The Women of the Caesars | Page 2

man from birth to death--of the husband, if not of
the father, or, if not of father or husband, of the guardian--that time
belongs to remote antiquity.
When Rome became the master state of the Mediterranean world, and
especially during the last century of the republic, woman, aside from a
few slight limitations of form rather than of substance, had already
acquired legal and economic independence, the condition necessary for
social and moral equality. As to marriage, the affianced pair could at
that time choose between two different legal family régimes: marriage
with manus, the older form, in which all the goods of the wife passed to
the ownership of the husband, so that she could no longer possess
anything in her own name; or marriage without manus, in which only
the dower became the property of the husband, and the wife remained
mistress of all her other belongings and all that she might acquire.
Except in some cases, and for special reasons, in all the families of the
aristocracy, by common consent, marriages, during the last centuries of
the republic, were contracted in the later form; so that at that time
married women directly and openly had gained economic
independence.

During the same period, indirectly, and by means of juridical evasions,
this independence was also won by unmarried women, who, according
to ancient laws, ought to have remained all their lives under a guardian,
either selected by the father in his will or appointed by the law in
default of such selection. To get around this difficulty, the fertile and
subtle imagination of the jurists invented first the _tutor optivus_,
permitting the father, instead of naming his daughter's guardian in his
will, to leave her free to choose one general guardian or several,
according to the business in hand, or even to change that official as
many times as she wished.
To give the woman means to change her legitimate guardian at pleasure,
if her father had provided none by will, there was invented the _tutor
cessicius_, thereby allowing the transmission of a legal guardianship.
However, though all restrictions imposed upon the liberty of the
unmarried woman by the institution of tutelage disappeared, one
limitation continued in force--she could not make a will. Yet even this
was provided for, either by fictitious marriage or by the invention of
the tutor fiduciarius. The woman, without contracting matrimony, gave
herself by coemptio (purchase) into the manus of a person of her trust,
on the agreement that the coemptionator would free her: he became her
guardian in the eyes of the law.
[Illustration: A Roman marriage custom. The picture shows the bride
entering her new home in the arms of the bridegroom.]
There was, then, at the close of the republic little disparity in legal
condition between the man and the woman. As is natural, to this almost
complete legal equality there was united an analogous moral and social
equality. The Romans never had the idea that between the _mundus
muliebris_ (woman's world) and that of men they must raise walls, dig
ditches, put up barricades, either material or moral. They never willed,
for example, to divide women from men by placing between them the
ditch of ignorance. To be sure, the Roman dames of high society were
for a long time little instructed, but this was because, moreover, the
men distrusted Greek culture. When literature, science, and Hellenic
philosophy were admitted into the great Roman families as desired and

welcome guests, neither the authority, nor the egoism, nor yet the
prejudices of the men, sought to deprive women of the joy, the comfort,
the light, that might come to them from these new studies. We know
that many ladies in the last two centuries of the republic not only
learned to dance and to sing,--common feminine studies, these,--but
even learned Greek, loved literature, and dabbled in philosophy,
reading its books or meeting with the famous philosophers of the
Orient.
Moreover, in the home the woman was mistress, at the side of and on
equality with her husband. The passage I have quoted from Nepos
proves that she was not segregated, like the Greek woman: she received
and enjoyed the friends of her husband, was present with them at
festivals and banquets in the houses of families with whom she had
friendly relations, although at such banquets she might not, like the
man, recline, but must, for the sake of greater modesty, sit at table. In
short, she was not, like the Greek woman, shut up at home, a veritable
prisoner.
She might go out freely; this she did generally in a litter. She was never
excluded from theaters, even though the Roman government tried as
best it could for a long period to temper in its people the passion for
spectacular entertainments. She