Authors: Robert C. Knapp
Or this:
Pompullius Antiochus, her husband, set up this gravestone to Caecilia Festiva, his dearest, sweet wife, hard-working and well-deserving, who lived with me 21 years without a contrary word.
(CIL
9.3215 =
ILS
8433, Corfinio, Italy)
A marriage contract from Egypt indicates monogamy on both sides, respect, sharing of responsibilities, and so on. Ideally, then, there was respect, if not love, mutual cooperation, as well as fidelity on both sides of the marriage. But, in fact, strifeless marriage was often not on the cards: Artemidorus notes that a man dreaming of marriage ‘portends upheavals and scandals. For marriage cannot be conducted without disorder’
(Dreams
2.65). The
Carmen
makes this clear too, as Dorotheus’ nativities predict such things as a man marrying an agreeable wife, happiness for the father of a child, or, conversely, ‘disaster and disgrace because of women and anxiety and grief because of them.’ Or perhaps the wife will turn out to be a whore, or a sign ‘indicates the badness of the marriage from men and women so that his life will revolve in grief and misery because of women …’
(Carmen
2.1).
Despite the overtly male-dominated nature of marriage, women were active partners and certainly not pushed into the background. The wife’s basic duty was to maintain the house, including foodstuffs and clothing, and raise the children. This expectation carries over into Christianity. Around
AD
200, St. Clement notes that a woman ‘is destined for pregnancy and housekeeping’
(Miscellanies (Stromata)
4.8.58.2–60.1 – Rowlandson, no. 51). But a wife had many expectations beyond or intertwined with home management and child-rearing. Most of all, she was expected to uphold certain standards. In Plautus’
Amphitryon
he has Alcmena say:
As for me, I don’t think of my ‘dowry’ the way it is commonly conceived. I think of it as modesty, a sense of shame and controlled desires, fear of the gods, love of parents, harmony with relatives, compliance with your wishes, ever ready to do good to others, ever useful in praiseworthy deeds.
SOSIA
: Good God! If she is speaks truly, she is a paradigm of the very best.
(Amphitryon
839–43)
There is exaggeration for comedic effect, but the portrait is essentially the same as the one we see on epitaphs of excellent women. Chastity was particularly praised. An inscription from Rome speaks for numerous evocations of the high value placed on a wife’s moral uprightness:
Titus Flavius Flavianus set up this monument to Papinia Felicitas who lived 25 years, 5 months, and 25 days. She was a wife most virtuous and chaste, incomparable among women.
(CIL
6.23773 =
ILS
8441, Rome)
Or this from North Africa:
Postumia Matronilla was an incomparable wife, a good mother, a devoted grandmother, chaste, devout, hard working, frugal, efficient, watchful, responsive, life-long partner to one man only, whose bed alone she ever shared, a matron full of industry and good faith, who lived 53 years, 5 months, and 3 days. (
CIL
8.11294 =
ILS
8444, Zaatli, Jabal az, Tunisia)
Household management is exemplified by Papinia’s inscription as well, with her efficiency and frugality praised along with other virtues; her loving care within the family always had to be foremost in a good wife’s mind. Although presumably some ordinary men adorned their women as advertisements of their wealth, as the elite did, modesty usually included dressing in an appropriate manner. Women were urged to ‘adorn themselves modestly and sensibly in seemly apparel, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or costly attire …’ (1 Timothy 2:9; see also 1 Peter 3:3–4). And last but certainly not least, a wife was to
maintain good relations with her husband. Beyond the banal ‘we never had a quarrel’ of the ideal conjugal pair, the picture of a wife’s place was clearly one of submission to her husband. Artemidorus says that wives are bad when they ‘bark or bite’
(Dreams
2.11), i.e. talk back to their husband/master. ‘Likewise [i.e. like the slaves relating to their masters] you wives, be submissive to your husbands …’ advises the male author of 1 Peter 3:1. However, the husband was not to take advantage of this submission, but rather was to be considerate of his wife; he urges men to ‘live considerately with your wives, bestowing honor on the woman as the weaker sex …’ (1 Peter 3:7).
Not only is she to uphold standards, she is to teach younger women and children to do so. Older women are to teach younger the proper way to behave, namely to love their husbands, children, be sensible, chaste, domestic, kind, and submissive to their husbands – see Titus 2:4.
The traditional elite view was that Roman marriage was a cold relationship arranged by adults for their children, its purpose and heart being procreation and the protection of family resources and influence; within this the wife ‘lay back and thought of Rome,’ while the man exercised his sexual virility not just on her, but also on concubines, whores, and slave girls. This view never quite fit with the expressions of a warm, sustaining family life found in funeral inscriptions and elsewhere outside the elite’s literary constructs – or even, in some instances, within those constructs. But still, even though there is no direct access to the Roman marital bed, it is possible to say with a fair degree of confidence that in social and religious conventions alike the purpose of sex in marriage was less enjoyment than procreation.
Nevertheless, sex is certainly a normal part of a woman’s life in marriage. It reflected the dominant/submissive cultural pattern of that institution, but within that habit was the possibility, even the necessity, that a wife would be a good sexual partner. If the literary version of a wedding song composed by the elite poet Catullus captures the actual, normal essence of advice for the bride, her submissive sexual role is clear: ‘Bride make sure that you do not deny what your husband asks for, or he will go elsewhere to seek it’
(Poems
61.147.49). Artemidorus confirms this attitude for ordinary people:
To have intercourse with one’s willing and submissive wife – one not reluctant regarding sex – this is a good thing in the judgment of all. For the wife represents for the one who dreams the craft or profession from which he derives pleasure, or over which he rules, as also he controls his wife. For the dream portends profit from such things, as men on the one hand take pleasure in the acts of Aphrodite, and, on the other, take pleasure in making a profit. But if a wife is reluctant or does not offer herself, this is a sign of the opposite.
(Dreams
1.78)
It is easy to imagine ‘old wives’ advising young brides to do what the husband wants, ‘men will be men’ – an acknowledgment of the psychological element of sex in marriage along with the procreative aspect. The raw explicitness of assumedly chaste females’ exposure to male sexuality, whether in rituals such as the Lupercalia or the genitalia greeting them as they shared the male baths in the ritual of the Virile Fortune (Ovid,
Fasti
133–56), was a reminder that the male was the master and creator, the female the receptacle; submissive she must be.
Overt allusions to sex were found all around. In Pompeii, for example, the notice ‘here lies happiness’
(hic habitat felicitas)
is written above and below the symbol of male sexual and protective power, the phallus
(CIL
4.1454). But men were more or less free to express their sexual drives with slaves and prostitutes; women were not. So ‘respectable’ women’s sexual pleasure was restricted to marriage. And enjoy sex she certainly could – and, indeed,
must
if conception was to take place. Medical writers from Hippocrates to Galen to Soranus linked female orgasm, or at the very least a positive attitude toward intercourse, to conception. So within the fundamental function of a married woman – procreation – enjoying sex was not only permitted, but hoped for.
The range of enjoyment naturally varied from ‘doing one’s duty gladly’ to reveling in sexual excess. Paul’s attitudes at 1 Corinthians 7:2–6 exemplify a wife’s experience of sex as a ‘duty’:
The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband’s body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife. Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent … (compare 1 Thessalonians 4:3–6)
Galen endorsed this sort of restrained although at least potentially still enjoyable connubial sex when he praised Christians’ ‘restraint in cohabitation,’ and again among the elite Seneca praised the under-ardent wife. If the elite Lucretius is to be believed, the less passionate rear-entry position was preferred for conjugal intercourse:
And how the pleasing pleasure is taken is also of very great importance, for wives are thought to conceive more often through intercourse after the manner of wild and domesticated animals, because thus with breasts down and genitals raised, the male seed can reach where it needs to go.
(On the Nature of Things
4.1263–7)
The ‘missionary position’ was too apt to lead to useless, excessive passion, and to
coitus interruptus
as a way to avoid pregnancy:
Sexually stimulating movements are of absolutely no use to wives. For a woman keeps herself from conceiving – even fights against it – if she enthusiastically encourages a man’s penetration by the movement of her hips and makes him ejaculate onto her writhing bosom. For she turns the furrow from the plowshare and keeps the seed from falling where it should. (
On the Nature of Things
4.1268–73)
Toward the other end of the spectrum of conjugal sex, Publilius Syrus has a saying worth repeating: ‘A compliant wife turns a man against whores’ (Maxim 492). Considering the sexual skill of at least some prostitutes, this might have set the bar fairly high for some couples.
While wives could enjoy ‘natural’ sex, in general ‘deviant’ behavior (any sexual activity beyond procreative) was frowned upon in the conjugal bed. Phaedrus in one of his fables notes: ‘Then using the same material, Prometheus made a woman’s tongue from the substance of her private parts. This is what produces the shared connection to obscene acts of both’
(Fables
4.15). But some married couples clearly engaged in oral sex: Firmicius in one of his astrological castings notes that a sign indicates a husband and wife ‘practice impure intercourse,’ probably referring to oral sex
(Mathesis
6.31.38–9). And Artemidorus is clearly aware of the full range of sexual activity, as he writes of married couples in dreams performing the whole array of standard and deviant sexual
positions and acts, although his interpretations always rely on the basic principle that domination is good, subordination is bad.
The extent that lesbianism entered the life of ordinary women is impossible to gauge, but certainly such experiences existed. As Pseudo-Lucian writes:
Come now, epoch of the future, legislator of strange pleasures, devise fresh paths for male lusts, but bestow the same privilege upon women, and let them have intercourse with each other just as men do. Let them strap to themselves cunningly contrived instruments of lechery, those mysterious monstrosities devoid of seed, and let woman lie with woman as does a man. Let wanton lesbianism – that word seldom heard, which I feel ashamed even to utter – freely parade itself, and let our women’s chambers emulate Philaenis, disgracing themselves with Sapphic amours.
(Affairs of the Heart
28/MacLeod)
Artemidorus provides evidence that lesbianism was practiced by the general population, as the possibility of a woman possessing another woman appears in his work:
If a woman penetrates another woman, she will share her own secrets with the one being penetrated. But if she does not know the one penetrated, she will attempt frivolous undertakings. If a woman is penetrated by another woman, she will be divorced from her husband or widowed. Nevertheless, she will learn the secrets of the one doing the fucking.
(Dreams
1.80)
Such matter-of-fact notation of lesbianism is balanced by others who held that female same-sex relationships were to be avoided, as for example Paul, who criticized polytheistic women as ‘exchanging natural relations for unnatural ones’ (Romans 1:26).
Women in the household
Beyond the basics of the sexual life in marriage, a woman had many sources of joy and pleasure. As I have already pointed out, because of
intense and effective acculturation, and the lack of alternate acceptable patterns of behavior, a woman would not have questioned her role; this acceptance led to a large measure of emotional security and, once she had established her worth and so position by bearing children, she encountered few fundamental problems her upbringing had not prepared her to deal with effectively. Traumas of childlessness, of barrenness, of childhood mortality must have come aplenty. But the psychological support system was ready to deal with these ‘expectable’ reversals, and a woman was seldom alone.
The most essential activity of marriage was the concentration of the parents on children. It is so fundamental that for the early Christians motherhood was woman’s special gift, her path to eternal life: ‘Woman will be saved through bearing children, if she continues in faith and love and holiness, with modesty’ (1 Timothy 2:15). Although as in any society there would be aberrant behavior, in the normal course of things, a mother loved her children. A letter from Egypt is eloquent in its care and concern and worry: