While home spaces were not as gendered as those in #AncientGreece, this article talks about how spaces in Rome were also somewhat gendered -- and in his attack against #Clodia, #Cicero used Clodia's defiance of those norms against her!

#Scandalisation, #gender and space in #AncientRome: The case of #Cicero and #Clodia

by Muriel Moser
First published: 17 June 2024

"Ciceros thus uses different notions of space for his argument. First, by drawing up a moral landscape of her shameful deeds, Cicero seeks to emphasise the magnitude of her guilt [as an adulteress and murderer of her husband]. Second, built spaces are important for Cicero's argument because they allow him to ‘reveal’ Clodia's private acts, that is, acts that occurred in private spaces, to his male audience in a public space in a dramatic way, thus offering entertainment and creating outrage. Finally, Cicero is able to present her acts as shameful and problematic by blurring built spaces with gendered social spaces.

"This last aspect of his use of space is particularly complex and perfidious and made possible not least by the fluidity of the spatial concepts at work in a #domus and other ‘private’ places, such as gardens and provincial villas. Take the Roman domus: Cicero could use several levels of meaning in this term. A Roman domus was a physical location with a strong symbolic value. It was considered to be the seat of a family, to the point that the term could be equated with the family itself. And, as the family stood at the heart of the Roman moral order, the domus also had a strong #moral connotation The Roman house was, further, a political and hence a public site: it was used to conduct political business, to make connections and to present the public image of the house's owner. It is likely that Clodia received her guests in the atrium, the centre of the public part of the domus, or in an adjacent room (cubiculum) more suitable for private business, but it is difficult to map these roles onto specific areas within the Roman domus. Roman houses were not divided into a ‘public’ and a ‘non-public’ area: some areas were clearly intended for interaction with people outside the household, such as members of the public, guests or supplicants, while other parts were reserved for the life of the family and the business of the household, but there was no clear dichotomy, the separation of these spaces being fluid, with gradations of privacy.

"It is this fluidity that allows Cicero uses spatial references to make Clodia scandalous. For it allows him blur the division between built spaces used by women and conceptual or social spaces, notably politics, that were reserved for men. In this way, Cicero is able to construct Clodia's social events as #transgressions into #MaleSocialSpace. How is this achieved? Having ascribed each of her acts to a specific space as noted above, he turned events that (if they happened at all) would otherwise have been accessible to at most a few people – the goings-on inside Clodia's house (domus) in Rome, in her private garden by the Tiber or at her country house at Baiae – into the public object of the trial of Caelius. In so doing, Cicero accused her of having used these built spaces in a manner that had infringed on social spaces that were unsuitable for respectful women, because they were, so he insinuated, reserved for men. It is the infringement of these #gendered social spaces that constitute her worst transgression according to Cicero."

Read more:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1468-0424.12794

#RomanWomen #RomanHistory #Patriarchy #Rome #WomensRights

The Misunderstood #RomanEmpress Who Willed Her Way to the Top

A fresh view of #GallaPlacidia, who married a barbarian and ruled when the world power fell into chaos

by Romy Blümel, January/February 2023

Excerpt: "It was around midnight that the cataclysm began. #Placidia would have heard distant sounds of Gothic horns and growing pandemonium around the Salarian Gate in the city’s northwest; not long afterward, flames could be seen rising from the nearby Gardens of Sallust.

"The Goths had breached the walls. The British-born monk Pelagius, who was also trapped in Rome that same night, used language that echoed the biblical vision of Judgment Day to convey the horror of the moment: 'Rome, the mistress of the world, shivered, crushed with fear, at the sound of the blaring trumpets and the howling of the Goths.'

"St. Jerome, when he heard the dreadful news from Roman refugees, captured the sense of shock: 'It is the end of the world!' he wrote. 'Words fail me; sobs prevent me from speaking. The city that once subjugated the world has been subjugated in its turn!'

"For Romans, it was the beginning of the end. But for Placidia, it was just one more twist in an astonishing life saga that could have inspired a subplot of 'Game of Thrones.' After the sack, the pampered and beautiful princess would be taken from her gilded palace as a prisoner of the Visigoths. Four years later, Placidia shocked Romans by marrying one of her captors. Then, by age 26, she was back in Italy, re-inventing herself to rule as the last empress of the Western Roman Empire.

"And yet, she has been treated mercilessly by historians, who have either vilified or ignored her for most of the last 1,500 years. This has left her today all but forgotten, even though the final decades of the Western world’s most enduring empire cannot be understood without her.
#Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Catherine the Great — to the roster of history’s unfairly maligned women leaders must be added the name of #GallaPlacidiaAugusta.

Although her name in Latin means
'placidity' or 'peace,' Placidia’s life was anything but; she experienced more adventures than Marie Antoinette and Amelia Earhart combined. Perhaps no other figure, male or female, enjoyed such an intimate view of the Western Roman Empire’s operatic death throes or influenced events for such a prolonged period. But the attacks on her reputation began not long after her death, with authors like Cassiodorus denouncing her rule as the nadir of Rome’s fortunes. Only in recent years have scholars gone back to read the contemporary sources with more objectivity, revealing Placidia as a far more sympathetic figure, a strong-willed leader with radical ideas on how to save the crumbling empire.

"It’s part of a general reassessment of her era, known as late antiquity, once dismissed as a gloomy saga of 'decline and fall' to the Middle Ages, including a fresh look at so-called #barbarians, who were far more sophisticated than Romans alleged.

" 'Placidia had an amazingly adventurous life,' explained Paola Novara, a scholar at the National Museum of Ravenna, who has written about Placidia’s legacy, including her influence on art and architecture throughout Europe. 'She was a hostage for years. She was married twice, to a Gothic king, then to Rome’s most powerful general. She had one child who died, another who became emperor. She must have been a very strong and powerful character. But there has long been a negative image of Placidia,' she continued. 'She was not a bad sovereign. She was brave and capable. In fact, Placidia was the last significant ruler of the Western Roman Empire. She managed it for 25 years!' "

Read more:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/misunderstood-roman-empress-willed-way-to-top-180981294/

Archived version:
https://archive.ph/JPuze

#WomenRulers #RomanWomen #RomanHistory #FallOfRome #History #Histodon

Not surprising...!

How #Patriarchy Undermined the #RomanRepublic

by Douglas Boin, Nov 24, 2025 2:00 PM

Excerpt: "The men of the republic, who called themselves their society’s 'Chosen Fathers,' enforced this two-tiered society through strict #VotingLaws and limits on women’s #autonomy. Heavily manipulated voting districts ensured that only the voices of the senatorial elite, Rome’s self-proclaimed optimates, or 'best men,' dominated, not progressive champions, freed slaves, or newly-enfranchised citizens. No woman could run for higher office. Women could neither sit on juries, nor exercise their vote.

" 'As soon as women become the equals of men,' the statesman and senator Cato the Elder said in 212 B.C., 'they will have become our masters.'

"Yet as Rome’s republic expanded beyond the capital city, beyond Italy, and gradually acquired its Mediterranean empire, stories of a different sort of woman reset women’s expectations at home. In the eastern Mediterranean, highly educated woman philosophers, avant-garde poets, and above all, the fearless Greek-speaking queens of Egypt, including #Cleopatra, held sway. Inspired by these role models across #Europe, #Africa, and #Asia, #RomanWoman began to challenge the republic’s inequities and ideologies and claim their voices in the male-dominated republic.

"Grandmothers and mothers taught their daughters to read and cultivate their intellectual talents. An educated girl, the new wave of educators argued, knew how to assert herself against a man who 'swaggers through the city acting like a tyrant.' Cato’s quotation comes from a pivotal moment when women and their allies poured into the streets to demand the repeal of a war-time-era tax on their savings. Other women were political leaders who earned the scorn of their contemporaries. Some were erased or forgotten. In one case, the life of an upper-class woman and contemporary of Julius Caesar, Clodia, saw her reputation destroyed by false claims of harlotry, home-wrecking, and husband-killing.

"#Clodia, an unapologetic champion for expanded voting rights for the enfranchised men of Italy, bravely went before an all-male jury in the center of the Roman Forum in April 56 B.C., as the prosecution’s star witness to testify against her day’s runway, endemic corruption. Instead of defending his client from the charges, however, the leading defense attorney, Marcus Tullius Cicero, turned the case into a referendum on Clodia’s character. Transforming Clodia into the trial’s villain, the speech, the Pro Caelio, outlasted Rome’s fall. It has been taught in high school and college classrooms for two millennia as a masterclass of rhetoric, from which countless men in business, law, and politics have learned to emulate Cicero’s #misogyny.

"Trailblazing women like Clodia have always, in the historian’s shorthand, been called “ahead of their time.” But history deserves to be told from another point of view: by pointing out the parade of men who have stubbornly and perennially thwarted progress. Rome’s republic might have survived a bit longer had its own people listened to, not silenced, its women."

Read more:
https://time.com/7326211/roman-republic-women/

Archived version:
https://archive.ph/YJcBB

#RomanWomen #HistoryRepeatsItself #FallOfRome #RomanHistory #USPol #HistoryRepeats #WomensRights #VoterDisenfranchisement