A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice by Jack Holland Read Free Book Online Page B

single one is known by name. But the women of Rome made themselves known; a few have been talked about ever since. Messalina, whose name became synonymous with sexual excess; Agrippina, the woman of ruthless, ‘unnatural’ ambition who murdered her way to the top; Sempronia, the intellectual who abandoned the female sphere to enter the dangerous male world of conspiracy and revolution; Cleopatra, the brilliant seductress who plotted to rule the Empire and plunged it into civil war; and Julia, the emperor’s rebellious daughter who defied her father’s plans and threw the state into crisis. Theyemerge from the pages of Rome’s historians and poets as flesh-and-blood examples of how men viewed women. Much of what is said about them is far from flattering. But men’s vitriol proves as powerful a historical preservative for women as does their desire. These recorded sentiments are an indication of the impact women made and the obstacles they overcame, including some of the most fearsome misogynistic laws ever codified.
    The Romans were not original thinkers. They did not produce a new theory or philosophy to justify the oppression and dehumanization of women. The stereotypes that evolved in Greek culture were good enough for them (as they have been for many succeeding cultures, including our own). But Roman writers allow us to see behind them. In the literary and historical portraits of the handful of extraordinary women who helped shape one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever seen, we get a glimpse of their struggle to assert themselves.
    A difference quickly emerges between the misogyny of the Greeks and that found in Rome. Greek misogyny is based on fears of what women might do if they were free to do it. However, as far as is known, if women challenged men, these actions were confined to their private world and only made public through the realm of the Greek imagination. But from the start, Roman women openly challenged the prevailing misogyny and made public their feelings and demands. Roman women protested their fate and took to the streets. In Rome, the veil of their anonymity was lifted. Women entered the public sphere, and made history. They intervened in wars and stopped them; they took to the streets in protest at government policy and changed it; they murdered their husbands; a few trained and fought as gladiators in the arena (evoking worrying images of Amazons); they subverted the authority of their fathers; they even sought personal satisfaction in their relationships, and rejected their role as breeders of rulers; and, perhaps mostdisturbingly of all, they came tantalizingly close to political power. They provoked a backlash which mustered some of the biggest guns that literature and history have ever aimed at them.
    The context in which this battle was waged was the greatest and most successful empire the world has ever produced, an empire of some sixty million people that at its peak stretched from Scotland to Iraq and embraced a bewildering variety of cultures and peoples. Rome, its capital, was the largest city that had ever existed, with a population in the first century AD of between one and two million. It was the New York of its day, a city of savage spectacles and immense grandeur, teeming with people of different races from every corner of the vast, sprawling Empire.
    Of those millions, only a comparatively few names have been preserved. They are, overwhelmingly, the names of those who made up society’s upper echelons, contending for honour, power and wealth in a theatre every bit as dangerous and bloody as that of the arena, where gladiators fought to their deaths under the burning Roman sun to the cheers and howls of the Roman mob.
    It is in this arena of the ruling class that, over 2,000 years later, we find the names of nearly all of the Roman women still known to us. They were defined by their relationships to men: as daughters, sisters, mistresses, wives, and mothers. Like the