SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard

Author:Mary Beard
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd.

49. A Roman wall-painting depicts an idealised scene of an ancient wedding, mixing gods and humans. The veiled bride sits at the centre, on her new marital bed, being encouraged by the goddess Venus sitting with her. Against the bed leans a louche figure of the god Hymen, one of the deities supposed to protect marriage. On the far left, human figures make preparations for bathing the bride.

To what extent this image of the Roman wife was, at any period, more wishful thinking than an accurate reflection of social reality is impossible to know. There was undoubtedly a lot of vociferous nostalgia in Rome for the tough old days, when wives were kept in their place. ‘Egnatius Metellus took a cudgel and beat his wife to death because she had drunk some wine,’ insisted one first-century CE writer, with apparent approval, referring to an entirely mythical incident in the reign of Romulus. Even the emperor Augustus took advantage of the traditional associations of wool working, in what was something like the ancient equivalent of a photo opportunity, by having his wife Livia pose at her loom in their front hall in full public view. But the chances are that those tough old days were in part the product of the imagination of later moralists, as well as a useful theme for later Romans to exploit in establishing their old-fashioned credentials.

No less problematic is the competing image, prominent in the first century BCE, of a new style of liberated woman, who supposedly enjoyed a free social, sexual, often adulterous life, without much constraint from husband, family or the law. Some of these characters were conveniently dismissed as part of the demi-monde of actresses, showgirls, escorts and prostitutes, including one celebrity ex-slave, Volumnia Cytheris, who was said to have been the mistress at one time or another of both Brutus and Mark Antony, so sleeping with both Caesar’s assassin and his greatest supporter. But many of them were the wives or widows of high-ranking Roman senators.

The most notorious of all was Clodia, the sister of Cicero’s great enemy Clodius, the wife of a senator who died in 59 BCE, and the lover of the poet Catullus, among a string of others. Terentia is rumoured to have had her suspicions about even Cicero’s relations with Clodius’ sister. She was alternately attacked and admired as a promiscuous temptress, scheming manipulator, idolised goddess and borderline criminal. For Cicero she was ‘the Medea of the Palatine’, a clever coinage linking the passionate, child-murdering witch of Greek tragedy with Clodia’s place of residence in Rome. Catullus gave her the soubriquet Lesbia in his poetry, not only as camouflage but in order to gesture back to the Greek poet Sappho, from the island of Lesbos: ‘Let’s live, my Lesbia, and let’s love / And the mutterings of stern old men / Let’s value them at a single penny … / Give me a thousand kisses’, as one poem starts.

Colourful as this material is, it cannot be taken at face value.

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