Pudicitia: The Construction and Application of Female Morality in the Roman Republic and Early Empire Master’s Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Graduate Program in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies Professor Cheryl Walker, Advisor In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies by Kathryn Joseph May 2018 Copyright by Kathryn Elizabeth Spillman Joseph © 2018 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my advisors for their patience and advice as well as my cohort in the Graduate Program in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies. Y’all know what you did. iii ABSTRACT Pudicitia: The Construction and Application of Female Morality in the Roman Republic and Early Empire A thesis presented to the Graduate Program in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Waltham, Massachusetts By Kathryn Joseph In the Roman Republic and early Empire, pudicitia, a woman’s sexual modesty, was an important part of the traditional concept of female morality. This thesis strives to explain how traditional Roman morals, derived from the foundational myths in Livy’s History of Rome, were applied to women and how women functioned within these moral constructs. The traditional constructs could be manipulated under the right circumstances and for the right reasons, allowing women to act outside of traditional gender roles. By examining literary examples of women who were able to step outside of traditional gender roles, it becomes possible to understand the difference between projected male ideas on ideal female morality, primarily pudicitia, and actuality. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements…iii Introduction…1 Chapter One: The Structural Framework for Female Morality within Livy…6 Chapter Two: Pudicitia in Practice…30 Chapter Three: Pudicitia and Crossing Gender Spheres through Religious Organization and Political Involvement…52 Conclusion…70 Bibliography…73 v Introduction Within the Roman world, the only individuals who can be said to have had true agency, true control over their lives, were educated male citizens who could afford to participate in politics. This select segment of the population also had the loudest voice and the one best represented in most of the ancient literature that survives today. Through such ancient sources come ideas and philosophies on the marginalized figures who often did not have a public voice of their own. Because social hierarchies and moral guidelines limited interactions between different groups, the literature often reflects stigmas and stereotypes surrounding liminal figures. Thus, understanding marginalized groups requires sifting through the ancient sources to discern how they actually functioned in Roman culture versus how they are presented to modern audiences. The combination of traditional and private ideas on morality within ancient texts can yield further insight into the surviving evidence for marginalized figures who were able to gain some types of partial agency. This thesis strives to explain how traditional Roman morals, derived from the foundational myths in Livy’s History of Rome, were applied to women and how women functioned within these moral constructs. The traditional constructs could be manipulated under the right circumstances and for the right reasons allowing women to act outside of traditional gender roles. By examining literary examples of women who were able to step outside of traditional gender roles, it becomes possible to understand the difference between projected male ideas on ideal female morality, primarily pudicitia, and actuality. 1 Moral constructs allow individuals to know how to properly interact in public and private spheres, which are further segmented into gendered spaces. Any cultural system has not just gendered space but gendered activities. Gendered spaces are fluid and evolve over time, and, in the Roman world, there were some boundaries that individuals could cross without losing status and regressing in the social hierarchy. The ability to cross these boundaries depends on the individuals’ original standing, how far they venture outside their traditional role, and whether they gain power through changing roles. Partial agency is a temporary increase in power that usually comes from crossing social boundaries, but for such temporary power to be effective and not detrimental, individuals acting outside of their normal sphere must be relatively high within the moral spectrum of their usual sphere. This paper seeks to understand how women as marginalized figures functioned within and without the moral limits placed on them by Roman culture and the male figures they interacted with. Women are usually presented on either extreme of the moral spectrum in literature. They are portrayed as primarily moral or immoral and represent good or bad behavior within the narrative. One explanation as to why women are represented with such duality is the effect that reputation had on individuals. If a woman was called a whore, even if it was a false accusation, it would be forever a part of her character. The elder Seneca writes about a hypothetical case in Controversiae 1.2. A girl, who had been kidnapped and forced into prostitution, manages to stay a virgin while working in a brothel and eventually escapes by killing her a soldier who visits her as a client. She returns to her family and later wishes to become a priestess which sparks debate about whether it would be appropriate since she had been sold as a prostitute. The arguments presented against the girl “suggest that the girl is unfit for priesthood because of the possibility of sexual pollution of some kind or another; pollution on the grounds of her murder of the soldier is 2 also referred to but receives considerably less attention.”1 The only thing that matters about this girl is that she worked as a prostitute even though no part of her experience was her choice. Her sexual purity was tainted, and, as a consequence, she faced limitations on what she was allowed to do. Not all women in ancient literature are hypothetical, and neither were the basic limitations placed on them. The primary way women were restricted was based on morals. To be a moral woman, one had to have pudicitia. The root of pudicitia comes from pudor which is a used to describe a feeling of shame, or the demonstration of shame, and is usually linked to shame that resulted from a lack of proper sexual behavior.2 Manifestations of impudicitia could include anything from blushing to wearing overly lavish clothing because of the Roman ideas on modesty and female virtue. The male equivalent to pudicitia, virtus, requires a public display but, because of the close relationship between pudicitia and ideas of modesty, moral Roman women were discouraged from adorning themselves excessively because they would appear to lack proper self- restraint. Depending on the exact circumstances, a woman deemed to be immoral could be ostracized by her peers or be reprimanded within the legal system. Having pudicitia required women to navigate a morality-based social hierarchy that, as seen in Seneca the Elder, had the potential restrict a woman’s already limited opportunities. The Romans inherently connected a woman’s morality to how aware of her own shame she was. Understanding pudicitia and what exactly it meant for a woman to have it can help scholars better understand the lives of women in the Roman world. Pudicitia actively guided what correct 1 Rebecca Langlands, Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 255. 2 P. G.W. Glare, ed., Oxford Latin Dictionary (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1982), s.v. "Pudor," definition 1514. 3 behavior was for Roman women even if a woman was not specifically described as having it. Because aspects of pudicitia could fall under the domain of other terms to describe female morality, sometimes more specific terminology was used to describe a woman. As an applied concept of female morality, Pudicitia’s reach is broad and to understand such moral constraints, a structural framework that provides examples of moral and immoral women is needed. Livy’s History of Rome creates such a framework because Livy states in the prologue that he wrote this work to examine the moral history of Rome. The first five books of Livy are particularly relevant because they combine both mythological and more historical aspects of the foundation of Rome. The women emphasized in Livy are personifications of Rome and the moral climate at the time. Even when the women discussed were not actual historical figures, the way Livy uses these women in his narrative provides insights into how female morality was construed. Using only the first five books to construct a guideline for female morality is selective, but Livy’s purpose in highlighting these women is to represent how Rome’s cultural ideals on morality originated. There are aspects of most all of the characters in the first five books that cross over from traditionally good to traditionally bad which demonstrates the development of morality in early Roman history and mythology. Livy’s structural framework provides a traditional viewpoint on women’s roles but can be contrasted with the examples of women in other historical works, particularly women who are contemporaneous with the time the author is writing. Because women were a marginalized group, it is problematic to rely solely on texts written by privileged men to explore how the constraints of concepts of female morality affected women within Roman culture. As in the Controversiae, a woman’s morality could be judged by external voices who saw their actions as directly connected to the moral environment in Rome. Philosophical works on pudicitia and female morality generally 4 discuss only the very virtuous or the very immoral using traditional viewpoints such as those in Livy.