WOMAN’S POSITION

Among the Romans the domestic position of women was on the whole much more favourable to the growth of feminine culture than in Greece. They were not jealously guarded in special apartments, but were allowed to retain their seat at the table and join in the conversation when guests arrived, as Cornelius Nepos points out with a pardonable sense of superiority. Becker, in his Gallus, thus states the difference between Greek and Roman treatment of women: “Whilst we see that in most of the Grecian states, and especially in Athens, the women (i.e. the whole female sex) were little esteemed and treated as children all their lives, confined to the gynaikoreitis, shut out from social life and all intercourse with men and their amusements, we find that in Rome exactly the reverse was the case. Although the wife is naturally subordinate to the husband, yet she is always treated with open attention and regard. The Roman housewife always appears as the mistress of the whole household economy, instructress of the children, and guardian of the honour of the house, equally esteemed with the paterfamilias both in and out of the house.”

“Walking abroad was only limited by scruple and custom, not by a law or the jealous will of the husband. The women frequented public theatres as well as the men, and took their places with them at festive banquets.” "Even the vestals participated in the banquets of the men." Although “learned women were dreaded,” a knowledge of Greek and the fine arts was in later times counted an essential part of feminine culture. “Certain advantages accrued to those who had many children, jus trium liberorum.” Masculine “voluntary celibacy was considered, in very early times, as censurable and even guilty;” and from Festus “we learn that there was a celibate fine.” The statement apparently credited by Mr. Lecky that for 520 years there was no case of divorce in Rome, has been shown to rest on a misconception of a passage in Gellius. Yet “manners were so severe, that a senator was censured for indecency because he had kissed his wife in the presence of their daughter.” It was also considered “in a high degree disgraceful for a Roman mother to delegate to a nurse the duty of suckling her child.”

NO WOOING AND CHOICE

Yet amid all these domestic virtues and family affections we search in vain for the prevalence of Romantic Love. We have already seen that for the growth of this sentiment something more is needed than domestic affection, and that something is comprised in the word Wooing. There was no wooing at Rome. In most cases, the father took his daughter’s heart in his hand, and, treating it as a piece of personal property, bestowed it on the suitor who best “suited” him. “From the earliest times,” says Ploss, “it was customary in Rome to marry girls when they had barely reached their twelfth or thirteenth year; engagements were probably made at a still earlier age. Although legally the daughter’s consent was required, in actual practice she exercised no choice; her extreme youth in itself preventing this. Often a marriage contract was a mere matter of agreement between two families in which love and personal favour were disregarded; nor did even the betrothal bring the future couple into closer intimacy.” With reference to the laws of the Twelve Tablets, M. LegouvÉ remarks, in his Histoire Morale des Femmes, that “Rome was worthy of Athens. Not only did a Roman father dispose of his daughter against her inclination, but he even had the right to dissolve a marriage into which she had entered, and to take away from his daughter the husband he had given her, whom she loved, and by whom she had children.” In justice, however, it must be added that this latter right was rarely exercised; but the fact that the Romans could tolerate the very notion of such a law shows what little account was made of love.

Another absurd impediment to personal choice was raised by the Theodosian Code, which compelled a girl to marry a man who had the same calling as her father—a custom which, indeed, seems to prevail in parts of Europe to the present day, and which is as incompatible with Love as the ancient Hebrew rule that the oldest daughter must be married first—a rule which compelled Jacob to marry Leah before he could get his beloved Rachel, for whom he had laboured seven years. “First come first served” is a rule which Cupid rarely heeds in the case of several sisters.

In the case of the men it is possible that Sexual Selection occasionally came into play, when early betrothals did not prevent it; for the old Romans were too rational to anticipate the silly and criminal French custom of bargaining for a bride before they had even seen her. In such a case, if the bride was attractive, the suitor’s imagination, dwelling on the fact that this vision of loveliness was to be his own, exclusively, for ever, may have been warmed for a moment with something very like romantic sentiment. But beauty in Rome, Ovid informs us, was very rare—"How few are able to boast it!"—so that even with the men who had a choice, Individual Preference based on Personal Beauty could have been rarely exercised. And as for the women who had no choice, they may have felt a temporary elation on first meeting their destined husbands; but this feeling was merely the manifestation of a vague instinct, comparable to the “love” which a bevy of modern boarding-school “buds” show for the only man they are allowed to see regularly,—their ugly teacher,—and the unreality and silliness of which they laugh at themselves when they are at last allowed to meet the man of their own, individual, free choice, who teaches them the feeling of real Romantic Love.

VIRGIL, DRYDEN, AND SCOTT

Nevertheless, compared with Greek literature, the works of the Roman poets show an advance in their conception of Love; for they avoid at least the Hellenic confusion of love with friendship. Compared with the best modern poets, however, who labour with the pure gold of Love alone, the Roman poet’s productions still show much of the base ore from which the modern gold has been extracted. It is interesting, in this connection, to read what Dryden has to say concerning Virgil’s conception of Love, and Scott’s comments on Dryden.

In his dedication of the Æneid, Dryden speaks of Book IV. as "This noble episode, wherein the whole passion of love is more exactly described than in any other poet. Love was the theme of his fourth book; and though it is the shortest of the whole Æneis, yet there he has given its beginning, its progress, its traverses, and its conclusion; and had exhausted so entirely his subject, that he could resume it but very slightly in the eight ensuing books.

“She was warmed with the graceful appearance of the hero; she smothered those sparkles out of decency; but conversation blew them up into a flame. Then she was forced to make a confidante of her whom she might best trust, her own sister, who approves the passion, and thereby augments it: then succeeds her public owning it; and after that the consummation. Of Venus and Juno, Jupiter and Mercury, I say nothing; for they were all machining work; but, possession having cooled his love, as it increased hers, she soon perceived the change, or at least grew suspicious of a change; this suspicion soon turned to jealousy, and jealousy to rage; then she disdains and threatens, and again is humble and entreats, and nothing availing, despairs, curses, and at last becomes her own executioner. See here the whole process of that passion, to which nothing can be added.”

Sir Walter Scott, however, does add, in a foot-note to his edition of Dryden: “I am afraid this passage, given as a just description of love, serves to confirm what is elsewhere stated, that Dryden’s ideas of the female sex and of the passion were very gross and malicious.”

OVID’S ART OF MAKING LOVE

Gross and malicious also are the ideas of the female sex and the passion frequently encountered in the poems of Ovid; not so coarse and cynical, indeed, as in Martial and Catullus, but sufficiently so to have confounded the Æsthetic judgment of the present generation, and spread the notion that Virgil and Horace are greater poets than Ovid, whereas, from the point of view of originality and imaginativeness, by far the greatest of the three is Ovid, who also had much more influence on the great writers of the best period of English literature than his rivals, as Professor W. Y. Sellar has pointed out.

Both these circumstances are to be regretted—the undervaluation of Ovid’s genius as well as his frequent frivolity on which it is based. For Ovid was unquestionably the first poet who had a conception of the higher possibilities of Love; in fact he was the greatest, and the only great, Love-poet before Dante. His rare genius enabled him to anticipate and depict the modern imaginative side of Love, even while he seemed wholly devoted to the ancient sensual side. And, in reading his poems, great caution is necessary, lest these emotional anticipations of his quasi-modern genius be supposed to have been common and prevalent among less gifted Romans of his time.

Ovid was a profound observer and psychologist, and had a most subtle knowledge of contemporary feminine nature; Although the principal object of his Ars Amoris is to teach men how to out-trump the natural cunning of women, yet he does not forget his feminine readers, but gives them numerous hints regarding the best way of fascinating fickle men. In the Remedia Amoris he describes various remedies for healing Cupid’s wounds, most of which are approved to the present day; and the Elegies and Heroides, too, are full of pretty modern touches and flashes of insight. A few of these points may be briefly alluded to.

Coyness, although often manifested by the Roman women in almost as crude a manner as among savages, does not appear to have been appreciated by all of them at its full value; so the poet frequently counsels them as to the more subtle ways of exercising it; one of his rules for women being, that if they have offended an admirer, the best way to make him forget it is to pretend to be offended themselves, which will restore the equilibrium. How the consciousness of being beautiful makes a woman courageous, coy, and cruel is shown in another place. That eyes have a language plainer than speech is not a modern discovery; and that a short absence favours, long absence kills, passion was also known to Ovid. He warns men against the danger of feigning love, because this may end in arousing genuine passion. Men are informed that courage and confidence in one’s ability to win a woman are half the battle. And disappointed lovers are assured that failure sometimes turns into an advantage, for it may arouse pity, and love enter in the guise of friendship.

The emotional hyperbole and mixed feelings of Love are not strangers to Ovid. He compares the tortures of Love to the berries on the trees in number, to the shells on the sea-beach; for true Love, he says, always creates anguish and pain; and “the sweetest torment on earth is woman.” Among the companions of Cupid are “flattery and illusion.” But “even if the beloved deceives me with false words, hope itself will yield me great enjoyment,” could only have been written by one who realised the imaginative side of love. And in another passage the poet directly enjoins the necessity of intellectual culture to take the place of the faded charms of youth.

Hero’s Letter to Leander in the Heroides contains some pretty touches. Leander has informed his love that when the storm prevents him from swimming over to her, his mind yet hastens to meet her. But Hero is in great trouble at his prolonged absence, and her deepest anguish is Jealousy of a possible rival: in the absence of real grounds of apprehension, her imagination invents them, as in a modern lover’s mind. She suspects that his passion has lost the ardour which sustained him in his difficult feat; and, too weak to quite swim over to him and back again, and anxious to save him the double journey, she suggests that they should meet in the middle of the sea, exchange a kiss, and each return to the shore whence they came.

Is there anything more exquisitely romantic or pathetic in all modern Love-poetry—in Shakspere, Heine, Burns, or Byron?

BIRTH OF GALLANTRY

Becker says of the Greeks that “The men were very careful as to their behaviour in the presence of women, but they were quite strangers to those minute attentions which constitute the gallantry of the moderns.” This holds true apparently of all other nations of antiquity; and to a student of the history of Love it is therefore of exceeding interest to find in Ovid’s poetry the first evidences of the existence of Gallantry—a disposition on the part of the men to sacrifice their own comfort to the pleasures and whims of women.

Mr. G. A. Simcox was the first writer, so far as I know, who pointed out Ovid’s priority in this matter (in his History of Latin Literature). In Ovid, he says, “The whole description of gallantry implies that the idea was a novelty, and that the lover would require a great deal of encouragement to enable him to make the sacrifice of paying such attentions as could be commanded from a servant. This throws a new light on the habit the Augustan poets have of calling their mistress domina, which is more noteworthy, for they call no man dominus. One does not trace the idea at all in Latin comedy, where the heroines are for the most part only too thankful to be caressed and protected. One finds the word in Lucilius, but even in Catullus it is hardly established.”

Instances of gallant behaviour are not rare in Ovid’s poetry; but the didactic tone in which they are detailed makes it almost appear as if the poet were recommending to his countrymen the value of a nice little discovery of his own which would convert crude love-making into a fine art. Never be so ungallant—he says in effect, though he does not use the word—as to refer to a woman’s faults or shortcomings. Compliment her, on the contrary, on her good points—her face, her hair, her tapering fingers, her pretty foot. At the circus applaud whatever she applauds. Adjust her cushion, put the footstool where it ought to be, and keep her comfortable by fanning her. And at dinner, when she has tasted the wine, quickly seize the cup and put your lips to the place where she has sipped.

Unfortunately this morning dawn of Romantic Love, as depicted in the pages of Ovid, was soon hidden beneath the dark clouds of mediÆval barbarism, not to emerge again till a thousand years later.