Women in Ancient Rome: The History of the Lives and Social Roles of the Roman Empire's Female Inhabitants

The modern world has the ancient Romans to thank for the origins of many modern technologies, conveniences, and ideas, from running water, baths, and republican government to roads. Indeed, the Romans remain renowned for producing lawyers, engineers, generals, administrators, and architects, and they raised their citizens to value duty, seriousness, self-control, and continuity. At the center of Roman society was the household, where the man at the head of every household was, by Roman law, an absolute ruler. His authority over his wife, children, slaves, and property was, at least on paper, complete.

Practice was a different story.

Roman wives appeared wholly dependent on the surface. They lived in their husbands' houses, bore children, and the tombstones erected for them usually praised their chastity, piety, and skill at spinning wool. However, Roman women were also public figures in ways the wives of other ancient Mediterranean cultures were not. They walked the streets of her city without a veil, went to the dinner parties hosted by the men, and could own property in their own name. Roman women could divorce their husbands as easily as they could divorce their wives, and at some points in Rome's vast and illustrious history, women ran estates worth more than the GDP of some small modern countries. On certain religious occasions, women stood at the center of the city's public life.

Although there is no shortage of historical accounts about Rome, ancient sources are uneven about the roles and lifestyles Roman women had across the centuries, and almost every writer was a man. Thus, the women whose voices come down to modern readers are the ones who caught some male writer's attention for one reason or another. In fact, the legal rules that defined Roman women's positions changed across the centuries, and by Augustus's reign, Roman women unusually free figures by any measure the ancient world could offer.