Women Writing Latin

Women Writing Latin in Roman Antiquity, Late Antiquity, and the Early Christian Era

Laurie J. Churchill, Phyllis R. Brown, Jane E. Jeffrey, Laurie J. Churchill, Phyllis R. Brown, Jane E. Jeffrey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136742910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

This book is part of a 3-volume anthology of women's writing in Latin from antiquity to the early modern era. Each volume provides texts, contexts, and translations of a wide variety of works produced by women, including dramatic, poetic, and devotional writing. Volume One covers the age of Roman Antiquity and early Christianity.

I
Roman Antiquity

Women Writing in Rome and Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi

Judith P. Hallett

From the first decades of the second century B.C.E. onward, Latin literary works represent women as creators of written texts. For example, at lines 20–75 of his Pseudolus, a comedy that can be dated by its production notice to 191 B.C.E., the playwright Plautus portrays a lovesick young man named Calidorus as smitten by the courtesan Phoenicium. He is especially distressed by a letter he has just received from her. In the excerpts from this letter that Calidorus and his ingenious slave—the title character Pseudolus—read aloud, she proclaims her passion for Calidorus and complains that she has been sold to another man. To be sure, Pseudolus makes sarcastic remarks about Phoenicium’s handwriting, style, and sentiments. Still, she is characterized as employing a sophisticated literary vocabulary and several poetic figures of speech. Such details, albeit in the portrait of a fictional character, imply that Plautus (and presumably his audience) thought women, even those of nonelite backgrounds, capable of writing as men do.

Many later Roman authors of the classical era, which extends from the time in which Plautus wrote to the early second century C.E., refer to the writings of several historical women from the first centuries B.C.E. and C.E. Unfortunately, most of these Latin texts by women have not survived to modern times. One such woman, Clodia, enjoyed close ties with some of the most politically powerful men in mid–first century B.C.E. Rome. Her controversial brother, Publius Clodius Pulcher, served as tribune of the people in 58 B.C.E. and was a candidate for higher office when he was assassinated by his foes six years later. Her more conservative husband, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer, served as consul in 60 B.C.E. after a military career that included commanding the province of Cisalpine Gaul in northern Italy.¹

Scholars generally identify this Clodia as the lover of the poet Catullus (ca. 84–54 B.C.E.), a woman immortalized in his verses under the metrically equivalent name of “Lesbia.” Catullus’s choice of this particular pseudonym for his inamorata pays homage to the sixth-century B.C.E. Greek female poet Sappho of Lesbos. His high regard for Sappho took other forms as well: he translated some of her lyrics into Latin and adopted her distinctive meter in two of his poems. In calling Clodia “Lesbia,” Catullus may also have implied that Clodia, like Sappho, not only wrote but also valued elegantly crafted poetry.²

Significantly, at Pro caelio 27.64, a lawcourt speech of 56 B.C.E. defending another young man with whom Clodia was romantically involved, the orator and statesman Cicero dismissively refers to Clodia by the Greek noun poetria, “female poet.” Furthermore, several of Catullus’s poems that represent “Lesbia” as speaking may be interpreted as alluding to her performances of poetry, some of it poetry that she wrote herself. Among these Catullan poems are two, 70 and 72, written in the elegiac meter. They portray her as voicing a memorable literary conceit: that she would prefer Catullus’s affections even to those of the god Jupiter. In poem 51—which loosely translates lyrics by Sappho, retaining their original Sapphic meter—Catullus first speaks in his own person of “Lesbia” as “sweetly laughing”; later, he appears to assign “Lesbia” an entire, final, stanza in which she laughs at his idleness and self-preoccupation.

Clodia’s own daughter, Caecilia Metella, would seem to have followed her mother’s example. The poet Ovid represents her, at Tristia 2.437–38, as having written poetry, and at the same time as having been celebrated, pseudonymously, as “Perilla.” In the early years of the first century C.E., Ovid also writes from exile on the Black Sea to another young female poet he calls Perilla, perhaps his own stepdaughter, at Tristia 3.7. Most noteworthy of these lost women writers is the younger Agrippina (15–59 C.E.), the sister of the emperor Gaius Caligula, wife of the emperor Claudius, and mother of the emperor Nero. Her memoirs are cited as an important historical source in the late first century C.E. by the elder Pliny at Natural History 7.46 and in the early second century C.E. by the historian Tacitus at Annales 4.53.3.

Nevertheless, a few writings in Latin by Roman women of the classical period have been preserved for posterity. The earliest dates from the second half of the second century B.C.E.: two fragments of a letter from a noblewoman named Cornelia to her son Gaius Sempronius Gracchus. This Cornelia was the daughter of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, a military leader renowned for ending Rome’s second Punic War against the North African city of Carthage when he defeated Hannibal at Zama in 202 B.C.E. But she is more often remembered as the mother of two politically radical sons, Gaius Sempronius Gracchus and his elder brother, Tiberius. Both of these men died at the hands of their enemies while serving as tribunes of the people, Tiberius in 133 B.C.E. and Gaius in 121.³

The letter urges Gaius not to seek the office of tribune, but to think of her sorrowful plight instead. It was likely to have been written ca. 124 B.C.E. Born ca. 195–190 B.C.E., Cornelia would have been in her late sixties or early seventies at the time she wrote it. According to Plutarch’s biography of Gaius Gracchus, Cornelia for many years after Gaius died lived in her villa near the Bay of Naples, invariably “recalling the accomplishments and sufferings of her dead sons for her guests without any display of emotion.”

According to Plutarch’s Life of Tiberius Gracchus, Cornelia’s husband Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, consul in 177 B.C.E., had left her a widow in 153 B.C.E., shortly after she gave birth to the last of their twelve children. Plutarch also relates that after Cornelia was widowed, she rejected a marriage proposal from a Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt and devoted herself totally to rearing the three of her off-spring who survived their childhood—Tiberius, Gaius, and a daughter, Sempronia.⁴ Other Roman authors of later periods stress Cornelia’s dedication to the upbringing of her children as well. In the Dialogue on Oratory, Tacitus has one of his characters maintain that the extensive role played by elite Roman mothers in their sons’ education during the bygone republican era resulted in a superior breed of Roman political leader. Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, is the first such woman Tacitus cites by way of illustration.

So, too, the first-century C.E. writer Valerius Maximus recalls an anecdote about Cornelia’s emotional investment in her sons at Memorable Deeds and Sayings 4.4—namely, that when a woman staying at Cornelia’s bayside villa insisted on displaying her own extremely beautiful jewelry, Cornelia detained her in conversation until Tiberius and Gaius returned from school, and then announced, “These are my jewels.” Later in the same century the elder Pliny describes a celebrated statue of Cornelia at 34.31 of his Natural History. The inscription at its base—“Cornelia, daughter of Africanus, [mother] of the Gracchi”—survives to this day.⁵ Pliny reports that in his own time the statue stood in the portico of Octavia, sister of the emperor Augustus, an edifice erected around 20 B.C.E. But Pliny also notes that the statue had originally been placed in the portico of Metellus, a structure built during Cornelia’s own lifetime. Evidently Romans of later generations hailed Cornelia as a paragon of matronal and maternal excellence because her own contemporaries had inspired them to do so.

These two fragments of Cornelia’s letter survive only in the manuscripts of the biographer and historian Cornelius Nepos. He is thought to have died in approximately 24 B.C.E., a full century after Cornelia would have written these words to her younger son. No other extant classical Roman source quotes from these fragments directly. Some scholars have found this fact disconcerting. Some also consider the unusual style of the letter, the self-absorption of its first-person speaker, the self-assertive stance adopted, the angry language employed, and the raw emotions expressed to be at strong variance with their own, modern notions of an admirable mother. As a result, there are those who would question Cornelia’s authorship of this letter and even the female gender of the author.⁶

Yet both Cicero, in an essay of the mid–first century B.C.E., and the late first century C.E. oratorical authority Quintilian, at Institutes 1.1.6, provide evidence that letters of this sort were in public circulation after Cornelia’s death, familiar to them and no doubt to others as well. At Brutus 211, Cicero portrays his friend Atticus as arguing for the powerful impact of fathers, teachers, and mothers on children’s speech. To establish the beneficial influence of maternal speaking habits, he notes that he has read the letters of Cornelia and states that their style proves the Gracchi “to have been nurtured not so much in her bosom as in her speech.” Quintilian invokes Cornelia for the same purpose, observing that “we have heard that their mother, Cornelia, had contributed greatly to the eloquence of the Gracchi, a woman whose extremely learned speech also has been handed down to future generations.”

Echoes of Cornelia’s letter also resonate in similarly indignant speeches assigned to mature women by Roman authors writing in the twenties and teens B.C.E. These echoes further suggest that Cornelia’s letter is authentic, or at least that the letter was thought to be by Cornelia at around the time Nepos was writing. The earliest of these Latin texts that call Cornelia’s letter to mind is the work of the historian Livy: in a speech delivered by the fictional Veturia—aged mother of the early republican leader Coriolanus—to dissuade her traitorous son from invading Rome in 488 B.C.E. It appears at chapter 40 of Livy’s second book, which appears to have been completed around the time of Nepos’s death.⁷

The other speeches are slightly later in date. Those of three other fictional figures—the Carthaginian queen Dido, the Latin queen Amata, and the mother of Euryalus—in books 4, 7, 9, and 12 of Vergil’s epic Aeneid were written shortly before 19 B.C.E. The fictional speech that the love poet Propertius in his final elegy places in the mout...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Women Writing Latin: An Introduction
• Part I. Roman Antiquity
• Part II. Late Antiquity and the Early Christian Era
• Appendix
• Contributors