Page 146 - Western Civilization A Brief History, Volume I To 1715 9th - Jackson J. Spielvogel

Cato the Elder on Women
During the Second Punic War, the Romans enacted the Oppian Law, which limited the amount of gold women could possess and restricted their dress and use of carriages. In 195 B.C.E., an attempt was made to repeal the law, and women demonstrated in the streets on behalf of the effort. According to the Roman historian Livy, the conservative Roman official Cato the Elder spoke against repeal and against the women favoring it. Although the words are probably not Cato’s own, they do reflect a traditional male Roman attitude toward women.
Livy, The History of Rome
“If each of us, citizens, had determined to assert his rights and dignity as a husband with respect to his own spouse, we should have less trouble with the sex as a whole; as it is, our liberty, destroyed at home by female violence, even here in the Forum is crushed and trodden underfoot, and because we have not kept them individually under control, we dread them
collectively. . . . But from no class is there not the greatest danger if you permit them meetings and gatherings and secret consultations. . . .
“Our ancestors permitted no woman to conduct even personal business without a guardian to intervene in her behalf; they wished them to be under the control of fathers, brothers, husbands; we (Heaven help us!) allow them now even to interfere in public affairs, yes, and to visit the Forum and our informal and formal sessions. What else are they doing now on the streets and at the corners except urging the bill of the tribunes and voting for the repeal of the law? Give loose rein to their uncontrollable nature and to this
untamed creature and expect that they will themselves set bounds to their license; unless you act, this is the least of the things enjoined upon women by custom or law and to which they submit with a feeling of injustice. It is complete liberty or rather, if we wish to speak the truth, complete license that they desire.
“If they win in this, what will they not attempt? Review all the laws with which your forefathers restrained their license and made them subject to their husbands; even with all these bonds you can scarcely control them. What of this? If you suffer them to seize these bonds one by one and wrench themselves free and finally to be placed on a parity with their husbands, do you think you will be able to endure them? The moment they begin to be your equals, they will be your superiors. . . .
“Now they publicly address other women’s husbands, and, what is more serious, they beg for law and votes, and from various men they get what they ask. In matters affecting yourself, your property, your children, you, Sir, can be importuned; once the law has ceased to set a limit to your wife’s expenditures you will never set it yourself. Do not think, citizens, that the situation which existed before the law was passed will ever return.”
Q What particular actions of the women protesting this law angered Cato? What more general concerns did he have about Roman women? What did he believe was women’s ultimate goal in regard to men?
Source: Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of the Loeb Classical Library from Livy: History of Rome, Book 34, Loeb Classical Library Vol. II–V, trans. by B. O. Foster, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Copyright a 1935 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. The Loeb Classical Library is a registered trademark of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
doctors warned that early pregnancies could be dan- gerous for young girls, early marriages persisted due to the desire to benefit from dowries as soon as possi- ble and the reality of early mortality. A good example is Tullia, Cicero’s beloved daughter. She was married at sixteen, widowed at twenty-two, remarried one year later, divorced at twenty-eight, remarried at twenty- nine, and divorced at thirty-three. She died at
108 Chapter 5 The Roman Republic
thirty-four, not a particularly young age for females in Roman society.
The Evolution of Roman Law
One of Rome’s chief gifts to the Mediterranean world of its day and to succeeding generations was its devel- opment of law. The Twelve Tables of 450 B.C.E. were
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