Video Transcript: Greek and Roman Women

In this segment, we're going to talk about Greek and Roman women. We've just talked about  Jewish women before this, now Greek and Roman, and then in the next one, we're going to  put it all together. So here are some points about what we know about Greek and Roman  women. And there have been, there has been a lot of work on this for now about 30 years.  And once the, the interest in women got stirred up with biblical scholars and scholars of  ancient Rome. So we refer to Greco Roman, the Greco Roman period. And I know a Greek  woman, she's a tourist guide, who says there is no such thing as Greco Roman, there are  Greeks, and there are Romans. And she's got a point. And yet at the same time, by the time  of the New Testament, by the time, the New Testament writers come on the scene, and there  has been a melding of cultures, if you know anything about the ancient Greek culture,  traditions, you know, what we call the classics, time of the great Greek city states of Athens  and Sparta and the others, and, and how that culture evolved into what we call Hellenistic  culture of the third second centuries BC. And, and then into the time of Roman dominance in  the whole of the Mediterranean rim, the Mediterranean area. There, there is a melding of  cultures and the, they take both the best and the worst of Greek culture and into Roman  culture. And to give an example of that. The elite, elite Romans, when they got the best  education, it was not only the the Latin literary tradition, but the Greek. And some of the, the  best of Roman literature of the time is written in Greek. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, in the  middle of the second century writes his memoirs in Greek, and it's very literary Greek, you  know, on the streets in the city of Rome. And the first and second centuries, Greek was still  the predominant language. People who were from Italy and Rome, spoke Latin as their first  language. But there was enormous migration. And migration is one of the patterns that we'll  be talking about to what's going on today with the upheavals of people all over the world,  because of because of natural disasters, but also the because of war. This kind of upset that's  happening now, was also happening just before the New Testament era, in the Roman world.  And then the economic prosperity, the economic boom, that happened once there was peace, also encouraged a lot of migration. And we know for example of a Christian community in  Gaul present day France that underwent persecution. That's how we know about it. But they  were from Asia Minor, they were from Turkey. So there are examples like that, that we know  of, and massive migration into the city of Rome. And the common language on the street was  Greek. It's something, I think to me, about Greek here, the Greek language of this period.  English today is becoming the universal language. It's to the detriment of native English  speakers who don't have to learn another language. But it's the language that everybody  wants to learn. It's the language of business and to mass communication, etc. Well, Greek  was that language, then, not Latin, official documents and official monuments were In Latin,  but often with a Greek translation as well, so that other people could read it. And, and so, so  Greek is, is a common language and a rather simple Greek, which we refer to Koine Greek,  which means common ordinary. It's the Greek in which the New Testament is written. And it's  pretty much the Greek that's spoken on the streets. So, so we have that, that use of the  Greek language that so it's no surprise that the that the New Testament is written entirely in  Greek, and other post biblical Post New Testament, early Christian literature until the late  second century. The first Latin Christian literature is from the late second century, everything  else before that is great. So if you want to understand the world of early Christianity, learn  Greek. So cultural differences between Greeks, and Romans, one of them that that has to do  with women that is often pointed out, pointed out by Roman writers. So here we come with  the cultural bias toward Greeks. And that, that the Greeks secluded their women, they, the  women, were supposed to stay at home, and not go out into public. Well, that's nonsense. I  mean, women were out in public, but this is we're talking about a cultural ideal of the elite of  the upper classes. And that women in the in the upper classes should not feel shut up shut in  by this, but rather, they have the privilege of not having to go out. The the Jewish writers,  Philo, from the first century in Alexandria, echoes this by saying that married women should  be able to go as far as the front door, young, unmarried women, not even to the front door. So this is this is obviously an unrealizable ideal, but it's echoing an ideal of Greek, but he's  Jewish. For these. It's Greek culture, elite males. Again, we don't know what the women  thought about this. So we don't have the women's voices. So Roman writers, a couple of them

will say, well, we don't do it the way the Greeks do, which is to keep their women inside we it.  By contrast, our wives go with us to dinner parties out. So So you have that perception of  cultural difference. And, of course, the the Greek world, for a Roman, the Greek world is the  east, it's the it's from Greece, East into the other Mediterranean lands to the east. And there's something there and we'll talk about this when we're talking about the role of deaconesses, to about this idea of privacy for women, private part of the house, the that men should not go  visit women. And all of this, of course, is continues today in Echoes, particularly in Islamic  societies, which are also from the come from that part of the world. So there is something  about Eastern cultural customs, wanting women to be protected, private, secluded, and in the West, not so much. And this is already echoed by Roman writers who are aware of this  question. Now, a second point here is legislation versus real procedures. And here, I'm going  to introduce this Roman word potestas. It's a legal term means power, but it's a legal term for  the authority. And we're going to be talking now about how, how Roman families function  because the families of the New Testament are in living in the Roman world. It is the power of  the male head of the household, over everyone in the household. And theoretically, it is a  power of life and death. Theoretically, the male head of the household the paterfamilias,  the title has the authority to execute after due process to execute Anyone who severely  violates the norms of the family, the norms of the society, the obvious example of that would  be adultery. of women. Because adultery in this world is understood as, as the sexual  relationship of a man with a woman who is not his wife. But who belongs to another man who  is married to another man. So adultery is a question of the violation of the rights of a husband over his, his wife. So an obvious example would be adultery, murder, you know, the, sort of  the big, the big sins. So I say this is a theoretical power, there were some almost mythical  stories about men exercising this power. But in fact, in reality, by the time we're coming into  the time of Imperial Rome, which is the time of the New Testament, there are no attested  examples of of this actually happening, the life and death power. However, again,  theoretically, the male head of household owns all the properties of the family, including of  his adult sons. So as long as the father is alive, he is the one who theoretically has the control and can act on it if he wants. In practice, that rarely happened. But this question of potestas  is, is an important one. Now, when we talk about property ownership, and the citizenship and  things like that, with with property ownership, as I said, the the as long as father is alive, he's  got the the legal authority and the legal ownership. And so when father dies, his sons, then  his his adult sons, acquire their own potesta over their own families. And so, as some Roman  historians, historians of Roman families say, people weren't terribly sorry When Father died,  because then they get the legal control the males do. Now, what about women, the women  certainly could inherit property. They were supposed to have male control a ‘tutor’ is is, is the title of a man who would have authority over their property whose permission they would  need to buy and sell property, which they did on their own. But supposedly, with this male  authority, there were ways in which you could get out of that. And one of them was by  producing a certain number of children's three and four children who survived to the age of  one, a woman would be rewarded for that. Notice that they're worried about population in the, at least in the upper classes. And they so they reward women for having children. So then you would be free of this, and you could do it on your own. So So basically, what it meant was that in that control was again, theoretical, and it wasn't terribly exercised. So women had property  ownership. They did not have potestas they did not have that kind of authority. But they did  have legal property ownership and the ability to use it. Citizenship. Women were also citizens  in Rome, for Roman citizenship if and this is different from Greek because, as far as we know,  Greek women did not have citizenship in their city states. But But Roman women did, if they  were qualified and their family was qualified for Roman citizenship that the women were  citizens also, the difference being they did not have the vote for there were elections in most  Roman cities for the city, magistrates, the people who ran the city. And every male Roman  citizen was entitled to vote. You had plenty of people living in the cities who were not citizens, not Roman citizens. Just because you were born in a place did not qualify you for citizenship.  You had to have to come from the right family or do the right things to acquire citizenship.  We'll talk about that a bit later about marriage and divorce. We're going to talk about 

marriage again, a little bit later. But here, let's just say that that most women were married at a rather early age, the higher the social status, the earlier the age, because marriages were  political opportunities for families. And and so marriage was something that in most cases, at  least for first marriage, was closer to what we would call an arranged marriage. Divorce was  common in any any of these cultures. Jewish, Greek, Roman, divorce was commonly  practiced. And that's why it was so unusual to have this tradition from Jesus against divorce.  In terms of women's religion, yeah, in Roman religion, there were particular devotions,  particular cults, that were only for women, the women participated certainly in. In civic  religion, we, we distinguish here between civic religion, and private religion. Civic religion is  the worship of the gods of the of the empire. And the gods of the city, every city had its own  patron gods as well. Private religion is perhaps what we're more concerned with, because  Christianity was a private religion, but we'll talk about that more later. But in terms of civic  religion, there were certain devotions that were only for women, one was a celebration of the  matronalia March 1 And so So Roman matrons, a matron was a Roman citizen in a legal  Roman marriage that the matron and matrona so for instance, there was a celebration of the  matronalia of or of Mata Mata. And one of the interesting things about the celebration of  Mater Matuta is that the only women who qualified were matron Roman matrons, who were in a first marriage, not having been divorced. So, there were these little segments of Roman  society women's society in which women worshiped together in which they had their own kind of celebrations, their own kind of companionship with each other. So these are some of the  things that we could say about Greek and Roman women.