6 ms·

Back when that meme of "how often do men think about the roman empire" was going around, I was talking to my girlfriend about it and I noticed how I couldn't na

Back when that meme of "how often do men think about the roman empire" was going around, I was talking to my girlfriend about it and I noticed how I couldn't name any Roman women other than [Agrippina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippina_the_Younger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippina_the_Younger). I mostly just watch [toldinstone](https://toldinstone.com/ https://toldinstone.com/) and [Historia Civilis](https://www.historiacivilis.com/ https://www.historiacivilis.com/) on Youtube. I'm not really that interested in roman history, it's just nice infotainment to put on in the background, so it's not like I am going out of my way to learn about roman history, so it may also be that the presenters are glossing over the role of women in roman society. But I also watch a lot of ancient roman cooking videos, and again, the role of women is often absent in the historical texts that these videos quote from. I find it odd that I can only name a single roman woman, when I can name at least a few dozen women in other historical time periods that were very patriarchal. medeival, renaissance, and colonial era European history has many famous women, and Chinese and Japanese history has many named women, many in the courts of nobles, but they were still written about. I also don't read into these eras of history deeply, I just consume infotainment about them. It makes me wonder how much worse roman civilization must have been for women that they apparently didn't even bother to write down anything about them. Or is it that pop-history about ancient rome tends to be more male-oriented than history about other historical eras, and so women are just not talked about?

countrymile 2y ago
I was thinking something very similar to this. For all the thinking about the Roman empire, we (well the vast majority of we) need to be very thankful we live now rather than then. Tom Holland's dominion gives a very interesting run down of the horrors of those times.
shrubble 2y ago
There is Lucretia, and Virginia who was treated so badly by the aristocrats that it led to the overthrow of the decemviri and restoration of the Republic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verginia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verginia, Macaulay wrote a famous poem about her as well, https://www.theotherpages.org/poems/virginia.html https://www.theotherpages.org/poems/virginia.html
- swaginator 2y ago
  Oh yes, I forgot about Lucretia, that was actually the only other one I know about. That makes two I guess.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
recursivecaveat 2y ago
In later European monarchies you could have a queen or a woman acting as a powerful regent. There's no way a woman could be elected consul in the republic though, and it seems like child emperors were not much of a thing. I think the same is true for lower levels on the political ladder: they were all elected instead of truly hereditary, so women were legally barred.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ffgjgf1 2y ago
  Yeah, but that was the case in the western world until the 1900s. I doubt someone would describe France in the late 1800s in the same way though (and they didn’t get the right to vote until 1944).
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pvg 2y ago
that they apparently didn't even bother to write down anything about them. That doesn't sound at all right and it might be just a quirk of your sources? Just cracking open Tacitus https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Tacitus/Annals/1A*.html https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Tacitus/A... Don't need to get farther than 3 paragraphs in and a Roman woman is politicking in high Roman politics: Adopted as son, as colleague in the empire, as consort of the tribunician power, he was paraded through all the armies, not as before by the secret diplomacy of his mother, but openly at her injunction. For so firmly had she riveted her chains upon the aged Augustus that he banished to the isle of Planasia
- glitchc 2y ago
  Was there a name? It wasn't mentioned in the quote. Was it revealed later? If not, I suspect the OP's point stands. The only woman I could think of was Helena, mother of Constantine, of course that's the Eastern Roman Empire in Byzantine, not the seven hills people often think of when they say Rome.
  - labster 2y ago
    And I could add Anna Komneme, who was definitely Roman, but not in the Classical period nor the city of Rome. Boudicca and Zenobia were more famous for disagreeing about being Roman, and leading revolts. Oddly the most famous women of the Roman Empire were commoners in Roman Judea: Mary, Anne, and Mary Magdalene.
    - ffgjgf1 2y ago
      Well Irene managed to usurp the throne in a similar way to most male emperors (by scheming and murdering her opponents, even if one of them happened to be her own son…) and even managed to rule on her own right for a while. Which was extremely unique historically, even by modern standards (how many female dictators are there?).
  - pvg 2y ago
    If not, I suspect the OP's point stands. The point that I'm replying to and that I quoted is 'Romans didn't write about women'. I don't see how it stands when you can open a Roman chronicler and right away he's writing about women. The only woman I could think of I mean, you have 'suspect' and 'think of', I've got a link to a big pile of Roman writing. It's not hard to check if women are in fact represented in Roman writing.
roughly 2y ago
There's a self-fulfilling cycle that happens here in both history and anthropology where the assumption when looking at old cultures has been that they were a patriarchy, because that's all we've ever seen, because every time we look at an old culture we're assuming it's a patriarchy, so when we see things that look like a matriarchy we assume we're mistaken because everything else we've seen has been a patriarchy, so this must be one, too. For instance, looking at the art from Minoan Crete, there's abundant examples of works where women are portrayed in the ways that in other cultures of the region were how the rulers were portrayed, but since we're assuming they were a patriarchy, the assumption has been that these were gods being portrayed, and not rulers, because rulers are men and these were women, so they couldn't have been rulers. You see similar where we'll find grave sites where the skeleton seems female, but they're buried with the trappings and in the fashion of a ruler, and a shocking amount of effort is spent trying to reconcile that contradiction. (This is not to argue that Rome was actually a matriarchy or anything silly like that, rather that the blindness of history to the role of women reaches almost comical levels in other places, so it's not surprising to find a blank spot in Roman history in pop culture, at least.)
- coldtea 2y ago
  >For instance, looking at the art from Minoan Crete, there's abundant examples of works where women are portrayed in the ways that in other cultures of the region were how the rulers were portrayed, but since we're assuming they were a patriarchy Who assumes that? For over 40 years I've been reading conjectures about Minoan Crete being a matriarchy or substantially less patriarchical from all kinds of sources, it's quite a common theory. Even Wikipedia: "While historians and archaeologists have long been skeptical of an outright matriarchy, the predominance of female figures in authoritative roles over male ones seems to indicate that Minoan society was matriarchal, and among the most well-supported examples known."
  - roughly 2y ago
    Yes, and the reason it's taken more than 40 years to go from conjecture to broadly if grudgingly acknowledged theory is that there is and has been a baseline assumption of patriarchy within the field for centuries. Looking at the evidence on its own without the notion that a matriarchy would be outlandish and weird, there'd be no doubt what you were looking at, but instead we spent a long time talking about how strange it was they kept painting fancy women on the walls and we couldn't figure out who their kings were.
KineticLensman 2y ago
From reading ‘I Claudius’ I additionally remember Livia and Messalina. [Edit] oh, also Calpurnia, and Incontinetia Buttocks
- ffgjgf1 2y ago
  Until well into the Imperial period women didn’t even technically have their own names. They based all called Julia, Claudia, Cornelia etc. which was just the female version of their father gens. If you had 3 sisters sisters you’d just be Claudia IV.. So basically it’s pretty easy to come up with an unlimited number of Roman women if you just know a few Roman family names. Of course for boys it was only marginally better since each family just reused 3-4 first names (and eventually just started using numbers instead of names as well..)
tosser137 2y ago
[flagged]
andsoitis 2y ago
> It makes me wonder how much worse roman civilization must have been for women that they apparently didn't even bother to write down anything about them. A starting point to learn about specific Roman women: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distinguished_Roman_women https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distinguished_Roman_wo... One thing to note is that freeborn women in Ancient Rome were citizens but could not vote and could not hold public office, severely limiting their public role and hence reference by historians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_Rome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_Rome
- swaginator 2y ago
  That's a pretty short list given the length of the roman empire. Shorter than I expected honestly.
  - ffgjgf1 2y ago
    Probably mainly because it’s relatively underdeveloped Wikipedia article and we have very few surviving sources from the Roman period compared to the middle ages (and I’m pretty sure the list of Greek women or any place pre ~1000 AD would be even shorter).
    - swaginator 2y ago
      That's a good point.
rKarpinski 2y ago
How about Cleopatra or the Virgin Mary?
- ben_jones 2y ago
  Also Boudica
ffgjgf1 2y ago
> worse roman civilization must have been for women that they apparently When it comes to women rights the Romans were relatively progressive (possibly unintentionally) by historical standards. I think certainly an improvement over the Taliban style treatment of women in classical Athens.. By the mid/late Republican period they switched to a form of marriage which allowed women in practice to retain their legal personhood and wealth to some extent after marriage (legally she remained under the protection of her father/family while living in her husband’s household, meaning that he had very limited authority over her or her personal property). In the Imperial period https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_trium_liberorum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_trium_liberorum while far from universal (but from what I understand it was possible to get it without having 3 children in some cases) granted women comparable rights to those they possessed in pre-1800s Europe.
xchip 2y ago
Cleopatra, Hypatia, Cornelia, Calpurnia,... Also their mythology was full of powerful women, why would an oppressive and patriarcal society would tolerate having a woman as the goddess of knowledge or hunting? Probably women were happy in their housewife role, so were my grandmothers.

countrymile 2y ago

I was thinking something very similar to this. For all the thinking about the Roman empire, we (well the vast majority of we) need to be very thankful we live now rather than then. Tom Holland's dominion gives a very interesting run down of the horrors of those times.

shrubble 2y ago

There is Lucretia, and Virginia who was treated so badly by the aristocrats that it led to the overthrow of the decemviri and restoration of the Republic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verginia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verginia, Macaulay wrote a famous poem about her as well, https://www.theotherpages.org/poems/virginia.html https://www.theotherpages.org/poems/virginia.html

swaginator 2y ago
Oh yes, I forgot about Lucretia, that was actually the only other one I know about. That makes two I guess.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

recursivecaveat 2y ago

In later European monarchies you could have a queen or a woman acting as a powerful regent. There's no way a woman could be elected consul in the republic though, and it seems like child emperors were not much of a thing. I think the same is true for lower levels on the political ladder: they were all elected instead of truly hereditary, so women were legally barred.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ffgjgf1 2y ago
Yeah, but that was the case in the western world until the 1900s. I doubt someone would describe France in the late 1800s in the same way though (and they didn’t get the right to vote until 1944).

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

pvg 2y ago

that they apparently didn't even bother to write down anything about them. That doesn't sound at all right and it might be just a quirk of your sources? Just cracking open Tacitus https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Tacitus/Annals/1A*.html https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Tacitus/A... Don't need to get farther than 3 paragraphs in and a Roman woman is politicking in high Roman politics: Adopted as son, as colleague in the empire, as consort of the tribunician power, he was paraded through all the armies, not as before by the secret diplomacy of his mother, but openly at her injunction. For so firmly had she riveted her chains upon the aged Augustus that he banished to the isle of Planasia

glitchc 2y ago
Was there a name? It wasn't mentioned in the quote. Was it revealed later? If not, I suspect the OP's point stands. The only woman I could think of was Helena, mother of Constantine, of course that's the Eastern Roman Empire in Byzantine, not the seven hills people often think of when they say Rome.
- labster 2y ago
  And I could add Anna Komneme, who was definitely Roman, but not in the Classical period nor the city of Rome. Boudicca and Zenobia were more famous for disagreeing about being Roman, and leading revolts. Oddly the most famous women of the Roman Empire were commoners in Roman Judea: Mary, Anne, and Mary Magdalene.
  - ffgjgf1 2y ago
    Well Irene managed to usurp the throne in a similar way to most male emperors (by scheming and murdering her opponents, even if one of them happened to be her own son…) and even managed to rule on her own right for a while. Which was extremely unique historically, even by modern standards (how many female dictators are there?).
- pvg 2y ago
  If not, I suspect the OP's point stands. The point that I'm replying to and that I quoted is 'Romans didn't write about women'. I don't see how it stands when you can open a Roman chronicler and right away he's writing about women. The only woman I could think of I mean, you have 'suspect' and 'think of', I've got a link to a big pile of Roman writing. It's not hard to check if women are in fact represented in Roman writing.

roughly 2y ago

There's a self-fulfilling cycle that happens here in both history and anthropology where the assumption when looking at old cultures has been that they were a patriarchy, because that's all we've ever seen, because every time we look at an old culture we're assuming it's a patriarchy, so when we see things that look like a matriarchy we assume we're mistaken because everything else we've seen has been a patriarchy, so this must be one, too. For instance, looking at the art from Minoan Crete, there's abundant examples of works where women are portrayed in the ways that in other cultures of the region were how the rulers were portrayed, but since we're assuming they were a patriarchy, the assumption has been that these were gods being portrayed, and not rulers, because rulers are men and these were women, so they couldn't have been rulers. You see similar where we'll find grave sites where the skeleton seems female, but they're buried with the trappings and in the fashion of a ruler, and a shocking amount of effort is spent trying to reconcile that contradiction. (This is not to argue that Rome was actually a matriarchy or anything silly like that, rather that the blindness of history to the role of women reaches almost comical levels in other places, so it's not surprising to find a blank spot in Roman history in pop culture, at least.)

coldtea 2y ago
>For instance, looking at the art from Minoan Crete, there's abundant examples of works where women are portrayed in the ways that in other cultures of the region were how the rulers were portrayed, but since we're assuming they were a patriarchy Who assumes that? For over 40 years I've been reading conjectures about Minoan Crete being a matriarchy or substantially less patriarchical from all kinds of sources, it's quite a common theory. Even Wikipedia: "While historians and archaeologists have long been skeptical of an outright matriarchy, the predominance of female figures in authoritative roles over male ones seems to indicate that Minoan society was matriarchal, and among the most well-supported examples known."
- roughly 2y ago
  Yes, and the reason it's taken more than 40 years to go from conjecture to broadly if grudgingly acknowledged theory is that there is and has been a baseline assumption of patriarchy within the field for centuries. Looking at the evidence on its own without the notion that a matriarchy would be outlandish and weird, there'd be no doubt what you were looking at, but instead we spent a long time talking about how strange it was they kept painting fancy women on the walls and we couldn't figure out who their kings were.

KineticLensman 2y ago

From reading ‘I Claudius’ I additionally remember Livia and Messalina. [Edit] oh, also Calpurnia, and Incontinetia Buttocks

ffgjgf1 2y ago
Until well into the Imperial period women didn’t even technically have their own names. They based all called Julia, Claudia, Cornelia etc. which was just the female version of their father gens. If you had 3 sisters sisters you’d just be Claudia IV.. So basically it’s pretty easy to come up with an unlimited number of Roman women if you just know a few Roman family names. Of course for boys it was only marginally better since each family just reused 3-4 first names (and eventually just started using numbers instead of names as well..)

tosser137 2y ago

[flagged]

andsoitis 2y ago

> It makes me wonder how much worse roman civilization must have been for women that they apparently didn't even bother to write down anything about them. A starting point to learn about specific Roman women: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distinguished_Roman_women https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distinguished_Roman_wo... One thing to note is that freeborn women in Ancient Rome were citizens but could not vote and could not hold public office, severely limiting their public role and hence reference by historians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_Rome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_Rome

swaginator 2y ago
That's a pretty short list given the length of the roman empire. Shorter than I expected honestly.
- ffgjgf1 2y ago
  Probably mainly because it’s relatively underdeveloped Wikipedia article and we have very few surviving sources from the Roman period compared to the middle ages (and I’m pretty sure the list of Greek women or any place pre ~1000 AD would be even shorter).
  - swaginator 2y ago
    That's a good point.

rKarpinski 2y ago

How about Cleopatra or the Virgin Mary?

ben_jones 2y ago
Also Boudica

ffgjgf1 2y ago

> worse roman civilization must have been for women that they apparently When it comes to women rights the Romans were relatively progressive (possibly unintentionally) by historical standards. I think certainly an improvement over the Taliban style treatment of women in classical Athens.. By the mid/late Republican period they switched to a form of marriage which allowed women in practice to retain their legal personhood and wealth to some extent after marriage (legally she remained under the protection of her father/family while living in her husband’s household, meaning that he had very limited authority over her or her personal property). In the Imperial period https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_trium_liberorum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_trium_liberorum while far from universal (but from what I understand it was possible to get it without having 3 children in some cases) granted women comparable rights to those they possessed in pre-1800s Europe.

xchip 2y ago

Cleopatra, Hypatia, Cornelia, Calpurnia,... Also their mythology was full of powerful women, why would an oppressive and patriarcal society would tolerate having a woman as the goddess of knowledge or hunting? Probably women were happy in their housewife role, so were my grandmothers.