• Most Romans married, and a great variety of sources portray husbands and wives visually and in words. These include idealizations, such as those found on tombstones, and biting critiques, including those by satirists such as the poet Juvenal.

Epitaph on a Roman Tombstone from Around 130B.C.E.

“Stranger, my message is short. Stand by and read it through. Here is the unlovely tomb of a lovely woman. Her parents called her Claudia by name. She loved her husband with all her heart. She bore two sons; of these she leaves one on earth; under the earth she has placed the other. She was charming in converse, yet gentle in bearing. She kept house, she made wool. That’s my last word. Go your way.”

Juvenal’s Sixth Satire, Written Sometime in the Early Second CenturyC.E.

“[Y]ou are preparing for a covenant, a marriage-contract and a betrothal; you are by now getting your hair combed by a master barber; you have also perhaps given a pledge to her finger. What! Postumus, are you, you who once had your wits, taking to yourself a wife? Tell me . . . what snakes are driving you mad? Can you submit to a she-tyrant when there is so much rope to be had, so many dizzy heights of windows standing open? . . . If you are honestly uxorious, and devoted to one woman, then bow your head and submit your neck ready to bear the yoke. Never will you find a woman who spares the man who loves her; for though she be herself aflame, she delights to torment and plunder him. So the better the man, the more desirable he be as a husband, the less good by far will he get out of his wife. No present will you ever make if your wife forbids; nothing will you ever sell if she objects; nothing will you buy without her consent. She will arrange your friendships for you; she will turn your now-aged friend from the door which saw the beginnings of his beard. . . . Give up all hope of peace so long as your mother-in-law is alive. It is she that teaches her daughter to revel in stripping and despoiling her husband; it is she that teaches her to reply to a seducer’s love-letters in no unskilled and innocent fashion; she eludes or bribes your guards. . . . The bed that holds a wife is never free from wrangling and mutual bickerings; no sleep is to be got there! It is there that she sets upon her husband, more savage than a tigress that has lost her cubs; conscious of her own secret slips, she affects a grievance, abusing his boys, or weeping over some imagined mistress. She has an abundant supply of tears always ready in their place, awaiting her command in which fashion they should flow. . . . But whence come these monstrosities? you ask; from what fountain do they flow? In days of old, the wives of Latium were kept chaste by their humble fortunes. It was toil and brief slumbers that kept vice from polluting their modest homes; hands chafed and hardened by Tuscan fleeces, Hannibal nearing the city, and husbands standing to arms. . . . We are now suffering the calamities of long peace. Luxury, more deadly than any foe, has laid her hand upon us, and avenges a conquered world.”

Sources: Tombstone: Naphtali Lewis and Meyer Reinhold, Roman Civilization, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 524; Juvenal: Juvenal, trans. G. G. Ramsay, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1918), pp. 85, 99, 101, 103, 105, 107.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS