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Yes, but women were women, not becaue of their subservience, but because of their biology. Holland is trying to suggest that anyone who was subservient ( boys, servants, women) were all socially gendered as ‘women’. That ‘woman’ effectively is a synonym for subservience, and is not a stable category of its own ( as in an adult human female).
The Pax Romana has long been shorthand for the empire’s golden age. Stretching from Caledonia to Arabia, Rome ruled over a quarter of the world’s population. It was the wealthiest and most formidable state in the history of humankind. Why didn’t ancient Judaism become the universal religion of the Roman world after it had been freed of its cultic centre? All the Ancient empires celebrated power, crushing, killing and humiliating the kings’s enemies, for example Assyria, and they shouted these sentiments loud enough on many inscriptions. In Rome, death by crucifixion was a shameful death reserved for what would have been thought of as the dregs of society.The emperor Trajan, who ruled from 98 to 117 and took Rome’s territory to its greatest recorded extent, certainly felt the tension between maintaining control and satisfying the innate Roman desire for conquest, as became evident in his invasion of Parthia in his final years. He had hoped to follow in the footsteps of Alexander the Great by subduing Mesopotamia and crossing into India, but realised he had overreached. The eruption of a rebellion in Mesopotamia prevented him from fully transforming the territory into a Roman province; he died shortly afterwards. Attempts to impose peace did not always bring contentment. To rule as Caesar,” writes historian and The Rest is History podcaster Tom Holland, “was to drive the chariot of the Sun.” Pull the reins too tight, and one risked plunging the Roman empire into chaos; not tight enough, and the entire system of governance could crash. By the mid-2nd-century AD, the point at which Holland’s latest book ends, Rome ruled from Scotland to Arabia, a stretch so large that even a divine chariot might have struggled to overfly it in one go. Many an emperor had his fingers burned while striving to keep a grip on his growing domain. It was a bold imperial adviser who uttered the name of Icarus. Interesting enough but far more focused on the dominate sexual proclivities of the Roman elite than anticipated and not made clear to me how that impacted the fall, rise or effective governance of Empire? Maybe Holland did this to flog the book to a broader audience? Freddie is certainly pliable enough to acquiesce. Vespasian’s rise, before he became the Roman ruler who would usher in the age of imperial peace, is another tale of social mobility. “Raised in a small Sabine hamlet some 50 miles from Rome,” Holland writes, he was a newcomer to the traditional senatorial aristocracy. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.
Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?I understand those commonalities across time, which is part of why I’m skeptical of the widespread sexual “omnivorousness” that Holland describes, such as the purported rarity of sleeping only with one sex or the other (for a man of status) during this period of Roman antiquity. I’m not discounting the details he cites, but questioning the general conclusions he seems keen to draw. If you are lower down the scale, I think your life is pretty terrible. If you’re a slave girl, you are there to be raped. The Roman legal and sexual dynamics licenses pretty much perpetual rape if you are subordinate in a powerful household. I mean, the same is true for boys, but women are likely to be sexually abused throughout their life. And that is why Christianity is so radical, because Paul, when he’s writing to, say, the Romans of Corinth (Corinth is a Roman colony, so they’re culturally Roman to the Romans in Rome), he is saying to the male householder: “You are playing the role of Christ, your wife is playing the role of the church, therefore. That’s why you must have a monogamous, enduring relationship. Christ doesn’t go around raping the scullery maid. You mustn’t.” And that is the transformation that Christianity brings to sexual ethics.
The Roman slave system was brutally exploitative, but, unlike the North American slave system, it was not based on racist assumptions and, as Holland shows, it did offer those enslaved in the households of the rich and famous a path to prominence.There’s also a danger of using previous examples of historical change and superimposing them, or at least the terminology, on the current historical changes taking place. It’s a natural thing to do as we try to grapple with change, but supposing our current conditions are unprecedented; as the change from the earlier Roman world following its conversion to Christianity was unprecedented?
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