Women's Lives

A soldier takes ten years to sail home from a war that already took ten. He loses every ship and every man he started with. Meanwhile his wife holds off a hundred and eight suitors who have moved into his house and are eating it empty, and his son goes looking for news of a father he has never met. When he finally lands on his own island he arrives alone, asleep, and disguised as a beggar — and spends the second half of the poem finding out who in his own household can be trusted.

Ischomachus explains how he took delivery of a wife who was not yet fifteen, had been raised to see and hear and ask as little as possible, and taught her to run his household — the storerooms, the inventory, the slaves, the accounts. The fullest account anyone in classical Greece wrote of what a woman's work actually was, told entirely by her husband.

In 195 BCE the women of Rome block the streets to demand repeal of a law capping how much gold a woman may own and what she may wear. Cato argues that giving way ends the republic. He loses. The fullest ancient argument about women, property and public luxury.

A young man is on trial for political violence and attempted poisoning. Cicero barely addresses the charges. Instead he goes after the prosecution's chief witness — Clodia, a widow of the highest family — and spends the speech making her the defendant: her parties, her gardens on the Tiber, her lovers, her brother. He won.