A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (9 page)

I hope everyone will pay keen attention to the moral life of earlier times . . . and will appreciate the subsequent decline in discipline and in moral standards, the collapse and disintegration of morality down to the present day. For we have now reached a point where our degeneracy is intolerable – and so are the measures by which alone it can be reformed.
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As in the 1960s and 1970s, the problem was that women were having fewer children but more sex. The resurgence of the ‘family values’ movement was an attempt to reverse that trend. The Roman state, however, had more coercive power than the moral majoritarians of 1980s America.

The old strict form of marriage, which had placed a wife
under the absolute authority of her husband, lapsed with the centuries, and was replaced by more informal arrangements. Clearly, husbands were no longer made of the stern stuff of Rome’s founding fathers and had grown too tolerant over the years. Some were refusing to divorce their wives when they caught them in adultery. A few husbands were accused of even profiting by it. Liberalism of this sort was judged to be the cause of the rot which moralists saw all around them. Augustus drafted a series of laws, known as the Lex Julia, aimed at encouraging men and women to marry and at restoring the traditional Roman family. Augustus imposed penalties on those who had not married by a certain age, and rewarded those who did and fathered children. He revived the ancient law allowing fathers to kill their daughters, and husbands their wives, if caught in the sexual act; husbands were again obliged to divorce their adulterous wives or face severe penalties. Augustus took the jurisdiction of adultery cases away from the family and handed it over to a public court. Divorce was not enough. Augustus wanted erring wives dragged through the courts and punished. The wronged husband was given sixty days after the divorce to prosecute his former wife. If he proved too softhearted, she could still be prosecuted by any member of the public who was above the age of 25 – surely one of the greatest encouragements ever codified for self-righteous busybodies who enjoyed the spectacle of a woman being publicly disgraced. Although the new law allowed a woman to divorce her husband for adultery, it did not oblige her to do so; and she was barred from bringing a criminal prosecution against him. That is, adultery was a public offence only for women.
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The new laws also made it an offence for a man to have sexual relations with any woman outside of marriage, except a prostitute. Applied to upper-class women, it meant they were not permitted to have any form of sexual liaison at all, unless
they were married. In protest, some women put their names on the registry of prostitutes kept by the Roman authorities who oversaw the city’s 35 official brothels. This desperate dodge was eliminated later when Tiberius, Augustus’ successor, barred any woman who came from a respectable family (that is middle-class or senatorial) from registering as a prostitute.

Augustus proclaimed this new legislation from the ancient rostrum, the speaker’s platform in the Forum, which he redecorated with marble and bronze ships’ prows. They are the only laws passed in his long reign to which he gave his name (Julia, named in honour of his family, the Julian, into which Julius Caesar had adopted him), an indication of the importance he attached to them. It was one of his proudest moments as ruler. Augustus, it was declared, had refounded Rome. Shortly thereafter, in 2
BC
, the Senate proclaimed him Father of his Country, the first Roman ever to receive this honour. But the Lex Julia was deeply unpopular. Given the moral freedoms Roman men and women enjoyed, a backlash against them was inevitable. For the proud emperor, it came in the most humiliating form imaginable.

Within weeks, perhaps days, of the Senate’s proclamation, Julia, the thirty-seven-year-old daughter of the ‘Father of his Country’, made an incredible mockery of his laws and shook the foundations of the new moral order he had attempted to impose. Had there been a tabloid newspaper, its front page would doubtless have screamed: ‘Julia in Orgy Shock: Sex Romp on Rostrum’.

According to the Stoic philosopher and imperial adviser Seneca: ‘She had received lovers in droves. She had roamed the city in nocturnal revels, choosing for her pleasures the Forum, and the very Rostrum from which her father had proposed the adultery law.’ She was accused of seeking every kind of gratification from casual lovers.
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She was even alleged to
have hired herself out as a prostitute. (The same allegations would later be made against Messalina, the wife of the Emperor Claudius.)

The anecdotes that survive about Julia, Augustus’ only child, depict a witty, strong-willed young woman. Once, her father commented unfavourably on the immodesty of her dress. The next day when she appeared in proper attire, he complimented her, to which she replied: ‘Today I dressed for my father’s eyes, yesterday for a man’s.’
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Daughters’ talents or ambitions, however, were of little importance compared to their ability to produce sons. Between the ages of fourteen when Julia was first married and twenty-eight, she had three husbands, all chosen for her by her father who was desperate to have a male heir. She must at times have felt like the imperial incubator. She dutifully produced three boys and two daughters, all with her second husband, Agrippa, her father’s right-hand man, who was over twice her age when they married. But none of her sons survived to fulfil her father’s dreams of finding a male heir of his own direct lineage. It was one of her two daughters, Agrippina, who would go on to produce a male heir to the throne – the emperor Caligula.

Julia’s behaviour was more than just a wild fling. The orgy on the rostrum was timed (as well as placed) for maximum effect. The very year that Augustus was declared Father of his Country, his daughter demonstrated his complete failure as a father to his own family. She knew how a daughter can most keenly wound her father. Her promiscuity was the revenge of a daughter who rebelled in the only way that was open to her – to seek her own personal gratification, as Seneca notes with horror. She was playing sexual politics, forced to do so because her body had become a political commodity. Paradoxically, by giving it away she was reclaiming it as her own. But Julia’s acts were acts of political defiance as well as of
personal protest. Augustus’ laws were deeply unpopular (as Livy noted), nowhere more so than within the intellectual coterie in which Julia moved and from which evolved a counter-cultural rebellion. Something similar happened in America and other Western democracies with the sexual revolution of the 1960s against the conservative, family-oriented moral code of the previous decades.

Augustus, enraged, did not try to keep the scandal secret. He dragged his daughter and her friends before the courts, accusing her of promiscuity, adultery, and prostituting herself. The court heard the full, lurid story. She was condemned. He banished her forever. She died 16 years later without ever seeing him or Rome again.

The stage was now set for one of the great creations of misogyny. Cato the Elder had warned his fellow Romans long ago, when women were demanding the right to wear gorgeous clothes, that ‘woman is a violent and uncontrolled animal’ to whom any concession of freedom will lead to complete abandonment and the collapse of all moral standards. That fear was embodied in Messalina, the wife of the emperor Claudius (10
BC
–
AD
54).

Messalina was the great-granddaughter of Augustus’ sister Octavia, who married Mark Antony after Fulvia died. She married Claudius in
AD
37, when she was probably still a teenager (though the year of her birth is not known for certain) and he was almost 47. Four years later, after the assassination of Caligula, Claudius succeeded him to become emperor. He would last for 13 years. Perhaps the most unlikely of Rome’s rulers, he is portrayed as a rather scholarly eccentric, maladroit, and consumed with the pursuit of arcane history. In dramatic contrast, his young wife has become identified with a psycho-sexual disorder: ‘Excessive heterosexuality (promiscuity) or what is known as the Messalina complex . . .’
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According to Havelock Ellis, one of the twentieth century’s most famous sex experts: ‘Sex is no real pleasure to the Messalina type. It’s only an attempt to find relief from deeper unhappiness. You might call it a flight into sex.’
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In modern times, various theories have been expounded to explain ‘the Messalina type’, from frigidity to thwarted maternal instincts to latent lesbianism; more recently, the whole notion of such a thing as nymphomania has been questioned.
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But the Messalina of history is more than a psychological category. Among other things, she is one of the outstanding examples of how prejudice works as a kind of reductionism.

Messalina’s historical importance stems from the fact that she was only the second woman to become a Roman empress. Her sole role model was Livia, the austere wife of Augustus whose private life was as impeccable as any matron’s. In but one thing Messalina seems to have imitated her: her determination to get rid of anyone suspected of hostility to her or to her husband, or of harbouring ambitions to supplant her son Britannicus as Claudius’ heir. In this, she was brutally efficient, eliminating potential rivals to Julio-Claudian dominance before they could act. But the Messalina that has come down to us is not the ruthless politician but the nymphomaniac, largely thanks to the poet Juvenal’s portrait of her in his
Sixth Satire.
In it he accuses her of sneaking through the dark streets as soon as Claudius was asleep, her black hair disguised by a blonde wig, to enter a brothel:

Look at those peers of the gods, and hear what Claudius suffered.

Soon as his august wife was sure that her husband was sleeping,

This imperial whore preferred, to a bed in the palace,

Some low mattress, put on the hood she wore in the nighttime,

Sneaked through the streets alone, or with only a single companion,

Hid her black hair in a blonde wig, and entered a brothel.

Reek of old sheets, still warm – her cell was reserved for her, empty,

Held in the name of Lycisca. There she took off her dress,

Showed her golden tits, and the parts where Britannicus came from,

Took the customers on, with gestures more than inviting,

Asked and received her price and had a wonderful evening,

Then, when the pimp let the girls go home, she sadly departed,

Last of them all to leave, still hot, with a woman’s erection,

Tired by her men, but unsatisfied still, her cheeks all discoloured,

Rank with the smell of the lamps, filthy, completely disgusting,

Perfumed with the aroma of whore-house, and home, at last, to her pillow.
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This portrait by Juvenal (
AD
50–127) of rampant female sexuality has, like the myths of Pandora and Eve, become proverbial, reducing woman to a voracious vagina, forever unsatisfied. He also uses Messalina to generalize about women:

Their appetites all are the same, no matter what class they come from;

High or low, their lusts are all alike . . .
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But is his portrait also a myth? Juvenal was writing about sixty years after the reign of Claudius, and the new dynasty under which he lived was still very anti-Julio-Claudian. The virtuous Roman matron had made a comeback in the form of the wives of the emperors Trajan (
AD
98–117) and Hadrian (117–138). Besides, Juvenal was a satirist, holding up to ridicule the vices of mankind and society. The satiric method involves taking vices to extremes for comic as well as moral
effect. Moralists in any age, whether it is second-century Rome, or twenty-first century America, enjoy nothing so much as horrifying their audiences by playing on their deepest fears and prejudices. How much of a misogynist Juvenal himself was is open to debate, but he was certainly playing to the misogyny of his audience. He did so with remarkable eloquence, as have many misogynists before and since. Juvenal’s
Sixth Satire
is yet another instance of what may at first appear to be a paradox about misogyny: it has inspired more great writing than any other prejudice. One cannot imagine anti-Semitism or any other type of bigotry for that matter, producing good poetry. The paradox goes to the very heart of misogyny and its deepest contradiction. Juvenal’s portrait of the woman of whom he so strongly disapproves is coloured by fascination and desire. And it is his desire and fascination as much as his indignation that make him eloquent.

Messalina lasted seven years at Claudius’ side, during which time it appears he had no knowledge of her sexual adventures. The incident that precipitated her fall from power has perplexed historians. In
AD
48 when the emperor was out of Rome, she married the lover who was her current favourite, a handsome aristocrat named Caius Silius, during a bacchanalian festival. The theory that the marriage was part of a plot to replace Claudius as emperor flies in the face of Messalina’s record of defending the interests of her son as future ruler. Why would she entrust Britannicus to the care of a stepfather, who already had sons of his own? Her interests and his were best protected by ensuring Claudius survived. The historian Cornelius Tacitus has a more reasonable, less complicated explanation: ‘Messalina’s adultery was going so smoothly that she was drifting, through boredom, into unfamiliar vices . . . the idea of being called [Silius’] wife appealed to her owing to its sheer outrageousness – a sensualist’s ultimate satisfaction.
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