Unusual Facts About Women In Ancient Rome
There’s no doubting that the Roman Empire was a tough place to be a woman. Roman law meant that women had few rights and little opportunity for public roles. But despite that, many women subverted the conventions of the time and found ways to play an active part in the affairs of the empire. Read on to find out how Roman women lived and even thrived in the face of rampant sexism.
1. Vestal virgins
The Vestal Virgins were six women who lived in the Temple of Vesta in Rome. Appointed as children and serving for 30 years, these women had an important role to play in protecting Rome with their holy rituals. These duties included tending a sacred eternal flame.
For them to be effective, it was deemed essential that the Vestals retained their virginity. And if they didn’t, punishment was brutal: the offending Vestal would be imprisoned in a sealed room and left to die a lingering death.
2. Donkey milk
For women of the Roman elite, skincare was a pressing concern. The ideal was to have a complexion that was pale and smooth. And one way to make sure that your skin was at its best was to bathe in donkey’s milk.
Women at the top of the social scale had specialist slaves, cosmetae, to tend to them while they took their milk dips. The Emperor Nero’s wife Poppaea Sabina went one step further, concocting a preparation of donkey milk and dough to use as a facial.
3. Hypatia of Alexandria
Julius Caesar conquered the Egyptian city of Alexandria for Rome in 48 B.C. It was an important center for scholarship of all kinds. Unusually, one of the leading philosophers and mathematicians of the fifth century was a woman, Hypatia.
By Hypatia’s time, Christianity had reached Alexandria, with many following the faith. But Hypatia retained the beliefs of an earlier pagan time, and this attracted unwelcome attention. A gang of Christian fanatics seized her, killed her in a vicious beating and burnt her remains.
4. Work
There’s no doubt that most Roman women fell into two categories: they were either housewives and mothers, or slaves. But there were other, albeit limited, alternatives of which some women took advantage. They could work as midwives, wet nurses, or in the fields.
Then there were those Roman women who actually ran their own businesses. Some made craft items in their home which they could sell. On the darker side, there were women who turned to prostitution as their only way to earn money.
5. Childhood
For Roman girls, childhood ended early: they were considered ready for marriage at the age of 12. But while they were still regarded as minors, girls did at least have toys. We know this because of the custom of burying females who died young with their playthings.
Towards the end of the 19th century, the grave of a second-century Roman girl called Crepereia Tryphaena was discovered. Included in her sarcophagus was a doll fashioned from ivory with moveable limbs and a set of clothes and accessories. Just like Barbie!
6. Cosmetic horrors
Roman women used some truly repellent ingredients in their pursuit of beauty. For acne, women daubed their faces with onion or chicken grease. When they wanted to get rid of unwanted hair, they’d rub it off with pulverized oyster shells. Ouch!
Mashed earthworms were mixed in oil and used as a dye to conceal gray hairs; crocodile droppings were used as a facial treatment. Other common ingredients for Roman cosmetic preparations included goose grease and the oil from sheep fleeces.
7. Male power
Women were regarded by Roman men as definitely second-class. In fact, a woman’s status as a Roman citizen came from her relationship to her father or husband. Any legal rights that women had came only through their male relatives.
When women divorced, it was commonly the husband who would be given custody of the children. Even female names were governed by relations to men. A girl would be given the feminized version of her father’s name: if your dad was Julius, you’d be Julia.
8. Agrippina the Younger
Agrippina the Younger was not a woman to cross. Emperor Caligula, her brother, exiled her from Rome because she had been conspiring against him, but she was able to return to the imperial city after his murder.
She then married her uncle Claudius, who now happened to be Emperor. He proved a weak leader, and Agrippina took over much of the imperial business. To top it all she had Claudius poisoned in 54 A.D. Her son Nero then became emperor; he later poisoned his own mother.
9. Dress
Respectable Romans wore an undergarment called a tunica intima beneath a long sleeveless dress called a stola. On top of the stola they wore a palla, a kind of cape which was loosely draped around the body.
Women on the edges of society such as prostitutes would dress differently. Their favored garb was the toga, a less elaborate form of dress. If a respectable woman wore a toga, it was often a sign of disgrace; married women unfaithful to their husbands might be compelled to wear the toga.
10. Breast is best?
As far as upper-class Roman women were concerned, breast was best: just not their own breasts. Instead, they would farm out their infants to wet nurses. These were recently pregnant women who could provide natural nourishment for babies.
A second-century obstetrician called Soranus Of Ephesus was an influential figure in child care. He recommended that women should use wet nurses directly after pregnancy as they would be too tired to breastfeed. Other male “experts” said that women who didn’t breastfeed their own infants were simply vain or idle.
11. The public baths
Public baths were a central feature of life throughout the Roman Empire. They had excellent facilities including steam rooms, hot and cold plunge pools, and dry heat rooms. And they were not just places to get clean: they also served as the setting for a lively social life.
Men and women used the same public baths up until the second century A.D., when Emperor Hadrian banned shared bath houses. What he thought of public latrines — basically rows of holes shared indiscriminately by both sexes — is unknown.
12. Women in politics
Roman women could not hold political office, but they sometimes wielded considerable political power. One who did was Livia Drusilla, wife to the Emperor Augustus. She ensured that her son Tiberius succeeded her husband, whom she had allegedly poisoned.
Another politically powerful woman was Pompeia Plotina, married to Emperor Trajan. She was with her husband on a military campaign when he died of a stroke. On his deathbed he named Plotina’s favorite cousin Hadrian as the next emperor — or so Plotina claimed. After her death, Hadrian made her a goddess!
13. Arranged marriages
As we’ve seen, Roman girls were expected to take on the full role of women at an early age. That meant they were often married while still in their very early teens. But it was different for men, who would often wed women who were much younger than them.
This age gap reflected Roman norms of men being the breadwinners and women the housekeepers and child-raisers. Arranged marriages were the norm: families would organize matches which were frequently motivated by financial, social, or political considerations.
14. The ideal woman
In the eyes of most Romans the ideal woman was clearly defined. She should, of course, be married and be a competent housekeeper. Desirable wifely skills included spinning, cooking, and looking after all aspects of household business.
In this almost impossibly perfect ideal, Roman women should also be of suitable modesty. For females who didn’t manage to live up to those exacting standards, the outlook could be grim. Yes, “failing” as a wife and mother could mean that a woman became a social outcast.
15. The Sabine Women
In the earliest days of Rome, before the city lay at the center of a sprawling empire, what can only be described as cruel crimes took place. That was when the Romans began to kidnap women from tribes living nearby.
In particular the women of the Sabine tribe were abducted by Roman men led by Romulus, the first Roman king, in the eighth century B.C. The Sabine tribe lived in Italy’s Apennine Mountains and they had what the Romans wanted: women to be mothers to a new generation.
16. Gladiators
If you thought that gladiatorial combat in Rome’s many arenas was a male preserve, think again. Historical evidence shows that women, too, fought in these highly popular spectacles. But unlike the men, women did not fight to the death.
Some of the women who fought were enslaved, with their owners hoping to make money from them. But other fighters actually came from superior classes. Professor David S. Potter explained their motivation to history.com by saying, “It’s exciting. It’s different. It…[upsets] their parents.”
17. Helena and Christianity
Christianity arrived in Rome in the first century A.D., but its adherents were viciously persecuted by Emperor Nero. It was Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine, who paved the way for Christianity to really take hold in the Roman Empire in the fourth century.
After her own conversion, she traveled to Bethlehem in the eastern Roman Empire. There, she commissioned the building of a church at the birthplace of Jesus and another at the claimed location of the Ascension near Jerusalem.
18. Legal rights over children
When it came to who had legal rights over children from a marriage, the balance lay very much with fathers. Women had very little in the way of rights to child custody in the event of divorce. Divorce itself was relatively easy, depending simply onone partner declaring a separation.
Although fathers had the absolute right to have custody of their children, they didn’t always exercise this power. If it suited the father, he could elect to leave the job of rearing children to his ex-wife.
19. Education
In general, organized education was reserved for boys. But some among the upper classes believed that girls should at least get some instruction. This tended to concentrate on the basic skills of writing, reading, and simple math.
Arts subjects were also considered to be suitable for girls: dancing, music, and poetry could all be included in the curriculum. For girls from the lower Roman classes what instruction there was centered on the practical skills needed to run a household and raise children.
20. A dangerous woman
Fulvia lived at the time of Julius Caesar; thanks to the deaths and subsequent legacies of a couple of wealthy husbands, she became a rich woman. Then her third husband, Mark Antony, became a co-ruler of Rome in 47 B.C. after Caesar’s assassination.
The couple were responsible for several murders of political rivals and enemies. When Mark Antony left Rome in pursuit of Caesar’s killers, Fulvia raised eight legions to take on her husband’s rival Octavian. She lost that battle and died in exile in Greece in 40 B.C.
21. Concubines
Concubines, the mistresses of elite Roman men, were far from rare in Rome. In fact, they were even recognized by the Roman legal system. In some cases a concubine would be in a stable relationship with an aristocratic man, but marriage was impossible because of her low social status.
The female mistress was called a concubina, but there were also male counterparts involved in homosexual relationships: such a man was a concubinus. These male concubines were usually slaves and did not enjoy the status of female mistresses.
22. Diet
In 2021 researchers from Britain’s University of York published the details of an intriguing study into Roman diets. The research analyzed 17 sets of human remains from the city of Herculaneum, which had been engulfed by the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.
The research revealed that men and women actually ate significantly different foods. The York University website pointed out that “women ate more animal products and locally grown fruit and vegetables, while the men dined on more expensive fish.”
23. Beauty in the eye of the beholder
Roman women, and presumably their men, had some strange ideas about eyebrows. Eyes had to be made up as well, with anything from soot to kohl used to create dark highlights. But when it came to the eyebrows, Roman women wanted to have just one instead of two.
The height of fashion was to have a single eyebrow. If you were lucky, your eyebrows might grow that way naturally. If not, the unsightly gap could be filled with dark makeup or even a piece of animal hair stuck in place.
24. Affairs
Elite men had their concubines, but some aristocratic women also indulged in affairs. One such was Julia the Elder, daughter of Emperor Augustus. She enraged her father with her promiscuous behavior, and eventually he punished her by exiling her from Rome.
Another who scorned the conventions of the day was Messalina, who was the wife of Emperor Claudius. Despite being married to the Emperor, Messalina wed her lover Silus, and the pair conspired to overthrow Claudius. But the plot was uncovered and Messalina was put to death.
25. Body-shape rules
The Roman ideal of female beauty included strict rules about the perfect body shape. A woman should be tall with a full figure. Broad hips were favored, as were sloping shoulders, and women should not be too thin.
Of course, many did not conform to this demanding ideal. But there were ways to fake it. Breasts could be accentuated by padding or disguised by binding to get just the right size; women on the skinny side could bulk themselves out with heavy clothing.
26. Hair
Roman women were rather particular when it came to hair. Redheads and blondes were preferred to those with brown or dark hair. If you were unlucky enough to be a brunette, you could disguise this handicap with dyes.
Another way to change your hair color was to wear a wig. Merchants sold red or blonde hair from Britons and Germans on the streets of Rome. To achieve curls, women used bronze hair tongs that had been heated over an open fire.
27. Women’s rights
In the early days of the Roman empire, women had no legal rights at all and were entirely beholden to their fathers or husbands. But things did slowly improve, and by the first century A.D. women began to enjoy increased freedom.
Women could now control their own finances, and they could buy and sell property, as well as inheriting it. What’s more a law was introduced during the reign of Emperor Augustus which gave women who’d borne three children legal independence.
28. Bizarre contraception
When it came to contraception, some of the methods used by Roman women were downright bizarre. One especially weird practice was promoted by the scholar Pliny the Elder. He claimed that effective contraception could be achieved by first catching a large, hairy spider.
The head of this particular spider, Pliny claimed, contained a pair of small worms. Attaching these “worms” to a woman using deer hide apparently “guaranteed” no pregnancy for a year. Other contraceptive methods involved the use of everything from pomegranate peel to elephant dung.
29. Childbirth
In the days before effective pain relief or modern medicine of any kind, childbirth was no picnic for Roman women. In an attempt to alleviate the pain, herbal remedies were administered, featuring ingredients such as catmint and verbena root.
Less appetizing, and surely no more effective, was an allegedly pain-relieving concoction whose ingredients included dried pig dung. Or you could try breathing in the vapor from the fat of a hyena. If all else failed, the only other alternatives were magic spells and amulets.
30. Julia Avita Mamaea
Julia Avita Mamaea subverted the usually impassable barriers to women wielding political power by ruling via her son. In A.D. 222 the Emperor Elagabalus was murdered and Mamaea made sure her son Severus succeeded by bribing the Praetorian Guard, the emperors’ personal security detail.
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This Severus was something of a milksop, so his mother was able to conduct the business of the empire through her domination of him. But it didn’t end well: in 235 A.D. the army took control of matters, assassinating both Mamaea and Severus.