Two Women in Rome

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Because women had the right to own property, they might engage in the same business transactions and management practices as any landowner. As with their male counterparts, their management of slaves appears to have varied from relative care to negligence and outright abuse. During the First Servile War, Megallis and her husband Damophilus were both killed by their slaves on account of their brutality, but their daughter was spared because of her kindness and granted safe passage out of Sicily, along with an armed escort. [114] Women and a man working alongside one another at a dye shop ( fullonica), on a wall painting from Pompeii While it is unusual to find historic fiction set in the 1970’s during a period most would consider as the recent past, it works, as Italy, especially Rome, is timeless; history rubbing shoulders with the world of today with true aplomb.

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Roman religion was male-dominated but there were notable exceptions where women took a more public role such as the priestesses of Isis (in the Imperial period) and the Vestals. These latter women, the Vestal Virgins, served for 30 years in the cult of Vesta and they participated in many religious ceremonies, even performing sacrificial rites, a role typically reserved for male priests. There were also several female festivals such as the Bona Dea and some city cults, for example, of Ceres. Women also had a role to play in Judaism and Christianity but, once again, it would be men who debated what that role might entail. The Other Women The Hippocratic view that amenorrhea was fatal became by Roman times a specific issue of infertility, and was recognized by most Roman medical writers as a likely result when women engage in intensive physical regimens for extended periods of time. Balancing food, exercise, and sexual activity came to be regarded as a choice that women might make. The observation that intensive training was likely to result in amenorrhea implies that there were women who engaged in such regimens. [184] The two women of the title are British expatriates living in Rome; Lottie lives there in the near-present, and Nina lives there in the 1970s. Lottie is an archivist, and in the course of her work she comes upon documents relating to Nina’s murder in 1978. As she pursues her research she comes to identify with Nina and finds echoes of Nina’s unhappy life in her own. It’s clearly a very well written and researched book but I didn’t love it as much as I would have liked.Like the Flaminica Dialis, the regina sacrorum, "queen of the sacred rites," wore distinctive ceremonial dress and performed animal sacrifice, offering a sow or female lamb to Juno on the first day of each month. [144] The names of some reginae sacrorum are recorded by inscriptions. [145] The regina was the wife of the rex sacrorum, "king of the sacred rites," an archaic priesthood regarded in the earliest period as more prestigious than even the Pontifex Maximus. [146] Karen K. Hersh, The Roman Wedding: Ritual and Meaning in Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 4, 48, et passim citing Humbert (1971), pp. 1–11. See also Treggiari, Roman Marriage.

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Roman women had a very limited role in public life. They could not attend, speak in, or vote at political assemblies and they could not hold any position of political responsibility. Whilst it is true that some women with powerful partners might influence public affairs through their husbands, these were the exceptions. It is also interesting to note that those females who have political power in Roman literature are very often represented as motivated by such negative emotions as spite and jealousy, and, further, their actions are usually used to show their male relations in a bad light. Lower class Roman women did have a public life because they had to work for a living. Typical jobs undertaken by such women were in agriculture, markets, crafts, as midwives and as wet-nurses. Sandra R. Joshel, Sheila Murnaghan, "Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture" (Routledge; New edition 2001), p. 86.Nina seems to have led a rewarding and useful life, restoring Italian gardens to their full glory following the destruction of World War Two. So why did no one attend her funeral in 1978? Ariadne Staples, From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins: Sex and Category in Roman Religion (Routledge, 1998), p. 184. There are times when Lottie truly believes Nina is speaking directly with her, wanting her story to be told which causes her to begin to doubt everything is being told and when she gets a little too close to the truth, Tom has to ‘fix’ things to keep her out of danger. Garrett G. Fagan, "Violence in Roman Social Relations," in The Oxford Handbook of Social Relations (Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 487.

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An emancipated woman legally became sui iuris, or her own person, and could own property and dispose of it as she saw fit. If a pater familias died intestate, the law required the equal division of his estate amongst his children, regardless of their age and sex. A will that did otherwise, or emancipated any family member without due process of law, could be challenged. [54] From the late Republic onward, a woman who inherited a share equal with her brothers would have been independent of agnatic control. [55] Told on many levels with more than one story intertwining, the tale of Two Women in Rome is a captivating look into a world that is and once was very, very real. Author Lottie Archer arrives in Rome excited to begin her new job as an archivist. When she discovers a valuable fifteenth-century painting, she is drawn to find out more about the woman who left it behind, Nina Lawrence. Anthony Corbeill, Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome (Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 87ff.; Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 725; Mary Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant, Women's Life in Greece and Rome, p. 350, note 5.Catharine Edwards, "Unspeakable Professions: Public Performance and Prostitution in Ancient Rome," in Roman Sexualities (Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 66ff.

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Because elite marriages often occurred for reasons of politics or property, a widow or divorcée with assets in these areas faced few obstacles to remarrying. She was far more likely to be legally emancipated than a first-time bride, and to have a say in the choice of husband. The marriages of Fulvia, who commanded troops during the last civil war of the Republic and who was the first Roman woman to have her face on a coin, are thought to indicate her own political sympathies and ambitions. Fulvia was married first to the popularist champion Clodius Pulcher, who was murdered in the street after a long feud with Cicero; then to Scribonius Curio; and finally to Mark Antony, the last opponent to the republican oligarchs and to Rome's future first emperor.

As is the case with male members of society, elite women and their politically significant deeds eclipse those of lower status in the historical record. Inscriptions and especially epitaphs document the names of a wide range of women throughout the Roman Empire, but often tell little else about them. Some vivid snapshots of daily life are preserved in Latin literary genres such as comedy, satire, and poetry, particularly the poems of Catullus and Ovid, which offer glimpses of women in Roman dining rooms and boudoirs, at sporting and theatrical events, shopping, putting on makeup, practicing magic, worrying about pregnancy — all, however, through male eyes. [6] The published letters of Cicero, for instance, reveal informally how the self-proclaimed great man interacted on the domestic front with his wife Terentia and daughter Tullia, as his speeches demonstrate through disparagement the various ways Roman women could enjoy a free-spirited sexual and social life. [7]