Women in the Classical World by Fantham Elaine; Foley Helene Peet; Kampen Natalie Boymel

Author:Fantham, Elaine; Foley, Helene Peet; Kampen, Natalie Boymel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 1994-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

Figure 7.4. A large engraved bronze container, the Ficoroni cista, dates to fourth-century B.C.E. Rome but was found in a tomb in Palestrina, a nearby town. It is one of the earliest signed objects from Italy, and bears the name of Novios Plautios. The style, a blend of late Classical Greek and Etruscan elements, demonstrates the degree to which early Roman art was shaped by these two cultural forces.

Roman noble families in the late Republic and Empire used their daughters’ marriages to make alliances with promising young officers or politicians, or to bind competing clans and power groups. So it was natural that in their legends of the past they should invent marriages to explain transfers of power to new dynasties. Just as Virgil gives the Trojan prince Aeneas a legitimate claim to the Latin kingdom of the shadowy King Latinus through marriage to his even more shadowy daughter Lavinia, so Numa and other successors to the monarchy of Rome are given a link to the previous king through marriage. But the women are ciphers until Rome enters the phase of Etruscan domination. Romans saw the relative prominence of women in Etruscan society as a factor in its supposed degeneracy (See Chapter 8). Hence they constructed their legends of the dynasty from Tarquinia to reflect women’s power both used and misused. So the beneficent power of Tanaquil, gifted in the interpretation of omens, and king-maker both for her husband Tarquinius Priscus and the Italian “slave” child Servius Tullius, turns in the next generation to the vicious intrigues of Tullia and her husband Tarquin the Proud (Superbus). The military absences of husbands and fathers, increasing as Rome grew powerful and her enemies more distant, is a factor in early legends and will become a major factor in both the sufferings and the evolving autonomy of Roman women (cf. Evans 1991).

The two most famous women in Roman legend, Lucretia and Verginia, are sacrificial figures, like Alcestis and Iphigenia in Greek mythology. But in contrast they earn their fame as much by their role in stimulating male political action as for their undoubted virtue. Ideologically the Roman woman’s primary virtue was pudicitia (not so much chastity, as sexual fidelity enhanced by fertility). This was the female equivalent to fides, a man’s loyalty to his friends and his country. So Romans cherished the legends of Lucretia the wife and Verginia the virgin daughter.

Lucretia’s domestic tragedy became a public revolution (see Chapter 8). Raped in her husband’s absence by King Tarquin’s son (himself a kinsman of her husband), Lucretia summoned her father, husband, and maternal uncle, declared herself dishonored and killed herself “rather than be an example of unchastity to other wives.” Romans believed that popular outrage at her death provoked the expulsion of the Tarquin dynasty and the creation of the free people’s government (res publica). Lucretia’s husband, Collatinus, and her uncle, Lucius Junius Brutus, led the revolution and were among the first annual elected magistrates. But gender ideology pointed the moral of the

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