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).
I mostly just watch [toldinstone](https://toldinstone.com/) and [Historia Civilis](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?
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
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.
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.
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?).
Livia. She's named in the phrase just before that. The full quote is:
"When Agrippa gave up the ghost, untimely fate, or the treachery of their stepmother Livia, cut off both Lucius and Caiusº Caesar, Lucius on his road to the Spanish armies, Caiusº — wounded and sick — on his return from Armenia. Drusus had long been dead, and of the stepsons Nero survived alone. On him all centred. 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"
That's Livia Drusilla, also Iulia Augusta, wife of Emperor Augustus and mother of Emperor Tiberius.
Thanks for the clarification. I remember reading Mary Beard's Women and Power, and her lament regarding Greek literature was related to this point. She used examples from the Iliad, Odyssey and other works to illustrate how in the history of humanity, soft power that women frequently exert (politics) has minimized in favour of hard power (violence) that men tend to norm towards.
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.
> 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.
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
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).
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.)
>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."
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.
>is that there is and has been a baseline assumption of patriarchy within the field for centuries
Given 100% of present societies and all examples from recorded history can you blame them for this baseline? That's literally what a baseline is supposed to be!
Like, you're adding say USA (350M), China (1.4B), France (80M), etc with say, some Amazonian tribe of 5K people (which you don't count as part of the 99.999% patriarchical Brazil)?
I guess in that way it's enough that 200 tribal villages (more than the UN nations iirc) to be matriarchical for the world to be "predominantly matriarchical" or at least 50%-50%.
Agree op is wrong as worded. Sort of depends how you count though. If you count like an anthropologist, tons of non patriarchal examples.
But they don't seem to have scaled in the same way for one reason or another.
If you count by membership the number of people who live in patriarchal societies vs not, I think you would come up with an answer very very close to 100% patriarchal.
There's a little bit of an interesting facet of this, which is that it depends on how you're defining patriarchal societies - if you're looking at what is explicitly encoded into the legal systems, it's hard to argue that, as of today, the US or really most of modern world qualifies, and similarly if you're looking at who holds power, while the gender skew is still towards males, a disinterested observer from the future would not observe a society in which power is either exclusively or as a rule held by men. I'm not sure the legal structures around gender in China or India (if we're talking about percentages of the global population), though, although at least for India one could argue Indira Gandhi might have been the most powerful person in India since the empire.
Semi-related, I was doing some reading about different cottage industries from antiquity and the feudal era and was wondering if a feudal-era simulator existed that included cottage industries as part of its core mechanics. I ended up finding that Manor Lords game later on which features this exact mechanic!
It's pretty amazing how much labor was done by women that was crucial to society. Beer, medicine, weaving, braiding, bowstringing, raising livestock, etc.
Last thing, there is a anecdote by Richard Feynman I think where he is in a room with his friend's wife who is crocheting. He explains to her that topologically, the knot she is making can be made six other ways. She goes "yes, the such-and-such and such-and-such knot. Do you crochet?". It's interesting how much knowledge humans were about to collect about the world before the scientific method.
There is a book "1000 Years of Women's work" that is on my reading list now but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
> It's pretty amazing how much labor was done by women that was crucial to society. Beer, medicine, weaving, braiding, bowstringing, raising livestock, etc.
There is a very rich strain of feminist literature on this very point!
> He explains to her that topologically, the knot she is making can be made six other ways. She goes "yes, the such-and-such and such-and-such knot. Do you crochet?".
If you are a fan, be prepared for quite some unpleasantness. Turns out, the story isn't even about topology. No, Feynman was, in his own words, "flabbergasted" that women were able to grasp and explain to each other rather basic matters of analytical geometry.
That's a similar but different anecdote. The one I am thinking of he specifically is talking to someone's wife while she is crocheting. It may not have been Feynman though, I CTRL+F'ed "Surely You're Joking" and wasn't able to find it or I would have cited my sources in the parent comment.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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).
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..)
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.
I mostly just watch [toldinstone](https://toldinstone.com/) and [Historia Civilis](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?