[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]
The introduction of this special issue on “domestic violence” in the Roman world sets the scene mostly in contemporary Australia, not in the Roman past, and is completed by two appendices combining advice on how to address domestic abuse in the modern classroom “globally” (p. 12) with outreach information on helplines for students and teachers residing in the UK and Australia. The editors place great emphasis on the need for “thoughtful management” (p. 2) of relevant materials in education and research. The twelve contributions explore the ideology of “domestic violence” in the Roman world, and are intended to focus on the various types of evidence as well as the challenges inherent in their interpretation. Although the commitment to addressing these challenges may not always be seen as a priority in the contributions, the editors make sure that the specific aims are clearly outlined: “firstly, to examine some of the ways in which the Roman world can function as a meaningful case study for the transhistorical and transcultural experience of domestic abuse; and secondly, to examine the specificity of domestic abuse in the ancient Roman world” (p. 2).
Eleanor Cowan applies the modern concept of “coercive control” to the historical investigation of “domestic violence” in the ancient world as “an attempt to begin to draw the outline of the ‘cage’ in which some/many/most women and girls in the Roman world found themselves” (p. 18). Four case-studies—Plautus’ Menaechmi, Augustine’s Confessions with Greek papyri from late antique Roman Egypt, Tacitus’ Annals, and juristic fragments from the Digest (in that order)—are used to identify instances of “domestic violence” illustrating, inter alia, “patriarchal entitlement” and “intimate partner homicide” (p. 16). The aim is to derive a broader definition of “domestic violence” that would allow to rethink ancient experiences of abuse, especially if the modern reader is a survivor or perpetrator of “domestic abuse”.
Ash Finn questions from a social perspective the idea promoted by modern scholars that divorce was an effective deterrent to “intimate partner violence” in the Roman world. The argument is that regardless of how common or speedy Roman divorce may have been, and since there is little evidence that “intimate partner violence” was widely condemned or considered a legitimate reason for divorce, Roman wives would face pressures not to leave an abusive conjugal relationship, but to stay and adapt. This is very interesting, but sources of different nature are cited without specific methodological precautions, which makes it uneasy to assess objectively the ways in which patterns of compromise or reconciliation may have evolved.
Tim Parkin addresses the abuse of elderly parents in the Roman world. It is assumed that this type of abuse was a very real aspect of Roman domestic life, because of traditional conceptions of patria potestas. From the legal sources pointing to the duty of support between children and parents “instances of neglect and of the shirking of duties by adult offspring, and the general anxieties of older parents about their care” (p. 43) are inferred. A brief mention of possibly relevant evidence in the archeological record is made. Rare, but interesting, instances in the papyri of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt are given prominence, while it is emphasised that the extant literary evidence—slight, gendered, and biased—reveals perceptions of alleged abuse, as opposed to the realities underlying these perceptions.
Kirsten Parkin attempts to trace the representations of “intimate partner violence” in Latin forensic declamations. It is asserted that reading “intimate partner violence” in the controversiae “provides an insight into the foundations of a ubiquitous Roman misogyny that underpins gender-based violence” (pp. 51–52). Declamations dealing with distinct unlawful acts, such as adultery and rape, are thus interpreted as both reflecting and shaping a male culture of violence that permeated all kinds of family ties and power relationships; which results, in the contributor’s view, in cultivating and normalising attitudes that condoned the perpetration of “gender-based violence”. If a suggestion can be made to the benefit of the contributor, it is to consult important recent works arguing the contrary case, that is, how subversive the declamatory gendered discourse could be (see, for instance, Ps.-Quint. Dmin 262 where, although the focus is on rape, the speech against the husband who raped a virgin may allude to an original socio-cultural configuration of adultery as a ‘male unlawful act’).
Janette McWilliam explores in detail the topic of family abuse in the Roman education of males with learning difficulties or impairments. By analysing three case-studies that problematise the relationship between disciplined behaviour and corporal punishment—the Didaskalos of Herodas, the case of emperor Claudius, that of Atticus Bradua—the contribution sheds light on the extent to which educational violence was embedded within ancient schools, and on the other hand, on the forms, functions, and effects of emotional and verbal abuse by family members against elite males with learning impairments.
Marguerite Johnson discusses Roman elegiac and satirical expressions of “domestic slave abuse” against female slaves by their mistresses “to read domestic violence among women as a cultural dynamic underpinned by patriarchal institutions that not only institutionalize the abuse of slaves but both initiate and permit it at the hands of disempowered females” (p. 84). The gendered dynamics characterising the domina–serva relationship are explored through the “undeniably anachronistic” (p. 94) lens of protest femininity and toxic femininity, with the perhaps expected conclusion that “we witness the dominae mimicking masculine values underpinning the Roman cultural attitudes towards slaves as decidedly Other, and therefore decidedly vulnerable to the vilest expressions of disdain”.
Sarah Levin-Richardson departs from the ways in which the much discussed material evidence from the House of the Vetii at Pompeii “encodes enslaved individuals’ susceptibility to coerced sexual and physical labour, as well as to confinement and punishment” (p. 105). The aim is to reconstruct from within the lived experiences of household slaves in terms of exposure to physical, emotional, and sexual violence. The creative approach of critical fabulation is adopted to craft, to that end, the perspective of Eutychis. Despite its usefulness in terms of rendering vivid a marginal—if not completely lost—point of view, as emphasised by the contributor, the approach remains speculative and unverifiable.
J. Lea Beness and Tom Hillard take a cautious approach to discussing narratives about archaic intra-familial violence in relation to their political relevance and exemplary function. The contribution questions the problematic association of ‘domestic’ with the domus in the construction of Roman cultural memory, given that acts perceived as belonging to the private sphere received constant public scrutiny (the pioneering works by Yan Thomas are overlooked in this regard). The perspective is anthropological, focusing on the ways in which archetypical acts of intra-familial violence—the killing of Remus by his brother, the rape of the Sabine women, the killing of Horatia by her brother, Brutus applying the death penalty to his sons, the rape of Rhea Sylvia—were later revised to fit changing mentalities.
Robert Cowan explores the eco-feminist conception of the woman-nature connection in Tibullus’ erotic elegies, Elder Cato’s De agricultura, Virgil’s Georgica, and Columella’s De re rustica, as ‘ontologically’ reflecting an underlying ideology of subordination and control. In an attempt to show that what we today term “domestic abuse” lies behind environmental exploitation in these texts, the contributor intends “to throw different lights on the realities and ideologies of domestic abuse and environmental exploitation in ancient Rome, as well as their transhistorical and transcultural continuities” (p. 125). Questions remain about the epistemological-‘phenomenological’ problem of violence in these texts as well as its methodological analysis.
Kimberly Harris proposes a comparative analysis of Tacitus’ accounts of the murders of Apronia and Pontia Postumina[1] to examine the Tacitean representation of elite Roman women’s experiences with “domestic violence”, especially “homicide by an intimate partner”. We are invited to read “tentatively” Tacitus’ attitudes towards the legal and non-legal treatment of “domestic violence” as “more broadly representative of elite attitudes” (p. 148). It remains unclear whether it is necessary to reinterpret as cases of “domestic violence” Roman representations of acts of intra-familial violence, which were punishable by law under a different label (in this case, homicide, as the contributor acknowledges), simply because they are supposed to have occurred in a domestic setting: “the murder of an elite Roman woman” (p. 139) was not an autonomous crime in Roman law, and proving the perceived ‘domestic’ nature of the murder is not the same thing as legally defining the act as ‘homicide’.
Sarah Lawrence highlights the tension between the legal, the moral, and the social in the masculine normative view of Nero’s treatment of his wife, Octavia, in Tacitus’ Annals and the anonymous Octavia. The contributor captures the essence of the broader historical problem, which is “attempting to understand, rather than judge,” (p. 152) “Roman ideas of acceptable and unacceptable force so far as we can access them via texts written by male members of the elite” (p. 150). In line with the methodology of “historical empathy”, the contribution traces these blurred culture-specific limits, along with the judgements and expectations attached to them, thus providing a clear understanding of the complex ways in which violence against the Roman wife could be embodied, embedded, and enacted in historiographic and tragic versions of this specific episode.
Kylie Crabbe explores the representation of attempted rape in the Drusiana episode of the Acts of John, and how its main rhetorical elements, informed by “intersectional factors like class” (p. 168), shaped the gendered dynamics of “domestic abuse” in this early Christian setting. Crabbe argues that the text conflates sexual desire and sexual violence to promote the ascetic commitment to celibacy and in doing so, it “instrumentalizes Drusiana’s sexual exploitation in the service of explaining the elite male characters’ trajectory towards true discipleship” (p. 171). The resulting gendered expectations are asymmetric: the female victim is idealised, though also responsible, while the male abuser is flawed, though also easily redeemed.
This is an informative and thought-provoking special issue. Its timely nature and the collective efforts for sharper insights on the historical sensitivity of the problem are to be commended. The following observations and points of reservation are only meant to direct towards additional areas of discussion of a complex subject.
An in-depth discussion of the status quaestionis in Classical studies would have been helpful. The evidence regarding the alleged death of Poppaea Sabina by a kick in the belly during pregnancy is problematic: one should not disregard here Suetonius’ bias against Nero (as do Cowan, pp. 23–24; Finn, p. 34 n. 54; Harris, p. 139 n. 7); it is unclear if this alleged kick—a novelistic topos—was the causa mortis (cf. Tac. Ann. 16.6; Dio 62.27.5) or a “posthumous invention” (P. Schubert, P.Oxy. LXXVII 5105: Apotheosis in Hexameters, in: Oxyrhynchus papyri, 2011, vol. 77, 59–80). Since the topic is of significant legal relevance, one shortcoming is the lack of a stronger focus on the Roman legal framework of violence and its possible understandings as ‘domestic’ from the classical to the late antique era. The availability of meaningful Roman data regarding “domestic violence”, at least in the terms set out in the introduction, is most likely to be met with resistance: scholars who favour an emic perspective, will not be in agreement with a universalist approach to a highly elusive problem that does not apply modern categories to past societies in a heuristic way. Although there are contributions which more or less explicitly strive to adopt an emic perspective, even these do so without strictly focusing on historical semantics. The modern concept of “domestic violence” is, thus, mostly used in a way that implies that the Romans understood it exactly as contemporary Western societies do; but Roman literary sources ultimately lack a common lexicon from which a unified principle regarding Roman perceptions of “domestic violence” might be derived. The fact that the contributions, written exclusively in English, are moreover grounded on a predominantly anglophone bibliography should not make us forget that the correspondence between ancient and modern categories is problematic in other modern languages as well.
Hopefully, this special issue will ignite a renewed academic debate, not least by reminding us that extreme caution, conceptual precision, and metalinguistic awareness are necessary with the ways in which modern scholars use the present-day real-world problem of violence in all forms and manifestations to do scientific and historical research free from cultural bias.
Authors and Titles
Eleanor Cowan/Tim Parkin — Domestic violence and vulnerability in the Roman world: setting the scene
Part One: Violence in the domus
1.1 Perpetrators and victims of domestic violence
Eleanor Cowan — ‘Start with the cage’: coercive control and the Roman husband
Ash Finn — ‘Why doesn’t she just leave?’ Roman divorce as a deterrent to intimate partner violence
Tim Parkin — The abuse of aged parents in the ancient Roman world
1.2 Learning cycles of domestic violence
Kirsten Parkin — Reading intimate partner violence in Latin controversiae
Janette McWilliam — Family perpetrated and condoned violence in the education of male Greco-Roman children
1.3 Domestic violence against the enslaved
Marguerite Johnson — Bitchy ladies: domestic violence against ornatrices in Latin poetry — protest femininity, toxic femininity?
Sarah Levin-Richardson — Domestic violence and servile vulnerability in the House of the Vetii, Pompeii
Part Two: Vulnerability, victims, and their voices
2.1 Domestic violence beyond the domus
J. Lee Beness/Tom Hillard — A prehistory of Roman domestic violence
Robert Cowan — The farmer wants a wife: ecofeminism, domestic violence, and coercive control in Roman agricultural writing
2.2 Domestic violence and power
Kimberly Harris — The princeps investigates: two cases of domestic violence in Tacitus’ Annals
Sarah Lawrence — A tale of two Octavias: historical empathy and intimate partner ‘violence’
Kylie Crabbe — Domestic sexual abuse in early Christianity: conflations of violence and desire in the Acts of John
Notes
[1]That Pontia was “sexually assaulted” (p. 139) is not accurate: Tacitus (Ann. 13.44) eschews the vocabulary of violence or forced consent and explicitly says that Pontia did not fear anything (nihil metuentem).