Role of the Woman in Ancient Rome Essay

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Women in Ancient Rome

What was the role -- or roles -- of women in ancient Rome? There are a number of sources in the literature that point to a wide variety of interesting and sometimes humiliating roles and positions that women were linked to in Ancient Rome, and this paper reviews several of those.

Women in Ancient Rome -- The Literature

has researched and reported on a number of interesting instances of women's positions and activities in ancient Rome. In his book, McKeown quotes from Cicero's work, In Defense of Murena 27): "Our ancestors wanted all women to be under the control of guardians because of their feeble powers of judgment" (McKeown, 2010, p. 8).

Certainly there was rampant chauvinism in ancient Rome, and any chance that male power figures had to continue on the path of bias against women, they seemed to be able to succeed. However, there are examples in ancient Rome of women having power over men. In McKeown's book he quotes from Plutarch's Life of Anthony 10 (that is Mark Anthony); Plutarch explained that Fulvia, Mark Anthony's wife, "totally ignored the traditional wifely activities of spinning and housekeeping" (McKeown, 9-10). Fulvia also believed it was "beneath her dignity to control an ordinary man," and instead she wanted to "rule a ruler and command a commander," Plutarch explains.

Hence, Plutarch continues in McKeown's book, Cleopatra actually ended up owing a "teacher's fee" to Fulvia for teaching Anthony how to be submissive to a woman.

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When Cleopatra took on Mark Anthony he was well broken in, "trained from the start in obeying a woman" (McKeown, 10). Obviously Fulvia was a very powerful woman in ancient Rome, and she was described by Velleius Paterculus as "a women in body alone" (McKeown, 11).

Meanwhile, McKeown explains that under the Julian Law on adultery (of 18 B.C.) a woman that was caught in the act of adultery "…could be killed by her father" as long as her lover was also killed (12). Her husband did not have the authority to kill her, only her father. But if a husband was caught in an adulterous moment, there was no law that punished him at all (McKeown, 12).

McKeown (13) explains that when a vestal virgin in ancient Rome was caught and convicted of "sexual misconduct," that was rare, but it was "momentous." During times of military crises, some vestal virgins were caught in sexually compromising circumstances, McKeown explains. The punishment could not be death, because a vestal virgin's person was "sacrosanct"; hence instead of being executed, she was "…entombed in an underground chamber with a bed, a lamp, and some foot and water, and left to die" (McKeown, 13). The male that was caught in a sexual liaison with a vestal virgin was "publicly flogged to death," McKeown reports.

The author writes that about 170 women from "leading [Roman] families" were convicted in the year 331 B.C. Of "…poisoning their husbands" (8). On that subject, author.....

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