The freedwoman Claudia Acte (1st century CE) is one of the few people attached the Emperor Nero to have mostly escaped the censure of his Roman biographers.  This becomes even more remarkable when you realize that she is known entirely for her three-year love affair with Nero* while he was married to his step-sister Claudia Octavia.

Cassius Dio tells us that she originally came to Rome as a slave from Asia Minor.  Her name tells us that prior to being freed she most likely belonged to either the Emperor Claudius or to his daughter Octavia.

On the left (on one side of the coin) is Claudia Octavia, possibly Acte's former mistress.
[Coin showing Claudia Octavia on one side and the goddess Hera Perinthiōn on the other]
[1st century CE, source: Wikimedia Commons]

Nero took Acte, already a freedwoman by this point, as his mistress one year into his reign.  He was helped in this by his advisors Seneca the Younger and Burrus, both of whom hoped she would counteract the influence Nero’s mother, Agrippina the Younger, had over him.  Their hopes were fulfilled and Acte quietly proved herself a capable enough advisor to counter Agrippina’s influence for a while.  Nero may have tried to marry her, infuriating his mother by fabricating a royal ancestry for her.  The relationship ended after three years, though none of our sources tell us why.  Nor do we know exactly what Acte did afterwards, but considering how much wealth she acquired during those three years it’s likely that she retired very comfortably.

Did you know that Wikimedia Commons has a category for neckbeards?  This image of Nero is in it.
[Bust of Emperor Nero, Musei Capitolini, source: Wikimedia Commons]

How exactly to refer to Acte’s relationship with Nero presents some difficulty.  Suetonius uses the word concubina, which was usually considered to be a monogamous relationship,** though the Emperor was already married.  Nero’s other biographers avoid using any term and simply say that they had a relationship, avoiding the question entirely.  There could be any number of reasons for Suetonius to put things the way he did.  The fact that he was the only one, however, leads me to believe that she was considered more of a mistress than a concubine.

For all that she seems to have been an important person in Emperor Nero’s life for a short while, we know very little about Acte, with nearly all of our information coming from his biographers, who devote to her only a line or two each.***  At the very least she seems to have been intelligent enough to counter Agrippina for a while.

*Or at least his three-year love affair with her.  We have little to no idea how she felt about the matter.
**For a given value of monogamous.  Legally a man could have either a wife or a concubine, but not both.  For more info on this see here and here.
***Her epitaph has been found, but the text of it appears not to be available anywhere online.  *grumble grumble*

Sources/Further Reading:
Cassius Dio, Roman History 61.7 - Lacus Curtius
Suetonius, Life of Nero (sections 28 & 50) - Lacus Curtius (Latin text here)
Tacitus, Annals 13.12, 13.45, 14.2 - Lacus Curtius (Separate links)
Claudia Acte - Wikipedia
Agrippina the Younger - De Imperatoribus Romanis
Nero - De Imperatoribus Romanis

In the cities of Ancient Greece, free women’s primary task was the making of cloth and clothing.  Indeed, the association between women and textile work was so strong that “wool-work” was sometimes used as a catchall term for “the work women do.”

This was especially true in Athens.  The woman of the house was responsible for the production of most, if not all, of the textiles needed by the oikos.*  In richer households this mostly meant she oversaw the slaves who did the actual work of carding, spinning, weaving, etc.  The majority of wives, however, did this work themselves with the help of other women (free and slave) in the household, though in households with enough people the highest status work, weaving, usually went to a higher status woman, leaving more menial tasks women of lower status.  In addition to making most or all of the cloth needed by their respective oikoi, the free women of Athens were responsible every year for weaving the peplos worn by the city’s statue of Athena.  Every four years they wove the peplos for the Panathenaea, which was large enough to be fixed to a ship as a sail.

Textile work was nowhere near so important to Spartan women. According to Xenophon, Lycurgus (supposed founder of the Spartan state) felt that slaves were capable of creating enough cloth for a household, freeing wives up to focus on running their households and making themselves fit mothers.**  There is evidence, however, that Spartan free women’s work did include weaving.  Weaving for ritual purposes was done almost entirely by free women.  Unlike Athenian women, however, their reputations did not depend on their skills in weaving.

Textile work was the main part of women’s work elsewhere as well.  It was important enough in Gortyn that the city’s law code stipulated exactly how much of what she had woven a woman could take with her when she divorced. In those cities for which we have archaeological evidence, Olynthos for example, the prevalence and locations of loom weights back up the assertions of literary sources.  Nearly all Ancient Greek women were involved in the making of textiles, the only kind of women’s work that Greek men seemed to find productive.


*A rough translation of this word would be “household” or “family.”  It was the basic unit of society in most Greek city-states.
**It probably helped that Spartan clothing was far less complicated and voluminous than Athenian clothing.

Sources/Further Reading:

Primary Sources
Lefkowitz, Mary R. and Maureen B. Fant, trans. Women’s Life in Greece and Rome: a Source Book in Translation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Plato, Republic 5.451-461e - Perseus
Plato, Laws 7.804-806c - Perseus
Hesiod, Works and Days 59-82 - Perseus
Xenophon, Constitution of the Lacedaemonians 1.2-10 - Diotima
Diogenes Laertius 6.96-8 - Diotima
Xenophon, On Household Management [Oeconomicus] 6.17-10 -Diotima
Occupations of Freedwomen. Athens (Lewis, Hesperia 28 [1959] 208-38 - (Found in Lefkowitz & Fant (no.329), no link available)
Pausanias, Description of Greece 5.16.2-4 - Perseus
Pausanias, Description of Greece 3.16.1-2 - Perseus
Laws Relating to Women, Gortyn, Crete - Diotima

Secondary Sources
Pomeroy, Sarah B.  Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves. New York: Schocken, 1995.
Pomeroy, Sarah B. Spartan Women. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Nevett, L. C. “Gender Relations in the Classical Greek Household: The Archaeological Evidence.” The Annual of the British School at Athens 90 (1995): 363-381.

This is Part 2 of 2.  Part 1 is here.

As I showed last Friday, the Ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians knew and accepted as a matter of course that the Earth was spherical.  This knowledge was not lost and continued to be accepted as fact throughout the medieval period.

The astronomer Aryabhata
[Modern sculpture of Aryabhata on the grounds of IUCAA Pune, source: Wikimedia Commons]

In the early 6th century, the Indian astronomer Aryabhata* wrote the Aryabhatya in which he made his own calculation of the Earth’s circumference more accurately than Eratosthenes.  His work was read, translated, and commentated upon numerous times throughout the centuries.

The Venerable Bede is one of the earliest medieval Europeans we know of to make reference to the Earth as a sphere in the early 8th century.  He used this in The Reckoning of Time to explain the unequal length of days as the seasons changed.  This work was particularly widely copied and read due to Carolingian requirements for priests and was generally accepted without further proofs.  Additionally, the circulation of a few ancient works such as Plato’s Timaeus meant that medieval Europeans knew quite well that the Earth was round.

Plato's Timaeus, the only one of his dialogues available in Latin during much of the Middle Ages says that the Creator "made the world in the form of a globe, round as from a lathe, having its extremes in every direction equidistant from the centre, the most perfect and the most like itself of all figures"
[Pages from a Latin copy of Plato's Timaeus, early 10th century, source: Wikimedia Commons]

Islamic scholars still had copies of many works lost to Christian Europe, the most important of which were the works of Aristotle and Ptolemy.  Medieval Muslim rulers and scholars put a lot of energy into calculating the circumference and curvature of the planet** as they needed to be able to calculate the direction of Mecca from any given point on Earth.

The Persian scholar Ibn Sina, known as Avicenna in Europe.
[Image of Ibn Sina on a modern Tajikistani banknote, source: Wikimedia Commons]

In the 12th and 13th centuries, Islamic scholars such as Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd*** translated and wrote extensively on the works of Aristotle, Plato, and other ancient authors.  Ibn Rushd in particular concerned himself with the difference between Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the universe and Aristotle’s theories on the movements of the elements.

These works came to the universities of Christian Europe through Al-Andalus.  Western Europeans already knew the Earth was round, but these ancient texts and the commentaries on them and produced both a new interest in the topic.  Thomas Aquinas on several occasions used this fact as an example of something already known, which Roger Bacon and others speculated whether or not the equator was too hot to be crossed.****

Hildegard von Bingen included this image in her third visionary work Liber Divinorum Operum (Book of Divine Works).  I don't think it gets clearer than that.
[Image from the Liber Divinorum Operum, HIldegard von Bingen, 12th century]
[Source: Wikimedia Commons]

These works came to the universities of Christian Europe through Al-Andalus.  Western Europeans already knew the Earth was round, but these ancient texts and the commentaries on them and produced both a new interest in the topic.  Thomas Aquinas on several occasions used this fact as an example of something already known, which Roger Bacon and others speculated whether or not the equator was too hot to be crossed.****

The spherical nature of the Earth was not up for debate in this time period.  People knew it already.  The question of whether the Earth went around the Sun or vice versa, on the other hand was the subject of significant debate, but that is a topic for another time.


*He should technically belong in the Ancient post rather than the Medieval one but I accidentally left him out.  So he gets his own paragraph here.
**Names of interest here include Al-Ma’mun (a 9th century Caliph who hired several astronomers and geographers to calculate the distance between to cities as well as the curvature and the circumference of the Earth), Al-Farghani (one of the astronomers hired by Al-Ma’mun), and Abu Rayhan Biruni (an 11th century scholar who developed a more accurate way of calculating the Earth’s circumference).
***Known in Europe as Avicenna and Averroes respectively.  Ibn Rushd was so famous in Western Europe as a translator of and commentator on Aristotle that many works refer to him simply as “the Commentator.”
****Christopher Columbus proved that it could.  He did not prove that the Earth was round because 1) he and everybody else already knew that and 2) that’s not what he was arguing.  He used Al-Farghani’s calculation of the Earth’s circumference in Arabic miles and treated it as though it were in Roman miles to prove (wrongly) that the Earth was much smaller than people said it was.

Sources/Further Reading:
The Aryabhatiya (Translated by Walter Eugene Clark) - Wilbour-Hall (Note: not searchable, unfortunately)
Aryabhata - Wikipedia
Claudius Ptolemy, Almagest - Central Connecticut State University
Bede the Venerable, De Temporum Ratione - Chronologie und Kalender (Note: This is in Latin.  I was unable to find an English translation online.)
The Reckoning of Time - Wikipedia
Bede the Venerable - Wikipedia
Plato, Timaeus - MIT.edu (Search "globe" for the reference.)
Timaeus (dialogue) - Wikipedia
Aristotle, De caelo Part 2 - MIT.edu (Search "spherical" and you'll find the reference.)
Aristotle, Meteorology Part 1 - MIT.edu
Aristotle, Meteorology Part 2 - MIT.edu
Al-Ma'mun - Wikipedia
Al-Farghani - Wikipedia
Abu Rayhan Biruni - Wikipedia
Biruni's Measurement of the Earth - Geogebra
Ibn Sina - Wikipedia
Ibn Rushd - Wikipedia
Averroes - Islamic Philosophy Online (This is a collection of works by Ibn Rushd, mostly in Arabic and English.)
Hildegard of Bingen - Wikipedia
Johannes de Sacrobosco - Wikipedia
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Question 1, Article 1 - Christian Classics Ethereal Library
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Question 54, Article 2 - Christian Classics Ethereal Library
Thomas Aquinas - Wikipedia
Roger Bacon - Wikipedia
Spherical Earth - Wikipedia

As is unfortunately usual, there are no known pictures of Emma.  Instead, have an image of the king she supported (her husband Rudolph, on the right) and the king she opposed (Charles the Simple, on the left).
[Image from the Chroniques de France ou de St Denis, 14th century]
[Source: Wikimedia Commons]

Emma of France (d. 934 CE), wife of Rudolph of France, was one of the few early medieval queens who we know entirely through her married life rather than primarily through her widowhood.*  It is in large part due to her actions, both political and military, that her husband was able to keep the throne of France despite being a usurper and facing several revolts.

Her birth date is uncertain, as is the identity of her mother.  Her father was Robert I of France, but which of his wives, Aelis of Maine or Béatrice of Vermandois, was her mother remains under debate.  She married Duke Rudolph of Burgundy in 921 or thereabouts.  The couple had a son named Louis and possibly a daughter named Judith.

In July 923 her husband was elected and crowned King of West Francia.  This was in large part due to the support of Emma’s brother Hugh the Great, and it has been implied that it was due to his sister’s influence.  A few months later, Emma had herself crowned and consecrated as well,** making her the first Frankish queen that we know to have been officially crowned.  There were several attempts on the part of the Vermandois family to restore the Carolingian Charles the Simple to the throne, but Emma and Rudolph squashed them all.

Emma took a very active military role on several occasions.  In 927, she managed the defense of Laon, a key city in defending the couple’s hold on the realm, and led military offensives from there.  She refused to leave the city when Rudolph surrendered to Herbert of Vermandois and agreed to give the city to him.  Despite this, Emma held onto Laon until papal intervention forced her out.  Four years later she captured the city of Avalon and two years after that in 933 she led the siege of Château Thierry, which then surrendered to her, not to Rudolph.

Emma remained a very active queen up until her death in November of 934, when she was in the middle of helping her husband put down the revolts of some of his vassals. 


*Which was nonexistent since she died before her husband.
**I want to emphasize this: she had herself crowned.  This was her own idea and on her own initiative, not her husband’s.

Sources/Further Reading:

Stafford, Pauline. Queens, Concubines, and Dowagers: the King's Wife in the Early Middle Ages. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1983.

Emma of France - Medieval Lands (Charles Cawley)
Rudolph of Burgundy - Medieval Lands (Charles Cawley)
Emma of France - Wikipedia
Rudolph of Burgundy (Emma's husband) - Wikipedia
Robert I of France (Emma's father) - Wikipedia
Béatrice of Vermandois (possibly Emma's mother) - Wikipedia
Hugh the Great (Emma's brother) - Wikipedia

I’ve noticed several people lately talking about the myth that people believed the Earth was flat all the way until the late 15th century.  So I thought I’d write up my own history of thought on the topic.  This will be Part 1 of 2, covering the ancient Greek and Roman world.  Part 2 will cover the medieval world (and not just Europe) next Wednesday. (Edit: Part 2 is here.)

The most common evidence used to prove the Earth's spherical shape was the fact that it casts a round shadow on the Moon during a lunar eclipse.
[Lunar Eclipse in Estonia, October 28, 2004, photographed by Epukas]
[Source: Wikimedia Commons]

The earliest evidence we have comes from Greek sources.*  Different philosophers attribute the original idea to different people, the best known being Pythagoras.  None of the evidence is reliable but whoever it was, the idea gained enough widespread acceptance that by the 5th century BCE that Plato was able have his characters in Phaedo discuss the idea without much argument.  Aristotle used the theory to divide the planet into five climatic zones: one very hot at the equator, two temperate regions, and two very cold near the poles.

The idea spread throughout the Hellenistic world and in the 3rd century CE, Eratosthenes of Cyrene (now Libya) made an attempt to calculate the circumference of the Earth.  Depending on whether he used the Egyptian or Attic stade as a unit of measure (he doesn’t say), he was only off by 2%-17% and any error can be attributed to him having the wrong numbers.**

Strabo used a line from Homer's Odyssey and the fact that the Earth's roundness hides the bottom of a ship on the horizon to prove that Homer knew the Earth was a sphere.
[Ship at horizon, March 2006, photographed by Anton, source: Wikimedia Commons]

Three astronomers, Philolaos, Aristarchos of Samos, and Seleukos of Seleukia, suggested that the earth was not a fixed point around which other bodies orbited.  Both Aristarchos and Seleukos disagreed with Philolaos’ suggestion that both Earth and Sun orbited some central fire and argued that the Earth orbited the Sun.  All three of them were often ignored in favor of the model with the Earth at the center most popularized by the works of Claudius Ptolemy in the 2nd century CE.

The idea of a spherical Earth was so commonly accepted within the Roman Empire that both Cicero and Pliny the Elder refer to it as fact quite offhandedly.  By this point no one that we now know of in Roman or Hellenistic lands or the societies that came out of them was arguing that the Earth was flat.


*This doesn’t mean that the Greeks were the first or only people to figure this out.  This is not only a problem of what evidence has survived, but also what documents people have studied and circulated.
**I never learned this in history class in school.  No, I heard of it in one of my upper level math classes.  For shame.

Sources/Further Reading:
Plato, Phaedo 108-109 - Perseus
Aristotle, De caelo Part 2 - MIT.edu (Search "spherical" and you'll find the reference.)
Aristotle, Meteorology Part 1 - MIT.edu
Aristotle, Meteorology Part 2 - MIT.edu
Eratosthenes - Wikipedia
Philolaus - Wikipedia
Aristarchos of Samos - Wikipedia
Seleukos of Seleukia - Wikipedia
Cicero, Somnium Scipionis - Tertullian.org (The exact reference starts in paragraph 8)
Pliny the Elder, Natural History 2.2 - Perseus
Claudius Ptolemy, Almagest - Central Connecticut State University
Spherical Earth - Wikipedia

When it came to the question of what constituted a valid marriage (a question that mostly fell to the Church to answer), one of the only things that medieval Christian legalists could agree on was that consent was key.  This carried over from Roman law, which required only consent (often that of the couple was held to be implied by that of their parents) for a union to be legally valid.*  Medieval legalists delved into questions of the meaning of consent, the importance of consummation, and what other things were required for a valid marriage.

What we call the Early Middle Ages were a period of transition and integration between Roman, Christian, and “barbarian” marriage customs.  While it isn’t possible to speak of any definitive legal code in this time period, most legal writings began emphasizing the consent of the individuals actually getting married over that of their families, though it’s unlikely these opinions had much practical force.  The question of consummation and whether it was important as consent also began to come up.

By the 12th and 13th centuries, lawyers, in particular Gratian and those who followed him, were attempting to clarify and strengthen the Church’s position on these things, particularly on what constituted consent or a defect therein.  Defects in consent included concealing one’s identity from one’s spouse, being underage, insanity, or the concealment of heretical beliefs.**  The consent of parents was held to be important but not legally essential.*  Gratian held consummation to be as important as consent, though this was a less defensible position, considering that the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph were believed never to have consummated their marriage.

Over the course of a millennium, consent became more and more essential, while its definition became more refined.  The debate about consummation continued for centuries, with points scored on both sides.  It’s important to remember though that this only tells part of the story.  What happened in practice did not always match up with lawyers’ arguments.


*What the law said was not always what people actually did. In Ancient Rome, for example, though consent was the only thing legally required, social custom required a dowry and the enactment of various ceremonies.  These were equally important, but not legally required.  In medieval Europe, parental consent became less essential legally while still retaining its social importance.
**Some lawyers also argued that it was impossible for a woman to consent to marry her rapist and forbade any such marriage from taking place.  Gratian disagreed, arguing that she and her family could consent but only if the rapist repented and did penance.

Sources/Further Reading:
Brundage, James A. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Marriage and Divorce - Consistory Database
Marriage Canons in The Decretum of Gratian - Catholic University of America

One of the most infamous of Roman Imperial women, Empress Agrippina the Younger (15 – 59 CE) was sister, niece and wife, and mother to three successive Emperors.  Though she stands accused of incest, murder, and a whole host of intrigues designed to secure her own power, her reputation prevents us from really knowing exactly what happened.

Agrippina was the daughter of Agrippina the Elder and Germanicus.  She spent much of her childhood in Rome while her parents traveled.  At age 13 she married Domitius Ahenobarbus, a man whom Suetonius calls “in every aspect of his life detestable.”  The couple had one son together, the future Emperor Nero.

Her life changed when her brother Caligula became Emperor.  For a while he honored his sisters very highly, but after Drusilla’s death showed Agrippina and Livilla no respect and ended up exiling both of them.  It was probably during this time period that Agrippina wrote her (now lost) history of her family and of her mother’s life.**

Agrippina is probably best known for her relationships with her uncle Claudius and her son Nero.  She married Claudius in 49 CE after the Senate made unions between uncle and niece legal by special decree, largely due to her own political maneuvering.

Once Empress, Agrippina encouraged Claudius to prefer Nero over his son Britannicus.  She moved decisively to remove from power anyone who might oppose her plans to make her son Emperor and quickly married her son to Claudius’s daughter Octavia.  Ancient sources claim that Agrippina poisoned her husband when he began to favor Britannicus again, but how true that accusation was is unknown.

I find the power dynamics in this sculpture fascinating.
[Agrippina crowning her son Nero, 1st century CE, source: Wikimedia Commons]

Agrippina remained quite powerful during the early years of Nero’s reign.  It was only when he took up with his mistress Acte that her influence waned.  A rift grew between them and in 59 CE Nero attempted to have her killed in a shipwreck.  When she survived that, he sent his guards to kill her.***

All of the major sources on Agrippina’s are heavily biased against both her and her son.  As a result, we cannot know which of the accusations against her were true and which were mere fabrications.  What comes through is her desire for power and her intelligence in getting it.


*Romans and their terrible, confusing naming conventions for women.  Gah!  What?  Have strong opinions on this?  Who me?
**Thus she predates Anna Komnene as a female historian.
***We acted out the murder of Agrippina the Younger in one of my Classics courses in college.  Every single role (down to Agrippina’s maid and guardsman) was cross-cast except Nero.  I played the captain of the soldiers sent to kill her.

There was a strong connection in Early Medieval Europe between queens and monasteries, particularly convents.  They founded them, supported them politically and financially, and the majority of widowed queens eventually retired within their walls.*  It seems like a pretty quiet retirement.  For some it was.  For others, not so much.

Some queens took vows as nuns, willingly or unwillingly.  This didn’t mean they lived quietly though.  Many of them became abbesses of their communities, continuing to lead even after their retirement.  Many of these women remained active even in their “quiet” retirement as nuns, maintaining and defending the rights and properties of their monasteries.  Bertha, daughter of Lothar I, for example, involved herself in property dispute with Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims, with accusations being flung on both sides.  Nor was she the only one.  Many dowager queens, however, did not become nuns.

Richardis, former wife of Charles the Bald, was repudiated rather than widowed, but her actions were similar to those of a widow.  She became Abbess of Andlau.
[Mosaic in the church of Mont Sainte Odile depicting St. Richardis (right), photographed 2010]
[Source: Wikimedia Commons]

Queens like Adelaide of Italy were more active in their retirement, they made the monastery a base of operations and lived there but held themselves ready to leave and involve themselves in politics the moment the need arose.  Adelaide’s last (and certainly not only) trip out of Seltz Abbey, where she had retired, was to support her nephew against a rebellion.  Eleanor of Aquitaine, though not from the same time period, behaved similarly.  She nominally retired to Fontevraud but was heavily involved in the political and military actions of her sons and traveled often.  These two women are perhaps the most spectacular examples, but they are certainly not the only ones.

Fontevraud, to which Eleanor of Aquitaine retired.
[Aerial view of Fontevraud, photographed 2005, source: Wikimedia Commons]

Many widowed queens were not quite so active and simply retired quietly,** leaving little to no evidence of their later activities.  In a lot of ways a monastery was an ideal place for a widowed queen to retire to.  If she became abbess, she could continue using many of the skills she had learned as queen.  Even if she didn’t take the veil, the kinds of monasteries these women retired to tended to be fairly stable institutions that would be well equipped to care for an aging queen and were stable enough to serve as a base of operations.  Though not all queens retired to monasteries doing so did provide several advantages.


*Some only did so after acting as regent for an underage son or fulfilling the duties of queenship (keeping his household running, acting as advisor or sometimes regent, patronizing monasteries, etc.) for an unmarried son.  Some did so beforehand.
**Willingly or unwillingly.  Dowager Empress Angelberga was forced into a two-year retirement in a monastery not of her choosing after the election of her husband’s successor because the man was so wary of her political power.  It took a pleading letter from the Pope to the man’s wife for him to release her to go to a monastery of her choosing.

Free children in Ancient Rome lived under the guardianship of an adult male, usually their father.  Men were freed from guardianship when they came of age.  Women, on the other hand, remained under guardianship for most of their lives.*  A guardian did had no say in a woman’s private life, including in who she married.**  His role was to give formal consent to her public (mostly economic) actions, for women were believed to be light of mind and too easily persuaded.  This was law and its justification.  What that meant in practice, however, changed drastically over time.

The Twelve Tables (c. 450 BCE) mandated that all women (excepting Vestals) have a guardian, giving their “levity of mind” as justification.  At this point, women gained freedom from patria potestas (the absolute power of the head of a family) and became sui iuris in widowhood, though they still required a guardian.  If an adult woman wished to change guardians, she could do so via a non-marital coemptio, or fictional sale of herself.

In 195 BCE, both Cato the Elder and Lucius Valerius in voicing their opposite opinions on the repeal of the Oppian law*** based their arguments in practice and ideal of the guardianship of women.  This was still a powerful ideal, but it was changing in practice.  Marriage sine manu was becoming much more common than marriage cum manu, which meant that many women became sui iuris much earlier in their lives, with the deaths of their fathers (or other guardian) rather than of their husbands.

It was only with Augustus’ laws on family and the revisions passed shortly thereafter that some women gained complete freedom from guardianship.  According to these laws, freeborn women with three children and freedwomen with four no longer required guardians.  By this point, guardianship was already becoming much less strict as well.  There is evidence that some guardians simply agreed to most things a woman their care wanted to do.

Two centuries later, guardianship of women had become a mere formality.  The jurist Gaius argued that it should be abolished entirely, since women were already managing their own affairs, and when their guardians disagreed, officials more often sided with the woman than her guardian.  By the 4th century just that had happened.  The requirement for the guardianship of women in Roman Law had vanished entirely.


*The only exceptions, of course, were the Vestal Virgins, in deference to their priesthood.
**That right went to whoever had patria postestas over her.  A woman sui iuris was allowed make these decisions herself.
***This law was passed in 215 BCE during the Second Punic War after Rome’s defeat in the battle of Cannae.  In order to ensure that more money went to the state to pay for the war, the Oppian Law restricted women’s wealth and their right to display what wealth they did have.

Sources/Further Reading:
Women in Roman Law and Society - Diotima
On guardianship (Gaius, Institutes 1. 144-5, 190-1.) - Diotima
Marital Subordnation (Gaius, Institutes 1.108-118, 136-137a.) - Diotima
The Twelve Tables (excerpts). Rome, 450 B.C. (traditional date). (FIRA2, vol. 1, p. 23. Tr. ARS. L) - Diotima
Livy, History of Rome 34.1, exc. Late 1st cent. B.C.-early 1st cent. A.D. L - Diotima
Two contracts for the services of wet nurses for slave children. Alexandria, 13 B.C. (BGU 4.1106, 1107. G) - Diotima [Two examples of brothers acting as guardians]
Women in Ancient Rome - Wikipedia

It turns out that next week will be posts number 99, 100, and 101.  In honor of that, and since I know there are people reading this, I thought I’d open those up to requests.  (To be honest, I usually welcome requests, but this time I’m making it explicit.)  I usually alternate Ancient and Medieval, so the schedule should look like this:  Monday - Biography (Ancient), Wednesday - Medieval, Friday - Ancient.  So, is there anyone or anything you want to see me write about?  Comment here or tell me on the Contact Me page.  I swear I don't bite.