Domestic Violence and Vulnerability in the Roman World
November 25 2024 is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and will mark the beginning of the World Health Organisation’s ’16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence’.
The World Health Organisation’s international call for activism is a recognition of a worldwide crisis, with statistics revealing that globally in the twenty-first century one in every three women will experience physical and/or sexual violence during her lifetime.
These statistics, and the impact that such violence has on the lives of millions, including child witnesses, are critically important for us as historians, researchers, colleagues, teachers, and students to recognise.
A joint project at the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne and involving colleagues based in Australia, the US and the UK, is drawing attention to women’s experience of domestic abuse, including coercive control, in the ancient Roman world.
Many people will know the story of Poppaea, the wife of the emperor Nero, whom he kicked to death whilst she was pregnant. Nero was also responsible for the execution of his previous wife, Octavia. One ancient playwrite imagined Octavia’s Nurse giving her this advice: ‘you should use submissiveness to win over your unkind husband … so you yourself can be safe’ (Octavia 177-79).
An earlier playwrite, Plautus, depicted the collapse of a marriage as a war between husband and wife (Menaechmi 127-134).
We know the names of only a handful of victims. Saint Augustine’s mother, Monica, struggled to placate her abusive and adulterous husband and offered advice other women in her community (Confessions 9.9 (19)).
Those who took her advice found ways to endure, but those who did not, “continued to be subjugated and abused”.
Appia Annia Regilla, an aristocratic woman and wife of the Greek author Herodes Atticus, was also murdered while pregnant. Apronia was thrown from a window by her husband. John Chrysostom, a church father, described the nightly shrieks of women echoing through the streets of Antioch.
Epigraphic evidence gives a glimpse of how two families of victims of uxoricide broke with the usual conventions (which emphasized marital concordia) in order to tell a different story. Prima Florentia’s parents commemorated their daughter, drowned by her husband in the Tiber at the age of 16. Iulia Maiana (commemorated by her brother and teenage son) was married for twenty-eight years before she was murdered by her “most cruel” husband.
In addition to uxoricide and physical violence, women in the Roman world experienced intimidations and humiliations which map in recognizable ways onto modern understandings of “coercive control”.
Wife in Plautus’ Menaechmi has her property stolen by her husband and given to his prostitute. Aurelia Attiaina, the female litigant in a papyrus from Oxyrhynchus (P.Oxy. L 3581 Oxyrhynchus, fourth to fifth century CE), describes ongoing abuse.
She explains that she has experienced forced abduction and forced marriage followed by abandonment when her husband left her and their baby for another woman. She then explains that her husband subsequently tricked her into taking him back home, promising that he would pay a fine if he behaved badly to her in this way again only to behave “worse than his previous actions”.
The emperor Caligula is supposed repeatedly to have threated his wife, Caesonia, and his mistress:
Whenever he kissed the neck of his wife or a mistress, he would add: ‘This lovely neck would be severed the minute I gave the order.’ Indeed, from time to time he would exclaim that he might even have to use torture on his own Caesonia to find out why he loved her so very much.
The global statistics for domestic violence and the impact that such violence has on the lives of millions of victims (including child witnesses) means that there is little to be gained, and much to be lost, if we hesitate to use these terms when discussing our ancient evidence.
Making use of the terms which are most familiar to our audiences, and which may indeed speak to their own lived experience, is an act of inclusivity that recognizes the potential impact of domestic violence on our audiences and the ways in which it will inform their interpretations of the evidence under consideration.
Dr Eleanor Cowan is Lecturer in Roman History Discipline of Classics and Ancient History and co-editor of a special edition on 'Domestic Violence and Vulnerability in the Roman World' in the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies.
