Note 9 — Chapter V · WOMAN IN ANCIENT ROME

In this remarkable fervour for social justice woman was bound to find profit. The service done to her consisted mainly in providing a sounder basis for the liberty and power which she had won, largely by the equivocal aid of the growing laxity in regard to marriage. The Stoics—philosophers, lawyers, and emperors—believed in the equality of men and women. Antoninus Pius embodied in one of his judgments the common Stoic sentiment that fidelity was equally expected of husband and wife. The great Stoic jurist, Gaius, severely criticised the older Roman law, that dealt unequally with man and woman, and “scouted the popular apology for it in the mental inferiority of the female sex,” says Sir Henry Maine.[9] Dion Chrysostom called for the legal suppression of prostitution. Briefly, the Stoics, who controlled the legal and imperial courts for more than a century, completed the work of putting woman on a level of legal and social equality to man, and their world included—as the letters and writings of Plutarch, Seneca, Tacitus, and Pliny show—a large number of women of equal culture and character.