irgins

Bust, Supposed to be of Antonia, Daughter of Mark Antony and Octavia,
and Mother of Germanicus, in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence

Caligula

A Bronze Sestertius (Slightly Enlarged), Showing the Sisters of
Caligula (Agrippina, Drusilla, and Julia Livilla) on One Side and
Germanicus on the Other Side

A Bronze Sestertius with the Head of Agrippina the Elder, Daughter of
Agrippa and Julia, the Daughter of Augustus

Claudius, Messalina, and Their Two Children in What is Known as the
"Hague Cameo"

Remains of the Bridge of Caligula in the Palace of the Caesars

The Emperor Caligula

Claudius

The Emperor Claudius

Messalina, Third Wife of Claudius

The Philosopher Seneca

The Emperor Nero

Agrippina the Younger, Sister of Caligula and Mother of Nero

Britannicus

Statue of Agrippina the Younger, in the Capitoline Museum, Rome

Agrippina the Younger

The Emperor Nero

The Death of Agrippina

WOMEN OF THE CAESARS

I

WOMAN AND MARRIAGE IN ANCIENT ROME

"Many things that among the Greeks are considered improper and
unfitting," wrote Cornelius Nepos in the preface to his "Lives," "are
permitted by our customs. Is there by chance a Roman who is ashamed to
take his wife to a dinner away from home? Does it happen that the
mistress of the house in any family does not enter the anterooms
frequented by strangers and show herself among them? Not so in Greece:
there the woman accepts invitations only among families to which she is
related, and she remains withdrawn in that inner part of the house
which is called the _gynaeceum_, where only the nearest relatives are
admitted."

This passage, one of the most significant in all the little work of
Nepos, draws in a few, clear, telling strokes one of the most marked
distinctions between the Greco-Asiatic world and the Roman. Among
ancient societies, the Roman was probably that in which, at least among
the better classes, woman enjoyed the greatest social liberty and the
greatest legal and economic autonomy. There she most nearly approached
that condition of moral and civil equality with man which makes her his
comrade, and not his slave--that equality in which modern civilization
sees one of the supreme ends of moral progress.

The doctrine held by some philosophers and sociologists, that military
peoples subordinate woman to a tyrannical regime of domestic servitude,
is wholly disproved by the history of Rome. If there was ever a time