156 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
in later Mediterranean societies. Literary and legal sources suggest that
senatorial men and women probably married several years younger, but still
with the characteristic age gap between husband and wife.^17
Of course, not every wife was younger than her husband, nor were the
consequences of the husband’s usual seniority the same in all cases.
Nevertheless, a passage from Pliny’s Letters about his third wife illustrates
the results the age difference will often have had. Pliny, in his forties, wrote
to the aunt of his wife Calpurnia, still in her teens ( Ep. 4.19): ‘I do not doubt
that it will be a source of great joy to you to know that [Calpurnia] has
turned out to be worthy of her father, worthy of you and worthy of her
grandfather. Her shrewdness and frugality are of the highest order. She loves
me – a sign of her purity. To these virtues is added an interest in literature,
which she has taken up out of fondness for me. She has, repeatedly reads,
and even learns by heart my works. What anxiety she feels when I am about
to speak in court! What joy when I have fi nished! She arranges for messengers
to tell her of the approval and applause I win as well as of the outcome of
the case.’ In a sense this could be labelled a ‘companionate marriage’ in
which Calpurnia shared the interests of her husband, and yet the young girl
was clearly not on an equal footing with her consular husband, to whose
interests and public achievement she subordinated herself.
Pliny’s praise of Calpurnia offers some insight into the conventional
values of marriage, at least from the aristocratic male viewpoint. First,
reference to Calpurnia’s shrewdness and frugality derives from the traditional
ideal that husband and wife cooperate in running their house and estate,
with the wife taking responsibility for managing the home while the husband
deals with external affairs.^18 Columella in his work on estate management
discusses the traditional role of the Roman matron in running the household,
and then uses his idealization of the past to condemn the present, in which
domestic tasks and management are left to slaves (12.pr.8–10). Pliny may
have praised his wife for the traditional virtues of household management,
but in fact slaves in aristocratic households relieved the wife of the necessity
of housework for the joint benefi t of the family. This may provide part of the
explanation for the difference in usual age at marriage for women of the
upper and lower classes: in humble families without slaves the inexperience
of a twelve or thirteen- year-old wife would have been seriously detrimental
to the household economy, while in wealthy households it was
inconsequential.^19 In any case, as part of his scheme to prod the aristocracy
into returning to the ancient virtues, Augustus advertised the fact that the
women of his domus performed traditional domestic tasks, an attempt to set
an example that was no more effective than Augustus’ other attempts to
turn back the clock.
The second virtue ascribed to Calpurnia, amor (love and devotion) for
her husband, is connected with the ideal of the univira , the woman who
devoted herself exclusively to one husband.^20 Love and devotion are not
easy to isolate and identify, and are impossible to measure, leaving historians