How Women Ruined the Roman Empire

The Roman Empire

“I have lived and I have finished the course which Fortune had set out for me, but now my famous soul will go to the underworld. I have established a famous city,” So said Dido, the self-made Queen of Carthage, she went on, “I die unavenged … but let me die. This way, this way, a blessed relief to go. Into the undergloom. Let the cold Trojan (Aeneas), Far at sea, drink in this conflagration And take with him the omen of my death!", said the heartbroken lover, cursing Aeneas, who abandoned her for his sacred mission to sow the seed of Rome in Italy.

The Aeneid tells us almost nothing about the foundation of Rome. Although Dido, her Phoenician name Ellisar, may have been a real figure, her interactions with Aeneas were fictional, as the foundation of Carthage and the fall of Troy occurred centuries apart. The Aeneid is a piece of Roman imperial propaganda. It was commissioned by Augustus to legitimize his usurpation of the Republic and also to express the virtues for which Rome stood. Aeneas’s affair with Dido is meant to foreshadow and justify the enmity between Carthage and Rome. The text doesn’t just foreshadow Rome’s hostility with its great Mediterranean rival, but it’s great internal rival, women.

In real Roman history, as real as Roman History can be after the 390 BC Gallic sack, Rome’s hostility towards women is made even more explicit. Rome at the beginning was a collection of vagrants, therefore womanless. The only women near them were of the neighboring Sabine tribe, so the Romans devised a plot to abduct them. They would throw a party, inviting the neighboring tribes, and then abduct the women. This is known in history as “The Rape of Sabine Women”. Regardless of how true the story is, it is undeniable that Rome was built on rape, whether it be due to a dramatic event or through the constant subjugation of women, as bounty or as wives.

Women were the first conquest of Rome. Rome had its glorious victories against the Italians, the Illyrians, and the Carthaginians, but such conquests would not have been possible without women serving as birth vessels who constantly regenerated the Roman population, nor without the insatiable desire of Roman men for booty, both animate and inanimate.

As Rome consolidated its control over the Mediterranean and became an empire that derived its wealth from commerce rather than conquest, the status of women improved, at least for those wealthy women in a position to benefit. Probably in response to this, Augustus introduced a set of morality laws, requiring all people to get married and have children and prohibiting extramarital affairs. Female opulence has been for centuries associated with societal decay, and in Rome, the most famous articulator of this sentiment was Juvenal, of “Bread and Circuses” fame. In a remarkably modern rant about makeup, Juvenal laments female wealth and vanity:

Once she’s clasped an emerald necklace round her neck, once

She’s stretched her earlobes and inserted a pair of giant pearls,

There’s nothing she won’t permit herself, nothing she thinks vile,

Nothing’s more intolerable than the sight of wealthy women.

Meanwhile her face is a hideous and quite ridiculous spectacle,

Caked with layers of bread-paste, reeking of greasy Poppaean

Creams, that stick to her wretched husband’s lips. Eventually,

She’ll uncover her face and remove the first few layers of stucco.

Virgil expressed the dutiful and ultimately triumphant Roman Patriarchal Myth. Juvenal expressed the vernacular patriarchy of resentment of an Empire at its peak. Juvenal lamented that some women could reap the benefits of the Empire. It would be a mistake, however, to mark Juvenal as the Myron Gaines or Andrew Tate of his time. Juvenal, through his critique of the Roman elite, which included wealthy Roman Women, and the masses sedated by “bread and circuses”, captures the spiritual hollowness of an Empire suffering from success. The garish portrait of a woman with gaudy jewelry and pasty makeup, though misogynistic, is a microcosm of a society that values nothing but ephemeral sensations. Juvenal could express the rot of Roman culture, but was unable to provide an alternative. For that, it would fall to Jesus Christ.

Christianity

Edward Gibbon said of Christianity’s role in the fall of the Roman Empire that “The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister”. The dialectic Gibbon establishes here is Greco-Roman vs Christian. Greco-Roman is a symbol of vitality, rationality, and therefore masculinity, and Christianity is a symbol of weakness, superstition, and therefore femininity. Gibbon’s history is dated, but through his Enlightenment lens, he expresses a truth about Christianity that modern discourse buries.

The most gendered political topic in our era is abortion. It is, correctly, framed as an issue of bodily autonomy for women. Women want the right to terminate their pregnancies if they choose. However, Rome was a very different society from our own. Abortion and Infant exposure weren’t choices made by women. Men had ownership over women's bodies and therefore retained the right to terminate their wives' pregnancies and murder their newborn babies. This was a choice taken by men to limit the number of legitimate heirs so as to prevent their estates from being split up into too many pieces upon their deaths, and it was used as a form of dowry control. Female children were a financial cost to families, and so were often killed to avoid such a cost (this practice still exists, albeit less brutally, in patriarchal countries like China and India).

For the Romans, weakness was the original sin for which there was no absolution. Women, slaves, and infants were all subject to the wrath of Roman men only because they couldn’t fight back. Christianity assigned all people, Jew and gentile, master and slave, man and woman, original sin, but absolution through repentance.

The association of early Christianity with women isn’t just intellectual word salad. Women factually comprised the majority of early Christians, according to both the early Christians and the Pagan Romans. And the Romans attempted to subdue the Christians as they had subdued everyone else. From Nero in the 1st century AD to Diocletian in the 4th century AD, the Romans would attempt to beat Christianity out of the empire, but always found more and more Christians to contend with. Diocletian, perhaps the most effective emperor since Augustus, engaged in the most systemic persecution of Christians, but every repression of the faith would only strengthen it. The Christians, inspired by their martyred god, promised eternal salvation for the sacrifice of their lives. And so, a generation after Diocletian, Constantine would make Christianity the preferred faith of the Empire. Constantine was an almost comically murderous emperor; he killed his son, wife, and brother-in-law. So it is somewhat ironic that it would be under him that the faith of love and forgiveness would see triumph over him.

It would be easy to say that Constantine’s murderousness presents a sort of conquest of Rome over Christianity, and not the other way around. But that is simply not true. Constantine formalized and institutionalized Christianity, and what had been a revolutionary outsider movement became the imperial orthodoxy. Christians would go on to persecute Pagans with a similar ferocity that the Pagans had persecuted them, most notably under Theodosius. That being said, Christianity was, if even a weak one, a conscience for the Roman Empire, which the Pagan Romans didn’t have. When Theodosius (probably) ordered a massacre of civilians in Thessalonica after one of his Gothic (the German kind) military commanders was killed, the Bishop St Ambrose excommunicated him, refusing to let him receive the Eucharist until he repented. Proclaiming “You must not think imperial power gives you the license to sin”. Theodosius eventually repented, but this shows that Christianity wasn’t just a façade for imperial power; it was a force that tempered its excesses. The Church would persist as an imperfect moral authority for Europe, but a moral authority it was.

Conclusion

I don’t mean to write A People’s History of the Roman Empire here. It was a truly extraordinary entity, not only by the standard of military conquest, but by political and literary sophistication and economic wealth. The struggles and characters of the Late Republic are intelligible to our world, and are documented in such detail that 2000 years later, we can follow them in some instances day by day. By some estimates, the city of Rome reached a population of 1 million at its peak, a figure not surpassed in Europe until the 19th century. Tacitus was correct when he claimed the Romans “Created a Desert and called it a Peace”, but it is because of the Roman Empire that his statement was even preserved.

Within the Rape-Demon Empire, there still existed people with their consciences. The Aeneid, though it was in effect a piece of Augustan propaganda, was a compelling story, which didn’t merely exalt Aeneas and demonize his enemies. It ends with Aeneas succumbing to his anger and killing his enemy Turnus as he begged for clemency. It is a matter of scholarly debate whether this was subversively anti-Augustus or not, but in any case, it is morally ambiguous in a way pure exultant propaganda is not. Moreso with the Dido story. Even in our “Feminist” culture today, most men don’t reckon seriously with the pain their abandonment inflicts on women. It’s usually handwaved away with something along the lines of “My crazy ex can’t get over me”. Virgil, again from the center of the rape-empire, lingers on Dido’s pain, with such eloquence that her suicide is perhaps the most enduring passage in Roman History. Virgil, though perhaps reducing the great queen of Carthage to a pathetic simp, created a deeply human character who would not only haunt Aeneas but the Roman Empire for the remainder of its existence. Dido couldn’t resist Aeneas’s masculine wiles, as the peoples of the Mediterranean and the women of Rome couldn’t resist the brute force of the Empire. But there was a strength in their weakness, which Virgil expressed in his work.

Rome fell, but Aeneas and Dido, the conquerors and the vanquished, endured. It would take a millennium for the European social and economic structure established by the church to break. When it did, the great minds of the time rejoiced. The lost glory of Rome would finally be reclaimed. What would this mean for the human spoils of the new age? That is a question for the next installment.