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ROMAN WOMEN survive two letters of Cornelia to her sons, if they are genuine, and an item from Agrippina's memoirs, which Tacitus consulted (Annales 4.53); but the only extended work of literature to survive from the period I shall concentrate on, that of the late Republic and early Empire, is the elegies of Sulpicia, and they are not so much a revelation of the inner experience of womankind as a demonstration that women can write conventional elegiacs too. Moreover, there is little Roman literature which is concerned with the daily life and experience of particular people: the lives of women tend to be incidental to oratory or history or philosophy or agriculture, or to the emotions of an elegiac poet. II What then can be said? There is an obvious temptation to generalize, and to apply pieces of information regardless of time, class, or place. But sometimes the generalizations hold for a wide range of society, and sometimes they can be made more precise. To begin at the beginning: a girl's chances of being reared were less than her brother's. Patria Potestas, as the jurist Gaius observed (Institutes 1.55) was uniquely strong in Rome, and if a father decided that his new-born child was not to be reared there was no law (before the time of the Severi) to prevent him. The foundling girls of Plautus' (Casina 39 ff., Cist. 124) and Terence's (Heaut. 627 ff.) standard plots may not be evidence for Roman practice, for they may have been taken over from Greek models which had to find some way of getting well-born girls out of their seclusion to meet well-born boys. But Cicero (de legibus 3.19) and Seneca (de ira 1.15.2) reveal that deformed babies were exposed (as they still are, though less obtrusively, if the handicap is bad enough), and it was part of a midwife's training to decide which babies were worth rearing. Healthy but inconvenient babies might also be left to die. Musonius Rufus (p. 80 ff. Hense) in the mid-first century A.D. devoted one of his lectures on ethics to the question whether one should rear all one's children. The rich do not, he says, so that there shall be fewer children to share the family property; Petronius (Sat. 116) and Tacitus (Ger. 19, Hist. 5.5) echo the complaint. Since the law required property to be shared among sui heredes, it must have been temptation. Among the poor, there was no question of splitting up an estate. Pliny (Pan. 26.5) praises Trajan's extension of the grain-dole to children: "There are great rewards to encourage the rich to rear their children, and great penalties if they do not. The only way the poor can rear their children is through the goodness of the princeps." If a family did, from greed or necessity, expose a child, it would

ROMAN WOMEN survive two letters of Cornelia to her sons, if they are genuine, and an item from Agrippina's memoirs, which Tacitus consulted (Annales 4.53); but the only extended work of literature to survive from the period I shall concentrate on, that of the late Republic and early Empire, is the elegies of Sulpicia, and they are not so much a revelation of the inner experience of womankind as a demonstration that women can write conventional elegiacs too. Moreover, there is little Roman literature which is concerned with the daily life and experience of particular people: the lives of women tend to be incidental to oratory or history or philosophy or agriculture, or to the emotions of an elegiac poet. II What then can be said? There is an obvious temptation to generalize, and to apply pieces of information regardless of time, class, or place. But sometimes the generalizations hold for a wide range of society, and sometimes they can be made more precise. To begin at the beginning: a girl's chances of being reared were less than her brother's. Patria Potestas, as the jurist Gaius observed (Institutes 1.55) was uniquely strong in Rome, and if a father decided that his new-born child was not to be reared there was no law (before the time of the Severi) to prevent him. The foundling girls of Plautus' (Casina 39 ff., Cist. 124) and Terence's (Heaut. 627 ff.) standard plots may not be evidence for Roman practice, for they may have been taken over from Greek models which had to find some way of getting well-born girls out of their seclusion to meet well-born boys. But Cicero (de legibus 3.19) and Seneca (de ira 1.15.2) reveal that deformed babies were exposed (as they still are, though less obtrusively, if the handicap is bad enough), and it was part of a midwife's training to decide which babies were worth rearing. Healthy but inconvenient babies might also be left to die. Musonius Rufus (p. 80 ff. Hense) in the mid-first century A.D. devoted one of his lectures on ethics to the question whether one should rear all one's children. The rich do not, he says, so that there shall be fewer children to share the family property; Petronius (Sat. 116) and Tacitus (Ger. 19, Hist. 5.5) echo the complaint. Since the law required property to be shared among sui heredes, it must have been temptation. Among the poor, there was no question of splitting up an estate. Pliny (Pan. 26.5) praises Trajan's extension of the grain-dole to children: "There are great rewards to encourage the rich to rear their children, and great penalties if they do not. The only way the poor can rear their children is through the goodness of the princeps." If a family did, from greed or necessity, expose a child, it would

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Why is it through this article it is more useful to understand what life was like for women overall in that time period? Please have 3 quotes with information about why it is more understanding for women. Please DONT REJECT QUESTION LET SOMEONE ELSE ANSWER. The article is also online if needed. Thank you
M https://learn ROMAN WOMEN* By GILLIAN CLARK I Times have changed for Roman women. To an undergraduate even a woman undergraduate - reading Greats some fifteen years ago, they were obviously a fringe topic, worth at most a question on the General Paper. There were pictures of dresses and hairstyles, in most of which it looked impossible to move. There were snippets of anthropology from Plutarch, as that a bride had her hair parted with a spear (Moralia 285b): entertaining, but about as relevant to the views of a bride in the late Republic as are wearing a veil (to symbolize being under authority) and being pelted with confetti (in hopes of many children) to a bride in the 1980s. There was an account of forms of marriage, with, usually, a panegyric of a Roman matron and a denuncia- tion of the laxity of the late Republic and immorality of the early Empire; and a handful of brief biographies: Cornelia, Sempronia, Arria. This information would be found somewhere around chapter 15 of a general handbook, once the author had dealt with the serious business of life, like the constitution and the courts and education and the army and the provinces. J. P. V. D. Balsdon's book made a difference, since he never forgot that he was writing about human beings, who worried about their children and ran their households and had long days to fill. But the real change came in the 70s, as the Women's Movement - a decade late - got through to the classics. First there was the new perspective offered by general feminist histories, though their scholar- ship was second-hand and often wild; then articles and books, though still only a few, trying to answer the sort of questions it now seems so odd we did not ask.' What did Roman women do all day, besides getting dressed? How did they feel about it? What else could they have done? Were they oppressed, and did they notice? Why do we know so little about half the human race? The perspective has shifted, and that may bring different pieces of evidence into focus; some of the questions are different too. But it is still not easy to answer them. We are still working with evidence strongly biassed towards the upper classes and the city of Rome. The lives of women not in, or in contact with, the senatorial class, can only be guessed at from inscriptions, if someone troubled to put one up. And even within the senatorial class, it was not the women who wrote. They wrote, as always, letters, their conversation might be admirable and their language reflect the purer Latin of a bygone age.? There 39,102 ост 12 MacBook Air
Transcribed Image Text:M https://learn ROMAN WOMEN* By GILLIAN CLARK I Times have changed for Roman women. To an undergraduate even a woman undergraduate - reading Greats some fifteen years ago, they were obviously a fringe topic, worth at most a question on the General Paper. There were pictures of dresses and hairstyles, in most of which it looked impossible to move. There were snippets of anthropology from Plutarch, as that a bride had her hair parted with a spear (Moralia 285b): entertaining, but about as relevant to the views of a bride in the late Republic as are wearing a veil (to symbolize being under authority) and being pelted with confetti (in hopes of many children) to a bride in the 1980s. There was an account of forms of marriage, with, usually, a panegyric of a Roman matron and a denuncia- tion of the laxity of the late Republic and immorality of the early Empire; and a handful of brief biographies: Cornelia, Sempronia, Arria. This information would be found somewhere around chapter 15 of a general handbook, once the author had dealt with the serious business of life, like the constitution and the courts and education and the army and the provinces. J. P. V. D. Balsdon's book made a difference, since he never forgot that he was writing about human beings, who worried about their children and ran their households and had long days to fill. But the real change came in the 70s, as the Women's Movement - a decade late - got through to the classics. First there was the new perspective offered by general feminist histories, though their scholar- ship was second-hand and often wild; then articles and books, though still only a few, trying to answer the sort of questions it now seems so odd we did not ask.' What did Roman women do all day, besides getting dressed? How did they feel about it? What else could they have done? Were they oppressed, and did they notice? Why do we know so little about half the human race? The perspective has shifted, and that may bring different pieces of evidence into focus; some of the questions are different too. But it is still not easy to answer them. We are still working with evidence strongly biassed towards the upper classes and the city of Rome. The lives of women not in, or in contact with, the senatorial class, can only be guessed at from inscriptions, if someone troubled to put one up. And even within the senatorial class, it was not the women who wrote. They wrote, as always, letters, their conversation might be admirable and their language reflect the purer Latin of a bygone age.? There 39,102 ост 12 MacBook Air
W https: 194 ROMAN WOMEN survive two letters of Cornelia to her sons, if they are genuine, and an item from Agrippina's memoirs, which Tacitus consulted (Annales 4.53); but the only extended work of literature to survive from the period I shall concentrate on, that of the late Republic and early Empire, is the elegies of Sulpicia, and they are not so much a revelation of the inner experience of womankind as a demonstration that women can write conventional elegiacs too. Moreover, there is little Roman literature which is concerned with the daily life and experience of particular people: the lives of women tend to be incidental to oratory or history or philosophy or agriculture, or to the emotions of an elegiac poet. II What then can be said? There is an obvious temptation to generalize, and to apply pieces of information regardless of time, class, or place. But sometimes the generalizations hold for a wide range of society, and sometimes they can be made more precise. To begin at the beginning: a girl's chances of being reared were less than her brother's. Patria Potestas, as the jurist Gaius observed (Institutes 1.55) was uniquely strong in Rome, and if a father decided that his new-born child was not to be reared there was no law (before the time of the Severi) to prevent him. The foundling girls of Plautus' (Casina 39 ff., Cist. 124) and Terence's (Heaut. 627 ff.) standard plots may not be evidence for Roman practice, for they may have been taken over from Greek models which had to find some way of getting well-born girls out of their seclusion to meet well-born boys. But Cicero (de legibus 3.19) and Seneca (de ira 1.15.2) reveal that deformed babies were exposed (as they still are, though less obtrusively, if the handicap is bad enough), and it was part of a midwife's training to decide which babies were worth rearing.5 Healthy but inconvenient babies might also be left to die. Musonius Rufus (p. 80 ff. Hense) in the mid-first century A.D. devoted one of his lectures on ethics to the question whether one should rear all one's children. The rich do not, he says, so that there shall be fewer children to share the family property; Petronius (Sat. 116) and Tacitus (Ger. 19, Hist. 5.5) echo the complaint. Since the law required property to be shared among sui heredes, it must have been a temptation. Among the poor, there was no question of splitting up an estate. Pliny (Pan. 26.5) praises Trajan's extension of the grain-dole to children: "There are great rewards to encourage the rich to rear their children, and great penalties if they do not. The only way the poor can rear their children is through the goodness of the princeps.' If a family did, from greed or necessity, expose a child, it would 39.102 OCT 12
Transcribed Image Text:W https: 194 ROMAN WOMEN survive two letters of Cornelia to her sons, if they are genuine, and an item from Agrippina's memoirs, which Tacitus consulted (Annales 4.53); but the only extended work of literature to survive from the period I shall concentrate on, that of the late Republic and early Empire, is the elegies of Sulpicia, and they are not so much a revelation of the inner experience of womankind as a demonstration that women can write conventional elegiacs too. Moreover, there is little Roman literature which is concerned with the daily life and experience of particular people: the lives of women tend to be incidental to oratory or history or philosophy or agriculture, or to the emotions of an elegiac poet. II What then can be said? There is an obvious temptation to generalize, and to apply pieces of information regardless of time, class, or place. But sometimes the generalizations hold for a wide range of society, and sometimes they can be made more precise. To begin at the beginning: a girl's chances of being reared were less than her brother's. Patria Potestas, as the jurist Gaius observed (Institutes 1.55) was uniquely strong in Rome, and if a father decided that his new-born child was not to be reared there was no law (before the time of the Severi) to prevent him. The foundling girls of Plautus' (Casina 39 ff., Cist. 124) and Terence's (Heaut. 627 ff.) standard plots may not be evidence for Roman practice, for they may have been taken over from Greek models which had to find some way of getting well-born girls out of their seclusion to meet well-born boys. But Cicero (de legibus 3.19) and Seneca (de ira 1.15.2) reveal that deformed babies were exposed (as they still are, though less obtrusively, if the handicap is bad enough), and it was part of a midwife's training to decide which babies were worth rearing.5 Healthy but inconvenient babies might also be left to die. Musonius Rufus (p. 80 ff. Hense) in the mid-first century A.D. devoted one of his lectures on ethics to the question whether one should rear all one's children. The rich do not, he says, so that there shall be fewer children to share the family property; Petronius (Sat. 116) and Tacitus (Ger. 19, Hist. 5.5) echo the complaint. Since the law required property to be shared among sui heredes, it must have been a temptation. Among the poor, there was no question of splitting up an estate. Pliny (Pan. 26.5) praises Trajan's extension of the grain-dole to children: "There are great rewards to encourage the rich to rear their children, and great penalties if they do not. The only way the poor can rear their children is through the goodness of the princeps.' If a family did, from greed or necessity, expose a child, it would 39.102 OCT 12
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