Roman Women: Their History and Habits

`Always, be it noticed, in ancient sources, it was the wife who was in danger of getting on her husband's nerves. You might think there were no irritating husbands...In the surviving literature of antiquity social criticism is a male preserve.' Except for a little by the poetess Sulpicia, all classical Latin literature that I can call to mind offhand is by men. Romans were not slow to criticism, and the super-articulate Ovid and Juvenal in particular did not spare women. The women have not been able to answer back, and this book does not try to do it for them, but it does a lot to promote understanding of how it was for women over the long centuries of Rome's ascendancy. Dacre Balsdon was fellow and tutor in ancient history at one of Oxford's oldest colleges, and Roman Women first saw the light in 1962. Here and there in the book an occasional remark by this fair-minded scholar shows how much attitudes have changed in 40 years, but there should be nothing in the book that jars on any other fair-minded person. It splits neatly into two parts called respectively History and (quaintly) Habits, the latter a long essay on the living (and dying) conditions of the women of Rome and its empire. Balsdon modestly deplores this abrupt split, putting it down to his own lack of ingenuity that he could not integrate the themes better. Thank goodness he failed at that - it is all quite complicated enough as it is. This is a scholarly work, not a popularising one. However the author hopes very reasonably that he can interest a wider audience than just students and other scholars. Marriage in general, and specific marriages in particular, are every bit as interesting in Roman times as in any other times. So is divorce, so is child-rearing. Childbirth itself, in an era before any proper midwifery or obstetrics, is discussed briefly with a proper focus on the risks; and the discussion of abortion, seemingly quite common and unquestionably legal until the end of the second century AD, has a startlingly contemporary feel in 2004. Naturally there are sections on prostitutes, concubines, slave-women and freedwomen, and there are absolutely fascinating short chapters on women's dress, hair-styling, jewellery and other make-up, plus of course the female participation in those specially Roman public institutions the baths. The first section `History' is unavoidably a history of government for the most part. For me this scholarly account is really more interesting than Graves managed to make it. Balsdon's focus is also on the period of the Julio-Claudian emperors, (up to and including Nero). He actually continues until the end of the reign of Constantine in the 4th century, but his narrative has a slightly detached feel in its latter stages, whether because that period and particularly the women of that period were genuinely less interesting or whether they were just less interesting to Balsdon. Rome never produced a really first-class historian to rival Herodotus and T

Those looking for a feminist approach will be disappointed. What we have here is a survey of the private and public life of Roman women up to the time of Constantine, together with many interesting anecdotes of particular women and their families. Balsdon, as always, writes intelligently and engagingly.