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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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In title opinions has a number of different constituencies among its listeners.
There are those who prize our heavy philosophical shows.
There are those who love most of all our music shows.
Others are poetry and novel shows.
There are those who think we're at our best and most relevant when discussing science
and the fate of modern technology.
And then there are those who relish above all the shows devoted to antiquity.
And who can blame them?
And tickwity is where it's at.
Always has, always will, providing the basic principles of our modernity.
The good news, I have with me in the studio one of the leading scholars of ancient Roman history
and today we'll be discussing the domestic and social institutions of the ancient Romans, including
patriarchy, marriage, inheritance laws, divorce, death, and gender relations.
Stay tuned friends, this is a show for everyone.
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Looks so good, it looks so cool, your pleasure lives in truth or poor, but don't give
me no beautiful, let's tell you about our waters cool.
That theme song of ours is a good little example of antiquities after life in our own age.
It's called Echo.
Echo was the nymph who in Ovid's version of the story fell in love with Narcissus who
was too in love with himself to be bothered with her.
She tries to get him to look away from the pool, but he's so transfixed by his own image
that he wastes away as Echo looks on helplessly.
Echo's voice still echoes across the ages, warning all the self-absorbed individuals in
our midst to turn away from their Facebook pages.
I'm to listen to her, I'd say, look over here at the ancient Romans, for example.
Ovid was a great Roman poet whose book the metamorphoses reworks a whole host of stories
that come mostly from Greek mythology.
What I admire about the Romans is that they were secure enough in their Roman identity
not to be worried about cultural originality.
They recognized the superiority of the Greeks in this domain and had no problems imitating
and adapting Greek art, Greek thought and Greek literature.
Think of Anias, the legendary ancestor of the Roman people.
Anias is a minor character in Homer's Iliad.
He's the Trojan son of Anchisis and Aphrodite goddess of love.
The Romans had no qualms about simply adopting Anias as their mythic ancestor, and they
did this relatively late in their civic history.
Book six of Virgil's Aniaad is the book where Anias descends into Hades to consult with
the dead, and that descent is based largely on Book 11 of the Odyssey, where Odysseus
visits the dead in Hades.
Now Virgil was a pious devotee of Homer, yet I've always been struck by the subtle differences
between Homer's representation and Virgil's remake of it.
In Homer, Odysseus is encountered with the dead, has much more to do with the private sphere
than the public sphere.
It is more domestic than political in its pathos.
Here Odysseus encounters the shade of his recently dead mother, Antichlea, whom he tries
to embrace three times in vain.
She's a disembodied spirit.
After conversing with his mother about their home in Ithaca, Odysseus goes on to speak
with a number of Greek women, mostly queens, who tell him stories about their various households.
In Virgil's underworld, the scene is very different.
It is far more male oriented.
Instead of his mother, Anias meets his recently dead father, whom he tries to embrace three
times.
Anchisis goes on to show his son Anias the long line of male progeny that will issue from his
line and that will bring the future city of Rome to its imperial dominion over the world.
What is on full parade in Virgil's underworld is the August power and authority of Roman
patriarchy.
Patriarchy is the essence of the Roman social and political life, and if we hope to understand
anything about Rome, we need to understand the institutional foundations and history of
Roman patriarchy.
The person who joins me in the studio today is one of the world's leading experts on this
topic.
Richard Saller is the Vernon and Elizabeth Warren Anderson Dean of the School of Humanities
and Sciences at Stanford, as well as the Klein Heinz family professor of European studies
in Stanford's Department of Classics and History.
Professor Saller is the author of several books among them.
Personal patronage under the early empire.
The Roman Empire, economy, society and culture, and most importantly for our topic today,
patriarchy, property and death in the Roman family.
He has also co-edited the Cambridge Economic History of Greco-Roman Antiquity Richard.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
Thank you.
So before we jump into our topic, which has to do with the main institutions of Roman
social life and society, it might be helpful first to address the question of the source
materials.
Namely, where exactly does our knowledge about phenomena such as Roman patriarchy come
from?
I think that that's a critical first step in understanding.
And I guess what I'd like to do to begin with is distinguish between early Rome, say
Rome down to 200 BC and classical Rome.
The first Roman historian wrote only about 200 BC.
So all of the centuries prior to that would qualify as prehistory in early Rome.
And the important thing about that is that much of the material that we rely on for Roman
patriarchy is later classical writing about what they imagined early Rome to be.
And there was no good contemporary material from early Rome or virtually none to actually
provide reliable evidence for the period.
So even for the Romans, this patriarchy was to some extent an exercise in imagination.
But you're not suggesting that the institutions of patriarchy had become obsolete by 200
BC and subsequently.
Not obsolete, but for example, the position of Roman women, the Roman wife, had dramatically
changed by the classical period if we believe in the Romans imaginative reconstruction
of early Rome.
So are we to understand then that it's the imaginative reconstruction of later Romans
that gives us the conventional understanding of Roman patriarchy as a kind of absolute monarchy
of the family father who has absolute rights over his wife and his children and his slaves
and they are all part of, I don't want to call it personal property, but more or less.
And that everything was subjected to the sovereign will of the family father and that
you're suggesting that this is actually more of an imaginative reconstruction than verifiable
reality prior to 200 BC.
That's exactly right.
The one thing that we have that probably is reliable from the earlier era are fragments
of the 12 tables, the earliest Roman legal code and that gives us a little bit of guidance.
But the story is preserved in authors like Livy for early Rome, for the foundation of
the Roman Republic in 509 BC.
That was largely a later imaginative reconstruction.
Well was the construction merely imaginative and therefore random or arbitrary or was it
it's not possible that the reconstruction has a certain significant quotient of truth about
it?
It's certainly based on what the Romans believed about their past and I don't think that
they invented it out of whole cloth.
On the other hand, I also don't think that they had any contemporary material that they
could rely on that would take them out of the realm of oral tradition and I think oral
tradition is a particularly unreliable form of transmission of historical memory.
So can you tell us since we can't, I gather we don't want to speak about Roman patriarchy
prior to 200 BC because the information we have about it is unreliable.
What do we know about it in historical times?
Well let me challenge what is the premise of what you said.
I think we can take an interest in Roman patriarchy before 200 BC as evidence of what
the Romans thought their past was about and what their identity was after 200 BC.
So I think it's certainly worth studying for purposes of cultural history even if the historian
can't be confident that the legends of early Rome actually happened in the way that they're
described.
Well this raises some interesting issues, tangential Richard which is the reliability of ancient
legend and oral traditions passed down by word of mouth.
And I guess because I am a big devotee of Jumbati Stavico, the 18th century Italian author
of the new science which most of which is devoted to trying to reconstruct the earliest
institutions of what he calls the Gentiles and Rome was for him, his major point of reference.
But the interesting thing about Vico and others is that where at the time 18th century and
into the 19th century so many people were assuming that Homer was nothing but poetry, imaginative
invention and fantasy, or that the founding legends, the legends of Rome's founding and
so on and so forth were merely fanciful.
Then it turns out that subsequent archaeology and philology determines that well, there's
a great deal of actual historical truth in the legends.
And therefore Shiliman who goes naively with Homer under one arm and goes and discovers the
city of Troy because he believed that Homer was not just poetry but that there was a
substrate of historical truth in that.
So I would imagine that a number of these founding legends about Rome or patriarchy were
that I think that because they're in oral form or in folkloric form that doesn't necessarily
make them dismissive that you can't dismiss them as evidence, right?
Well I don't think that it means that they're necessarily wrong but I don't think you
can say that they're necessarily right and actually Shiliman is an interesting example
because he claimed to have found primes Troy but it turns out that the level of excavation
that he identified with primes off by about 400 years from when Troy was supposed to
have been destroyed.
So there's a very uncertain relationship between these legends and the archaeological record.
Sometimes they coincide but often they don't and unless you have some kind of external
check to verify them in another way I think you can't be confident that they contain historically
accurate description.
I think this particularly true in areas of social relations and family relationships.
I think it's in human nature to project back the kind of conventions that one associates
with one's own world and not to be sensitive to the possibilities for very big differences
in family relationships from one's own experience.
So what do you think is the one of the most egregious misconceptions about Roman patriarchy?
Well I think one would want to start with defining what you mean by patriarchy and there
are two different aspects of patriarchy.
There's the husband's authority over the wife and then there's the father's authority
over the children and those two are often conflated and yet in law and actually in legend
those play out in very different ways.
So in classical Rome for which we have really good evidence the husband actually had virtually
no authority over the wife who could walk out of the house and divorce with her own property
regimes were kept separate and we can talk more about that if you like.
Very different from in law the father's authority over the children and so one needs to
distinguish between those elements of patriarchy.
I think the legal description of the father's relationship over the children, the kind of
legal contents of patriarchy are important to understand but also then to compare with
the descriptions that we have of actual working daily social relationships in letters and
in other forms and I think that it presents a somewhat different picture from the stark
legal image of patriarchy.
What about the word pate in Latin because one tends to define it as father but it means
a lot more than that and in some cases I think it's we just confuse matters when we equate
pate with the biological paternity.
I think that that's right and I would add to that I think that familia is a real problem
as well as in Potter familius because the Roman familia though it is the root for the English
word family actually has a very different meaning from today's family it overlaps but
it's by no means identical.
Would the familia be an extended family in the sense that it would include father or I mean
that's a husband, wife, father, mother, children but also household servants, slaves and
perhaps even other would it be more like a house in the European classical sense of the
house of the board ball or the house of the Habsburgs or something of that sort.
Exactly right it would include this broader group living in the house and in fact by the
classical period by the late republic the word familia is most often used simply to mean
a group of slaves it has no kinship content at all in many cases.
Right famually, Vigo makes a big deal about the family as being surf so or and then there
is the clients.
No, the client is a big word in American, American lexicon because every time you're
I'm the client and therefore I'm the king but of course the client was anything but a sovereign
entity in the Roman family what was a client?
A client was a hanger on a dependent and it was a word that indicated degradation so
Cicero famously said he would rather die than be called a Cleans of another Roman.
The clients typically were humbler men who and women but mainly men who came to attend the rich
and powerful and so one of the aspects of the Roman household is that every morning in
Rome these clients would scurry to the doorstep of the great and powerful men their patrons
in the hopes of either getting handouts of the leftovers from last night's banquet or
small sums of money.
So social life in Rome was organized in that way.
I don't know of any other society in European history that had this sort of overt form
of recognition of social dominance across the board of course royal houses had something
similar but the idea that every important senator in Rome had his cliente's running to greet
him in the morning in return for leftovers from the table from the night before I think
gives a pretty stark image of the hierarchy.
So when we speak in our own day and age and especially in Italy about clientellism and
relation to Berlusconi's government and I think that when the Italians bemoan the
Cleans de Lismo they are talking about an institution that has a long history on the Italian
peninsula I guess.
It certainly does although I would want to add that the valence of the word Cleantela has
changed a lot.
I think today that word almost universally carries connotations of corruption whereas in
the Roman world it largely didn't.
It did carry connotations of social inferiority but there was nothing illicit about it because
the Romans didn't start from a premise of egalitarianism among citizens.
But nevertheless I know having grown up in Italy that I don't want to dwell too much
on the contemporary situation but there's ways in which people in certain kinds of positions
of political authority and power are so many people depend on them and the system is
all structured in such a way that that person is in the role of a certain kind of I don't
want to say Patrifices but of a minority where the clients really do depend on his and
in some cases her sort of generosity or willingness to hand out favors.
I think that that's right in the cording to my friends it's a very big part of academic
appointments in Italy whereas I think in the United States today by contrast we go out of
our way to limit the influence of the patron in any selection process.
Exactly.
Good so now I invoked the descent of a niez into the underworld and there we're talking
about Virgil he's writing during the reign of Augustus so we're talking about way later
than 200 BC but nevertheless it is very male dominated and you see a kind of male lineage
going from niez all the way down to Augustus himself and I said that what's on parade
there is a certain kind of image of Roman patriarchy.
Now I understand that the path that is not the biological father and per se is more
of a power or authority and so forth but the status of the male in that institution was predominant
if not exclusive would you agree with that at least?
Yes although even there I think I'd want to draw some qualification because after all Augustus
and his adoptive father Julius Caesar claimed to sent from Venus to begin with so it doesn't
completely exclude women in authority but I absolutely take your point the whole Roman naming
system was one that followed the male line either the biological male line or the repaired
male line through adoption.
So Richard can we what can we say about what we call patriarchy in the historical times
of the Romans what are its main features?
In historical times there's no doubt but that the males and in particular the fathers in
the household thought of themselves as the dominant being and in fact even though in law
women the wives often had nearly equal property rights there was still an ideology of male
superiority and female inferiority.
Now here there's a different kind of source problem and that is that nearly all of the
material written materials that we have from Rome all of the literature was written by men.
We know that women did in fact write during this era but virtually none of that has been
preserved and so what we have to remember is that we have the male voice and the male voice
regarded males as the dominant figures in the household.
The supremacy of the males I suppose is linked to the institution of patriarchy.
It's not identical with it because you have told me before you know coming on air that
there in some cases women were the Patet familius in certain rare cases.
Can I qualify that a little bit?
They were the Potter familius in the sense that they were the head of household.
So if you imagine a situation in which a woman is widowed she might well have a house
that she inherits and she then controls the slaves in the household she controls the wealth
of the household.
So in that sense she's a head of household.
She's not referred to directly as a Patet familius but in the legal materials they will
have a heading about the legal rights of the Patet familius and examples of women in
control of households will creep in as examples of the Patet familius's power.
And when we talk about the political sphere, not the private sphere, obviously women were
not entitled to become senators and that was certainly mailed.
Senate from what I would like to hear you say something about whether it's true that
Roman Senate at least in Republican times in the earlier said we know about it was it composed
strictly of the Patet familius, a family father, let's say patriarchs and that it was a federation
of heads of households.
In legends about early Rome I think that's true but by the classical era it's certainly
not true.
So just to be clear the Potter familius is the oldest living male ascendant in the family.
That would mean in a case of a grandfather, a father, and a son it would be the grandfather
who would be the Patet familius and the 30 year old son with a son himself would not be the
Patet familius.
He would become the Patet familius when his father died.
We know for certain that there were sons in the Senate and there was a minimum age requirement
but in fact there are some very famous stories in Roman legend about, or we know this
actually is not legend, these are historical accounts about the father, the Potter, deferring
to his son when his son was in office with the consulship and this is a story that illustrates
a broader theme of putting civic responsibility ahead of family responsibility.
So going back now to the family, is it true that when a child was born into a Roman family
it was the father had to lift the child up and accept that child as his own.
Otherwise he could also refuse.
That's right and the father legally had the power to let the child live or not.
There's argument among historians about what the power of life and death of the Roman
father amounted to in practice but one thought is that it was this power of raising the
child or not that he had.
And oftentimes children unwanted would be sold either put up for adoption or sometimes
sold in to slavery even though.
So there are a couple of stages there that are worth distinguishing.
The newborn could be exposed and picked up by any passerby as a slave.
Once the father had accepted the infant into the family and the infant had citizenship,
it was in law illegal to sell that child but we know that it went on because families were
so poor and desperate that it was better to sell the child in order to let it live rather
than to have it starve in an impoverished home.
So when it comes to the recognition of when it comes to the birth of children there's
also this fascinating for me completely fascinating widespread practice of adoption and adoption
as a legal issue but also I just also as I mentioned my introductory remarks the idea
of how Rome freely adopts Greek legacies and so forth.
I still cannot figure out who the hell Octavian is.
He is some kind of adopted son of Julius Caesar who's like so many other Romans really
hard to know what is the bloodline.
This is very different than the Jewish tradition for example where there is a much more rigid
adherence to actual biological genealogy rather than adoptive genealogies.
And I take it that the only way to understand this widespread practice of adoption is to
at least from what some people say is that it's only when you understand that children
are at private property of the father that adoption makes sense because it's like you're
buying or you're purchasing a son when you adopt a son or daughter or that's another way
of making relations between different families but that once someone adopts that child it's
legally entirely belongs to the family and so forth.
Do you have other speculations about why adoption was such a widespread practice in ancient
Rome?
I think it's tied back to your opening comments about patriarchy and male line.
One of the things to remember is that adoption not of infants but adoption of grown
children and in particular grown sons and the idea was that if an aging Roman did not have
a son of his own, a biological son of his own, the way to repair the family line was
to adopt a teenage early 20-something son and the reason for doing that was to make sure
that you could perpetuate the cult of the male genius of the family.
So, you have to imagine that the households had a cult devoted to the particular male
family line representing that household and it needed to be carried on in the next generation
and so the principal duty of the adopted son was to carry on that cult and with it
came then the family property.
And that again for me is infinitely fascinating because that family cult and here you
and I spoke before in preparation for the show my one of my favorite books of all time
which is Fustel de Koolal, the ancient city in 19th century kind of early classic of philology
where he keeps insisting throughout that book at the only way to understand the ancient
world is to understand the importance of the cult where the Patrech Familius, the father
is not a biological, he's the high priest of the cult and of the Lars Familius, the household
gods and which he Fustel de Koolalus associates with ancestors and the dayification of ancestors
and that basically it's not so much a blood genealogy it was who is going to occupy
the role of the high priest of that cult, of the household cult and each family had its own
particular set of domestic deities, ancestors if you follow Fustel, that required this constant
ritualistic enactment and that the father's power derived from the fact that he was the
high priest of that domestic religion.
Is that what you were referring to when you say the need to keep the cult alive?
Right, the genius that is transmitted from one generation to the next through the male line
but you're right it's not necessarily biological, it was biological in the first instance
so if you had a son who survived the ravages of infant mortality then that would be the natural
successor but if you didn't have a son and often they didn't, I mean my demographic
simulation suggests that maybe one in three Romans at the age of 50 wouldn't have had a son
coming along to take that role then you go out and adopt, yeah.
Would that be because of early death or early death, right unpredictable mortality and other
families had two sons, so the whole issue of how you match the number of children to the family
resources in an age of high mortality is a recurrent one through human history and adoption
is one way that you can deal with that.
A lot of fascinating issues, so here when let's talk a little bit about inheritance because
obviously when we're talking about adoption we're talking about carrying on the line,
the cult, whatever but that it has to do with inheritance and I gather that you have assured
me that primogener was never a real institutional reality among the Romans or any kind of
ancient peoples that we know of.
Is that correct?
It's astonishing because we have, we hear so much about primogener as particularly merciless
kind of law, where does our notion of primogener come from?
I think it comes from the Middle Ages, Dubees work which I don't know well and it's after
the period that I know the source materials for but Dubees work about the rise of this
in what 10th, 11th centuries I think is relevant but what we do know about Rome going all the
way back to the 12 tables of 451, 50 BC so this is the one bit of good evidence I think
for early Rome.
Already they have a part of inheritance system in the case of succession where there's
no will.
They have a part of inheritance system that splits the estate among daughters as well
as sons.
It's not even exclusively male.
That was different in Athens.
In classical Athens the property was split among the sons.
The daughters got a dowry but in Rome going right back to the early days, all family
members stood to inherit a share of the property when there was no will.
How did they keep their households with its property intact if that was the case?
I think absolutely one of the problems that they had was fragmentation of estates and in fact
by the classical period Roman senatorial families were notoriously reluctant to have very many
children or any children at all and I think part of what's going on there is that there's
a real fear of fragmentation of the estate and the impoverishment of the children.
The problem is that if you live in a society where half of the newborns don't live past
the age of ten and that's roughly true of Rome we think.
There's a lot of guess work in knowing how many children to have in order to end up with
one son to inherit the name and to inherit a part of the estate.
That's quite surprising given the way Rome achieved its dominion around the Mediterranean
world which is primarily through wars.
You would think that the constant war machine that Rome developed would have exacted a
terrible toll on the male, well the sons born into families and that therefore rather than
being afraid to have too many children that you would assume that it would be the other
way around that you felt like you would have to have as many as possible in order to repair
the losses that war incurred in the social fabric.
That's right but we know that going back to I think it's 131 BC the sensor, Roman sensor
of that year of macadonicus gave a speech in which he lamented the fact that Romans were not
having enough children to maintain the population in the face of this incessant warfare
and he pleaded with Romans to do their civic duty and to have more children and that's
certainly a theme that Augustus picks up on Augustus' marriage legislation was notorious for
invading Romans' private lives in order to try to compel them to have more children.
No I know that he forbade bachelor's to go to the Colosseum at a certain point.
At a certain point you have to have a marriage certificate to get into the Colosseum.
Well not Colosseum was only built about 80 years later but yeah into the games.
Right, right.
Yeah, no that's right and there were other penalties in terms of the ability to accept
legacies from unrelated friends, penalties for not having children.
And I always thought that the reason there was such a reluctance to get married is that after
a certain degree of prosperity in a society, a flourishing that we see at sometimes in
advanced First World countries today where the birth rate just starts declining because
people are enjoying their lives too much and it's too much of an obstruction and therefore
it was dominated by the pleasure principle rather than the actual economic hardship of sustaining
a larger family.
I think there's something to that although there have been some very big changes today
in modern developed societies.
I think it's a matter of having fewer children but investing more in each one of them
because you can be pretty confident that a newborn is going to survive through adulthood.
The Romans didn't have any reason to have that kind of confidence in the survival of their
children but we hear various stories from classical Rome about how bachelor's were the focus
of a lot of attention because they didn't have children so people stood to inherit from
them when they died.
Yeah.
Well Richard, perhaps we could talk about the things related to, well we've been talking
about the inheritance laws a little bit and I guess I wanted to just wrap that up by asking
whether all children inherited equally from what we know.
I'm to say male children, you said the females had dowries so was it an actual kind of
egalitarian inheritance?
Well I want to distinguish between inheritance with the will, through a will, and inheritance
without a will.
In cases of inheritance without a will, the property the estate was divided evenly between
among all of the children male and female.
The whole point about Roman wills is that they allowed the test stator, the will writer,
to fashion his distribution of his property as he liked within certain limits and there
as far as we can tell daughters typically got some share but probably not as large a share
as the sons did through written wills but there's no sense in which there's a practice,
a regular practice of primogenitor where one son is picked out to inherit the estate.
So not completely egalitarian but much more egalitarian than one might imagine.
Well here this question I might have missed something but when you were talking about the
Patre familias but was the title or the role of Patre familias inheritable?
And if someone became the Patre familias wouldn't he automatically like claim to the totality
of the estate?
In the case of a family where a father dies leaving several sons each one would become a
Patre familias in his own right and that simply has to do with the law of property ownership.
So this Patre familias could be two years old but he would be the Patre familias if there
was no living male ascendant to be his Patre familias.
So that actually I think is a good indication that the phrase Patre familias didn't necessarily
carry the kind of authority that we associate with it today.
It meant property ownership and that property ownership could be by a two year old or
by a 60 year old.
So referring to the title of your book that first came out in 1994 about patriarchy,
property and death in the Roman family we've talked about patriarchy we've been talking
now about you know property and death we've talked a little bit about it but there's
some really astonishing well there you deal a lot with the mortality rates in that book
and you also point out how young the fathers of families actually seems we're dying.
That's right.
We think that the life expectancy on average was between 25 and 30 years at birth and roughly
what that meant was that probably a third of the newborns died in their first year and
about half of the newborns died before the age of 10 and then at the age of 10 those
that survived had an additional life expectancy in the range of 35 to 40 years.
That means that given that Roman men married relatively late in life around the age of
30 their life expectancy beyond their marriage age was pretty limited and so they were
very keenly aware of the fact that they might well die before their children came of age
and that's why property families were so attentive to making sure that there was a written
will that was up to date.
I would have thought that with the increasing affluence of Roman society that maybe the
mortality rate would improve.
Those who made it beyond age 10.
So there are a couple of things about that.
One of the aspects of increasing affluence was increasing urbanization and of course the
city of Rome was the biggest of them all.
It was the biggest city in Europe with a population of about a million biggest city in Europe
until London of about 1800 until the 19th century so less than 200 years ago until the 19th
century cities were death traps.
They were the concentration of population made the transmission of disease very easy and
so they were always population sinks and Rome was no exception.
In fact here Walter Shidel, who's my colleague in the classics department, has done some
of the most interesting work showing that the city of Rome probably had the worst seasonal
mortality that we know of in European history and that's because malaria was absolutely rampant
in the city of Rome and we have a body of inscriptions that show when people died through
the year and they died in the late summer early autumn.
That's a characteristic of a transmissible disease particularly malaria.
So Rome would have been really an awful place to live in a lot of ways I think but people
kept flocking to it.
So that's a good question.
Why would they keep flocking to it?
It was a place where at least through the classical era there were grain handouts that
meant that people could get some of their sustenance in Rome.
Literally there was a big attraction.
The drudgery of agricultural life shouldn't be romanticized.
The city had a variety of amenities to offer that kind of offset the mortality rates.
It's also a little unclear how much they understood about how dangerous cities were.
It's also true that this has been true of cities through the ages.
So London was a death trap through the early modern period and it's only in the 19th century
the first half of the 19th century that they begin to develop public health measures that
diminish the mortality in cities.
Was there a police force in ancient Rome?
Not during the Republican era.
So one of the things that Augustus does is he sets up a regular police force to police
the city of Rome.
But one of the reasons that Republican Rome, so before Augustus, was so chaotic, was that
it grew to be a city of about a million people and it had no police force to keep order.
And so by the late republic you have senators marching around the city with bodyguards
of gladiators in order to protect themselves because there were no police to do that.
And I also gathered that there was an excruciating noise levels and that Julius Caesar contemplated
but I guess never even attempted to ban chariots running through the streets at night
time so that people could sleep but that's kind of nowhere.
It must have been actually quite hellish.
But certainly the impression that juvenile, the best known Roman satirist, gives.
I think probably wasn't chariots so much as wagons.
I think there's a misconception that the Roman version of our car was the chariot.
That's not true.
But certainly wagons.
The wagon traffic taking goods in and out of the city must have generated a phenomenal
clatter because the wheels were wood with a metal strip around it on very hard rock pavement
cobblestones.
So it must have created a tremendous racket and there was a kind of terrible choice.
They could make sure that the wagon traffic came only at night in order to avoid tying
up the pedestrian movement around the city.
And if they did that then nobody could sleep and that's what juvenile says.
Well, here's a paradox I'd like to draw attention to.
It's a paradox in my mind but I may be misconceiving the issue.
So I insisted on the way in which Virgil's scene of the descent into the underworld is
a male dominated and in the Odyssey.
They're all these women that are the first people that Odysseus speaks to.
But the reality is that women in Greek society were really sequestered and it was a complete
apartheid, almost Taliban-like.
In Rome, despite all this ideological kind of triumphalism about the male line and Patrificamigias
and all that, I gather that women, even legally speaking, were far better off and that gender
equality was a much greater reality, probably not certainly on a perfect way in Rome.
Visa, Visa, Visa, Society, like Greece, is that the case?
It absolutely is the case.
That's right.
In terms of private property and private law, women had very extensive powers and in fact,
I think it would be right to say that women had stronger property rights, more nearly
equal property rights in classical Rome than in any other European society up to the mid-20th
century.
That ideological, or that contradiction with the ideology, is one that in fact a lot of Roman
authors wrestle with.
So the satirist, juvenile, whom I mentioned before in his famous sixth satire or infamous
sixth satire, rails against women who were behaving above their station, behaving
as if they were superior to men.
The dimensions in which he rails, I think, are really revealing.
One is that he doesn't like women who are learned, who can cite their virtual or
a homer.
He doesn't like women who are property and so can threaten to leave the family to divorce
their husbands and take their property with them.
He thinks that women's empowerment leads to their promiscuity.
Surely that's wildly exaggerated for the sake of what he thought was humor.
I think we today might not find it quite so humorous.
So yeah, this is a contradiction.
The analogy, I think, is the contradiction between the social station of ex-slaves freedmen
and in the ideology which placed them at the bottom of the citizen ladder and the reality
that some of these freedmen were the richest men in Roman society and had very considerable
social powers of result.
Is that right?
And I know that some of them were Greek tutors teaching and they were very learned at
erudite people teaching the sons of the Greek philosophy and art and literature and so
forth.
That's right.
And there there was a shift during the Republic, the sort of typical pattern, I think,
among the elite was that they had a Greek slave in the household to teach the children
when they were younger and they taught the girls as well as the boys.
But then for their advanced education, the sons went off to the eastern Mediterranean
centers of learning like Athens or Rhodes.
By the time of Augustus, the center of learning really has become Rome itself.
So it switches from, it switches to a system in which slaves are still educated within
the household and doing the education within the household.
But then the higher learning is in the city of Rome.
Okay.
Well, in the few minutes as we remain, can I ask you how you got your personal interest
to become a historian of Rome?
What is it that drew you to this study in the first place?
I started out my college career as an engineer at the University of Illinois and that was
mostly a matter of not having the imagination to think about anything else.
I took a Roman history course to meet a distribution requirement in the spring of my freshman
year and was completely smitten by it.
I think it was just much more engaging as subject matter than the courses that I was taking
in engineering at the time.
And so at the end of my first year, I flipped into classics and started taking Greek and
Latin and then went off to University of Cambridge for graduate work.
And that happened to be, I think, the kind of the leading center of ancient history in
the world at that point arguably.
Because were you tempted by the Greek to go to specialize in Greek history rather than Roman
history?
When I went to Cambridge as a graduate student, I really hadn't picked one or the other
and it was really the guidance of Moses Finley who was the kind of patron saint of all
of the graduate students at Cambridge.
It was his influence that pushed me in the Roman direction.
The irony here is that he was a Greek historian, but he pushed me away to work with somebody
else, Peter Garnsey.
And who are your favorite Roman authors?
Oh, I think Tacitus is my favorite.
His sense of political irony, I think, can't be beaten.
One of the regrets that I have as a teacher is that it takes students with some considerable
skill in Latin to be able to appreciate his remarkable writing style and the irony that
it carries.
But I think after Tacitus probably Virgil's in the it.
Great.
Yeah.
Well, all I can say is that it's great to have a dean of the humanities and sciences who
doesn't need any sort of instruction about what the value of the humanities are in the
face of the university because you're obviously right at the very thick and the foundations
of it.
So I'd like to thank you for coming on again, Richard.
I want to remind our listeners we've been speaking with Professor Richard Saller from the
Department of History and classic, Sarah Stanford about ancient Roman history and we invite
you to tune in to entitled opinions next week.
Thanks again, Richard.
Thank you.
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