [a novel about Roman society], which describes how some upper-class women burned with desire for men of the lower orders – dancers, bin-men and gladiators.
Sex also features prominently throughout the short “unspeakably disgusting life” of emperor Elagabalus (AD c203–22), a notorious transgressor and deviant, beset by gender confusion and depravity. However, he could not be accused of lacking a sense of humour; according to the sensationalist Historia Augusta [a collection of biographies of Roman emperors, heirs, and claimants from Hadrian to Numerianus]:
“he took lust in every orifice of his body, sending out agents in search of men with large penises to satisfy his passions… The size of a man’s organ often determined the post he was given. He habitually locked his friends up when they were drunk and suddenly, in the night, let into the room lions, leopards and bears – surreptitiously rendered harmless – so that when they woke up these friends would find at dawn, or worse, during the night, [wild animals] in the same bedroom as themselves. Several of them died [of shock] as a result of this.”
Things went further still when Elagabalus offered huge fortunes to any physician who could give him permanent female genitalia or, in the words of Roman historian Cassius Dio, “to contrive a woman’s vagina in his body by means of an incision”.
Fast-forward to AD 525 and sex was still a major aspect of Roman life. Theodora, who was empress to Justinian I, worked in a Constantinople brothel performing mime and obscene burlesque. One of her star roles was as Leda in Leda and the Swan; this involved lying on her back while other actors scattered barley on her groin. The barley was then pecked up by geese masquerading as Zeus. Inviting fellow actors to copulate with her on stage was another of Theodora’s party pieces.
But Theodora was later transformed into virtual sainthood with her raft of social reforms protecting women from physical and sexual abuse and discrimination, enacted when she assumed the position of empress.
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Paul Chrystal is the author of In Bed with the Romans (Amberley Publishing, 2015).
This article was first published by HistoryExtra in 2015
]]> Call the (Roman) midwife https://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/childbirth-ancient-rome-empire-mothers-midwives-how-babies-born/ Tue, 26 Mar 2019 12:51:10 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/childbirth-ancient-rome-empire-mothers-midwives-how-babies-born/ Even today, childbirth can be arduous, even dangerous – so how did mothers deal with the challenges in antiquity? Laurence Totelin introduces the midwives of the Roman empire and explores their techniques Marcus Ulpius Amerimnus and Scribonia Attica, a husband and wife who lived in the second century AD, rest together in their funeral monument at Ostia, near Rome. According to an inscription on the walls of the tomb, Scribonia herself commissioned it for the eternal rest of her family and freed-people. Marcus was a surgeon, as we learn from a bas-relief on the tomb, where he is represented in the act of treating a leg wound, next to his – rather oversized – surgical instruments.
Scribonia was a midwife, as illustrated
by her own bas-relief, where she is shown delivering a child. A naked woman sits in a birthing chair (a special seat with handles for the mother to grip during contractions), her belly swollen. She is supported by a woman, perhaps a relative, while the midwife sits on a low stool in front of them, ready to catch the baby; she looks straight out at us rather than at her patient’s genitals, perhaps to spare her blushes.
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Scribonia, as another of her names, Attica, indicates, had Greek origins, as did her mother Scribonia Callityche; their ancestors probably included slaves. But the midwife Scribonia had gone up in the world: she had made a good marriage with a skilled healer, and she had acquired wealth. Like her husband, she had tools, which she brought to women in labour: the birthing chair and the stool on which she sat were hers.
Childbirth in the Roman empire, as everywhere in the ancient world, was women’s business. Female midwives and family members brought children into the world and attended to the care of newborns. However, with the exception of inscriptions or art on funeral monuments such as that of Scribonia, almost no first-person accounts of pregnancy and childbirth in ancient Rome are available; our knowledge is mediated instead through the writings of male authors.
Admittedly, some of these men were very well informed, sympathetic to women, and prepared to recognise the skill of midwives. Soranus of Ephesus in Asia Minor (in what’s now Turkey), who was a physician active at the turn of the first and second centuries AD, was such an author. An adherent of the Methodic school of medicine, he favoured gentle treatments over harsh ones – and nowhere is this more apparent than in his Gynaecology, the only one of his treatises to be preserved in full.
The volume opens with a description of the ideal midwife: she should be “literate, with her wits about her, possessed of a good memory, loving work, respectable and generally not unduly handicapped as regards her senses, sound of limb, robust and, according to some people, endowed with long, slim fingers and short nails at her fingertips”.
All this advice, down to the shortness of the nails, is very sensible but smacks of wishful thinking. Certainly, not all midwives in the ancient world were literate. Literacy was not an essential accomplishment for a trade that was often passed from one female relative to another in an apprenticeship based on the oral word. Some tricks of the trade, such as contraceptive or abortive remedies and preparations to speed up a difficult birth, were best kept secret – and therefore not written down.
Part-time birthers
As for respectability, that was a matter of perspective. The author Eunapius, writing in the fourth century AD, reports an anecdote in which a hostess in a Roman wine shop – described as a relatively upmarket one – was serving a client when she was called by a neighbour and kinswoman to attend to a difficult birth (she was also skilled in midwifery). After the safe delivery of the child, she washed her hands and promptly returned to her customers. In many cases, midwifery was an occupation on the side – something undertaken by women as a contribution to their community’s welfare. Those who, like Scribonia, specialised in the business of birth and took the title obstetrix (midwife) may have been the exception rather than the rule.
It is tempting to assume that birth in the ancient world was a much more dangerous affair than it is today: there was little pain relief available, and little knowledge of infection and basic hygiene. However, in cases of uncomplicated births, women in the Roman empire could manage well with the assistance of only a wise family member – without much intervention apart from massaging of the genitals with an emollient such as warm olive oil. Advice on breathing could also help: Soranus tells us that women should “press their breath” when the pains are most acute.
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Women may also have found some comfort in wearing amulets to speed up the birth. Many amulets in the ancient world were made from perishable materials, but examples from Roman Egypt (30 BC–AD 641) made from durable haematite stone have been discovered. One example, now at the Kelsey Museum in Michigan, was inscribed with magical formulas and a representation of the uterus that could be opened and closed with a key – closed when the woman wanted to avoid pregnancy or wanted to ‘lock’ her uterus after conception, and opened when she wanted to become pregnant or to open up her uterus for labour.
Things became more complicated when labour was lengthy and a baby awkwardly positioned. Midwives and doctors relied on their most trustworthy instruments – their hands, with which they could gently encourage the opening of the uterus or attempt to reposition a baby whose presentation was poor.
Ancient texts do not mention episiotomies (cutting of the perineum to facilitate the birth of a child), nor are there references to forceps, and no such instruments have been found in the archaeological record. Though the ‘caesarean section’ allegedly derives its name from that of Caesar, Roman midwives and doctors did not undertake the procedure. Stories of ancient C-sections are all mythical – for example, the story of how baby Aesculapius, the god of medicine, was snatched from the womb of his dying mother, Coronis, by his father Apollo.
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Treatments and traumas
Midwives and doctors might administer herbs that caused the uterus to contract when the labour slowed down. Accounts tell of women being tied to ladders and shaken in order to speed up labour, although Soranus vehemently decried the practice. In the worst situations the mother’s life took precedence, and an embryotomy was carried out: the embryo was cut into pieces and extracted from the womb using hooks. Another risk for women in labour was retention of the placenta, which could lead to haemorrhage. Latin medical texts preserve various recipes for remedies that allegedly facilitated the expulsion of the afterbirth.
Ancient authors were aware that childbirth could be an ordeal for women, and could leave them exhausted or even kill them. Pregnancy, too, could cause discomfort, strange cravings – for coals and earth, for example – and nausea, against which the first-century-AD natural philosopher Pliny the Elder recommended the pips of citron (a citrus fruit).
One source recounting a case of ancient morning sickness – or, rather, its most severe form, hyperemesis gravidarum – is found in the Miracles of St Stephen, a fourth-century Christian text falsely attributed to St Augustine. It tells the story of a woman named Megetia who was afflicted with such bad vomiting in pregnancy that she dislocated her jaw, which made her unable to properly take food. After physicians proved unable to treat her, she travelled to the sanctuary of St Stephen near Carthage where, upon being visited by a snake in a dream, she was healed by the power of her faith in the Christian god.
Early Christian texts in general offer interesting insights into pregnancy and childbirth, because they are more focussed on the experience of women than any preserved medical text. According to the Protoevangelium of St James, an apocryphal gospel dating to the second century AD, Joseph called upon midwives after Jesus was born in a cave (not a stable, as tradition usually has it). One of these midwives, Salome, refused to believe that a virgin had given birth, and asked to inspect Mary’s genitals to check for the normal vaginal distention and blood loss that accompany birth. She found none of those signs – but her hand caught fire, healing only after she repented of her doubts. Though the story is, of course, a miraculous one, it does demonstrate that ancient midwives were used to dealing with the normal blood, sweat and tears of childbirth.
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Whose breast is best?
The question of whether mothers should breastfeed their own babies was a thorny one in ancient Rome. In antiquity, the only safe way to feed a newborn baby was breastfeeding. Finding animal milk (usually goat’s milk) in a big city such as Rome was not always easy, and the milk could prove indigestible or even dangerous. The vast majority of babies in antiquity were breastfed, often for what we would consider to be long periods of time – over 18 months. Ancient baby bottles have been discovered, but they were probably designed for feeding toddlers rather than very small babies.
Debates over baby feeding raged among the Roman upper classes. In one camp were advocates of maternal feeding; in the other, advocates of wet-nursing, at least in some circumstances. The physician Soranus, though not opposed to maternal feeding, acknowledged that the process could be exhausting for the mother, and that the milk of an overtired and feverish mother could prove harmful for the baby. A good wet-nurse – Greek, well-tempered and below the age of 40 – would be ideal. However, that perfect nurse may not always have been available, and other authors also worried about the bad influence that a wet-nurse could exert on her charge, because the Romans believed that character was passed through breast milk.
More generally, the Romans considered breast milk to be a powerful substance that could treat ailments ranging from phthisis (a respiratory illness) to cases of poisoning and eye complaints. Ancient recipes for eye remedies often recommended that ingredients be diluted in human milk – an ingredient that was readily available, and certainly cheap.
Laurence Totelin is senior lecturer in ancient history at Cardiff University.
This article first appeared in BBC History Magazine's 'The Story of Medicine' bookazine
]]> Agrippina the Younger: the first true empress of Ancient Rome https://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/agrippina-younger-empress-ancient-rome-empress-nero-caligula/ https://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/agrippina-younger-empress-ancient-rome-empress-nero-caligula/ Through she is often defined by her male relatives, Agrippina the Younger – matriarch, wife and murderer – made her name in her own right. Emma Southon charts her rise to power for BBC History Revealed Julia Agrippina is best remembered now as the tyrannical mother of mad emperor Nero, or as the overbearing and murderous wife of the emperor Claudius. Rarely, she is remembered as the sister of another emperor, Gaius (Caligula). She is almost never, however, remembered as a woman in her own right, free from the distorting lens of her male relatives.
But during her lifetime, Julia Agrippina, more commonly known as Agrippina the Younger, made unique and extraordinary inroads into the spaces of Roman political and social power, to the extent that she ruled for several years as her husband’s equal in power. She was the first true empress of Rome, although you’ll struggle to hear anyone refer to her as such.
Born into the Roman ruling family of the first century, the Julio-Claudians, Agrippina was destined to be at the centre of Roman power, but more likely, as a woman, just to the side.
Her mother, Vipsania Agrippina (Agrippina the Elder) was the granddaughter of the deified first emperor Augustus, while her father Germanicus was both the adopted son of the emperor Tiberius and biological grandson of Mark Antony. They were for a time Rome’s most beloved couple. Before Agrippina was 20, though, both her parents were dead and it was widely believed that Tiberius had murdered them both.
Whim of the emperors
During this time, little is known about Agrippina the Younger, except that she was married at the age of about 13 to her much older cousin, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus. Her situation changed when she was around 22 when Tiberius died and her brother Gaius, who would be known as Caligula, became emperor.
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His first priority was to rehabilitate his family’s reputation after decades of being maligned by Tiberius, and so he pulled all three of his sisters into the centre of the Roman state.
He showered them with all the honours the state could give, including giving them the rights of Vestal Virgins. In return, and following the death of their middle sister, Agrippina and the youngest Livilla were caught in the early stages of a plot to murder him.
This is the first time that the sources show us an Agrippina who is an active agent in her own life, when she is around 24 years old, has already been married for a decade, and given birth to her only child. Until this point, she is all but invisible, but suddenly, in AD 39, we catch a glimpse of a woman doing something remarkably bold to change the world around her.
The details of the plot are unclear – and some historians dispute there was ever a plot at all – but the events after it was uncovered suggest that Agrippina, Livilla and Drusilla’s widower Lepidus planned a coup. Agrippina endured an embarrassing trial, during which her love letters were read aloud, and was sent into exile with her sister on an island in the Mediterranean.
As a final humiliation, she was made to carry the ashes of the executed Lepidus with her. Whatever had been planned, the consequences suggest it was big.
During her exile, Agrippina’s husband died of dropsy and her brother died of a sword to the throat. In early AD 41, a coup led by the Praetorian Guard brought in a new administration in the imperial palace, replacing Gaius, who was assassinated, with Agrippina’s paternal uncle, Claudius.
As a man in his 50s best known for his physical disabilities and academic interests, he was not a natural choice for the political and military leader of the empire. He was, however, fond of his nieces and one of his first acts was to allow Agrippina to return to Rome and be reunited with her son. He offered her a quiet, safe life as a minor royal.
Causing outrage
This quiet life was not to be, primarily due to the presence of Agrippina’s son. He had been named Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus after his father, but everyone in Rome knew him as the youngest descendant of the divine Augustus. By the time she was 26, Agrippina was the lone surviving member of her family and her son the only male left carrying the bloodline.
This had two effects: it made them deeply dangerous to Claudius’s rule, and it filled Agrippina with a righteous belief that her son deserved to take his great-great-grandfather’s throne.
Nonetheless, she stayed out of the public eye as far as possible. That was until Claudius’s notoriously promiscuous wife Messalina was executed in AD 48 after being caught in a bizarre bigamous marriage. Then Agrippina burst into public life in a manner that shocked and horrified Rome: she married Claudius, her own uncle.
Agrippina's family: your guide to the Julio-Claudian dynasty
Agrippina the Elder (mother)
Seen as the sole biological descendent of the first emperor, Augustus, she was the only child born of the general Marcus Agrippa and Julia, Augustus’s daughter. She had six children and after her widowhood, tried to advance her eldest sons in Rome. She and they were exiled and executed in mysterious circumstances by the emperor Tiberius.
Germanicus (father)
Germanicus was the grandchild of Mark Antony and Octavia. He was known as a great general for his successes in Germany – being granted a military triumph – and had a promising political career. He died suddenly while in Syria and it was widely believed that Tiberius had poisoned him. He maintained his immense popularity even after his death.
Gaius Caligula (brother)
The youngest son Gaius survived the executions that claimed his mother and brothers, so inherited the empire from Tiberius in AD 37, before he was 25. Although he only ruled for four years, he has become infamous for his capricious, sadistic and perverted nature. When the Praetorian Guard launched a coup, Gaius, his wife and daughter were assassinated.
Nero (son)
Agrippina’s only child. After a tumultuous childhood, Nero became emperor in AD 54. The early years of his reign were seen as successful, but his behaviour deteriorated. His reign is associated with cruelty and numerous executions. He was overthrown in AD 68 after several generals revolted against him. Having fled Rome, he committed suicide.
Claudius (uncle/husband)
As he suffered from a stammer, uncontrolled emotional responses and a propensity to drool, he had no political career until he became emperor in AD 41. His rule was initially tumultuous and authoritarian, but became more peaceful after his marriage to his fourth wife: Agrippina. She allegedly poisoned him with a mushroom.
This outraged later Roman commentators whose morals were offended by such an act and such a marriage. Claudius was forced to have the incest laws changed in order for the marriage to be allowed. Why he chose to marry his niece is forever a mystery.
One source claims Agrippina seduced him, using her familial access to him to manipulate his weakness for women. In this version, Agrippina is an aggressive temptress, willing to sell her body to her own uncle in exchange for power. In another source, though, one of Claudius’s freedmen offers Agrippina as a prize while others present their own women, touting their fecundity and their good families.
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In this version, Agrippina is a passive bystander, little more than a walking bloodline. These are both narrative tropes, not real life. Instead, Agrippina was a mother in her 30s, hugely powerful on the basis of her name, money and connections. She was neither a passive womb, nor a young temptress.
It is Agrippina’s behaviour once she was Claudius’s wife that makes her quite so extraordinary. Unlike the wives of emperors before and after her, she was, in all ways, her husband’s partner in rule. Livia – Augustus’s wife and Tiberius’s mother – had previously been the model of a Roman women. But she had female power, amounting to influence over her male relatives who exerted the real, tangible power. And she only used it in private spaces, never trying to enter public life herself. But influence wasn’t enough for Agrippina. She wanted real power.
One of Agrippina’s first acts was to found a town at the place of her birth in Germany and name it after herself. Originally named Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium, its name was eventually shortened to its modern name: Cologne. She donned the colours gold and purple — colours only available to the emperor — and sat beside her husband in front of the Roman imperial standards. She caused outrage among the great and good by putting herself in public spaces and forcing men to acknowledge that a woman ruled over them. She became a visible partner in the emperor’s power that was both unique and highly disturbing to male Roman onlookers. She even wrote and published her own autobiography, the only Roman woman to have ever completed such an audacious public act.
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For five years, Agrippina enjoyed life as Claudius’s empress. These years were notably more peaceful, stable and successful than the eight years of his reign prior to their marriage. Of the 35 named senators executed by Claudius during his reign, just four occurred during the years of Agrippina’s influence. There were no more coup attempts from the armies, or significant violence in Rome. All the while, Agrippina and Claudius both groomed Nero to be the next emperor, preparing him with political offices and honorary titles. It seemed that the two would have a long reign and a peaceful succession.
Power of her own
This illusion was shattered when, in October AD 54, Agrippina murdered her husband with a poisoned mushroom and declared her 16-year-old son, under the name Nero, as emperor in his place. Her motivation is entirely obscure.
The sources almost unanimously paint her as a tyrant, desperate to cling to power and terrified of her stepson Britannicus being promoted above Nero. This last fear may well have been true. Agrippina’s primary goal in life appears to have been that Nero would survive to rule; that her mother’s family, not Claudius’s, would keep the imperial throne.
Her extreme act proved to be successful. Nero was acclaimed emperor peacefully and his reign would go on to last 13 years. Initially, Claudius’s death was nothing but good news for Agrippina. As wife of the emperor she acted as his partner, but was always the junior partner. With Nero ascending as a teenager, though, she was now effectively his regent, placing her as the senior partner.
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That Agrippina was Nero’s equal in power is evident in the iconography on the coins and friezes from this time. Both their faces are depicted on coinage, and in several they face one another, their heads of equal size and equal importance. In one sculpture, Agrippina is depicted as the personification of fertile Rome, crowning her young son.
Yet within months, Nero began to attempt to enforce more traditional gender roles in the palace. He wanted his wife, the teenage Octavia, and his mother to remain private and silent. He did not want his mother to be present at political events and, in order to make his point clear, he publicly humiliated her multiple times in front of foreign delegations and Roman officials. He even had her removed from the palace to curb her power.
Agrippina, however, had a strong sense of her own abilities and five years of experience running an empire, so she made sure her voice was going to be heard.
Agrippina's downfall
In AD 59, Nero lost patience with hearing his mother’s voice. He had fallen in love with an unsuitable woman named Poppaea, and wanted to be free to marry her. He also knew that men who listened to women could only be vilified as weak and feminine. As Agrippina was still popular, he was desperate to maintain public support so decided the best way was to stage an accident. He had a trick boat built that would sink with Agrippina on board, drowning her in the bay off the town of Baiae.
But it appears Nero was unaware of her strength as a swimmer. She survived the sinking attempt, which included a lead ceiling almost falling on her, and made it to shore with an injured arm. Hearing the news, Nero panicked and sent three men to her villa to murder her.
Agrippina died looking her killers in the eye and holding her ground. Called a traitor, she was denied a state funeral and buried in an unmarked grave. She was 43. Nero lost his popularity, and his reign never recovered. Agrippina was a cold-blooded murderer, and an excellent ruler. She oversaw a decade of peaceful Roman rule and opened the doors to the end of a dynasty. She learned from her predecessors how to be successful, and taught her son how to be ruthless. Truly, she was the first empress of Rome.
What was the legal position of women in Rome?
Agrippina went far beyond what was allowed. Legally, women in late Republican and early imperial Rome were perpetual minors. They were not allowed to sign contracts or engage in any legal activities themselves. Although they could own property, they could not buy or sell it without permission from a male guardian. By default, this was their father, but it could be their husband, brother, family friend or even a magistrate. Guardianships existed due to the belief that women had weak judgement (infirmitas consilii), which meant they were unable to make rational or good decisions by themselves. Certain women could be freed from guardianship as a reward for excellence. Under Augustus, women who bore three or more children were entitled to be emancipated. The restrictions on women’s public activities loosened during the imperial period, and there are many examples of women running businesses without interference from men. However, the legal and cultural taboos against women in politics and the military never weakened. These were always considered exclusively male spheres. Women were unable to vote during the Republic and legally unable to even enter the Senate house at any time. Women who tried to engage in political life were universally reviled throughout Roman history as monsters.
Emma Southon is author of Agrippina: Empress, Exile, Hustler, Whore (Unbound, 2018)
This content first appeared in March 2019 issue of BBC History Revealed
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