THE PATRICIAN ORDER
Copyright 2000 Max Dashu
The Roman majority were called plebians, literally the "people." Traces of the old Etruscan mother-right survived among them. Livy wrote that they did not know their fathers. [Livy x, 8] But patriarchy had gained ground, replacing the old usus marriage (based on cohabitation) with the more prestigious coemptio (based on sale). [See Thomson, 93; Johnston, 127ff] Though the social rank of common women was low, they had the run of Rome's streets and markets. They preserved ancient cultural streams in their rites and festivals, especially those of Ops, Diana and Bona Dea.
The patricians who ruled Rome were named after its male supremacist culture. This elite landholding class built Roman law on the base of patria potestas, the life-and-death power of the father over his wife, children and slaves. This privilege was enshrined in the Twelve Tables of the Law, not to be rescinded until the 2nd century CE. [Lyttleton/Werner, 83] Legally, the Roman word familia referred, not to a family of kin, but to slave holdings; paterfamilias meant "master of slaves." [Palmer, 117. Familia derived from famuli, "slave." Thomson, 92]
Roman law imposed a pronounced sexual double standard in rights and behavior. It placed women under tutela: male guardians held them in mano, "in the hand." The rationale offered in the Twelve Tables was female "levity of mind." [Lefko/Fant, 174] The state left judgement and punishment of women to their male relatives. (By no means did this result in lenient treatment.) Rape was treated as a property defense against the male guardian, not the female victim. [Brundage, 48, t.o.]
Only fathers were allowed to carry out the rites of the patrilineal ancestors, and to transmit inheritance. Women moved into the husband's household, usually as young teenagers or even preteens, and adopted their husbands' ancestors. The laws of Romulus denied women the right to divorce, but allowed men to repudiate their wives for adultery, for copying the household keys or "for the use of drugs or magic on account of children." This last was directed at contraception and abortion not approved by the husband. [Lefko/Fant, 173-4; Rouselle, 303; Spaeth, 59, comments that a wife's copying the keys implied adultery or secret drinking of the wine stores.]
The custom of the husband lifting his bride over the threshold commemorated Roman men's capture of the Sabine women, according to Plutarch. He added that the husband had the power to give or loan his wife to a friend. [Lives, 22, 63] She herself had no rights to grant or deny access to her own body, nor to determine whether or not to bear children, nor to raise a child that her husband ordered killed.
Patrician women were trained to self-restraint, obedience to their husbands or guardians, and to reserve "in speech, act and gaze." Plutarch again: "great modesty was enjoined on them; all busy intermeddling forbidden, sobriety insisted on, and silence made habitual." [Lives, 63] They had to veil in public, covering their heads if not their faces.
Whatever their husbands did, female patricians were expected to practice abstinence, sexually and otherwise. [Rouselle, 321-3] Early Roman law forbade women to drink wine, the preferred beverage, except on set festival days. Wine was the sacred medium of divine communion, "and its consumption was limited to men and gods." The penalty for women drinking wine was death, as Plutarch, Cicero, and many others attest. The historian Varro reported that Egnatius Mecennius beat his wife to death with a cudgel for drinking wine, and Romulus acquitted him. [Brouwer, 333; L/F, 176]
Five centuries later, Cato upheld men's legal power to kill their wives for drinking wine and for adultery: "If you should take your wife in adultery, you may with impunity put her to death without a trial; but if you should commit adultery or indecency, she must not presume to lay a finger on you, nor does the law allow it." [Pomeroy, 153; On the Dowry, in Lefko/Fant, 175]
Valerius Maximus approvingly cited cases of patrician men who divorced their wives for being outdoors with head uncovered, or for speaking to a freedwoman in public, or for attending the games without masculine permission. [Lefko/Fant, 176]
While gay sex was utterly legal and normal for males of any status, married women could be charged with adultery for lesbian sex: "... both the Elder Seneca and Martial refer to lesbian activities as adultery, the former suggesting that the death penalty was appropriate when the two were discovered in the act by a husband." [Boswell, 82]
In 216 BCE, when the country was shaken by Hannibal's invasion, a patrician backlash enacted the Oppian laws. Females were forbidden to wear multi-colored dresses or own more than a half ounce of gold or ride in carriages. The pretext for these laws was the state of emergency, but the Oppian laws remained in effect after after Carthage's defeat.
In 195 BCE, Roman women poured into the streets to demand repeal of these laws. Livy wrote that the matrons "blockaded every street in the city and every entrance to the Forum," and that the female crowd grew larger with each passing day, pouring in even from the suburbs and villages. [Lef/F, 177; Pailler, 523] This women's protest occasioned Cato's famous diatribe defending the patrician order:
Our fathers have willed that women should be in the power of their fathers, of their brothers, of their husbands. Remember all the laws by which our fathers have bound down the liberty of women, by which they have bent them to the power of men. As soon as they are our equals, they become our superiors. [Briffault, 428]
The tribunes vetoed the motion to repeal the Oppian laws, but the matrons forced them to yield by beseiging their houses. [Lef/F, 179-80
Another backlash occurred in the last years of the Republic. Divorce had become frequent, and the birth rate dropped. Seneca blamed Roman women for the divorces. Horace's ode at the Secular Games shows that various social problems were being blamed on female wantonness. An Augustan law of 18 BCE restricted divorces and rewarded women who bore three or more children with freedom from male tutelage. [L/W, 96-8]
This law, known as the Lex Julia, made female adultery a felony. Fathers could put a daughter and her lover to death, while a husband was forced to divorce an adulterous wife. The state prosecuted family and neighbors for not turning in adulterers. Even sexual infidelity by concubines was defined as adultery, and men could legally punish them as they did their wives. But concubines had none of a wife's rights. [Brundage, 43] The Lex Julia was named after the daughter of Augustus. She herself fell victim to the law, by which she was exiled to an island. It was an unpopular law, which women resisted. In time they were able to overcome some of its strictures. [Lefko/F, 181; Rouselle, 113-4]
THE SLAVE STATE
As Romans conquered an empire, they used the captives taken in war to create a society based on mass enslavement. The jurist Florentius explained that slaves were called servi because they were "saved" instead of being killed. Rome became one of the largest slave markets on the planet. Scipio Aemilianus was said to have sold off 60,000 Carthaginians, Marius 140,000 Cimbri, Aemilius Paulus 150,000 Greeks, while Pompey and Caesar enslaved over a million Asiatics and Gauls. [Johnston 160-1; Phillips, 18]
Slave dealers followed the legions, buying captives in lots. The quaestors held sales beside a spear driven in the ground, placing wreaths on the captives' heads, "like victims offered in sacrifice." The slave traders then marched them off in chains for auction in Rome. Still others fell into the hands of slave hunters who preyed on colonized regions without interference from Roman governors. [Johnston, 160-1]
Rome's conquests spelled disaster for Italian farmers, who could not compete with cheap wheat from the colonies. Crushed by rising taxes, they were forced to sell off to large landholders. Landless peasants flocked to Rome, joining the army or the multitude of unemployed commoners pacified with "bread and circuses." As Rome's empire grew, the city's popular culture was constantly replenished by immigrant nationalities. Most plebians were of foreign origin by the first century. [Johnston, 159ff]
Estate owners used slave gangs to work the fields of their vast latifundiae. These slaves lived under the harshest conditions; only the quarry and galley slaves were worse off. Rich families held hundreds or thousands of slaves, some held as many as ten or twenty thousand. The economy of slavery depressed the wages of free laborers. Manufacturing was dominated by "workhouses full of foreign slaves." [Plutarch, 674] Slaves came to outnumber free workers, not only in manual labor and service work, but in the trades and professions, working as artisans, scribes, mechanics, teachers, physicians, and managers. Many enslaved women and children were forced to work in brothels. Countless others were subject to rape and sexual predation by private slaveholders. [Johnston, 159-61; Brundage, 25]
Romans maintained slavery with all the force and brutality the word implies. Slave-holders beat, tortured and raped the humans they held in bondage. Apuleius described whipped slaves working a mill, with branded foreheads, their clothing in shreds, iron rings around their ankles. [Dockes, 209] Abuse ran the gamut from slapping to outright slayings, or torturing to death. Some matrons kept long pins to stab their attendants. The physician Galen recalled that his mother used to bite her slaves. [Rouselle, 334] Overseers punished slaves by cutting off noses, ears, tongues, lips, and feet, or by gouging out their eyes. [Dockes, 210]
Flogging was a common punishment, often using lashes studded with bone or metal. Sometimes victims were whipped while hung up by the arms, with weights attached to their feet. Masters also locked the disobedient into heavy log yokes, or demoted them to harder labor. Fugitives were hunted down by gangs of slave-hunters, tortured, branded or locked into metal collars. The rebellious and defiant were sold into the mines and quarries, to labor in shackles under the lash, or as gladiators, to fight for their lives in the arena. [Johnston, 173-5]
[Graphic: Inscribed collar declared the wearer a fugitive slave, and promised a reward to his captor. Iron collars often read: "Stop me; I'm running away," or simply carried the initials of these well-known words.]
Not surprisingly, Romans dreaded the thought of slave insurrections. Hiding fugitive slaves was punishable by death. Cicero's oration against Catiline clinched his case with an accusation that he had conspired to call out the slaves. Draconian measures, especially crucifixion, were used to deter retaliation. Torture and collective punishment were standard. If one slave killed the master, an old Roman law ordered crucifixion of all slaves in the household. Tacitus cited such a case in Nero's reign, when four hundred slaves were put to death. Mary Johnston comments: "The cross stood to slaves as the horror of horrors." The word itself became a curse: "Go to the cross." [L/W, 84; Johnston, 175]
Even in times when their might was secure, Romans feared that those they had enslaved would perform magic to harm them, and that the outlawed religions would replenish a witchcraft of resistance, fueled by the spiritual power of women, plebians, slaves. Columella copied his code of repressing slaves' religion from the old patrician Cato. The villicus (plantation slave) "shall make no sacrifices without orders from his master. He shall receive neither soothsayers nor magicians, who take advantage of men's superstitions to lead them into crime." [Dockes, 213]
A law of the Republic called for torture in interrogations of slaves and foreigners during criminal investigations. When powerful men came under suspicion in political intrigues, it was their slaves who were tortured. This torture was required; no other testimony from slaves was legal. Under the empire judicial torture was extended to citizens accused of treason, then expanded to cover poisoning, adultery, and sorcery. Judicial torture became enshrined in imperial Roman law. [Lea; Schaff; Russell, 152; Johnston, 170 on testimony]
Torture was also celebrated as public spectacle in the Coliseum. Grisly executions were carried out: condemned people burned at the stake, or thrown to starved animals in the arena. In hundreds of thousands of gladiatorial battles, slaves and captives were forced to fight each other for their lives. Ten thousand fights to the death were staged to celebrate Trajan's conquest of Dacia. Even mime performances featured actual tortures and executions. [L/W, 112]
Copyright 2000 Max Dashu