Thursday, September 25, 2008
A Roman Life
I was totally drawn to the section on the social history of the Roman Empire. Learning about the actual culture and how other people live is amazing to me. The part about the Roman family itself interested me the most. I mean, how it would be growing up in a family where your Dad could decided to kill you or sell you into slavery at anytime while you were growing up? You can bet that I would be the best behaved child that ever existed. I'm also a person who likes my space and it would drive me nuts that my mother, father and all my brothers, their wives and their kids were living together especially if we were living in an apartment building. Romans seem to have a bit more modern attitude towards women, not much mind you, but a bit. At least you weren't pretty much locked up in your house with the kids all time like the Greeks. Roman women were appreciated for what they did. They were also able to acquire rights to land and businesses. No, they weren't allowed to have anything to do with politics really but they certainly had more rights than Greek women did. One last thing that that interested me was that each year bread, wine and oil were given to the urban people.....free. No charge, just "Here you go, Enjoy!". How do you that that with a population over 500,000 to possibly a million?
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3 comments:
I agree that the Roman's social structure was very interesting. When you say that their attitude towards women is a little more similar to the attitude towards women in modern time, do you see it as a positive change? In my own opinion Greek women, even though they were completely submissive, meant a lot more to their husbands than roman women. Part of it might have to do with the fact that the women in Roman culture started to be a little more active in the society, which could have threatened their men. What do you think?
I want to say that the value of women was at least equal in both the Greek and Roman cultures and I think they did but then maybe that is just wishful thinking on my part. Aristotle did say that he felt that part of Rome's problem in the low numbers of citizenship was that women had a more active life style and they owned a lot more land than he felt was right, so the Greek men definitely would have felt threatened by this. I don't think Roman men felt threatened by this at all. If they did then I would think they wouldn't have allowed them to own in it in the first place or they would have changed the law to take that right away from them. As for a positive change for Rome itself, no. They weren't ready to give over the rest of the rights to women that should go with owning land and business i.e. voting, and being involved in politics at all. It doesn't seem that they put two and two together.
Life in Rome seemed pretty complicated. It was very Patriarichal. The fact that the father could sell or kill of a family member is pretty insane. Perhaps if the mothers of the children had more say in what was going on they would have probably spared those family members.
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