Note 8 — Chapter V · WOMAN IN ANCIENT ROME

It is so commonly believed that this enlargement of the liberty and power of the Roman women led to a general degradation of character that I must linger for a moment on the point. The popular idea of an entire corruption of Rome in the first century is quite discarded by modern scholarship. The English reader will find the finest and truest picture of that maligned age in Dr. Samuel Dill’s Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, in which the current exaggeration is fully refuted.[8] The popular notion rests almost entirely on the satires of Juvenal, a bohemian writer, anti-feminist and anti-aristocratic, who hung on the fringe of society to catch what dubious morsels he could of idle chatter and exaggerated scandal. It would be more reasonable to take Father Vaughan’s strictures on the “smart set” as a full picture of English society than to take Juvenal’s less conscientious gossip about a few wealthy women as a complete picture of Rome. A careful reader will soon see that Juvenal lashes Roman women for their culture and for innocent fads, as much as for vice. As Letourneau says: “Neither the satires of the poets nor the objurgations of moralists suffice to prove that the Roman woman was essentially inferior to her male companion.” The moralist he seems to have in mind is Seneca; but Seneca expressly claimed that woman was the mental and moral equal of man, and he lived in a circle of fine, cultivated ladies. The morbidity of a few of the wealthier women—a morbidity that has a parallel in every age of luxury and change, in both sexes—does not characterise the sex; and, as to the larger class of less wealthy women, Dr. Dill adds: “In his [Juvenal’s] own modest class female morality ... was probably as high as it ever was, as high as the average morality of any age” (p. 76).