A History of the Wife (8 page)

in Rome, his body, after being carried in state through the forum, should be sent to Cleopatra at Alexandria. Octavius charged Antony with many offenses, among them the gift to Cleopatra of the library at Pergamon with its 200,000 volumes. Equally telling was the charge that “at a great banquet, in the presence of many guests, he had risen up and rubbed her feet” and that he left a public trial at a crucial moment, when Cleopatra happened to pass by in her chair, so as “to follow at her side and attend her home.” Was this the conduct of a true Roman, for whom any public display of affection was considered inap- propriate?

The war declared by Octavius ended in the shattering defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31
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. Fleeing to Alexandria, where they awaited the imminent arrival of Octavius, Antony and Cleopatra anticipated payment with their lives. Painful as it would be to die at the respective ages of fifty-two and thirty-nine, they did not want to be left to the mercy of Octavius. No, in true Roman fashion, Antony would commit suicide, and Cleopatra, no less conscious of her honor, would do the same. The story that has come down to us of their last moments, which may or may not be true, seeks to portray them not only as lovers to the end, but also as exemplary Roman spouses united in joint suicide.

Antony is said to have committed suicide when he heard, mistak- enly, that Cleopatra was dead. In Plutarch’s account, he pierced his belly with his sword and lay down to die, but when he was told that the Queen was still alive, he asked to be taken to her. Cleopatra “laid him on the bed, tearing all her clothes, which she spread upon him; and, beating her breast with her hands, lacerating herself, and disfiguring her own face with the blood from his wounds, she called him her lord, her husband, her emperor... .”

Cleopatra’s death was reported to be equally spectacular. Though she suffered the visit of Octavius and allowed him to believe she intended to go on living in the interest of her children, she, too, took her own life. According to the legend, she had an asp brought in hidden among a pile of figs. Then she provoked the asp to bite her. But even Plutarch wrote that “what really took place is known to no one.” Octavius, it appears, gave credit to the account of the asp bite, and “though much disappointed by her death, yet could not but admire the greatness of her spirit and gave order that her body should be buried by Antony

with royal splendour and magnificence.”

After their death, it was, ironically, Octavia who raised Antony’s chil- dren—not only the two daughters she had had with him, but also one of Antony’s sons from his marriage to Fulvia and the children of his union with Cleopatra! Octavia raised them all alongside her own three children from her prior marriages. When we look today at the com- plexities of “recombined” families, we do well to remember Octavia’s household and her responsibilities to the many orphans under her roof.

The life of Mark Antony’s antagonist—Octavius/Augustus—provides another look at marriage at the highest level. His first marriage to Scri- bonia, who had already been married twice, was a political union that lasted only two years. After she gave birth to a daughter, Octavius divorced her because she couldn’t tolerate one of his favorite mistresses. At the same time, he fell so blindly in love with Livia that he brought her to his bed even while she was pregnant with her first husband’s child. Then he forced Livia’s husband to divorce her, and married her himself in 38
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., three days after the child’s birth. During the rest of his rule—a full fifty-one years—Augustus remained married to Livia, despite the fact that they never produced a living child and heir together. And when he died in 14
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., at the age of seventy-five, his last words were spoken to his wife urging her not to forget the happiness of their married life.
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Livia was apparently more indulgent toward her husband’s extramar- ital affairs than her predecessor. She not only accepted his mistresses, but was even said to have procured them for him. But this was not all that was said about Livia. Indeed, judged by the venomous accounts of such historians as Tacitus, she was an infamous intriguing shrew who secured the succession of her son Tiberius (from her first marriage) by removing those who stood in his way. Other historians have been more generous, Valerius Maximus and Seneca among them. And in the opin- ion of most scholars today, Livia’s contribution to Augustus’s success was considerable, and their devotion to each other exemplary. As the first empress of Rome, with her personal dignity and harmonious mar- riage, she set the standard for all successive empresses.
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For pictures of Roman marriage among the gentry, there are the letters written by the younger Pliny to his beloved third wife, Calpurnia. Here

is a sample:

Never have I complained so much about my public duties as I do now. They would not let me come with you to Campania in search of better health, and they still prevent me from following hard on your heels. This is a time when I particularly want to be with you, to see with my own eyes whether you are gaining in strength and weight. . . .

You say that you are feeling my absence very much, and your only comfort when I am not there is to hold my writings in your hand. . . . You cannot believe how much I miss you. I love you so much, and we are not used to separations.
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Pliny’s letters, even if they were intended for publication, are testi- monies to a very great love. Most wives undoubtedly did not receive such adulation.

But many enjoyed conjugal affection if we are to believe the numer- ous tombstones erected in their honor by grieving husbands. Funeral inscriptions praised them for being dear, holy, excellent, sweet, dutiful, obedient, chaste, loyal, thrifty, delightful, graceful, beautiful, and loving wives. The famous memorial tablet dedicated by her husband to a woman known as Turia in the first century
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. presented the picture of a fully appreciated wife. Her funeral inscription began: “Rare are marriages as durable as this one, uninterrupted by divorce.” It told the story of a wife who, after her husband’s political disgrace, made super- human efforts to have him rehabilitated. Managing to bring him covertly back to Rome and then hiding him in the crawl space under her roof, she badgered the city magistrates with countless supplica- tions—not without risk to her personal safety—and was ultimately crowned with success: the spouses were granted the right to live together again. The only cloud on their happiness was the absence of a child. When Turia offered to divorce her husband so that he could marry another, he refused. In the end, he mourned an exemplary woman, “a faithful and submissive wife, good and gracious towards others, sociable and kind.”
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Preserved in the Louvre, the funerary altar erected around 180
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. by Julius Secundus to his wife, Cornelia Tyche, and their daughter, Julia Secundina, after a shipwreck that took both their lives reads: “With an incomparable attachment and fidelity to her husband, and

an extraordinary devotion to her children, she lived 38 years, 4 months and 7 days, of which twelve years [were spent] with me.” The eleven- year-old daughter was remembered as “remarkable for her goodness, very pure in her conduct, and learned beyond the ordinary station of her sex.”

Wives, too, erected monuments to their lost spouses, often described with the same terms of endearment used for the women. It is probable that the same words meant slightly different things when applied to each gender. “Obedient” implied that a woman was compliant toward her husband, whereas it was never acceptable for a husband to be sub- ordinate to his wife.
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“Chaste” for a husband may have merely meant that he conducted himself discreetly, whereas for a woman
pudicitia
was to be taken literally.

Fidelity to a dead spouse was praised on the part of a widow, despite the laws that penalized women under fifty who refused to remarry. There was even a special honorific term—
univera
—for the woman who married only once. No one expected the same of a widower. A widower might marry immediately upon the death of his wife, but a widow was expected, out of respect for her late husband, to wait ten months—a period later increased to twelve months and then to two years.

Before leaving the ancient world, we shall take a brief look at homosex- uality among the Romans, who were almost as tolerant as the Greeks, especially during the late empire. According to historian John Boswell, there were “many same-sex couples in the Roman world who lived together permanently, forming unions neither more nor less exclusive than those of the heterosexual couples around them.”
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Nero, the flam- boyant Roman emperor who ruled from 54 to 68
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., went so far as to marry two men, sequentially, in public ceremonies. Suetonius wrote of Nero’s first homosexual marriage: “Having tried to turn the boy Sporus into a girl by castration, he went through a wedding ceremony with him—dowry, bridal veil and all—which the whole Court attended; then brought him home, and treated him as a wife. He dressed Sporus in the fine clothes normally worn by an Empress and took him in his own litter... through the Street of Images at Rome, kissing him amorously now and then.”
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He later also married his freedman Doryphorus. Nero forced the Imperial Court to treat his male brides with the same courtesy bestowed upon his three heterosexual wives

(first Octavia, whom he divorced on a trumped-up adultery charge and then put to death; then Poppaea, who died three years later; and finally Statilia Messallina.)

Homosexual weddings seem to have increased during the first and second centuries, but were outlawed in 342. Some of the reactions to these ceremonies sound very much like those voiced today by conser- vatives facing gay and lesbian commitment ceremonies, domestic part- nerships, and the possibility of legalized marriage. For example, Juvenal, in his mordant Satire 2, exclaimed: “Look—a man of family and fortune—being wed to a man!” And in that mocking tone for which he became famous, he spoke of having to attend a friend’s wed- ding, still “a small affair,” but one he feared would prefigure a groundswell of increasingly public same-sex weddings.

. . . . Such things, before we’re very much older, will be done in public—in
public,
and will want to appear in the papers! These brides, however, are racked by one intractable problem: they cannot conceive, and hold their husbands by having a baby.
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For all his mockery of male/male relations, Juvenal painted an even worse picture of heterosexual marriage in his Satire 6 aimed at Roman wives. Indeed, between the perils of matrimony and the pleasures of a male lover, Juvenal asked: “don’t you think it better to sleep with a little boy-friend?/ A boy-friend doesn’t argue all night or ask you for presents as he lies beside you... .”
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With Roman wives guilty of every form of treachery and debauchery, according to Juvenal, marriage was nothing more than a “noose” for a man to stick his “stupid head” into.

As for same-sex unions between women, there is no longer any doubt that Roman writers were familiar with lesbianism and invariably condemned it as “monstrous, lawless, licentious, unnatural, and shameful.”
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While Roman culture was relatively tolerant of eros between men, it was consistently hostile to love between
tribades
—the Latin term for lesbians. Nonetheless, female homosexuality may have been as much a part of Roman society as male homosexuality, if we are to believe the many disparaging remarks of such first- and second- century writers as Seneca the Younger, Martial, and Juvenal.

Physicians during the Roman period tended to view female homo- eroticism as a “disease” that manifested itself in masculine symptoms.

Soranus, the noted Greek doctor who practiced in Rome in the second century
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., believed that the cause of these symptoms was the physi- cal condition of an enlarged clitoris. Because an enlarged clitoris was the most obvious part of the female genital organs that could be com- pared to a male penis, it was thought that women so endowed took on the “active” attributes of men, instead of the “passive” attributes consid- ered natural for women. To “correct” this condition, Soranos and others counseled a surgical procedure known as clitorodectomy. It is still per- formed today as an Islamic practice in Egypt, the Sudan, and the sur- rounding region, despite protests from health professionals and feminist activists against genital mutilation.

It should not surprise us to discover that male homosexual practices were generally tolerated and the female equivalent was uniformly cen- sured in ancient Rome. Men in antiquity simply had greater freedom than women in all respects, including behaviors that have subsequently been called “sinful,” “deviant,” or “abnormal” by Christians, moralists, and psychiatrists. For at least five hundred years, from Plato to Plutarch, while lesbianism called forth the invective of male writers, men continued to discuss the relative merits of male homosexuality and heterosexual love. Plutarch’s
Eroticus
offers a good summary of the debate.

A defender of homosexuality argues that “true love has nothing whatever to do with the women’s quarters. . . . There is only one gen- uine love, that of boys.” He associates the love of boys with the virile virtues of philosophy and wrestling, and denigrates “love that dwells in women’s laps and beds, always pursuing comfort and softened by pleasures.” This attitude expressed during the Roman empire hearkens back to classical Greece, when misogynist contempt for women was standard fare.

But when we listen to the apologists for marital love in Plutarch’s dia- logue, we know that something has changed since the heyday of the Greeks. A more positive view of heterosexual intimacy, promoted by the Romans, has crept into the discourse. Instead of dismissing conju- gal pleasure as an inferior form of love, its spokesman states categori- cally that “for married couples, sexual relations are a foundation of affection, a communion, as it were, in a great mystery.” He speaks of the “mutual love and trust” and the “loving friendship” (
philotes
) that devel- ops between spouses. And defying five centuries of high-culture prefer-