At about the same time, elementary and secondary schools opened, to which Cornelia could have sent Tiberius and Gaius. In that case, a paedagogus, usually a slave, would have taken them to and from their classes and generally supervised their behavior. A secondary school master, or grammaticus, taught language and poetry, and was sometimes a distinguished intellectual in his own right. For children in their mid to late teens, the principle of apprenticeship was maintained, with boys being attached for a time to a leading senator, rather like today’s interns. Oratory was a highly developed art form and was essential to a political career. Teachers of rhetoric offered advanced training in the elaborate techniques of persuasion.
THE STATUS OF women in ancient Rome was mixed. Their main task was to bear legitimate children, and chastity outside the marriage bed was essential to achieving that aim. They had no political rights; they could not attend, address, or vote at citizen assemblies, and they could not hold public office.
As a rule, a girl married young, between twelve and fifteen years of age, but her husband was often a man in his twenties or older. Irrespective of whether she had passed puberty (generally thought to begin in the fourteenth year), it seems that she was expected to have, or perhaps to endure, sex immediately upon marriage. There were different kinds of contract. A wife might be passed into the manus, or hands, of her husband, but this was becoming increasingly unpopular. Otherwise, she remained under her father’s nominal patria potestas or, if he was dead, she controlled her affairs sui iuris, by her own legal authority, albeit under the guidance of a guardian or tutor. This was Cornelia’s situation.
Divorce was easy, and because of the age difference there was a large number of widows. While many remarried, Romans rather admired the univira, the woman who, like Cornelia, stayed true to the memory of one man.
(Boys, of course, enjoyed greater license than girls. They were expected to sow their wild oats, within reason. Once, when Cato saw a young nobleman emerge from a brothel, he told him, “Keep up the good work.” When he came across the young man a short time later, in similar circumstances, he remarked, “When I complimented you on ‘good work’ I didn’t mean you should make this place your home.”)
In spite of legal constraints, women were able to play an important role in family and public life if they wished, provided they obeyed the conventions of modesty and respectability. Within her household, a wife was the domina, or mistress, and she was regarded on an equal level with her husband. She led a full social life, visiting friends, patronizing the Games, and attending her husband’s dinner parties. She was able to exert political influence through her husband, whose career she promoted. Although marriages were often cool, professional affairs, we know of many happy couples.
Cornelia was not alone in seeing so many of her children die in their early years. The duty to produce progeny was hampered by primitive medical knowledge. The upper classes seem to have practised birth control and abortion, although it is unclear how effective their methods were. Techniques such as washing out the vagina, coating it with old olive oil, inserting sponges soaked in vinegar, or jumping up and down after intercourse are unlikely to have done much good. Doctors did their best to encourage fertility and were not meant to facilitate abortion, but in Hippocratic medicine a substance known as misy was claimed to prevent pregnancy for a year; unfortunately, we do not know what it is (some have suggested yellow copperas). Various plants were commonly used for birth control, and some have been found in modern times to have contraceptive properties—Daucus carota, or Queen Anne’s lace, for example.
Women who broke the rules of propriety received no mercy. In the first century, a certain Sempronia met the full force of male condemnation. It has been speculated that she was Cornelia’s granddaughter and, whether or not this was so, was similarly well-endowed with charm and intellect. She married well and received a good education in Greek and Latin literature. She wrote poetry, had a ready wit, and was an amusing conversationalist.
However, according to the historian Gaius Sallustius Crispus (whom we know as Sallust), there was another side to her personality:
She had greater skill in lyre-playing and dancing than there is any need for a respectable woman to acquire, besides many other accomplishments such as minister to dissipation. There was nothing that she set a smaller value on than seemliness and chastity, and she was as careless of her reputation as she was of her money. Her passions were so ardent that she more often made advances to men than they did to her. Many times … she had broken a solemn promise, repudiated a debt by perjury, and been an accessory to murder.
It is a curiously unconvincing passage: venial sins such as being a lively partygoer are gradually amplified into an unsubstantiated accusation of involvement in murder, as if one thing naturally led to the other. Some of Sempronia’s excesses echo those of Tanaquil and Tullia, perhaps because historians from the late Republic borrowed her traits in order to flesh out their portraits of those early fictionalized queens. As in their cases, Sempronia’s real offense seems to have been that she openly supported a dissident politician, an impermissible intervention into an exclusively masculine sphere of activity. Charges of sexual promiscuity and criminality, invented or exaggerated, were her punishment, for they would destroy her social standing.
CORNELIA MARRIED HER daughter, another Sempronia of course, to her celebrated cousin, Scipio Aemilianus. Her two boy jewels were the center of her attention. They shared a family resemblance, but their personalities were very different. Tiberius, the elder by nine years, was “gentle and sedate,” their biographer Plutarch writes, “while Gaius was highly strung and impetuous. When addressing the assembly one stood composedly on the spot, while the other was the first Roman to walk up and down the speakers’ platform and pull his toga off his shoulder as he spoke.” As regards food and lifestyle, Tiberius lived simply, while Gaius was ostentatious and picky.
As descendants of the most famous Roman of his day, the young men had distinguished political and military futures ahead of them. Cornelia used to tease them, complaining that she was still known as Scipio Aemilianus’s mother-in-law, and not as the mother of the Gracchi. Tiberius’s career nearly ended as soon as it began. He was appointed quaestor, or finance officer, to a consular general in Spain. The campaign against guerrilla insurgents went very badly. The Romans were comprehensively outmaneuvered and took refuge in their camp. Hearing that the enemy expected reinforcements, the consul had all fires put out and led his army of twenty thousand men out into the dead of night. He hoped to find safety at a remote former campsite. However, the Spaniards followed and soon had the Romans at their mercy. The consul, seeing that his situation was hopeless, agreed a surrender, to which he bound himself by oath. Thanks to his father, who had once commanded in Spain, Tiberius had excellent connections and played a leading part in negotiating the terms.
The Senate was outraged when it heard what had happened. Legions did not surrender. A tribunal with Scipio Aemilianus among its members ruled that the treaty should not stand. But sworn agreements could not be abrogated with impunity. In expiation for the religious offense of the breach, the consul was sent back naked and bound and handed over to the Spaniards. (They refused to accept him, in a faint echo of the Caudine Forks fiasco.)