We rarely hear women or other classes speak for themselves,
though there is little reason to think that they did not em-
brace the social ideals of the male aristocracy.
In the early days of Rome gender roles were determined
by the structure of the family. Th e father had absolute con-
trol (patria potestas) over the entire household, including his
children, slaves, and other dependents; patria potestas gave
the father even the power of life and death. Th is rule was less
absolute with regard to the wife, who in some respects was
an outsider in the family. Marriage was considered to be an
a l lia nce bet ween t wo fa mi lies more t ha n a n expression of ro-
mantic love. A wife was indeed under her husband’s control,
but she had earlier been under her father’s control. Moreover,
since her father would have provided her with a dowry (a
substantial gift of property that was usually paid in cash in
later times), she could, if the marriage became intolerable,
retreat from it back to the control of her father, taking the
dowry with her. (Later she could simply divorce.) In practice,
however, such separations rarely occurred, and the husband
generally had the use of his wife’s dowry throughout her life-
time and inherited it as part of his own estate at the time of
her death.
Th e greater mass of people had only a small farm or,
especially in the Imperial Period, no property at all. For
them, marriage was a more informal arrangement in which
a man and a woman simply decided to live together. Many
slaves (at least among those whose working conditions
permitted) lived in situations amounting to marriages rec-
ognized by their masters. Th e social roles of lower classes
were self-consciously modeled on those of aristocrats to the
extent possible. Th e secluded lives of aristocratic women,
however, could not be duplicated by poor women, who
were oft en forced to work in family shops, as peddlers, or
in other businesses.
Roman aristocratic men saw themselves as active and ef-
fi cient, equally skilled in the arts of peace (civil governance)
and war. Th ey viewed business—preferably working in the
law courts but perhaps managing a large agricultural or in-
dustrial concern—as a necessity that distracted them from
their ideal of a retirement devoted to study and literature.
Th e vital quality of good reputation, without which a man
would be humiliated in his attempts to make his way in the
world, depended not so much on his own behavior as on that
of his female family members—that is, on his ability to con-
trol them.
Th e ideal way of life for a Roman matron consisted of
domestic virtues: loyalty, obedience, aff ability, reasonable-
ness, attendance to religion without superstition, sobriety of
attire, modest appearance, and skill in wool working (which
was praiseworthy because it was old-fashioned). Any woman
who had had only a single husband throughout her life (uni-
vira) was considered fortunate. But Roman social ideology
also had a vision of a woman who had fallen away from vir-
tue. She began by drinking, which led to her taking a lover,
with whom she would plot to murder her husband. Th is idea
expressed male fears over the loss of control. Th us, men, es-
pecially men in the public eye as politicians, felt the need to
watch their women carefully. In contrast, it was very common
for a politician, such as Cicero (106–43 b.c.e.), to denounce a
rival on the ground that his women were out of line, even
insinuating that incest went on in his household. Th is accusa-
tion was made not because of factual evidence but because
such activity was a direct violation of accepted gender roles
and would automatically incite outrage in those who heard
about it. Such political maneuvering makes it very diffi cult to
understand whether the reports of the moral degradation of
the emperors and their families have any basis in fact. Such
accounts are common in writings by historical authors like
Suetonius (ca. 70–130 c.e.), who claims, for example, that
the emperor Caligula (r. 37–41 c.e.) slept with his sisters and
that Nero (r. 54–68 c.e.) slept with his mother, Agrippina the
Yo u n g e r.
Although Roman women were never closeted away
within the house as were women in Greece, Greek customs
deeply aff ected Roman ideas about the interaction of gen-
der with sexuality (especially aft er the second century b.c.e.,
when Rome conquered Greece and Greeks fl ooded into Italy
as slaves, paradoxically more sophisticated than their mas-
ters). What the Romans borrowed from the Greeks was a
very diff erent set of social roles than we usually encounter in
modern Western countries. Roman men were supposed to be
active, and women were expected to be passive; other consid-
erations were secondary.
A more ambiguous situation involved male puberty,
a period of masculine life marked sharply in Roman times
from around age 12, when a boy would have his fi rst hair-
cut (the shorn hair was dedicated at a temple in a religious
ceremony) and dress in adult clothes for the fi rst time, until
the physical course of puberty was completed and the beard
was growing fully. According to Roman tradition, a teenage
male ought to act like a man in all respects. But the infl uence
of Greek culture on Roman society was so great that a youth
could engage in love aff airs with older men, as did Julius Cae-
sar (r. 46–44 b.c.e.), without damaging his reputation exces-
sively. More generally, Roman men could legitimately have
sexual relations with their wives, with youths, or with prosti-
tutes or slaves of either gender, without any social judgment
against them for transgressing gender roles. What mattered
to the masculine image was not the physical gender of the
partners but maintaining the active role. Th us, a man who
became known for taking the passive role in homoerotic re-
lations would be publicly shamed as a pervert, but so would
a man who was suspected of sexual subservience to women,
even to his own wife.
Th e image of aristocratic women demanded strict fi del-
ity to husbands, but as society became more cosmopolitan,
especially in the late republic and empire (fi rst century b.c.e.
to third century c.e.), legal reforms that resulted in a high rate502 gender structures and roles: Rome