WOMEN IN THE GRECO-ROMAN CITY

Among those persons who crossed categories in order to better their lives, even at the cost of enduring some obloquy from neighborhood gossips and, presumably, considerable internal tensions within their families and within themselves, there were a great many women. Sarah Pomeroy looks at the phenomenon of marriage upward by imperial slaves and freedmen form the point of view of the woman. Why would a freeborn woman marry an imperial slave or freedman? The reason might be that while in some social categories (liberty, extraction) she was his better, in others (money, influence, possibly education or profession) he could improve the position. Outside the familia caesaris it was much more common for slaveborn women to marry free men than the reverse. Weaver found in his control group of seven hundred sepulchral inscriptions that freedwomen were usually manumitted at an earlier age than freedmen and quite often for purposes of marriage. In fact,29 percent married their own patrons-one of the most common means for female slaves to gain freedom and improved status.

Upwardly mobile women must have been constantly reminded that they were crossing boundaries that a good part of the society held sacred. The hierarchical pattern of the family, in which the male was always superior to the female, as surely as parents to children and masters to slaves, was deeply entrenched in law and custom and its erosion constantly deplored by the rhetorical moralists and the satirists. Still, in practice there were more and more opportunities for some women to break through this pattern. The traditional patria potestas of Rome had become less absolute from the time of the late republic on; the Hellenistic queens of the East and of Egypt had set a pattern of “masculine” ambition and ruthlessness that women of the Julio Claudian houses soon imitated. There were even theoretical justifications for considering women the equals of men. The Stoics had taken up the Cynicepigram attributed to Antisthenes, “virtue is the same for man and for woman, and Cleanthes is said to have written a book on the topic, although women remain conspicuously absent among the pupils of the earlier as of the later Stoics. Musonius Rufus did indeed write tracts urging that “women too should study philosophy” and that, except for vocational matters, daughters should “receive the same education as sons,” but his aim was to make women better managers of their households, that is, in their traditional roles.

For some woman the traditional roles were too conlining. Not surprisingly, the most conspicuous examples come from the upper clases, whose situations gave them greater freedom. Even Philo, a firm believer in the spiritual and mental inferiority of women, granted that the formidable empress Livia was an exception. the instruction (paideia) she received enabled her to “become male in her reasoning power.” Not were opportunities altogether wanting for women of lower standing. Inscriptions show that women were active in commerce and manufacture and, like their male counterparts, used some of the money they made in ways that would win them recognition in their cities Pomeroy observes that freedwomen from the eastern provinces often traded in luxury goods, “such as purple dye or Eumachia, who made her money in a brick-manufacturing concern, paid for one of the major buildings and donated it to a workmen’s association. She held the title of sacerdos publica. Another woman there, Mamia, built the temple of the genius of Augustus. Women estates and in business of all sorts are attested in Pompeii. Moreover, MacMullen points out that women appear more and more frequently as independent litigants, although the greatest activity begins just after the period of our primary concern. Throughout Italy and in the Greek-speaking provinces , MacMullen finds a small but significant  number of women mentioned on coins and inscriptions as benefactors and officials of cities and as recipients of municipal honors therefor.

Like men, though not early so frequently, women joined clubs-usually the same clubs as the men, for apart from associations of priestesses there is little evidence for all-women clubs. In lists of members of Greek associations, women appear alongside men, usually in fairly small proportions. Long before the Roman period. It is not easy to tell what the social significance of such membership was, however.

Women were also active in religious matters, both in cults that were exclusively or primarily practiced by women and in state or municipal and private cults that appealed to men and women alike. Inscriptions commemorate priestesses in ancient cults of many kinds.

There is probably some truth behind these complaints.  As mentioned earlier, the wives and mother of king Izates of Adiabene plyed a consider able role in his conversion to Judaism, and josephus tells a couple of stories fraudulent proselytism of women in Rome-one to the Isis cult, one to Judaism –that resemble Juvenal’s portrayal .

It is also difficult to tell whether the participation of women the new cults represented any significant change in their ordinary social roles. True, Johannes Leipoldt’s assertion that Isis was “patroness of the women’s movement” has been widely accepted. The prayer to Isis in POxy.1380, lines 214-16, is often quoted:”you have made the power of women equal to that of men.” whatever  “women’s movement” there may have been would be suppressed early.