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the bottomless greed and wild extravagance of women, are its most obvious manifestation.2 Women were a threat to the stability of society. But somewhat paradoxically women were also perceived as weak-willed and simple-minded, incapable of managing their own affairs, and in need of male protection and supervision.3 Such attitudes and the political and legal incapacity that necessarily accompanied them applied to all women. Wives, however, appear to have been a particular subject of misogynistic discourse. In particular, the attitude to wives appears to have been marked by anxiety and ambivalence.

The cult of Bona Dea offered a glimpse of how male ambivalence towards women was incorporated into the dynamics of myth and ritual. At different levels it established and undermined, affirmed and denied the dichotomy of male and female. Female space was simultaneously forbidden to and dominated by males. But the cult of Bona Dea, as we shall see, represented only one dimension of what was a complex ideological discourse on the nature of gender relationships.

Roman religion categorized females in terms of their sexuality or, more accurately, in terms of the stages of their sexual relationship with men. From a general perspective women who were, or were potentially sexually active constituted a separate ritual group to women who were not. The former category was again divided into two opposed groups—wives and prostitutes. This chapter will be concerned with the display of this division in myth and ritual. Women who were not sexually active were also further categorized into two groups—virgins and old women, that is, women before and after the sexually active stage. This group was much less important in ritual and was never explicitly polarized as were wives and prostitutes. Although young children of both sexes participated in the ritual life of the family and the city, virgins did not form an element of cult in the way that matrons and prostitutes did.4 Though the Vestal Virgins did represent in some ways the status of virginity, their case was a special one.5 The references to old women in cult are also extremely rare.

This chapter will be divided into three sections. The first will show that it was the married woman who was perceived as the greatest threat to the male dominated system; the second will examine Roman myths dealing with wives, and show how they reveal a deep ambivalence in male attitudes to married women; and the third will show how this ambivalence was reflected in ritual practice.

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UNEASY MISOGYNY

No woman escaped the stab of the satirists’ pen. Neither social class nor sexual status insulated women from satirical invective. The most formidable example of invective against women, Juvenal’s massive sixth satire, nearly seven hundred lines of vicious, misogynistic, vituperation is directed chiefly at the married woman—uxor. The satire, addressed to a young man about to be married, is on the theme of the suicidal folly of marriage. There was to be no respite from the horrors of matrimony for the unlucky husband. However the satirist does grudgingly admit that once upon a time women actually were virtuous. True, this was in the dim and distant past, either in the legendary age of Saturn, or in the early years of the Republic, before Rome was corrupted by long years of peace and excessive wealth. Virtue was forced on women in those days, says Juvenal, because life was hard and they had neither time nor opportunity for corruption. A sting in the tail perhaps, but none the less it was a hint of ambivalence, a respite from hatred however begrudging, in a monument to misogyny. The virtuous wife was pushed so far back in time that she was inaccessible, but she existed as an ideal, if only that. Juvenal provided only a glimpse of such an ideological respite from the relentless attacks of misogyny. Elsewhere the ambivalence of the discourse about women is more clearly articulated.

Livy, writing much earlier of the repeal of the Oppian law in 195 BC, attributed to Cato and Valerius—consul and tribune respectively for that year—a debate on the dangers posed by married women—matronae—to the state.6 The rhetoric of misogyny is very similar to that found in satire but the issues that are being dealt with are quite different. The Oppian law was a piece of sumptuary legislation which had been passed almost a generation previously when Rome was reeling from the defeat at Cannae. The apparent purpose of the law was to curb female extravagance. Two tribunes, Valerius and Fundanius, were now proposing a repeal of the law, since the state was enjoying a period of prosperity and there was no longer any need for legislative control on consumption. But as there was opposition to this proposal, the matronae, who wanted the law repealed, had in a body lobbied the voters making their way to the forum to vote on the bill. It was the appalling and unprecedented sight of matronae in the public streets talking to men who were not their husbands, that prompted Cato’s attack on women.

60 FROM GOOD GODDESS TO VESTAL VIRGINS

Juvenal’s poem was concerned with women as individuals, who posed a threat to men only in their private capacity as husbands. Livy’s passage offers a different perspective. Cato’s resentment and anxiety were directed at a particular category of women, the matronae.7 But it was not the matronae themselves that he feared; it was the fact that they had organized themselves into a lobby and were attempting to influence the legislative process. The matronae, by their capacity for collective action, posed a threat not merely to individual males but to the very foundation of the social and political structure. Legislative power belonged to a domain that was exclusively male. But Cato’s words suggest a fundamental insecurity about men’s dominance of that domain; women were capable of encroaching on it and men had to guard their territory vigilantly. Consider the following excerpts from the speech:

I thought it a fairy tale and a piece of fiction that on a certain island the men were destroyed root and branch by a conspiracy of women; but from no class is there not the greatest danger if you permit them meetings and gatherings and secret consultations.

(Livy, 34.2.3–4)

Our ancestors permitted no woman to conduct even personal business without a guardian to intervene in her behalf; they wished them to be under the control of fathers, brothers, husbands; we—Heaven help us!—allow them now even to interfere in public affairs, yes, and to visit the forum and our formal and informal sessions (iam etiam rem publicam capessere eas patimur et foro quoque et contionibus et comitiis immisceri).

What else are they doing now on the streets and at the corners except urging the bill of the tribunes and the repeal of the law?

(ibid., 2.11)

If you suffer them to seize these bonds one by one and wrench themselves free and finally to be placed on a parity with their husbands do you think that you will be able to endure them? The moment they begin to be your equals they will be your superiors.

(ibid., 3.2)8

Cato feared political domination by women. Such a threat could

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come from one category of women only—the matronae. This notion that matronae were capable of collective political action was not peculiar to Cato. Roman myth abounds in similar tales and there are plenty of examples from historical times, as Valerius points out in reply to Cato. Through Cato and Valerius Livy was expressing a common theme in Roman attitudes towards women. Matronae were a double source of anxiety; they were a threat to husbands as well as to the old established—male dominated— traditions of the state.

But though the threat from matronae was political, it was expressed in terms of women’s sexuality and by means of sexual innuendo.

Give loose rein to their uncontrollable nature and to this untamed creature (indomitio animali) and expect that they will themselves set bounds to their licence (licentia)…it is complete liberty, or rather if you wish to speak the truth, complete licence that they desire.

(ibid., 2.13–14)

Whatever the nature of the threat from women, whether it was directed at individual husbands or the hallowed institutions of the state itself, whether it came from individual women or from organized groups of them, it was always seen to stem from their sexuality. Women were seen, moreover, as being incapable of curbing their dangerously wild natures on their own initiative. If men were to avoid the consequences of untamed female sexuality, they had to do the taming themselves, ideally domestically where each man kept strict control over his own wife, or if that failed, by law. The consequences of failing to control women would be social and political turmoil.9

Cato’s diatribe, like Juvenal’s, was not all unrelieved gloom. Here too we can discern an ambivalence towards women. Cato also admits the existence of the virtuous woman, but like Juvenal puts her out of contemporary reach. Female virtue existed in the old days because those grand old Romans—maiores nostri—knew how to control their women. Subsequent wealth and ease had caused the degeneration of both men and women. This state of affairs was deplorable in men but dangerous in women. Thus, although my examples were taken from two very different literary genres, with very different social agendas, the rhetoric of misogyny is quite simi-