Marriage, a History by Stephanie Coontz Read Free Book Online

away his career for the sake of a woman’s love. Both he and Cleopatra were using their relationship to gain a kingdom.
    Octavian emerged the victor in 31 B.C., prompting Antony and Cleopatra to commit suicide rather than face being paraded through the streets of Rome as dishonored captives. Octavian promptly had Caesarion, then seventeen years old, put to death, and Egypt became a Roman province.
    Back in Rome, Octavian’s sister Octavia devoted her efforts to raising her family. In addition to the two daughters she had borne Mark Antony during their marriage, she had three children by her first marriage, as well as Antony and Cleopatra’s two youngest sons and Antony’s younger son by his first wife (her brother Octavian having had the older son put to death to eliminate a potential rival). Imagine the undercurrents in that blended family!
    Cleopatra’s ambitious campaign to escape Roman domination and revive the power of Egypt shows that princesses were not always helpless pawns in the marital intrigues of the ancient world. Sometimes they exerted great power in their own right, frustrating the plans of those who had arranged their marriages or hoped to profit from them. Women’s power plays generally revolved around their husbands: who they might marry or scheme to discard. But the development of Christianity offered one ambitious Roman woman an alternative strategy in the politics of marriage, sexuality, and kinship.
    Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century A.D. In the fifth century the emperor’s sister Pulcheria came up with a political strategy somewhat similar to that of Queen Elizabeth I in England more than a thousand years later. Pulcheria declared herself celibate, dodging an arranged marriage, and established an elaborate Christian cult to honor her virginity. Gradually she installed handpicked bishops in the churches. Upon her brother’s death, she seized power and married a common soldier who, according to her official proclamations, had pledged to honor and guard her virginity, so that her spiritual authority would remain intact. While her husband directed the empire’s military affairs, Pulcheria conducted most of the other government and social business through her control of the state church. 23
    In Japan in the eighth century A.D., another strong-willed princess was able to use her political skills to turn her marital and kin connections to her own ends and serve two terms as emperor of Japan. The Fujiwara clan was well known for its marriage politics. For several centuries they made sure that their sisters and daughters married the crown princes and emperors of Japan. This meant that the head of the Fujiwara family was the father-in-law or the grandfather—and often both—of the reigning emperor. As the power behind the throne, the Fujiwaras not only maneuvered the young emperors into marrying their own aunts but ensured that emperors abdicated at an early age, so that each emperor was a young man easily manipulated by the family’s elders. Thus the emperor himself had little real authority. To “capture the king”—to have the emperor father a son with one’s daughter—was the route to political power in the Japanese court . 24
    In the eighth century, however, before they had quite perfected their system, the Fujiwaras elevated one of their sisters, a commoner, from the position of a secondary wife to that of the Empress-Consort of Japan. Her daughter then became the crown princess, and when her father abdicated in her favor in 749, she became the Empress Koken. Nine years later her powerful kin maneuvered Koken into resigning in favor of a male with even closer links to the Fujiwara clan leaders. But Koken remained so politically effective that a few years later she was able to banish, then kill, her main opponent in the clan and depose the ruling emperor. She came back to the throne a second time, this time as the Emperor Shotoku, and