Powerful Matrons: new political actors in the late Roman Republic is the latest product of Rohr Vio’s prolific last few years. In the book’s introduction, Rohr Vio indicates that the current work is not only an English translation of Le custodi del potere. Donne e politica alla fine della repubblica romana, (Salerno Editrice, 2019), but also that this translation “has [presented] an opportunity for [Rohr Vio] to revise the text, whose contents have since been expanded and its structure redesigned” (18). Rohr Vio also points out the revision’s “integrated and updated bibliography and a new chapter discussing the legitimacy of women’s political initiatives in the 1st century BCE, which is key to understanding the processes outlined in these pages” (18). The focus of this review will be the latest version of this work, which makes the 2019 version available and accessible to a wider audience.
Valerius Maximus’ slight “What business has a woman with a public meeting? If ancestral custom be observed, none” is the hook of the introduction and the book as a whole (9).[1] Rohr Vio similarly starts the subsequent chapters with a historiographical excerpt (including but not limited to Plutarch and Tacitus), which she then places in conversation with the theme that each chapter represents. Hereafter, she illustrates gender expectations traditionally associated with women and how these mostly domestic roles were a framework to evaluate feminine conduct. She observes how authors such as Valerius and Cato mostly saw a clear demarcation between male and female actions in ancient Rome (Rohr Vio uses the Lex Oppia as a poignant illustration hereof), though these distinctions would become more muddled as internal conflicts started to show cracks in the by then already rocky foundation of the Late Republic. The latter is for Rohr Vio an opportunity for female figures to inhabit public and political spaces from which they were previously generally excluded (though there are exceptions, e.g. the Sabine women). Rohr Vio does not perceive any type of gender revolution but rather sees such instances as a symptom of the civil wars’ state of emergency. She concludes: “the matrons of the Late Republic did not act in the hope of upturning female duties and changing social roles, but instead they acted as guardians of a power that passed—fleetingly and only out of necessity—through their hands” (14). Inevitably, praise and blame exist as parameters in the perceptions of these women. Rohr Vio includes the classic example of the Laudatio Turiae as an example of how a matron might behave exemplarily during the civil war era, though most of the historical evidence from which Rohr Vio draws is literary. She describes her method for the book as follows: “Sources very rarely remember matrons’ political dynamism during this historical period. … It is only by juxtaposing all attested numerous episodes bearing similarities in the types of female political interventions, that we can interpret each female initiative not as an exception, but as evidence of the emergence of a new kind of female behaviour, which had become common practice in this historical period” (17). These pieces of “evidence of a new kind of female behaviour,” then, become touchstones for the seven chapters and chapter divisions outlined below. In general, Rohr Vio structures the chapters by dividing them into two or three categories, which she then applies to the various matrons of the Late Republic. While the scope of this review does not allow mentioning each example, the main protagonists include women ranging from Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, to Fulvia and Octavia, two of Marc Antony’s wives, and Livia Drusilla, Octavia’s future sister-in-law. The work’s conclusion and set of indexes will prove helpful for readers who are looking for specific matrons and their activities.
Rohr Vio starts with Chapter 1 “Creators of Family Ties and Political Relationships,” which she divides into the two following categories: “matrons as instruments in their own family’s marriage strategies” and “promoters of marriage ties and divorces.” She lists several examples of how necessarily passive matrons were able to employ “betrothals, marriages, divorces and repudiations” as tools to interfere in Late Republican Roman politics. These kinship links and the “important political implications of these matrons’ actions”, Rohr Vio observes, “were in clear violation of the mos maiorum” (43). Chapter 2 focuses on these matrons’ capacity as “educators of cives,” again looking first at the women’s own education, “before becoming educators,” and subsequently shifting to their roles as “mentors for sons.” Starting from Tacitus’ classic commentary on oratory and education in Tac. Dial. 28, she provides examples of the role of female educators and pupils, of whom Cornelia of the Gracchi, Atia (Octavian Augustus’ mother), and Cornelia Metella (Pompey’s last wife), to name just a few, are prime examples. Rohr Vio uses a tripartite division for Chapter 3 “Guardians of the Family and of Public Memory” as she identifies how the women could be “useful in their death,” but also as “organizers of funerals for family members” and as agents through “suicides for their own men.” Relevant examples here draw from events such as Julius Caesar’s use of his female relatives’ funerals (e.g., those of his father’s sister Julia and his wife Cornelia) to his own assassination. In general, Rohr Vio regards the main tasks of the matrons, including taking care of the bodies of their late male relatives and observing funerary practices, as opportunities to interfere in political matters. Matrons were also able to achieve the latter through their own suicides, often modelled on the archetypal suicides of Lucretia and Verginia, as the connected examples of Marcus Brutus’ wife Porcia and Aemilius Lepidus’ wife Servilia (the related women both died by burning coal) demonstrate. Whereas these first three chapters deal with evidence that mostly originates from the private sphere, Chapter 3 thus signals a mixture of the private and the public sphere, towards which the following chapters move further.
The next three chapters overlap frequently because Rohr Vio’s thematic focuses can be applied in various ways. As a result, the reader will encounter a cast of recurrent characters, of which the next three paragraphs will mention just a few. Chapter 4 “Delegates of their Relatives” lists instances of “wives acting on behalf of their husbands,” “mothers acting on behalf of their sons,” and “women interacting with soldiers on behalf of their relatives.” In each of these categories, Fulvia, Marc Antony’s wife, emerges as a main player, whether in collaboration with her mother-in-law Julia or alongside her brother-in-law Lucius in the Perusine War. Fulvia is also a recurrent figure in Chapter 5 “their Male Relatives’ Advisors,” where Rohr Vio continues the tripartite structure of categories as follows: “active alongside their husbands,” “instigators for their children,” and “accomplices of brothers, fathers, and lovers.” Whilst many of the sources Rohr Vio uses are historiographical (often accompanied by a useful synthesis of the historiographer’s agenda), Cicero’s works also feature prominently, as Terentia’s and Tullia’s presence in the first and third section of this chapter attests. Fulvia’s successor—Antony’s subsequent wife and Octavian Augustus’ sister— Octavia Minor appears here in the context of her mediation at the Treaty of Brundisium in 37 BCE—a prelude to Chapter 6, which pushes the previous chapter further by featuring “mediators in politics,” towards both their “relatives” and “men outside the family.” She returns to the recurring figures of the previous chapters, whilst stressing the emergency nature of the circumstances that allowed these women to mediate in political and military matters beyond the domestic sphere, thus “becoming political subjects and significantly impacting the life of their community” (172).
The final Chapter 7 is arguably the most appealing as it investigates whether these matrons were “innovators or conservatives” and considers “legitimacy strategies for women’s political action,” divided into “the ways through which matrons act: the role of precedents” and “typologies of female action: examples in the past.” Rohr Vio questions whether the novitas of female interference in the Late Republic was truly that novel, especially when one considers the legendary precedents of female exemplarity of the Sabine Women, Cloelia, and Coriolanus’ mother and wife Veturia and Volumnia. Rohr Vio connects several exempla, both positive (in the case of the positive exemplars, related to, e.g. Octavia Minor) and negative (by aligning Fulvia and Tarpeia, a quintessential example of Roman betrayal). In short, in either capacity, the Late Republican women seemed to mirror behaviour of the early Roman literary tradition, a dynamic which, Rohr Vio posits, “suggest[s] an ongoing interference between historical memory and the time of the authors reporting on it” (204).
In returning to Valerius Maximus’ disapproval of female political engagement, Rohr Vio uses her conclusion as an effective synthesis of the various protagonists and their different roles outlined in the chapters above, which allows for helpful connections between the chapters and their multifaceted matrons. She returns to the final chapter and its relevance to understanding this historical period, that is, as one that used established points of reference as a technique to legitimise or denigrate the accounts of these women and their political actions. To tie it all together, the book features a particularly helpful index of ancient names and of subjects after its updated bibliography.
For all its intriguing socio-historical evidence, the work could have benefited from more careful editing. Additionally, though the citations of both the Loeb translations in the body of the text and the Latin and Greek versions in the footnotes are helpful reference points, deeper engagement with the texts themselves would have made the work stronger, as many citations do not receive additional analysis beyond serving as an example of a given socio-historical trend. Despite these reservations, however, Powerful Matrons is especially, well, powerful in its capacity as a sourcebook for the various roles that these matrons assumed in the Late Republic. This book, either in print or digital format, could form a solid basis for a course on the topic of gender studies in antiquity as well. Most of all, the work functions as an encyclopedia of these matrons and their presence in and impact on the Late Republic, thus continuing the study and interest in this stimulating period of Roman history.
Notes
[1] Val. Max. 3.8.6: Quid feminae cum contione? si patrius mos servetur, nihil. Rohr Vio uses Loeb Classical Library translations (9).