The Women of the Caesars | Page 7

and shifting, there were not a few women of the aristocracy
who had changed husbands three or four times, and that not for

lightness or caprice or inconstancy of tastes, but because their fathers,
their brothers, sometimes their sons, had at a certain moment besought
or constrained them to contract some particular marriage that should
serve their own political ends.
It is easy to comprehend how this precariousness discouraged woman
from austere and rigorous virtues, the very foundation of the family;
how it was a continuous incitement to frivolity of character, to
dissipation, to infidelity. Consequently, the liberty the Romans allowed
her must have been much more dangerous than the greater freedom she
enjoys today, since it lacked its modern checks and balances, such as
personal choice in marriage, the relatively mature age at which
marriages are nowadays made, the indissolubility of the matrimonial
contract, or, rather, the many and diverse restrictions placed upon
divorce, by which it is no longer left to the arbitrary will or the mere
fancy of the man.
In brief, there was in the constitution of the Roman family a
contradiction, which must be well apprehended if one would
understand the history of the great ladies of the imperial era. Rome
desired woman in marriage to be the pliable instrument of the interests
of the family and the state, but did not place her under the despotism of
customs, of law, and of the will of man in the way done by all other
states that have exacted from her complete self-abnegation. Instead, it
accorded to her almost wholly that liberty, granted with little danger by
civilizations like ours, in which she may live not only for the family,
for the state, for the race, but also for herself. Rome was unwilling to
treat her as did the Greek and Asiatic world, but it did not on this
account give up requiring of her the same total self-abnegation for the
public weal, the utter obliviousness to her own aspirations and passions,
in behalf of the race.
[Illustration: Julius Caesar]
This contradiction explains to us one of the fundamental phenomena of
the history of Rome--the deep, tenacious, age-long puritanism of high
Roman society. Puritanism was the chief expedient by which Rome
attempted to solve the contradiction. That coercion which the Oriental

world had tried to exercise upon woman by segregating her, keeping
her ignorant, terrorizing her with threats and punishments, Rome
sought to secure by training. It inculcated in every way by means of
education, religion, and opinion the idea that she should be pious,
chaste, faithful, devoted alone to her husband and children; that luxury,
prodigality, dissoluteness, were horrible vices, the infamy of which
hopelessly degraded all that was best and purest in woman. It tried to
protect the minds of both men and women from all those influences of
art, literature, and religion which might tend to arouse the personal
instinct and the longing for love; and for a long time it distrusted,
withstood, and almost sought to disguise the mythology, the arts, and
the literature of Greece, as well as many of the Asiatic religions,
imbued as they were with an erotic spirit of subtle enticement.
Puritanism is essentially an intense effort to rouse in the mind the
liveliest repulsion for certain vices and pleasures, and a violent dread of
them; and Rome made use of it to check and counterbalance the liberty
of woman, to impede and render more difficult the abuses of such
liberty, particularly prodigality and dissoluteness.
It is therefore easy to understand how this puritanism was a thing
serious, weighty, and terrible, in Roman life; and how from it could be
born the tragedies we have to recount. It was the chief means of solving
one of the gravest problems that has perplexed all civilizations--the
problem of woman and her freedom, a problem earnest, difficult, and
complex which springs up everywhere out of the unobstructed anarchy
and the tremendous material prosperity of the modern world. And the
difficulty of the problem consists, above all, in this: that, although it is
a hard, cruel, plainly iniquitous thing to deprive a woman of liberty and
subject her to a régime of tyranny in order to constrain her to live for
the race and not for herself, yet when liberty is granted her to live for
herself, to satisfy her personal desires, she abuses that liberty more
readily than a man does, and more than a man forgets her duties toward
the race.
She abuses it more readily for two reasons: because she exercises a
greater power over man than he over her; and because, in the wealthier
classes, she is freer from the political and economic responsibilities that

bind the man. However unbridled the freedom that man enjoys,
however vast his egoism, he is