Introduction
The Second-Wave Roman City began in the first century BCE, as the Roman state accumulated more wealth, territory, and associated booty. As the production of other valuable items increased, trade in luxury items, in contrast, reduced prices and made those luxury items more accessible to a greater number of people of middling means. Roman rulers had a policy of not oppressing citizens unduly, keeping them motivated to serve in the military and vote on political matters. Because of this view, fewer nobles had to develop a coercive retinue and were, in fact, required to win over followers by the social benefit they provided, in spite of the wealth they had accrued. They typically did this by offering a display of powerful friends at banquets. Roman society had also undergone a process of urbanization by this point.
The early Roman city had grown up around a number of separate hills, each hill a center in its own right. Over time, the various functions of the city (religious, political, economic) came to be located on the same or nearby hills, and the hills were leveled to provide more space. Slavery, patriarchal family structure, clientage, public service, and large, close families helped cement the personal connections that made Roman society work. Gendered norms influenced men and women’s roles on a number of practical levels. Physical confinement in cities, streets, and houses based on limited knowledge of human welfare created a living environment that could be gender-informed. For example, the appropriate woman who was a good mother stayed home, in the gynaeceum, while the appropriate man attended the assembly. It was this life that individuals lived during the early Roman city, and institutions, too, played roles that could be described in terms of sex and gender. Social class seems to have influenced where one could go and how one could act.
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Gender Roles
In examining the world of the second-wave Roman city, one comes across a bewildering array of gender roles. In primary texts and inscriptions, men of this era appear cast as soldiers, farmers, and statesmen, while their female counterparts are expected to engage with traditional domestic skills. As much as this pervasive stereotype of good wives and mothers is stressed in literary and philosophical literature from this era, there is an all-encompassing context of family law that gets detailed throughout the Principate. The same law codes that detail the typical duties of Roman fathers and spouses also tend to illustrate exceptions to those norms, preserving law-abiding widows and daughters not only from losing their inheritance but also from being married against their will. Public life in the great centers of Roman civilization should be one of business for men: meat production and trade, butchery or blacksmithing, and any wealth or social overtone imaginable should be one made and preserved mostly by men working primarily with other men. While Rome and its urban centers and army of the time could present women with more opportunities, a robust body of Roman art and literature can suggest a mostly apathetic prevailing attitude regarding women, suggesting that educational and professional achievements by ordinary male citizens are commendable, while upper-class women should concern themselves primarily with domestic virtues, their honor, stoicism, self-discipline, and patriarchal beauty.
The women within this study will be primarily elite women, and although the occupations and lives of the super-wealthy indicate broader societal changes and concerns in a more obvious light, other elements of 'women’s work' in the home, and other elements of more 'common' women are quite possible to compile. It is important to examine new definitions of masculinity due to privileged opponents’ ancient comments on places where lower-class men become too idle or caught up with accessing the same occupations as women. It is not uncommon for men to have better salary and occupational prospects, of course, but many men of initial rank could become degradingly occupied if their descent was publicly announced. As much as anxiety about 'becoming women' demeans men, it demeans women further by emphasizing their identification and eradicating any occupation that carries 'the undertone of femininity.' Furthermore, impressive studies on the ideology of gender and the history of subordination contradict dogmatic assumptions about the universality of male privilege that have been shown. The ancient world concerning gender is only just being compiled. Given that 'feminism' as defined by the most effective bourgeoisie is nearly always a white middle-class ideology, some further understanding of these roles could also place the idea of aristocratic ideology in a unique light.
Class Dynamics and Social Hierarchies
This paper seeks to analyze gender roles and their relationship to class dynamics in the Second-Wave Roman City. This analysis will be structured according to the three broad phases in dating the cities, aiming to form an initial basis from which scholars in the future can build and improve. This paper argues that in the Second-Wave Roman City, it is plausible that a lack of overt wealth also limited power and that those who held positions of power where wealth was secondary were far more likely to be close to patrician or elite status than not.
The Second-Wave Roman City was a society made up of several distinct social strata. At the top were the patricians, or elite, and below them was the next highest class, plebeians. Below the plebeians were non-citizen residents, freeborn or freed, and then those residents and restricted citizens classified as ignobiles, followed finally by slaves. The gradation of these positions is reflective of the amount of power and freedom that characterized each of these groups. Importantly, each of these categories was determined by definitive and hard-to-escape chains of social, economic, and political power. Success was often limited, and if it appeared in one generation, there was no guarantee that it would manifest in future generations. A great deal of movement within each of these different classes, or coming into contact with these different classes, would be possible, but rapid and lasting mobility into a higher class was extremely rare. As the model of the city aptly describes, there were many options, little cash, illustrating how crucial sizable financial backing was to the functioning of many kinds of economic and social activities.
Class in the Roman Society
As the popularity of second-wave feminism grows within Roman studies, it has become increasingly important to consider the intersection of gender and class within the context of Roman society. The experiences of different Roman individuals—whether male or female, citizen or foreigner, free or servile—were heavily constrained and largely formed by the limitations and privileges that accompanied their gender and class. Very rarely were these spheres of descent experienced in isolation, as the interrelation of social identity types often led to gendered class oppression or, conversely, to gendered class privilege. Thus, without the careful study of intersectionality between gender and class, our historical understanding of Roman individuals runs the risk of being greatly oversimplified.
For elite freeborn women, legal empowerment was contrasted by an inability to participate in active public life. They viewed marriage as a highly weighty and limiting decision, as it would directly influence their family’s ongoing aristocratic lineage. Lower-class freeborn women, by contrast, had the potential for social mobility omitted from their spheres of descent—within their given occupational pool, poverty left little room for moving from an ascribed to an achieved social category. The enslaved women showed the least belonging to their class, as they could be transferred between households and could therefore be classified as part of the property of their male guardians. For the men, we see a similar theme: inequality based on class rather than exclusive of it. While the average male Roman citizen retained control over his personal and public life, he could also experience limitations regarding his occupation and mobility imposed by his social status.
Conclusion
The goal of this paper was to demonstrate that ancient societies were more diverse and dynamic than conventional models of social organization have suggested. Early in the development of the complex society of the ancient Mediterranean, the interaction of the male public sphere and female private sphere in the individual household seems to have limited the social institutions that each sex could use to break from the constraints of their economic class of origin. That is different from saying that it was impossible for upper-class women to exploit male clients.
Nevertheless, both gender and class could be important determinants of early integrative behavior. Examining the Roman world through different theoretical lenses enabled us to develop a more nuanced picture of social structure compared to a society in which class and gender are completely uncorrelated. This work has shown that the relationships between, and the significance of, gender and class are different in different cultures. In modern literature, gender and class have been considered as two separate variables to motivate members of a society in distinctive ways, with the emphasis having so far been placed on male upper-class behaviors. Our study has shown that an integrated analysis of the two can produce different and potentially richer insights.
We envisage that a fruitful avenue of future research would center around 'to what extent the ECS explains variation in productivity patterns in different ancient societies?' Moreover, how much could this be explained by lagging institutions? In the future, we envisage that an avenue of inquiry around this topic using climate science could also be fruitful. Such interdisciplinary work encourages an intimate and illustrative dialogue between past and present.
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