Library:The Assassination of Julius Caesar

The Assassination of Julius Caesar
Author	Michael Parenti
First published	2003

The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome is a book written by Statesian political scientist Michael Parenti, published in 2003 by The New Press. The book discusses "the issues of popular struggle and oligarchic power that were being played out decades before [...] [Caesar] was born, continuing into his life and leading to his death."

Acknowledgements

Over the years Charles Briody tried to improve upon my childhood altar boy's Latin with ad hoc lessons, mostly on the telephone now that we live at opposite ends of North America.  I must confess that all his best efforts never got me much beyond the Gallĭa es omnis divisa in partes tres level.  For this I have only myself to blame.  Luckily, all the major (and most minor) ancient sources are available in various English translations.  Briody also generously provided me with some crucial literature and notes of his own, and did a most helpful reading of the manuscript.  So too did Iain Boal and Daniel Shoup who, like Briody, gave me the benefit of their substantive criticisms and their classical education.

Peggy Karp did a close and especially valuable reading of the manuscript.  Jane Scantlebury helped me locate sources, and tendered advice and encouragement over the long duration of writing.  She also contributed a useful critique of the manuscript.  Susan McAllister went over an early version of the opening chapter for me, and provided other needed assistance.

Peter Livingston saved the day—and the book—labouring hard to snatch from the jaws of my treacherous computer precious text and endnotes that had been mysteriously devoured.  He thereby saved me many impossible months of reconstructive effort.  Willa Madden, my webmeister, also conducted helpful operations against the wanton vicissitudes of electronic storage.  Richard Wiebe and Andrea Segall brought several useful sources to my attention.  And Sheeda Jamsheed helped me navigate my way through the University of California library to dig up some materials.  My editor at The New Press, Colin Robinson, was enthusiastic and supportive all the way.  His assistant, Abby Aguirre, was most helpful.  Production editor Sarah Fan walked the book through its various phases with reassuring proficiency.  And Holly Knowles provided an excellent index.

To all these fine people I extend my heartfelt thanks.

Introduction: Tyrannicide or Treason

"O, what a fall was there, my countrymen!  Then I, and you, and all of us fell down, whilst bloody treason flourish'd over us."  —JULIUS CAESAR ACT III, SCENE 2

On the fifteenth of March, 44 B.C.E., in a meeting hall adjacent to Pompey's theatre, the Roman Senate awaited the arrival of the Republic's supreme commander, Julius Caesar.  This particular session did not promise to be an eventful one for most of the senators.  But others among them were fully alive to what was in the offing.  They stood about trying to maintain a calm and casual pose—with daggers concealed beneath their togas.

Finally Caesar entered the chamber.  He had an imposing presence, augmented by an air of command that came with being at the height of his power.  Moving quickly to the front of the hall, he sat himself in the place of honour.  First to approach him was a senator who pretended to enter a personal plea on behalf of a relative.  Close behind came a group of others who crowded around the ceremonial chair.  At a given signal, they began to slash at their prey with their knives, delivering fatal wounds.  By this act, the assailants believed they had saved the Roman Republic.  In fact, they had set the stage for its complete undoing.

The question that informs this book is, why did a coterie of Roman senators assassinate their fellow aristocrat and celebrated ruler, Julius Caesar?  An inquiry into this incident reveals something important about the nature of political rule, class power, and a people's struggle for democracy and social justice—issues that are still very much with us.  The assassination also marked a turning point in the history of Rome.  It set in motion a civil war, and put an end to whatever democracy there had been, ushering in an absolutist rule that would prevail over Western Europe for centuries to come.

The prevailing opinion among historians, ancient and modern alike, is that the senatorial assassins were intent upon restoring republican liberties by doing away with a despotic usurper.  This is the justification proffered by the assassins themselves.  In this book I present an alternative explanation:  The Senate aristocrats killed Caesar because they perceived him to be a popular leader who threatened their privileged interests.  By this view, the deed was more an act of treason than tyrannicide, one incident in a line of political murders dating back across the better part of a century, a dramatic manifestation of a long-standing struggle between opulent conservatives and popularly supported reformers.  This struggle and these earlier assassinations will be treated in the pages ahead.

This book is not only about the history of the Late Republic but about how that history has been distorted by those writers who regularly downplay the importance of material interests, those who ideological taboos about class realities dim their perception of the past.  This distortion is also manifested in the way many historians, both ancient and modern, have portrayed the common people of Rome as being little better than a noisome rabble and riotous mob.

In word and action, wealthy Romans made no secret of their fear and hatred of the common people and of anyone else who infringed upon their class prerogatives.  History is full of examples of politico-economic elites who equate any challenge to their privileged social order as a challenge to all social order, an invitation to chaos and perdition.

The oligarchs of Rome were no exception.  Steeped in utter opulence and luxury, they remained forever inhospitable to Rome's democratic element.  They valued the Republic only as long as it served their way of life.  They dismissed as "demagogues" and "usurpers" the dedicated leaders who took up the popular cause.  The historians of that day, often wealthy slaveholders themselves, usually agreed with this assessment.  So too classical historians of the modern era, many of whom adopt a viewpoint not too different from the one held by the Roman aristocracy.

Caesar's sin, I shall argue, was not that he was subverting the Roman constitution—which was an unwritten one—but that he was loosening the oligarchy's overbearing grip on it.  Worse still, he used state power to effect some limited benefits for small farmers, debtors, and urban proletariat, at the expense of the wealthy few.  No matter how limited these reforms proved to be, the oligarchs never forgave him.  And so Caesar met the same fate as other Roman reformers before him.

My primary interest is not in Julius Caesar as an individual but in the issues of popular struggle and oligarchic power that were being played out decades before he was born, continuing into his life and leading to his death.  Well into my adulthood, most of what I knew about ancient Rome was learnt from Hollywood and television.  In my head were images of men in togas, striding about marbled palaces, mouthing lapidary phrases in stage-mannered accents, and of course images of chariot races and frenzied arena crowds giving thumbs-down to hapless victims.

In my woeful ignorance I was no different from many other educated Americans who have passed from grade school to the postdoctoral level without ever learning anything sensible about Roman history.  Aside from the tableaux furnished by Hollywood and television, all that I knew of Julius Caesar I owed to two playwrights, William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw.  If one has to be misinformed about a subject, it might as well be from the wonderful pens of Shakespeare and Shaw.  Fictional representations of history do not usually strive for accuracy, their primary goal being to entertain rather than to educate.  Still they often are more literal than literary in the way they impact upon our minds.  And we had best monitor our tendency to treat the fictional as factual.

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is a powerful play that draws heavily from Plutarch, in an imaginative yet surprisingly faithful way.  Literary critics do not agree on whether Shakespeare wants us to consider the assassination as execrable or laudable.  We are left to wonder whether Caesar is to be admired or denounced, whether Brutus is noble or loathsome, and whether he or Caesar or Antony or anyone is the hero of the play.  For all its ambiguities, Shakespeare's treatment is a politically safe rendition.  He focuses on immediate questions of tyranny versus republican freedom.  Those are exactly the parameters within which the senatorial assassins confined the debate.

Likewise, Shakespeare shares the Roman elite's view of the common crowd as a mindless aggregation easily led hither and thither, first adulating Pompey, then bowing to Caesar, later hailing Brutus for saving them from tyranny, only in the next breath to be swayed by Antony.  In Julius Caesar, the common people seemingly are capable only of mindless violence and degraded disportment.  All this is in keeping with the dominant stereotype of the Roman proletariat that has come down to us.

George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra is charmingly written and highly engaging.  Shaw's Caesar is a benign aging fellow, who reluctantly settles for an avuncular relationship with Cleopatra.  Upon their first encounter, when she has yet to discover his identity, she repeatedly calls him "old gentleman."  It is clear from the outset that there can be no romantic interest between them because of Caesar's age and the young queen's immaturity.  At the end of the play, as Caesar departs for Rome, he voices his doubts that he will ever see Cleopatra again, but he promises to send her the young handsome Mark Antony, much to her delight.

In real life, when she was still in her teens, well before she met Caesar, Cleopatra already had slept with Antony.  It happened in 55 B.C.E. when a Roman expeditionary force was in Egypt to restore Ptolemy to the throne.  Antony was serving as commander of the cavalry.  Some time later, still predating Caesar's arrival, Cleopatra bestowed her favours upon a second Roman lover, Pompey's son Cnaeus, who was in Africa raising troops for his father.  And Shaw notwithstanding, in late 48 B.C.E., though Caesar was fifty-three and she but twenty-three or so, she proved ready enough to bed her third Roman.  It is said that Cleopatra was a woman of lively turn and enticing talents.  She also had a keen sense of the political.  That this Roman conqueror had the power to secure the Egyptian throne for her must have added to the attraction she felt for him.  It developed into a protracted love affair.  Eventually, she bore  Caesar a son and moved to Rome in order to be closer to him, thereby demonstrating that some things never change.

Although he was engaged in other sexual liaisons and possessed of a wife, Caesar found time to give Cleopatra a lavish welcome befitting a queen, erecting a gold effigy of her in a consecrated area.  He established her in a sumptuous villa across the Tiber, from which she held court, while political leaders, financiers, and men of letters, including the renowned Cicero, danced in attendance.

To his credit, Shaw does insert an iconoclastic sentiment not found in Shakespeare or among regiments of historians who have written about the Late Republic.  In a prologue to Caesar and Cleopatra that is almost never performed, the god Ra tells the audience how Rome discovered that "the road to riches and greatness is through robbery of the poor and slaughter of the weak."  In conformity with that dictum, the Romans "robbed their own poor until they became great masters of that art, and knew by what laws it could be made to appear seemly and honest."  And after squeezing their own people dry, they stripped the poor throughout the many other lands they conquered.  "And I, Ra, laughed; for the minds of the Romans remained the same size whilst their dominion spread over the earth."  Very likely SHaw was inviting his audience to draw a parallel to the small colonialist minds that held sway over the vast British empire of his own day.

There is another instance of Shaw's iconoclasm.  In Act II of Caesar and Cleopatra, Lucius Septimius refuses Caesar's invitation to join his ranks and prepares to depart.  Caesar's loyal comrade-in-arms, Rufus, angrily observes:  "That means he is a Republican."  Lucius turns defiantly and asks, "And what are you?"  To which Rufus responds, "A Caesarian, like all of Caesar's soldiers."  Left at that, we have the standard view espoused by Shakespeare and most historians:  The struggle is between those fighting to preserve the Republic and those who make themselves an instrument of Caesar's power.  But Shaw goes a step further, hinting that Republicanism vs. Caesarism is not really the issue.  So he has Caesar interjecting:  "Lucius:  believe me, Caesar is no Caesarian.  Were Rome a true republic, then were Caesar the first of Republicans."

That response invites the dissident query pursued in this book:  how republican was the Late Republic?  More than 2,000 years after Caesar, most students of that period have yet to bid farewell to the misapprehensions about the republicanism embraced by Lucius and most others of his social set.  They have yet to consider that republicanism might largely be a cloak for oligarchic privilege—as it often is to this day—worn grudgingly by the elites as long as it proved serviceable to their interests.  At the same time, as we shall see, ordinary Roman citizens had been able to win limited but important rights under the Republic, and did at times make important democratic gains, including occasional successes around land redistribution, rent control, debt cancellation, and other reforms.  As far as the Senate oligarchs were concerned, such agitation and popular victories were the major problem, perceived by them as the first steps down the path of class revolution.

To this day, dubious film representations about ancient Rome continue to be mass-marketed.  In 2000, while I was working on this book, Hollywood brought forth Gladiator, a swashbuckling epic about revenge and heroism, offering endless episodes of arena bloodletting.  Unencumbered by any trace of artistic merit, Gladiator played before packing houses in the United States and abroad, winning a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award.  The story takes place during the reign of the venal Emperor Commodus, more than two centuries after Julius Caesar's death.  Worth noting is how the Roman Senate is depicted.  We are asked to believe that the Senate was populated by public-spirited men devoted to the people's welfare.  But the people themselves are portrayed as little more than a rabble.  In one scene, two Senate leaders are seated in the Colosseum.  When one of them complains of the unsavoury proceedings below, the other opines that the crowd is interested only in bread and circuses, war and violence:  "Rome is the mob. [...] The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the Senate.  It is the sands of the Colosseum.  [The emperor] will bring them death and they will love him for it."  This view of the Roman populace as mindless bloodthirsty riffraff unfortunately remains the anti-people's history purveyed by both the entertainment media and many classical scholars.

I cannot recall exactly when I moved beyond the stage and screen images of Rome and Caesar and became seriously interested in the Late Republic as a subject of intensive study.  It was years ago, by way of my self-directed readings in ancient Greek history and political philosophy.  At first, it appeared to me that the Romans could never be as compelling and absorbing as their Mediterranean cousins.  But indeed they are, at least from 133 B.C.E. to about 40 B.C.E., the years covered in this book, most of which fall in that period designated the Late Republic.

To assist the many readers who might be unfamiliar with ancient Rome, the first three chapters deal with Rome's history and sociopolitical life.  Chapter Four treats the plutocracy's bloody repression of popular reformers and their followers from Tiberius Gracchus (133 B.C.E.) down to Caesar's early days.  Chapter Five offers a critical portrait of the historians' hero, Cicero, with a narrative of how he mobilised the forces of political repression on behalf of elite interests.  The next five chapters deal with Caesar's life and related political issues, his death and its aftermath.  The final chapter caps the whole subject of ancient Rome, taking to task the stereotype of the Roman people as a "rabble" and "mob."

When the editors of The New Press told me they wanted to include this book in their People's History Series, I agreed.  By my view, any history that deals with the efforts of the populace to defend itself from the abuses of wealth and tyranny is people's history.  Such history has been written over the past century by such notables as W.E.B. Du Bois, Philip Foner, Herbert Aptheker, Albert Mathiez, A.L. Morton, George Rudé, Richard Boyer, Herbert Morais, Jesse Lemisch, Howard Zinn, G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, and others.

But writing "history from the bottom up" is not an easy task when it comes to the Roman Republic, for there exists no trove of ordinary people's letters, diaries, and memoirs; no back issues of labour publications and newspapers; no court, police, and government documents of the kind that compose the historical record of more recent centuries.  Most of Rome's written histories, libraries, and archives were lost over time or were deliberately destroyed by the fanatical proselytisers of Christianity who conducted a systematic war of eradication against pagan scholarship and culture after they came to power in the fifth century C.E.  In any case, as far as we know, the small farmers, proletarians, and slaves of Rome left no written record to speak of.

So one must read against the grain, looking for evidence of the Roman people's struggle in the self-serving words and repressive deeds of the wealthy oligarchs.  A people's history should be not only an account of popular struggle against oppression but an exposé of the anti-people's history that has prevailed among generations of mainstream historians.  It should be a critical history about a people's oppressors, those who propagated an elitist ideology and a loathing of the common people that distorts the historical record down to this day.

Here is a story of latifundia and death squads, masters and slaves, patriarchs and subordinated women, self-enriching capitalists and plundered provinces, profiteering slumlords and urban rioters.  Here is a struggle between the plutocratic few and the indigent many, the privileged versus the proletariat, featuring corrupt politicians, money-driven elections, and the political assassination of popular leaders.  I leave it to the reader to decide whether any of this might resonate with the temper of our own times.

I - Gentlemen's History: Empire, Class, and Patriarchy

"Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!" —JULIUS CAESAR ACT I, SCENE 2

The writing of history has long been a privileged calling undertaken within the church, royal court, landed estate, affluent town house, government agency, university, and corporate-funded foundation.  The social and ideological context in which historians labour greatly influences the kind of history produced.  While this does not tell us everything there is to know about historiography, it is certainly worth some attention.

Historians are fond of saying, as did Benedetto Croce, that history reflects the age in which it is written.  The history of seemingly remote events vibrate "to present needs and present situations."  Collingwood made a similar point:  "St. Augustine looked at Roman history from the point of view of an early Christian; Tillemont, from that of a seventeenth-century Frenchman; Gibbon, from that of an eighteenth-century Englishman...."

Something is left unsaid here, for there is no unanimity in how the people of any epoch view the past, let alone the events of their own day.  The differences in perception range not only across the ages and between civilisations but within any one society at any one time.  Gibbon was not just "an eighteenth-century Englishman," but an eighteenth-century English gentleman; in his own words, a "youth of family and fortune," enjoying "the luxury and freedom of a wealthy house."  As heir to "a considerable estate," he attended Oxford where he wore the velvet cap and silk gown of a gentleman.  While serving as an officer in the militia, he soured in the company of "rustic officers, who were alike deficient in the knowledge of scholars and the manners of gentlemen."

To say that Gibbon and his Oxford peers were "gentlemen" is not to imply that they were graciously practiced in the etiquette of fair play toward all persons regardless of social standing, or that they were endowed with compassion for the more vulnerable of their fellow humans, taking pains to save them from hurtful indignities, as real gentlemen might do.  If anything, they were likely to be unencumbered by such sentiments, uncomprehending of any social need beyond their own select circle.  For them, a "gentleman" was one who sported an uncommonly polished manner and affluent lifestyle, and who presented himself as prosperous, politically conservative, and properly schooled in the art of ethno-class supremacism.

Like most other people, Gibbon tended to perceive reality in accordance with the position he occupied in the social structure.  As a gentleman scholar, he produced what elsewhere I have called "gentlemen's history," a genre heavily indebted to an upper-class ideological perspective.  In 1773, we find him beginning work on his magnum opus, A History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, while settled in a comfortable town house tended by half-a-dozen servants.  Being immersed in what he calls the "decent luxuries," and saturated with his own upper-class pre-possession, Edward Gibbon was able to look kindly upon ancient Rome's violently acquisitive aristocracy.  He might have produced a much different history had he been a self-educated cobbler, sitting in a cold shed, writing into the wee hours after a long day of unrewarding toil.  No accident that the impoverished labourer, even if literate, seldom had the agency to produce scholarly tomes.  Gibbon himself was aware of the class realities behind the writing of history:  "A gentleman possessed of leisure and independence, of books and talents, may be encouraged to write by the distant prospect of honour and reward:  but wretched is the author, and wretched will be the work, where daily diligence is stimulated by daily hunger."

As one who hobnobbed with nobility, Gibbon abhorred the "wild theories of equal and boundless freedom" of the French Revolution.  He was a firm supporter of the British empire.  While serving as a member of Parliament he voted against extending liberties to the American colonies.  Unsurprisingly he had no difficulty conjuring a glowing pastoral image of the Roman empire:  "Domestic peace and union were the natural consequences of the moderate and comprehensive policy embraced by the Romans. [...] The obedience of the Roman world was uniform, voluntary, and permanent.  The vanquished nations, blended into one great people, resigned the hope, nay even the wish, of resuming their independence. [...] The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom."  Not a word here about an empire built upon sacked towns, shattered armies, slaughtered villagers, raped women, enslaved prisoners, plundered lands, burnt crops, and mercilessly overtaxed populations.

The gentlemen historians who lived during antiquity painted much the same idyllic picture, especially of Rome's earlier epoch.  The theme they repeatedly visited was of olden times as golden times, when men were more given to duty than luxury, women were chaste and unsparingly devoted to their family patriarchs, youth were ever respectful of their elders, and the common people were modest in their expectations and served valiantly in Rome's army.  Writing during the Late Republic, Sallust offers this fairy tale of Roman times earlier than his own:  "In peace and war [...] virtus [valour, manliness, virtue] was held in high esteem [...] and avarice was a thing almost unknown.  Justice and righteousness were upheld not so much by law as by natural instinct. [...] They governed by conferring benefits on their subjects, not by intimidation."

A more realistic picture of Roman imperialism comes from some of its victims.  In the first century B.C.E., King Mithridates, driven from his land in northern Anatolia, wrote, "The Romans have constantly had the same cause, a cause of the greatest antiquity, for making war upon all nations, peoples, and kings, the insatiable desire for empire and wealth."  Likewise, the Caledonian chief Calgacus, speaking toward the end of the first century C.E., observed:

"[Y]ou find in [the Romans] an arrogance which no reasonable submission can elude.  Brigands of the world, they have exhausted the land by their indiscriminate plunder, and now they ransack the sea.  The wealth of an enemy excites their cupidity, his poverty their lust of power. [...]  Robbery, butchery, rapine, the liars call Empire; they create a desolation and call it peace. [...] [Our loved ones] are now being torn from us by conscription to slave in other lands.  Our wives and sisters, even if they are not raped by enemy soldiers, are seduced by men who are supposed to be our friends and guests.  Our goods and money are consumed by taxation; our land is stripped of its harvest to fill their granaries; our hands and limbs are crippled by building roads through forests and swamps under the lash of our oppressors. [...]  We Britons are sold into slavery anew every day; we have to pay purchase-price ourselves and feed our masters in addition."

For centuries, written history was considered a patrician literary genre, much like epic and tragedy, concerned with the monumental deeds of great personages, a world in which ordinary men played no role other than nameless spear-carriers, and ordinary women not even that.  Antiquity gives us numerous gentlemen chroniclers—Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Cicero, Livy, Plutarch, Suetonius, Appian, Dio Cassius, Valerius Maximus, Velleius Paterculus, Josephus, and Tacitus—just about all of whom had a pronouncedly low opinion of the common people.  Dio Cassius, for one, assures us that "many monarchs are the source of blessings to their subjects [...] whereas many who live under a democracy work innumerable evils to themselves."

The political biases of ancient historians were not interred with their bones.  Our historical perceptions are shaped not only by present socioeconomic status but by the ideological and class biases of the past historians upon whom we rely.  As John Gager notes, it is difficult to alter our habitual ways of thinking about history because "without knowing it, we perceive the past according to paradigms first created many centuries ago."  And the creators of those ancient paradigms usually spoke with decidedly upper-class accents.

In sum, Gibbon's view of history was not only that of an eighteenth-century English gentleman but one of a whole line of gentlemen historians from bygone times, similarly situated in the upper strata of their respective societies.  What would have made it so difficult for Gibbon to gain a critical perspective of his own ideological limitations—had he ever thought of doing so—was the fact that he kept intellectual company with like-minded scholars of yore, in that centuries-old unanimity of bias that is often mistaken for objectivity.

To be sure, there were some few observers in ancient Rome, such as the satirist Juvenal, who offer a glimpse of the empire as it really was, a system of rapacious expropriation.  Addressing the proconsuls, Juvenal says:  "When at last you leave to go out to govern your province, limit your anger and greed.  Pity our destitute allies, whose poor bones you see sucked dry of their pith and their marrow."

In 1919, noted conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter presented a surprisingly critical picture of Roman imperialism, in words that might sound familiar to present-day critics of U.S. "globalism":

"...That policy which pretends to aspire to peace but unerringly generated war, the policy of continual preparation for war, the policy of meddlesome interventionism.  There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack.  If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented.  When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest—why, then it was the national honour that had been insulted.  The fight was always invested with an aura of legality.  Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbours, always fighting for a breathing space.  The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome's duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs."

Still, the Roman empire has its twentieth-century apologists.  British historian Cyril Robinson tenders the familiar image of an empire achieved stochastically, without deliberate design:  "It was perhaps almost as true of Rome as of Great Britain that she acquired her world-dominion in a fit of absence of mind."  An imperialism without imperialists, a design of conquest devoid of human agency or forethought, such a notion applies neither to Rome nor to any other empire in history.

Despite their common class perspective, gentlemen historians do not achieve perfect accord on all issues.  Gibbon himself was roundly condemned for his comments about early Christianity in the Roman empire.  He was attacked as an atheist by clergy and others who believed that their religion had flourished exclusively through divine agency and in a morally flawless manner.  Gibbon credits Christianity's divine origin as being the primary impetus for its triumph, but he gives only a sentence or two to that notion, being more interested as a secular historian in the natural rather than supernatural causes of the church's triumph.  Furthermore, he does not hesitate to point out instances of worldly opportunism and fanatical intolerance among Christian proselytes.  Some readers may find his treatment of the rise of Christianity to be not only the most controversial part of his work but also the most interesting.

Along with his class hauteur, the gentleman scholar is likely to be a male supremacist.  So Gibbon describes Emperor Severus' second wife Julia Domna as "united to a lively imagination, a firmness of mind, and strength of judgement, seldom bestowed on her sex."  Historians do take note of the more notorious female perpetrators in the imperial family, such as Messalina, wife of Emperor Claudius, and Agrippina.  They tell us that Agrippina grabbed the throne for her son Nero by poisoning her uncle and then her husband, the reigning Claudius.  Upon becoming emperor, Nero showed his gratitude to his mother by killing her.  Nero was not what we would call a family man; he also murdered his aunt, his ex-wife, and a half-brother who had a claim to the throne.

Except for a few high-placed and notably lethal females, Roman women are virtually invisible in the works of most gentlemen historians.  Even when noticed, they are not likely to be seen as of any consequence.  That there were no female historians to speak of in antiquity, nor for many centuries thereafter, only compounded the deficiency.  In the last few decades, thanks mostly to the emergence of feminist scholarship, the research on Roman women has improved, despite the paucity of surviving data.  Ordinary Roman women, we know, tended to die younger than their male counterparts because of malnourishment, mistreatment, exhaustion, and childbirth.  Almost half of all Roman brides were under the age of fourteen, many as young as twelve, with consummation coming at the time of marriage even if before menarche.  Women of all ages almost invariably lived under the rule of some male, be it husband, guardian, or paterfamilias (head of the extended family or clan).

Through much of Roman history, females were denied individually given names as well as surnames.  Prominent gens names such as Claudius, Julius, and Lucretius gave forth the obligatory feminine derivatives of Claudia, Julia, and Lucretia.  Sisters therefore all had the same name and were distinguished from each other by adding "the elder" or "the younger" or "the first," "the second," and "the third."  Thus Gaius Octavius' daughters were Octavia the elder and Octavia the younger.  Denying them an individually named identity was one way of treating females as family property, mere fractional derivatives of the paterfamilias.

Women of common caste performed much of the onerous work of society as laundresses, domestic servants, millers, weavers, spinners, and sometimes even construction workers, all in addition to their quotidian household chores.  As far as we know, even when they laboured in the same occupations as men, they were not permitted to belong to craft guilds.  Bereft of opportunities for decent livelihood, some of the more impecunious females were driven to selling their sexual favours.  Prostitution was given standing as an employment and taxed as such.  Owning a brothel was considered a respectable venture by some investors.  In general, the great mass of poor women had little hope of exercising an influence on political issues, though numbers of them must have participated in public protests.

The devoted, self-sacrificing wife was a prized character in Roman writing.  Examples abound of matrons who faced exile or risked death to stand fast with their husbands.  But Roman matrons could also be rebellious on occasion.  As early as 195 B.C.E., they successfully pressured the magistrates to repeal the lex Oppia, a law passed during the austerity of the Second Punic War restricting the use of personal ornaments and carriages by women.  That they would mobilise themselves in this willful manner sorely vexed many a patriarch.

By the Late Republic (approximately 80–40 B.C.E.) and during the first century of the empire, Roman matrons made a number of important gains relating to marriage, divorce, property rights, and personal independence.  Some of them even owned substantial property, and administered commercial operations.  During the civil strife following Caesar's death, the Second Triumvirate posted a list of 1,400 particularly wealthy women whose property was to be assessed.  The women organised a protest in the Forum before the magistrates' tribunal, and demanded to know why they had to share in the punishment of the civil war when they had not collaborated in the crime.  "Why should we be taxed when we have no share in magistracies, or honours, or military commands, or in public affairs at all, where your conflicts have brought us this terrible state?"  Whatever influence women exercised in business affairs, they never gained full civil rights, nor could they sustain much visibility on the political landscape.

Upper-class wives had the reputation of being overly generous with their sexual favours.  Sallust clucks about the women who "publicly sold their chastity."  Horace fumes about the matron who becomes well practiced "in lewd loves, then seeks younger adulterers, while her husband's at wine."  Writing early in the second century C.E., Juvenal seems to anticipate the venomous misogyny that would soon pour from the pens of the Christian church fathers.  Roman matrons, he tells us, are wanton hussies, engaged in their illicit pursuits at the expense of the hapless cuckolds who are their husbands.  They have long discarded the virtuous devotions of the forebears, along with the "naturally feminine" traits of modesty, chastity, and domestic servitude.  In like fashion, a historian from our own era registers his disapproval of the growing sway exercised by high-placed improvident women in the Late Republic whose "unwholesome influence" engendered a "growing license" and "did much to debase the moral and social standards of the day."

In truth, Roman matrons were doubtless no more promiscuous than their own husbands, whose own commonplace dalliances were largely overlooked, given the double standard of that day.  Under the patriarchal system, a man was free to kill an allegedly unfaithful wife, while himself patronising prostitutes or keeping a concubine.  The codes against adultery initiated by Emperor Augustus were aimed at wives, with no prohibitions imposed upon husbands.  One of the many Roman writers who see only virtue in Rome's earliest epoch and decadence in their own times is Valerius Maximus.  He approvingly cites examples of husbands of yore who divorced their wives or otherwise treated them severely for acting in what we might consider mildly independent ways, such as walking abroad with head uncovered, talking to a common freedwoman, or attending public games without the husband's knowledge.  "While women were thus checked in the old days, their minds stayed away from wrongdoing," Valerius assures us.

Powerful men such as Julius Caesar often treated women from well-placed families as disposable strategic assets, to be bartered in arranged marriages designed to fortify one's fortune or help forge political coalitions—a practice that continued within European aristocratic circles down through the ages.  Women were also a source of sensual divertissement for Caesar as for most other Roman men.  A few—such as his first wife Cornelia, his longtime mistress Servilia, and, in his last years, Cleopatra—did win Caesar's love, though none could ever claim exclusive command of his sexual attentions.

Many Roman husbands were hopeless philanderers who fixed upon loveless marriages to advance their careers, pocket ample dowries, or simply enjoy a convenient concupiscence.  Still there were instances of deep conjugal links being forged.  Valerius gives several examples of husbands who were stricken at the loss of their wives.  So does the younger Pliny, who himself expressed genuine love for his wife.

Along with the gender bias, some gentlemen historians let slip a noticeable ethno-class bigotry.  The progenitor of all historians of the Late Republic is Cicero.  Hailed by Balsdon as "perhaps the most civilised man who has ever lived," Cicero has been revered by classics professors and Latin teachers throughout the ages.  This most civilised man was not above stoking the crassest ethno-class prejudices.  Cicero sneered at the Greeks and Jews, both the slaves and freedmen among them, who rallied to the side of democratic leaders, declaring that "men of those nations often throw [...] our assemblies into confusion."  The Greeks are given to "shameless lying," the Jews to "barbaric superstition."

Some latter-day historians have taken their cue from Cicero.  Theodor Mommsen describes the Roman Forum as a shouting fest for "everyone in the shape of a man" with Egyptians, Jews, and Greeks, both freedmen and slaves, being the loudest participants in the public assemblies.  Cyril Robinson notes that many proletarians were "of Greek or Oriental origin [...] [whose] loose and feeble character made them bad citizens."  The "purity of Roman blood began to be contaminated by the admixture of this alien element."  Those of "Oriental blood" were "incapable of assimilating the national habits of decency and restraint," although "not all Greeks, of course, were vicious or unwholesome characters."

J.F.C. Fuller tells us that Rome's "Latin stock was increasingly mongrelised as Greeks, Asiatics, Spaniards, Gauls, and other [slaves] were absorbed through manumission and became citizens."  Another esteemed classicist, Jérôme Carcopino, flirts with a racist blood theory of history, writing that interbreeding between Roman aristocrats and their female slaves or freedwomen, followed by frequent emancipation or adoption of the offspring, left "many of the best families in the city infected with an actual hybridisation, similar to that which has more recently contaminated other slave-owning peoples."  This mixed breeding "strongly accentuated the national and social decomposition" of Rome.

In ancient Rome, as in societies before and since, class oppression was supported by class bias.  The lowly were considered low because of deficiencies within themselves.  Class bias, in turn, was often buttressed by ethnic prejudice.  Many of the poor, both slaves and free, were from "barbarian" stock, and this further fueled the tendency to loathe them as wastrels and brigands, troublesome contaminants of respectable society.  So ethnic and class bias conveniently dovetailed for those who looked at their world de haut en bas, and this included not only the likes of Cicero but many of the writers who came after him.