Better Than You Think: Women in Ancient Rome | A Guest Post by Kate Quinn

Today Hist-Fic Chick welcomes debut historical fiction author Kate Quinn, whose new novel Mistress of Rome released in stores last Tuesday, April 6th. Kate has written a fabulous guest post on the roles of women in Ancient Rome for your enjoyment today. The daughter of a history major, Kate Quinn grew up with anecdotes about Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great instead of Grimm’s fairy tales, and used to sneak out of bed to watch I, Claudius behind her parents’ backs. Still in elementary school when she saw the movie Spartacus, she resolved to someday write a book about a gladiator. That ambition turned into Mistress of Rome. When Kate left California and moved three thousand miles for college, her weekdays were spent in classes and her weekends – 8 hours a day, both Saturdays and Sundays – were spent in Boston University’s basement computer lab, a subterranean space, filled with fluorescent lights and as different as could be from her former life. After a semester of underground weekends, spent with the Gladiator soundtrack playing on repeat, Kate emerged with the manuscript for her debut novel. You can visit Kate at her website or on her blog.

Check back for my review and a giveaway of Mistress of Rome later this week!

Guest post by Kate Quinn:

Whenever we speak of the role of women in times past, there’s always a caveat: what we are really talking about is the role of middle to upper class women. Let’s face it, the lives of poor women across the globe and across the centuries is pretty universal: whether working in a rice paddy or a cornfield or a city slum, a poor woman’s choices through the ages were generally limited to growing up, marrying young, pumping out babies, and working till she died. Poor women in ancient Rome were no exception to this depressing trend. But Roman women of the middle and upper classes? Well, that’s a different story.

Roman girls did usually marry as teenagers, and they married whoever Dad picked for them. But as married women they had considerable rights: they were legally boss of the house, they were honored by the Emperor and the state, they had their own goddesses and public festivals (men not allowed), and they could even maintain some control over their incomes and property. If they didn’t like their husbands, they could get a divorce – and they didn’t need a lawyer, a mediator, or a court to do it. In Rome, all you had to do to get divorced was say, “I divorce you.” Sometimes you didn’t even have to go that far: more than one Roman husband returned home to find a note from his wife stating that she had married somebody else, and by the way she’d send a few slaves later for her things. The husband had no legal way to get her back, since Roman law didn’t recognize bigamy – the law reasoned, with a certain simplicity, that if she was married to somebody else she wasn’t married to you, and that was an end to it. The only thing a husband could do was gnash his teeth and return, as the law also demanded, at least a portion of his wife’s dowry. With divorce so easy, patrician women tended to bounce from one husband to another with more ease than Elizabeth Taylor ever did. I’m not sure that’s entirely a good thing, but at least ancient Rome was shorter on slimy divorce lawyers than we are now.

Roman women also reaped the benefit of being able to control their own bodies. Birth control was available to many women – one Egyptian recipe lists auyt gum and acacia tips. What exactly you were supposed to do with the auyt gum and acacia tips is a mystery, but something must have worked because the Roman Senate was constantly moaning about the declining birth rate. They kept offering special privileges to mothers of large families, hoping to bribe women into having more children, but the women of Rome must have snorted and said “No thanks” because the trend continued for small families.

The dangers of childbirth aside, Roman women lived longer because they lived cleaner. Middle and upper class women bathed frequently, and even poor women could go to the public baths for a minimal fee. Women with a little money could enjoy many luxuries that we have today: shaved legs, dyed hair, facials, massages. Any public bathhouse had special hours for women where the housewives of Rome could gather for a manicure and a good gossip, just like a modern-day spa. Aspiring politicians even sponsored prepaid bath days where everyone could come to the local bathhouse for free pampering. (I wish this practice continued today – I’d be much more motivated to cast my vote if I got a free facial and pedicure out of it.)

Of course, Roman facials and pedicures usually came at the hands of slave women who didn’t have life nearly so good as their mistresses. The live of a Roman slave girl could be pleasant or hellish, depending on who owned her. She might land in a nice tolerant household where she got three square meals a day, and the hardest thing she had to do was wield a curling iron on her mistress’s wigs. Her life would be fairly easy, she could make a little money or even own property, and if she served well she’d probably be freed in her mistress’s will. On the other hand, she might land in the kind of household where she was routinely beaten, whored out to her master’s friends, and thrown into an eel pond if she broke a plate (one unpleasant government official during the reign of Augustus used to do exactly that to his slaves).

Even in a humane household, any reasonably pretty slave girl resigned herself to warming her master’s bed from time. It wasn’t really regarded as abuse, more just a fact of life: “Here he comes again, oh well, it’s better than getting stuck ironing all the togas.” And she might come out of it pretty well: her master could easily get fond of her, free her once he’d moved on to somebody else, even set her up with citizenship and a dowry for marrying. A slave girl might be only property, but as a free Roman woman she could marry respectably, her children would be Roman citizens, and her family status could raise itself over the next generation. Roman slavery was no picnic, but legally they did enjoy a better position than most: excessive cruelty by an owner was punishable by law, and when a slave was sold their spouse and children were supposed to be sold with them.

Overall, women in ancient Rome had it better than their descendants in medieval Europe, even though the Middle Ages lie much closer to us in time. The Romans did some things very well – property laws, birth control, skin care. Other things would s
hock us profoundly: divorce was so casual that even an average woman could have six or seven husbands in the course of her lifetime, and many women would no more hesitate to sleep with her husband in front of a fan-wielding slave than a woman in the modern era would hesitate to have sex in front of an air conditioner.

But in the end, if you ever play that game of what historical era you would most like to visit if you had a time machine, you could do much worse than to visit ancient Rome. Just make sure to specify that you get to be a rich woman – because in any era, it is no fun to work in a field, have six children, bury four of them, and then die by thirty.

MISTRESS OF ROME—IN STORES NOW
Synopsis: “Hailed by Margaret George as ‘stunning…a novel that is both literary and a page-turner,’ Mistress of Rome will captivate readers with the depravity, blood lust, secrets, and sweeping romance of a time thousands of years ago. The story follows Domitian’s reign as he watches over the violent gladiatorial games he loves so much, and keeps a close eye on his latest and most fascinating mistress yet, a passionate and wary slave girl named Thea. Once owned by the cruel heiress Lepida Pollia, Thea quickly becomes her rival for the love and affection of the novel’s hero and Rome’s most famous gladiator: Arius the Barbarian. Shortly after a jealous Lepida tears them apart, Thea remakes herself as a talented singer, which lures Domitian to her. As Thea finds herself in a terrifying and dangerous game of cat and mouse with her new owner, she fights for both soul and sanity. A plot is crafted among many of the Emperor’s closest as they vow to do whatever it takes to end his cruel reign.”