Why Ancient Sources are Often Silent about Women
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Sources about the lives of ancient women are rare compared to those about men, but the situation is not hopeless! The first sources about the life of Roman women date back to the 3rd century BC. It is mainly the funerary inscriptions that help us understand the legal status of women in, for example, the time of the Roman Republic before the imperial period. In other written sources, in the historiography of ancient authors, however, women are usually mentioned only in passing. Why? Have you ever thought about who wrote the sources? With very few exceptions, they were men.
Sources about the lives of ancient women are rare compared to those about men, but the situation is not hopeless! The first sources about the life of Roman women date back to the 3rd century BC. It is mainly the funerary inscriptions that help us understand the legal status of women in, for example, the time of the Roman Republic before the imperial period. In other written sources, in the historiography of ancient authors, however, women are usually mentioned only in passing. Why? Have you ever thought about who wrote the sources? With very few exceptions, they were men.
If women don't write about themselves, there are no sources in which they report on their lives from their own perspective. This does not make it any easier to reconstruct their lives. If an ancient author did record the everyday life of women, or if it played a role in letters or biographies of men, these were usually women from the families of the Roman nobilitas, the upper class. The sources are silent about other women.
Several aspects of women in antiquity can nevertheless be reconstructed with the existing source material. They were not involved in politics and public duties and therefore did not have the right to vote. Their father or husband was their guardian, also in judicial matters. Nevertheless, they were very important to the Romans. Family and marriage were considered the cornerstones of society. Bearing (male) offspring, successors, was a fundamental task. Raising children, supervising the slaves of the house and taking care of the household - these were the tasks of a Roman woman. In some cases, however, they had other spheres of action. They could often spend the money that their husband provided them with. In rare cases, the woman could take over the husband's duties completely, for example when he was absent. A few examples of this are known to us.
In comparison, we know more about imperial women. Since they were of public interest, they were written about more often. So we learn that there were exceptions here too: some emperor's wives had power within the tasks for which they were responsible. Let's look at Agrippina, Nero's mother, for example: because Nero was still very young when he became emperor, she is said to have had a great deal of influence on her son's governmental work in the first years of his reign. In fact, she is said to have been instrumental in her son becoming emperor at such an early age. The ancient author Tacitus even reports that she had her husband murdered so that Nero would become emperor. We can also see from coins that Agrippina was interested in power. Her portrait is depicted together with that of Nero, and the legend refers to her as “Agrippina Augusta, wife of the divinised Claudius, mother of Nero Caesar”. Such depictions are exceptions, but they do help us realize that the augustae were usually more than "just" the wife of the emperor.