Women in Roman Society

Women could have citizenship status, but they had no formal role in Roman society. Women couldn’t serve in any of the capacities men served in as mag-istrates, politicians, or soldiers. A woman couldn’t even be an empress in her own right, though they were used for family alliances, such as when Augustus made his daughter Julia marry Marcellus, then Agrippa, and finally Tiberius in an effort to establish a dynasty through his only descendant. If an emperor left only a daughter, then the succession passed to a male relative or another man altogether.
Women had almost no legal identity other than as a man’s daughter, sister, wife, or mother. Vespasian (AD 69–79) passed a law that said any woman who had become involved with a slave man should be treated as a slave herself. Real slave women had even less of an identity, if that’s possible to imagine. Barbarian women didn’t think much of Roman women. When Septimius Severus campaigned in Britain in AD 208–211, he made a treaty with the Caledonians from Scotland. During the negotiations, the empress Julia Domna made fun of the wife of a chieftain called Argentocoxus about how British women slept with lots of different men. Argentocoxus’s wife snapped back: ‘We fulfil nature’s demands in a much better way than you Roman women do because we consort openly with the best men, whereas you let yourself be debauched by the vilest men in secret.’