This Civilization Let Men Legally Murder Their Wives And Daughters

It’s the empire we’re still taught to admire…

Image courtesy of The University of Melbourne

The Roman Empire is held up as one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known. We’re taught to admire its roads and its aqueducts, its laws and its armies, its philosophers and its architecture. Universities are full of courses dedicated to Roman history, lecture halls where students study the genius of Roman engineering and the brilliance of Roman governance. Politicians quote Roman leaders, architects copy Roman buildings, and the entire idea of Western civilization goes all the way back to Rome.

But there is another side to Rome that you will almost never hear about in any of those lectures, and it has to do with how that great and civilized empire treated its women. Under Roman law, a woman was the property of her husband, and he could beat her, divorce her, or kill her without facing any consequences at all. Yet this is the part of the story that nobody wants to talk about. And it deserves to be talked about, because it changes everything we think we know about the empire.

This is what the greatest civilization in history actually did, the Rape of the Sabine Women, where Roman men took young women by force to serve their own desires. —Image courtesy of The Humanities Collaborative

The truth about women’s lives in Rome

In early Rome, marriage worked through a system called manus, where a woman passed directly from the control of her father into the control of her husband. From that moment on, she belonged to him in every legal sense. She owned no property of her own, she had no independent legal existence, and everything she brought into the marriage was now controlled by her husband.

The man who held this power was called the Pater Familias, the male head of the household, and he had the same power over his wife as he did over his children and his slaves. Basically, he held legal power over the lives of everyone beneath him, and that included the right to hurt them.

According to this law, a man could beat, divorce, or kill his wife for any offense that damaged his honor or threatened his property, and these were treated as private matters that no one outside the family had any right to question. It was accepted as completely normal, and no matter what a man did to his wife, even killing her, he walked away without any consequences.

Even the emperor’s daughter was not safe, as Augustus repudiated and exiled Julia under his own laws against women’s adultery — Image courtesy of Ancient Origins

No woman was safe from male violence

We know this happened because the Romans recorded it, and the way they recorded it shows how worthless a woman’s life was in their eyes. The historians Valerius Maximus and Pliny both wrote about a man named Egnatius Mecennius who beat his wife to death because she had been drinking wine, and neither of them condemned him for it. These historians wrote about these murders like they were unremarkable events, with no sense that anything wrong had happened.

Egnatius was just one man among many. The records are full of other women who were killed just like her. A sixteen-year-old girl named Prima Florentia was drowned by her husband in the Tiber River. A woman named Iulia Maiana was murdered by her husband after 28 years of marriage. The list goes on, and behind every name is a woman who was killed by the person who was supposed to protect her.

This is how evil the laws were against women, where even a father could kill his own daughter to protect his family’s honor — Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Even the most powerful women in Rome were not safe. The emperor Nero kicked his pregnant wife Poppaea to death. He had his first wife Octavia killed, and he ordered the murder of his own mother. If the wife of an emperor could be killed this easily, you can imagine how little protection an ordinary Roman woman had. The violence existed from the bottom of society all the way to the very top, and at every level, the men held the power and the women paid the price.

Nero kicked his pregnant wife to death and murdered his mother, and yet statues like this one still stand in his honor. —Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Women chose equality when revenge was easier

Behind every civilization we admire for its philosophy and its democracy and its laws were women who had none of the rights those things were supposed to stand for. Every golden age was a golden age for men only. The women who lived in those societies were owned by the very men we celebrate as visionaries.

Look at ancient Athens, the place we call the birthplace of democracy. Athenian women could not vote, could not own significant property, and spent their entire lives under the legal control of a male guardian, whether that was their father, their husband, or their son. The democracy we praise so highly was a democracy for men only, and the women who lived in it had no more say in their own lives than the slaves did.

Look at English common law, which gave us so much of our modern legal system. Under the doctrine of coverture, a married woman ceased to exist as a separate legal person the moment she married. Her husband owned her property, her earnings, and her body, and this remained the law well into the 1800s.

The fight for the right to vote looked like this, women knocked to the ground and arrested outside Parliament — Image courtesy of Wikipedia

The 1800s were not even the end of it. Marital rape was not a crime in all fifty American states until 1993, which is within the lifetime of most adults reading this. In 1959, American newspapers were printing columns asking their readers whether husbands should be allowed to hit their wives, like it was a perfectly reasonable thing to debate. Most people go their whole lives without knowing any of this, and the reason is that it happened to women, and the suffering of women has never been considered important enough to teach.

When you look at thousands of years of women being owned, beaten, and killed by the men who were supposed to love them, you start to understand how much women have actually endured. There’s a quote that says it better than anything else. “Men should be glad women want equality and not revenge.” That mercy is more than men ever showed women, and it is more than most of them have earned even now.

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