Jennifer Proce
It has been commonly observed that during the time of the late Roman Republic, society was feeling the destructive effects of many years of civil wars. These wars were responsible for a breakdown in Roman ideals. Rome’s people had become dissatisfied with their quality of life and had developed a lack of patriotism. Political corruption and moral decline among the ruling class was prevalent. Within this affluent group, marriage as an institution had lost its appeal, and divorce was on the rise. This led to relaxed social relationships between the sexes and the licentiousness of women from the respectable classes.
Augustus, the first emperor of Rome, was concerned with current social attitudes. Sullied conduct presented a problem that Augustus intended to correct. He idealized the valiant and virtuous life of early Rome, and he wanted his country to embrace these traditional Roman moral ideals again. “As sole ruler of Rome [Augustus] used his power to establish a period of peace and stability, and endeavored to reawaken in Romans a sense of national pride, and a new enthusiasm . . . [for] their traditional moral values; those of bravery, parsimony, duty, responsibility, and family devotion.”
The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how de facto propaganda was employed through the inculcation of Roman legends and written histories to initiate social reform and encourage high moral conduct by its women. In trying to renew traditional Roman values, Augustus tried to
strengthen the decaying social fabric of Rome. He knew that legislation could not achieve this alone. “[Therefore], poets and writers proclaimed the ideals that Augustus wished to instill into the Roman people . . .” It is through these writers that the Augustan Propaganda of Roman ideals was born.
During this Augustan reform, great Roman writers arrived on the scene. Livy and Virgil shared the same hopes for Rome as Augustus and hoped to initiate a Roman revival of its former glory through their work. Both of these writers had a close association with Augustus. In his book From the Gracchi to Nero: A History of Rome from 133 BC to AD 68, H. H. Scullard observes it was no less natural that [Augustus] should gather these [writers], as so many other threads into his own hands, because even in Augustan Rome, without printed books and the broadcast word, writers could exercise great influence on public opinion. He wished to spread abroad the ideals and hopes of the new age. He might command the pen of publicists, but he was in fact most fortunate in winning the loyal and enthusiastic support of three writers who proved to be among the greatest the world had known.
Virgil’s and Livy’s desire to see the empire returned to its former glory was an elemental factor that can be detected in their work. Of these men, “Virgil was regarded by the Romans as their greatest poet. The Aeneid, his most famous poem, is still considered one of the most influential poems of all time. In the Aeneid, Virgil writes his version of the divine events that would lead to the founding of Rome. The Aeneid is accepted as presenting “a prototype of the Roman way of life.”
One of the most memorable characters in the Aeneid is Dido, the queen of Carthage. In Virgil’s portrayal of Dido as “the opponent of the Roman way of Life,” we see a woman who is powerful, ambitious, and capable.
Dido leads her people from Tyre to Africa and founds Carthage. Then, she meets Aeneas. She immediately falls in love with Aeneas, and becomes “a victim to her own passion.” Due to this passion, she neglects her kingdom and forsakes her vow to remain faithful to her recently murdered husband,
for a man who ultimately rejects her. Dido’s tragic tale is an example of Augustus’ social reform: it provides instruction to women through criticism of female behavior. Virgil draws attention to Dido’s emotional and moral weaknesses because she is a woman. Dido demonstrates this weakness by forsaking her country for the passion of a man.
In her book Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves, Pomeroy states that “The weakness and light mindedness of the female sex were the indulging principles of Roman legal theory that mandated all women to be under custody of males.” This custody was enforced through the institution of the Paterfamilias, legislation that restricted women’s activities outside the home. In other words, Romans felt so strongly that women should not interfere in the man’s world that they created legislation to support this attitude. Therefore, a Roman environment in which a woman could attain Dido’s exclusive power did not exist. However, toward the end of the Republic, some women managed to work around the Paterfamilias to successfully command real life responsibilities. Since the Romans disapproved of this, Dido’s predicament in the Aeneid helped promote the idea that women should remain uninvolved in the practice of power and politics. Therefore, it is through Dido’s fate that the Roman Empire warned women to heed this advice or the results could be ruinous.
The second example that links Dido to Augustus’ social reform is seen through the consequences Dido faced by abandoning her sense of duty to her country. As evident in many Roman tales, upholding one’s duty to Rome is a value held in the highest regard. According to Suzanne Cross, “Both men
and women growing up in an increasingly powerful Rome [were] imbibed with concepts of heroism and duty . . . Roman women were expected to embody and support that cultural greatness as much as her man.” A sense of duty was one of the very values that Augustus hoped to revive through his reform. Virgil indicates that when Dido neglected her country’s needs, it led
not only to her own demise through her suicide, but to the demise of Carthage as well. This is also emphasized by Virgil’s portrayal of Aeneas, the idyllic Roman hero, who never abandons his “divine” duty. He, in contrast, forsakes his own desire and leaves Dido and Carthage to found what would become Rome. The Aeneid teaches that had Aeneas not followed his duty, Rome would never have existed. This very idea would have been reprehensible to any Roman. It also suggests that by fulfilling one’s duty to Rome, even greater glories could be expected.
The third way that Virgil’s treatment of Dido can be interpreted as instructive propaganda for women can be seen in Dido’s abandonment of her vow to remain faithful to her dead husband. The Romans held great respect for the wife who, after her husband’s death, never remarried. One of the most revered women in Rome was Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi. She married once, bore twelve children, and after her husband’s early death, never remarried. Due to her devotion to her husband, she even turned down the proposal of King Ptolemy. Cornelia’s devotion to her husband and family was so admired by the Romans that they erected a statue of her to honor her name. Augustus later restored the statue. Virgil would have us believe that had Dido remained true to her husband, then the outcome may have been different for her and Carthage.
This theme of promoting admirable woman from Roman legends with intent to influence conduct is also represented in Livy’s written histories. The Encyclopedia Britannica assents that “Livy’s histories were deeply rooted in the Augustan revival.” Livy himself wrote that “in history you have the infinite variety of human experiences, and in that record you can find for yourself both examples and warnings.” This promotion of admirable qualities is recurring in his Histories of Rome and exemplified in his retelling of the rape of Lucretia. In this legend, Collantinus, a relation of the ruler Tarquin, was away on military duty where he wagered with the other men over whose wife was the most virtuous. To gather their proof, the men decided to surprise their wives without notice. All the wives, except Lucretia, were found cavorting at parties while their husbands were away.
Conversely, Lucretia was found diligently spinning wool throughout the evening, waiting for word of her husband’s safety. Collantinus won the bet, but fatefully Sextus, heir to the Tarquin throne, had seen his wife, and fell immediately in lust with her. Later, he returned to her home and threatened to kill her and leave her to be found in bed with her slave if she would not sleep with him. Since Lucretia knew that this would destroy her honor as well as her husband’s, she regretfully agreed to his demands. Following this incident, Lucretia summoned her husband and family and told them what had happened. Although they absolved her of her crime, she took her own life because she felt the shame of committing adultery to be too great. After the public learned of the great injustice to the noble Lucretia, a great revolt arose that toppled the Tarquin dynasty. Lucretia embodied many of the things that the Romans considered honorable: the devotion she showed to her husband by dutifully remaining at home in his absence and how she spun wool to occupy her time. In addition, Lucretia’s resolve to take her own life due to the shame of losing her chastity also caused the Romans to admire her.
Another major source of Roman propaganda was Plutarch’s Lives. The Lives provides historical and biographical accounts of the Romans during the time of the Republic. While Plutarch wrote after the time of Augustus, Livy, and Virgil, much of his work seems to embody the same theme. Although his work was not a political act designed to formally promote moral ideals, Plutarch himself was interested in promoting high moral conduct through his work. In his Introduction to Lives, John Dryden writes that Plutarch wrote to “arouse the spirit of emulation.” Writing used in this way, in order to influence and incite emulation, can be seen as a form of propaganda and instruction.
A most distinct example of this is demonstrated in Plutarch’s relation of the tale of Brutus’ wife, Portia. Based on Plutarch’s account, Portia could see that her husband was deeply troubled. Because she cared for him so deeply, his torment was agonizing to her. She wanted to help rid him of his troubles, but she knew that because she was a woman she was not considered strong enough. Therefore, she devised a method to prove her strength and devotion to him. Portia proved her worthiness by taking a dagger and inflicting a deep wound upon her leg. She then hid her wound from her husband and proceeded to make a lengthy speech about her resolve to stand by him no matter what. It was only after she concluded her speech that she revealed her wound to him. She proved herself worthy to bear his secrets and absolved him of part of his burden. In Portia’s speech, she confesses to the inferiority of women to men, and thus pronounces it to all women. Portia ends her test of devotion by proclaiming “I have tried myself, and find that I can bid defiance to pain” (Lives 580). Later, when Portia hears that her husband has been killed, she takes her own life as well.
It is in this text that one sees the propagation of the Roman ideals of courage, devotion, and duty. Portia promotes women who are strong, courageous, fiercely devoted to their husbands, as well as one who knows her place. According to Pomeroy, Portia’s acts qualify her as an ideal Roman woman by her defense that “the ideal-wife motif stresses that not only should a woman have only one husband, but she ought not to survive him.”
In another instance, Plutarch discusses a woman’s negative behavior, and thus instructs his audience on how not to behave. According to Cross, Roman histories were “held up by the Romans as cautionary tales of the disastrous impact of ambitious women.” Virgil’s treatment of Dido is one example of this. Here, Plutarch provides an example from the late Republic that is more likely to be based on fact as opposed to the Aeneid’s myth. For instance, in The Lives, we learn about Terrentia, the wife of Cicero. Whenever she is referred to, a negative connotation is conveyed. Regarding this, Plutarch writes, “Terrentia [was] in her own nature neither tenderhearted nor timorous, but a woman eager for distinction who, as Cicero himself says, ‘would rather thrust herself into his public affairs, than communicate her domestic matters to him’ ” (Lives 421). However, we do learn that during her husband’s absence, she was successful in managing both money and property. Terrentia displayed undesirable behavior when she managed to engage in business practices without the use of a tutor. She was crafty enough to evade the law of Paterfamilias. Fortunately, for her, and the future of other women, Rome was otherwise engaged in a nasty civil war at the time. Otherwise, Terrentia may have been prosecuted for her unlawfulness. The punishment that Terrentia received for her behavior was divorce from her husband. Divorce, as the Romans put it, was referred to as “doing away with” a wife, implying, in quite a callous way, that divorcing one’s wife was a mere trifle. It also implies that a wife was not of much importance to her husband if he could so easily rid himself of her without much concern (Lives 421; 428).
Within the roughly 350 pages in Plutarch’s vol. 2 of the Lives, Portia’s tale occupies the most significant passage devoted to Roman women: a mere one and a half pages. This can be interpreted as propaganda in two ways. First, it sends a strong message about what female behavior was admired in Roman society. Second, it promotes the idea that women were considered insignificant to the Roman national idea of who they were and what they accomplished. This aided Roman men in keeping women in their submissive roles.
Psychologists generally agree that our social roles are learned. “We internalize the attitudes of the society around us by making the attitudes our own . . . [therefore] people internalize cultural expectations about how to behave. This is usually accomplished through the imitation of role models.” Therefore, the works of Virgil, Livy, and Plutarch all can be interpreted as propaganda by how they helped to define the roles of women in the Roman Empire.
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