The Women of Pliny's Letters

Jo-Ann Shelton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136225673
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

Pliny's letters offer a significant source of information about the lives of Roman women (predominantly, though not exclusively, upper-class women) during the late first and early second centuries CE. In the 368 letters included in his ten published books of epistles, Pliny mentions over 30 women by name, addresses letters to seven, and refers to well over 40 anonymous women.Many of the references are brief comments in letters whose topics are the activities of Pliny's male acquaintances.Nonetheless his letters inform us about the roles of women in Roman families, marriages, and households, and also record the involvement of women in such matters as court cases, property ownership, religious orders, social networks, and political activities.

This book has two aims. The first is to bring these women to the foreground, to explore their kinships, relationships, and activities, and to illuminate their lives by viewing them in the social, cultural, and political environments of the period in which they lived.This book utilizes historical, literary, legal, and epigraphical sources to examine the events, circumstances, and attitudes that were the contexts for the lives of these women. The first aim, then, is to gain insight into the reality of their lives.

The second aim of this book is to investigate how Pliny defines the ideal behavior for women.In his accounts of the actions of both women and men, Pliny frequently shapes his narratives to promote moral lessons.In several of his letters about women, he elevates his subject to the status of a role model.The second aim of this book is to use the descriptions provided by Pliny to acquire a better understanding of what behavior was admired in Roman women of this period, and to consider how the concept of the model Roman woman is constructed in Pliny.

1 Arria the Elder and the heroism of women

Our investigation into the lives of the women who appear in Pliny’s letters starts with a group of women connected to one another through blood or marriage. Their stories begin in the last years of the principate of Augustus and extend well into the reign of Trajan, a period of about 100 years. They were the wives and daughters of men who were critical of the form of government established by Augustus and consolidated by his successors. They were, however, more than passive witnesses to events of this period; some played a vital role in perpetuating discontent with imperial rule. For their loyalty to the men in their family, and for their hostility to the emperors, these women paid heavy prices. Tacitus and Suetonius, historians who were contemporaries of Pliny, record the activities of the men who fostered dissent, but offer very little information about the women. Pliny, however, pays considerable attention to the women of this family. For most, he is our sole source of information about their lives. His letters thus grant us the invaluable opportunity to become acquainted with women who would otherwise be unknown. From the letters, we receive the impression that it was the women who linked the family together from generation to generation, preserved its history, and instilled in each new generation a respect for and a desire to emulate the family tradition of dissent. In addition, these women undertook to encourage the creation of a written narrative about the deeds of family members and to secure it for an audience far larger than just the family. They thus ensured that the fame of these family members would endure. Although Pliny’s accounts provide information about this family of dissidents that is additional, rather than alternative, to Tacitus and Suetonius, his highlighting of the activities of the women offers us a different perspective and enables us to learn how the events of the first century CE affected these women, and how they, in turn, influenced events.

It is possible that Pliny’s interest in recording the activities of these women was kindled by the zeal and persistence of the women themselves in telling their tales and promulgating their family history. However, his desire to bring their lives to public attention may have been motivated, in large part, by his anxiety about his own reputation, an anxiety discussed earlier in the Introduction. Several of these women had been prosecuted in 93 CE, toward the end of Domitian’s reign, at a time when Pliny himself had remained unscathed and had even enjoyed career advancement. In the period after Domitian’s death in 96, many men in the senatorial class, which had acquiesced in the emperor’s atrocious deeds, were eager to explain their behavior. Pliny asserted in his letters that he had, in fact, been a good friend to these women (Letters 3.11.3 and 9.13.3) and had provided them with substantial assistance, both during the darkest hours of their punishment and afterward, when they sought to clear the family name by censuring their persecutors. By claiming that he had not deserted these women, even when his concern for their welfare put his own career and life in peril, Pliny created in his letters — and left for posterity — a portrait of himself as a courageous and effective friend whose contributions to the opposition to Domitian had simply gone unnoticed.¹ In addition, to impress upon readers that the family’s reputation for courage extended back several generations, Pliny included a letter about the brave deeds of the grandmother of one of the women prosecuted in 93 CE — deeds which had occurred five decades earlier, and two decades before Pliny’s birth. Although Pliny’s knowledge of this woman was second-hand, by recording her deeds in a letter, he gives the impression that his concern for and connections to the family were long-standing. We might justifiably wonder to what extent Pliny manipulated his accounts not only of his own activities, but also of the activities of these women in order to embellish his self-portrait. It is certainly important to remember that we are viewing the actions of these women through Pliny’s filter. We can nonetheless still gather from his letters information not available elsewhere about their responses to the challenges in their lives. We can also illuminate their lives by understanding the contexts in which they grew up, married, and raised children. Therefore, in my attempts to reconstruct the life stories of these women, I have included discussions about events, laws, customs, and conventions that framed their lives and shaped the decisions that they made. My intent has been to construct the setting for their lives and decisions. The “background information” provided in this first chapter will also be pertinent to gaining an understanding of the lives of women discussed in later chapters.

Arria the Elder (Arria Maior)

Arria the Elder ended her life by plunging a dagger into her chest. The year of her death was 42 CE. She was perhaps about 40 years old. We know nothing about Arria’s childhood or her natal family.² By tradition, girls were usually assigned the feminine form of their father’s nomen — that is, his gentile (family) name — and we might therefore suppose that Arria’s father (and his father before him) had been an Arrius. We cannot be certain, however, because, by the early imperial period, it was not unusual for children to be assigned names that would instead preserve the name of the family of their mother, or of the family of their father’s mother.³ Although Pliny addresses three letters (Letters 4.3, 4.18, and 5.15; see also Letter 4.27) to a man named Arrius Antoninus, who would have been a child at the time of Arria’s death, he does not indicate that they were related .⁴ The Latin word maior, which means “elder,” has been attached to Arria’s name to distinguish her from her daughter, who was also named Arria (a good example of a daughter receiving her name from her mother, not her father). Arria the Elder will henceforth be designated as “Arria E.”

Arria E was married to Aulus Caecina Paetus, a man of senatorial rank from a family in Etruria.⁵ He served as a suffect consul in 37 CE.⁶ From Pliny’s letters, we know that Arria E gave birth to at least two children, a son who died in childhood, and a daughter who survived to adulthood. (See Genealogy Chart 1.) Quite possibly there was also a second son, if the Caecina Paetus recorded in inscriptions is indeed her son.⁷ Although his name at birth would have been derived from his birth father’s family, hence Caecina Paetus, he was apparently adopted by Gaius Laecanius Bassus and thus also took the name of his adoptive family.⁸ It was not unusual for male Roman citizens to be adopted when they were already adults and when their natal parents were still alive. A family with more than one son might give one up for adoption to a family with no son. The motivation of the natal parents would be to concentrate family funds on one son’s career, and to gain for the son they had adopted out the financial resources and social connections necessary for a successful political career.⁹ However, since one son of Arria E and Paetus had died in childhood, it is unlikely that they would have adopted out their one remaining son while they were alive. The adoption may have occurred after their deaths.

Arria E’s husband, Aulus Caecina Paetus, incurred the wrath of the emperor Claudius. However, the man presumed to be their biological son had a successful career in Roman public life. Emperors were sometimes kind to the children of men they had sentenced to death, perhaps in order to persuade people that they were benevolent by nature and inclined to punish only those undeniably guilty of treason.¹⁰ He was suffect consul in 70 or 71 CE, served as curator of the Tiber River in 74 CE, and was proconsul of the province of Asia after that.1 ¹¹ If this man was indeed the biological son of Arria E and Aulus Caecina Paetus, it is odd that he is not mentioned by Pliny, who claimed a close association with the family. Perhaps he, unlike his sister, had renounced the political sympathies of his birth parents and chosen to distance himself from his natal family.

Arria E’s daughter was already married at the time of Arria E’s suicide in 42 CE. I speculate that there was an age gap of approximately — very approximately — 20 years between mother and daughter. Roman “women” married at a young age; it was not unusual to be a bride at the age of 15 and to be wed to a much older man. Working back from the year of the suicide, we know that the daughter was already married then and was therefore perhaps about 18 years old — that is, born about 24 CE. If Arria E had married Paetus when she was 15 years old, and given birth to her daughter when she was about 18, then she was born about 4 CE, and was approximately 38 years old at the time of her death. (Of course, if the daughter were the youngest of her children, Arria E might have given birth to her at the age of 30 or beyond, and thus been about 50 at the time of her suicide.) It is possible that Arria’s marriage to Paetus was not her first marriage. A girl of 15 who had been married to a much older man might well be widowed while still young and then remarried, but we have no evidence that this was a second marriage for Arria. Indeed, the circumstances of her suicide (which will be discussed later) suggest that she was determined to be remembered as a woman who had had only one husband.

Arria E’s other son died in childhood. Her behavior, at the time of his death, is recounted by Pliny in Letter 3.16 as evidence of the strength of her character and of her willingness to sacrifice her own welfare for the interests of her husband. Pliny had learned from a conversation with Arria E’s granddaughter that, on one occasion, Arria E’s son and husband were both gravely ill. The son died. Though grief-stricken, Arria E concealed his death from her sick husband in order to protect him from the distress of bad news. When he inquired about the boy’s health, Arria deceived him by replying: “He has rested well and willingly taken food” (Letter 3.16.4). She arranged and attended the funeral without her husband’s knowledge. Repressing her anguish, she assumed a happy and comforting countenance when she entered his bedroom, and pretended that their son was still alive and even recovering. Only when she left the bedroom did she allow herself to dissolve into tears. As Pliny comments, she continued to play the role of mother although she had lost her son. And she chose to endure the strain of feigning good cheer in order not to jeopardize the recovery of her husband.

Pliny depicts her son’s death as a traumatic experience for Arria E. Nonetheless, the loss of a child was not a rare event for Roman women. Arria E lived in an era when the incidences of miscarriage and stillbirth and of mortality among infants and children were high. Although conclusive statistical evidence is not available, scholars have estimated that the infant mortality rate may have been as high as 30%.¹² And, in an era when medical care was primitive, many young children who survived their first year nonetheless died young as a result of diseases, accidents, or poor nutrition. It is estimated that 25% or more of children between the ages of one and ten did not survive. One funerary inscription records the deaths of two brothers at the ages of five and eight. Another records the death of a six-year-old girl. A third informs us of a woman who bore two sons, only one of whom survived her.¹³ Cornelia, the mother of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, bore 12 children, of whom only three survived to adulthood.¹⁴ Veturia, the wife of a soldier, bore six children, of whom only one survived her when she herself died at the age of 27.¹⁵ Agrippina the Elder (see Figure 1) bore nine children, two of whom died in infancy and a third in early childhood.¹⁶ Quintilian, the scholar of oratory and Pliny’s teacher, lost both his sons, one at age five, the other at age nine. (And his wife had died when she was only 18 years old.)¹⁷

The Julian laws

It is quite possible that Arria E experienced more than three pregnancies and more than one loss of an infant or child. In any case, her bearing of one or two children who survived beyond childhood would have been proof that, as a wife, she had fulfilled her most important social duty: the production of the next generation of Roman citizens. About the time that Arria E herself had been born, the emperor Augustus (who himself had only one child, a daughter, Julia) was expressing concern about the declining population of Roman citizens, which he blamed in part on the reluctance of people to marry and to become parents. The entrance into Italy of immigrants and slaves, and the birth of slaves within Italy kept the population at a stable level, but Augustus wanted more citizen families, and perhaps particularly more upper-class families. He therefore sponsored legislation to encourage marriage and child-bearing. This legislation was remarkable because it authorized the intrusion of the state into matters which had traditionally been family concerns. Citizens were now urged to consider that they had not just a family responsibility, but even a civic duty to produce children. As Severy comments, Augustus’ legislation “officially made proper family behavior part of a citizens’ duty. The laws heavily encouraged citizens to marry and procreate in a chaste and respectable manner for the good of the res publica. One’s family responsibilities thus became primary duties to the community, in addition to the monitoring of other families’ failures in this regard…. (A)lthough official concern for marriage and childbearing was not unprecedented, the ways in which Augustus legislated these areas of private life changed in some critical ways the conceptual relationship of the family to the state.”¹⁸

The first set of these laws was passed in 18 BCE and became known as the Lex Julia. (Julius was Augustus’ family or gentile name after his adoption by his great-uncle, Julius Caesar.) Augustus’ subjects did not, however, embrace the legislation with enthusiasm, and, in 9 CE, he reiterated his concerns in a revised version of the laws, known as the Lex Papia Poppaea, named after the two consuls of the year who, ironically, were both childless bachelors. Unfortunately, a complete record of the original laws has not been preserved. Moreover, the distinctions between the two sets has been obscured because later jurists generally referred to them as if one body of legislation. Hence the term “the Julian laws” is often used to designate both sets of laws.¹⁹ The legislation was directed at men between the ages of 25 and 60, and women between the ages of 20 and 50. The establishment of an upper limit of 50 years of age for women — the end of a woman’s childbearing years — indicates that Augustus’ intent in encouraging marriage was to increase the population of Roman citizens. The legislation p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: writing about lives
• 1 Arria the Elder and the heroism of women
• 2 Arria's family and the tradition of dissent
• 3 Pliny's wives
• 4 Mothers, nurses, and stepmothers
• 5 Grandmothers, aunts, and mothers-in-law
• 6 Daughters and sisters
• 7 Women outside the family
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Pliny's letters
• Index of ancient names
• Index of subjects