ABSTRACT
Study of the status of women in Roman society is made difficult by the nature of our sources. We are comparatively well informed about the legal status of women. The social status of women and the way in which women interacted with men are rather more difficult to understand. Our substantial problem is that the literary and epigraphic sources tend to represent extreme views of women. These depictions of women conform to stereotypes. They are either chaste, supportive and loyal or deceiving, promiscuous and avaricious. Neither Juvenal’s misogynistic Satire VI nor the funerary inscriptions noting the manifest virtues of the departed may bear any relationship to the behaviour of contemporary women. Legal sources tell us about law and not behaviour. Legislation against adultery for instance tells us that adultery was a criminal offence, but not how widespread or socially acceptable adultery was. These sources do, however, attest ideologies. Funerary inscriptions suggest the virtues that represented an ideal of womanhood and we may assume that women were under some pressure to aspire to those virtues. Pliny’s idealised women again show us an ideological representation of women, and the ideology-whether or not it was shared by women-may be assumed to have had some social effect. Similarly, Juvenal’s Satire VI suggests that an ugly misogynism (however seriously we regard the depiction) was not completely foreign to Roman manhood. In some rare sources, however, depictions of women do not seem to conform to stereotypes and these, together with the attested ideologies, allow some progress to be made.
