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Introduction

Where do we look for Roman women? The traditional answer has been - in Latin literature; that's to say in the histories, poems, biographies and political speeches composed by, and for, élite men.

Few women, however, feature in this literature, and when they are included, it is often to make a point about modern morals or the importance of home life. These women are symbols, not 'real women'.

State inscriptions are another possible source of information but, like Roman history books, they seldom mention women. Roman tombstones and statue bases celebrate women, but in a formulaic way (as do our modern-day equivalents), so they do not usually bring individual women to life for us, and it seems that all Roman children were sweet, all wives were chaste, all marriages were argument-free.

And even when these ancient inscriptions do appeal to us, there is the possibility that we are over-influenced by a sentimental portrait, which leaves out all the complexities of living relationships.

Roman paintings and sculpture present yet another avenue to the past. Women's portraits in the Roman tradition are often quite realistic, but they, too, fall into certain patterns, and sometimes individual heads seem to have been imposed on standard bodies.

Archaeology offers a different perspective, and Pompeii in particular is famous for having preserved for centuries, under lava, the details of the everyday life of the town. Nearby Herculaneum also shows us houses and flats, workplaces, bars and shops that are seldom even hinted at in the rather rarefied literature of Roman times.

Virtuous women

We know of good women from literature, legend, coins and statues but, above all, from the many epitaphs that have survived from Roman Italy - such as the following, concerning 'Claudia'.

Bereaved Romans often praised their mothers, wives and daughters on their tombstones, although their words were usually much briefer than this famous epitaph from Italy in the late second century BC. Often, however, they did echo the key feminine virtues mentioned in the epitaph, those of affection, good housewifery and chastity. Wool work was very much a symbol of a good woman.

Every Roman schoolchild also learned the story of another good woman, Lucretia, who attracted the unwelcome attentions of a tyrant by her beauty and her domestic industry (working late at night at the loom). Her rape and subsequent suicide was said to be the origin of the Roman revolt against the Etruscan monarchy, and the foundation of the Roman Republic in 509 BC. The story is told by the historian Livy in his first book (late first century BC).

Augustus instigated the practice of holding up the women of the imperial family as inspiring models of virtuous womanhood in the first century AD. Later emperors carried it further and in the second century AD empresses such as Sabina (wife of the emperor Trajan) were depicted as embodying, for example, pietas (family feeling).

Faustina the younger, wife of Marcus Aurelius, often featured on coins symbolising various virtues, while Marcus's daughter-in-law, Lucilla, was particularly associated with modesty.

Letters and epitaphs tell of the particular grief of Roman parents if a girl died before marriage - and they seem truly to have delighted in their living daughters. The first and second century writer Pliny the Younger (Letter 5.16) paints a touching portrait of his friend's daughter, Minicia Marcella, who died at the age of 13.

Alluring mistresses

Erotic fresco painting from Pompeii  © Roman poetry is the main basis for (mis)information about adulterous Roman wives or glamorous mistresses. Propertius (who flourished 30-20 BC), Tibullus (48-19 BC) and Ovid (43 BC-AD 17) wrote love poems in the first person, each about a named mistress, following the lead of Catullus (c.84-54 BC), who had written short lyric poems about 'Lesbia'. These poems are set in a kind of fantasy world, and had a great influence on later European poetry.

To give just a flavour of his style, perhaps the most famous poem (LXXXV) by Catullus is:

Scholars have speculated that the 'Lesbia' he addressed in some poems was the elegant widow Clodia, who was attacked by the orator Cicero in court (in his defence of Caelius, 56 BC) for her loose living, but I think that is wishful thinking.

Ovid's delightful short poem about a rendezvous with the imaginary 'Corinna' in the evocative half-light of the afternoon has inspired many poets. Marlowe's version is great poetry, and a good rendering of the Latin. Here is an extract:

The second-century satirist Juvenal devoted his longest poem to the horrors of marriage. It is a gallery of awful married women whose vices (such as body-building and correcting their husbands' grammar) include committing adultery with men, women and even donkeys! It's racy reading, but not exactly reportage.

At a pithier level, the eruption of Vesuvius over Pompeii in AD 79 caused a whole range of everyday comments about women to be preserved, although needless to say we don't have the women's version of the stories uncovered there.

We have a graffito from a Pompeian workshop which describes the cloth-worker Amaryllis in lewd terms. And a famous exchange on a pub wall records some banter between a weaver, Successus, and his mate, Severus, over the unrequited passion of Successus for the lovely barmaid Iris (Corpus of Latin Inscriptions, CIL 5.1507; 4.8259). Less romantically, a customer at another pub claimed to have made love with the landlady (CIL 4.8442).

Other depictions of women can be seen in the various erotic paintings on Pompeian walls. Some of these paintings are apparently in-house advertising in brothels, and others are simply for domestic entertainment. Certainly Roman men attended brothels or frequented streetwalkers, while most prostitutes would have been slaves, and doubtless had short and miserable lives.

It is known for sure that married men and women had affairs - even after the emperor Augustus made them illegal. But the Roman orgy is a modern invention (not even Juvenal thought of such a thing). Sorry if that's a disappointment.

Working women of Roman Italy

A fresco portrait of Terentius Neo and his wife  © People did not always work for a wage in the ancient world. Most people worked on the land and in the home, while upper-class men and women supervised households and estates.

Although there were specialist cloth shops, all women were expected to be involved in cloth production: spinning, weaving and sewing. Slave and free women who worked for a living were concentrated in domestic and service positions - as perhaps midwives, child-nurses, barmaids, seamstresses, or saleswomen. We do, however, have a few examples of women in higher-status positions such as that of a doctor, and one woman painter is known.

How do we know about women's work? From men saying in print what women should be doing - poets (like Virgil), and philosophers (like Seneca), and husbands praising their dead wives on tombstones not only for being chaste (casta) but also for excelling at working wool (lanifica).

We can also learn about women's work from pictures on vases and walls (paintings), or from sculptural reliefs on funerary and public art. Septimia Stratonice was a successful shoemaker (sutrix) in the harbour town of Ostia. Her friend Macilius decorated her burial-place with a marble sculpture of her, on account of her 'favours' to him (CIL 14 supplement, 4698).

Graffiti such as the ones on the wall of a Pompeian workshop record the names of women workers and their wool allocations - names such as Amaryllis, Baptis, Damalis, Doris, Lalage and Maria - while other graffiti are from women workers' own monuments, usually those of nurses and midwives (see CIL 14.1507).

Women's domestic work was seen as a symbol of feminine virtue, while other jobs - those of barmaid, actress or prostitute - were disreputable. Outside work like sewing and laundering was respectable, but only had a low-status. Nurses were sometimes quite highly valued by their employers/owners, and might be commemorated on family tombs.

Reliability of sources

As you will have noticed by now, it is not a simple matter to just 'follow the clues' when looking for information about the far distant past. Even assembling a variety of ancient sources does not necessarily result in a truthful or complete picture.

Collecting evidence about Roman women's lives involves ranging over completely different kinds of information, and sifting each piece carefully, with due attention to the purpose of each source and the bias or ignorance of its author. A love poet, for example, wants to express his feelings about a real or imagined beloved, not to give you a rounded portrait of a real woman - while a son mourning his mother's death will mention only her virtues.

Any writer's choice of words, image and medium will be governed by his budget, and by the conventions of his time and social group. All of these aims and limitations affect the portrait presented. Bear in mind that the great majority of these sources are not authored or commissioned by women, but by men who are striving to make a particular point.

When trying to work out what the lives of Roman women were really like, you should be at least as critical of ancient sources as you are of modern media coverage of celebrities. Every type of evidence has to be sifted and looked at from different angles if we hope to catch the essence of Roman women, and end up with some kind of understanding of their everyday lives.

Find out more

Books

Women's Life in Greece and Rome edited by Mary Lefkowitz and Maureen Fant (Johns Hopkins, 1992)

Women in the Classical World: Image and Text by Elaine Fantham et al (New York, 1995)

Roman Women edited by Augusto Fraschetti (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2001)

Women in the Classical World: Image and Text by Elaine Fantham et al (New York, 1995)

Reading Roman Women by Suzanne Dixon (London, 2001)

Status: Roman Working Women in Ostia by Natalie Kampen (Berlin, 1981)

I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome by Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson (New Haven, 1996)

I Claudia II: Women in Roman Art and Society by Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson (Austin, 2000)

About the author

Suzanne Dixon is from Australia and has held lecturing positions at both the Australian National University and the University of Queensland. Her published books include The Roman Mother (1988), The Roman Family (1992) and Reading Roman Women (2001). She has also written numerous scholarly articles on the classical world. Suzanne now lives on an island in Moreton Bay, off the South Queensland coast, and is a freelance writer.