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Page 2
Caligula
A Bronze Sestertius (Slightly Enlarged), Showing the Sisters of
Caligula (Agrippina, Drusilla, and Julia Livilla) on One Side and
Germanicus on the Other Side
A Bronze Sestertius with the Head of Agrippina the Elder, Daughter of
Agrippa and Julia, the Daughter of Augustus
Claudius, Messalina, and Their Two Children in What is Known as the
"Hague Cameo"
Remains of the Bridge of Caligula in the Palace of the Caesars
The Emperor Caligula
Claudius
The Emperor Claudius
Messalina, Third Wife of Claudius
The Philosopher Seneca
The Emperor Nero
Agrippina the Younger, Sister of Caligula and Mother of Nero
Britannicus
Statue of Agrippina the Younger, in the Capitoline Museum, Rome
Agrippina the Younger
The Emperor Nero
The Death of Agrippina
WOMEN OF THE CAESARS
I
WOMAN AND MARRIAGE IN ANCIENT ROME
"Many things that among the Greeks are considered improper and
unfitting," wrote Cornelius Nepos in the preface to his "Lives," "are
permitted by our customs. Is there by chance a Roman who is ashamed to
take his wife to a dinner away from home? Does it happen that the
mistress of the house in any family does not enter the anterooms
frequented by strangers and show herself among them? Not so in Greece:
there the woman accepts invitations only among families to which she is
related, and she remains withdrawn in that inner part of the house
which is called the _gynaeceum_, where only the nearest relatives are
admitted."
This passage, one of the most significant in all the little work of
Nepos, draws in a few, clear, telling strokes one of the most marked
distinctions between the Greco-Asiatic world and the Roman. Among
ancient societies, the Roman was probably that in which, at least among
the better classes, woman enjoyed the greatest social liberty and the
greatest legal and economic autonomy. There she most nearly approached
that condition of moral and civil equality with man which makes her his
comrade, and not his slave--that equality in which modern civilization
sees one of the supreme ends of moral progress.
The doctrine held by some philosophers and sociologists, that military
peoples subordinate woman to a tyrannical r�gime of domestic servitude,
is wholly disproved by the history of Rome. If there was ever a time
when the Roman woman lived in a state of perennial tutelage, under the
authority of 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 r�gimes: 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.
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