Note 6 — Chapter V · WOMAN IN ANCIENT ROME

And, about the year 190 B.C., the new spirit of the women broke out in fiery eruption. During the war with Carthage a law had been passed (215 B.C.) forbidding the women to wear heavy golden ornaments or many-coloured robes, and restricting their use of chariots. At the close of the war (195 B.C.) the women demanded the repeal of this Oppian Law, as it had been passed to secure funds. Cato, however, who was then Consul, and others resolved to retain the law, and a struggle ensued that one could almost transfer from the forum of ancient Rome to the Parliament Square of modern London. Livy (Ab urbe condita, 1. xxxiv. c. i.-viii.) describes how, not only crowds of men of opposing sides invaded the Capitol, but the matrons themselves, “restrained neither by authority nor modesty nor the control of their husbands,” beset all the ways that led to the Forum, and importunately demanded the votes of the legislators. Reinforced by crowds of provincial women, they kept up a noisy agitation during the debate in the Forum, and—strangest parallel of all—“dared to approach the consuls, prætors, and other magistrates,” and at length forced their way into the houses of the tribunes and won them to the cause! Conservative patricians looked with alarm at this new species of “masculine women” (androgynæ). Cato, who led the resistance, complained that he had to bore his way with shame through a crowd of women to reach the Forum. If the men did not wish to see themselves under the heel of the women in a few years, he said—Livy gives his speech at length—let them keep their wives in order at home and forbid them to appear in public. But there were conscientious traitors to the masculine cause, as there are to-day. Lucius Valerius replied to Cato, and, intimidated by the armies of Amazons without, the senators repealed the Oppian Law. Cato had to be content, some years later, to impose a heavy tax on their property.[6]