The following citation is from “Sex and Power in History” by Amaury de Riencourt. (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1975), pages 123-127, in Chapter Four entitled “Roman Matrons and World Empire.”
In the citation below, I have indicated the beginning page numbers in the Dell edition by placing them in square brackets, so: [123]. Where footnotes appear in the text, I indicate these with curly brackets, so: {4}. The footnotes are included at the bottom of the citation. Block quotes in de Riencourt’s work are difficult to reproduce in email, so I have indicated these by placing the material de Riencourt cites within quotation marks. Finally, italicized text in the citation below is indicated by placing asterisks around the italicized word or phrase, so: *these are italicized words.*
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The fact that the social “liberation” of Roman women took place in an overall atmosphere of moral decadence warped the very nature of their emancipation. Women were emancipated, but for the wrong reasons, amid a widespread breakdown of religious faith, traditions, and respect for authority.
Fruit of the one-sided masculine Greco-Roman culture, this feminist rebellion was marred by a decisive flaw: by revolting against masculine authority and the overstressing of male values on strictly *masculine terms,* Roman women ultimately destroyed the foundations of their
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own society and civilization. One of the future Fathers of the Church pointed it out clearly when, describing pagan Rome, he exclaimed that some “women put on men’s clothing, cut their hair short … blush to be women, and prefer to look like eunuchs …” {7} In any given society, women appear to have secured their rightful share of power and influence only through the full acceptance of their inherent femaleness; in a negative way, the Roman example testifies to this.
Roman women unwittingly wrecked with their own hands their feminine strongholds within a patriarchal society; from the proud, dignified and influential mothers they had been in the early republican times, they became despisers of their prime biological function in imperial times and began competing with men on men’s terms. In this, they were unsuccessful. They made no significant contribution to whatever Roman culture there was; and by failing to reestablish respect for specifically female values, they made their contribution to the corruption of Roman life under the imperial sway of the Caesars–without ever achieving any direct share in political power which fell increasingly under the sway of the legions and the Praetorian guards. In contrast to the Byzantine Empire, they provided not a single ruler; no empress ever ruled in Rome.
Thanks to women’s rebellion, a generation gap appeared in the middle of the first century B.C. and, in the words of Guglielmo Ferrero “the younger generation was … wild, scatterbrained and skeptical, emancipated from all family authority, and impatient for the enjoyment of quick and easy profits.” {8} The atmosphere was already pregnant with the decay in the days of Augustus, prompting Horace to utter his famous ode: “Our fathers, viler than our grandfathers, begot us who are even viler, and we shall bring forth a progeny more degenerate still.” {9}
In times of revolution, as we shall see, women determine the pace of change and the eventual stabilization that comes when revolution has run its course. They determine the amplitude of the swings from one extreme to the other; all the more so because, under normal circumstances, they are essentially the *conservative* force that distrusts rapid or violent change.
In Italy, up to that time, it was the women who had preserved the customs and traditions of former generations, who lived in old-fashioned simplicity and preserved the full flavor of the ancient pronunciation of Latin. It was they, in fact, who resisted with all their might the increasingly cosmopolitan, luxurious, and corrupting way of life that wealth and world empire inflicted upon Roman society; {10} But, by the time of Julius Caesar, the dissolution of family life reached its apex, and most of the disciplinary and judicial functions exercised in
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the old days by the paterfamilias were being transferred to an increasingly bureaucratic state. And the state itself, corroded by revolution and civil war, was in no position to reestablish any respect for authority in the social life of the Romans. The chief sufferers were the virtuous women themselves, often superseded in their husband’s affections by the bolder exotic courtesans of those cosmopolitan times–the famous *ambubaiae* from Syria, for instance. {11} Symbolic of this was the universal pity felt by all Romans for Calpurnia, Caesar’s legitimate wife, when he brought Cleopatra to Rome and displayed her with no lack of ostentation. The entire Roman society was in a state of disintegration–the outcome of four centuries of social evolution which had “changed the strength and rigidity of a despotic organization into the freest form of sexual union ever seen in Western civilization … ” {12} Now marriage was concluded merely by common consent, without need for ceremony or formalities. {13}
Imperative reasons of state prompted Augustus, now sole master of the “civilized” world, to try to correct these abuses. By promulgating a series of “Julian Laws,” he hoped to put a brake on a social dissolution so far advanced that the biological future of the Roman people itself was at stake, threatened by its exceedingly low birthrate. The most important law, the *lex Julia de pudicitia et de coercendis adulteriis* (“Julian law of chastity and repression of adultery”) promulgated in 18 B.C., brought marriage, for the first time, under the supervision of the state. A number of other laws, applicable to certain classes of citizens, attempted to consolidate both marriage and the waning authority of the husband. The two were seen as intimately connected since many “men excused their celibacy by referring to the growing independence of woman, which made her character more imperious, her desires more extravagant and her selfishness more capricious.” {14}
When the next piece of legislation, the *lex de maritandis ordinibus* was presented to the Senate, there were violent debates. In order to encourage larger families, Augustus had to gain the women’s goodwill; in effect, the mother of three children acquired freedom from the power of the husband, outraging the patriarchally minded puritans, who felt that far too much power had been given away already. Having thus further weakened the power of the husband of a prolific wife, Augustus was asked to add specific riders to the law in order to reinforce the husband’s authority at home. He refused and remarked that “it is your business to order and to advise your wives as you please, even as I do mine.” {15}
This vast legislative effort was mostly in vain; there were too many legal loopholes, and Augustus came to the conclusion that legislation could not alter disposition and character. He finally attempted to re-
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store religious faith, reviving Rome’s traditional creed while trying to restrain the growing invasion of Oriental religions–also in vain.
The old patriarchal order of the republic was never restored in the Roman Empire. Roman women, by and large, retained most of the freedom they had acquired during the revolutionary period. In the prevailing climate of moral anarchy, this became conducive to loose morality, lack of marital affection, instability in the family, adultery, erotic licentiousness, and debauchery Satyricon-style. Writers have left us cynical remarks reflecting the dismal social picture of the times. “Pure women are only those who have not been asked,” stated Ovid, and Seneca judged that a married woman who had only two lovers was a remarkably faithful wife. Juvenal, a true misogynist, venomously asserted that there were hardly any women left in Rome who were worth marrying. {16} The Messalinas and Poppaeas of the time certainly justified his sarcasm. And when he condemns the fact that they were allowed to mix freely with men on the benches of the great circuses where the cruelest gladiatorial contests ever devised by man took place, and describes the shattering impact of these spectacles on women’s morals, he was probably dead right. {17} women fully shared in the extraordinary brutalization of life in the Roman world, one which profoundly shocked and repelled the more refined Greek-speaking easterners.
The Antonine emperors legislated away what was left of patriarchal prerogatives concerning wives and children, merely legalizing what custom had made fact, while still preserving a semblance of patriarchalism. The overall material status of women had improved to such an extent that most of the wealth of Rome had passed into their hands. One striking fact was the growing influence of women in politics, especially at the provincial level. While the authority of the emperors was becoming daily more absolute, and the average citizen’s freedom more and more curtailed, women took a hand in local politics–witness the election placards posted by female politicians that were discovered on the walls of Pompeii.{18}
The triumph of the first full-fledged feminist movement known to history had, as ultimate consequence, led to the crippling of Rome’s family structure and largely destroyed family loyalty and solidarity. Roman legislation and social evolution steadily eroded what was left of male privileges and responsibilities and, under Domitius Ulpianus’s inspiration, proclaimed that women were entitled to the same rights as men–a theory put into practice from Emperor Alexander Severus onward. Meanwhile, corroded by shrinking vitality and depravity, the
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total population of Italy began to shrink alarmingly. Various emperors (Aurelius, Aurelian, Valentinian, and even Constantine) had to resort to the massive importation of barbarians to compensate for the declining birth rate. Aurelius filled the ranks of the depleted legions with slaves, gladiators, and common criminals. As early as the days of Emperor Septimus Severus, legal documents mention a *penuria hominum,* a catastrophic shortage of manpower.
Unconscious victims of an unwarranted emphasis put by Greco-Roman culture on exclusively male values, “modern” Roman women looked down on childbearing as unworthy of their talents. Unfortunately for them, other women within and without the empire remained immensely fertile. While barbarians and Orientals increased their total numbers at a fast tempo, Italy and Greece saw their populations dwindle. Even Roman Gaul was contaminated by the disease. It had all started with the feminist movement in the upper classes; with the progress of democratic equality under the Caesarian Empire, it had spread downward and outward, to reach the urban proletariat and the rural peasantry. Infanticide was widespread, and sexual lewdness undoubtedly lowered men and women’s fertility; marriage was frequently deferred or avoided altogether. At the tail end of this evolution, the western Roman Empire was rapidly becoming, in population terms, an empty shell. The Romans actually committed ethnic suicide.
The collapse of the western Roman Empire was the inevitable consequence. Fast-breeding Teutonic populations eventually overwhelmed it and plunged Europe into the Dark Ages. But before this came about, signs began to appear in the midst of this moral degeneration pointing to a rebirth of ethics and a reconstruction of family life. The old Roman faith was as dead as the Greek; in both cases their patriarchal pantheons had collapsed. And yet, a religious awakening began sweeping over the entire Roman Empire.
[end of chapter]
[Footnotes, found on page 432 of the Dell edition]
7. Jerome, *Selected Letters* 22.13.27
8. Ferrero, *Greatness and Decline in Rome* 1.152
9. Horace, *Odes* 3.6: Aetas prentum pejor avis tulit nos nequiores, mox daturos progenium vitiosiorem.
10. Ferrero, *The Women of the Caesars,* p. 34: ” … woman, in periods commanded by strong social discipline, is the most beneficient and tenacious among the cohesive forces of a nation; and … in times when social discipline is relaxed, she is, instead, through ruinous luxury, dissipation, and voluntary sterility, the most terrible force for dissolution.”
11. Hitti, *History of Syria,* p. 302.
12. Ferrero, *Greatness and Decline in Rome,* 4:194.
13. Ferrero, 4:195: “Henceforth in the family the woman was almost entirely free and equal to the man … the unfortunate husband in the days of Augustus was but a shadow of caricature of the old Roman *paterfamilias* with his terrible austerity. Power he had none, except that of squandering part of the dowry …”
14. Ibid.
15. Ferrero, 5:65.
16. Ferrero, 5:67.
17. Dill, *Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius,* p. 86.
18. Ibid., 211. Also p. 81: “In the reign of Tiberius, Caeccina Severus, with the weight of forty years’ experience of camps, in a speech before the Senate, denounced the new-fangled custom of the wives of the generals and governors accompanying them abroad, attending reviews of troops, mingling freely with the soldiers, and taking an active part in business, which was not always favorable to pure administration.”