Domina Quotes

“Exploring the dynamic between tradition and change when it came to the role of women as powerful and influential figures is an essential part of understanding the evolving nature of the Roman world. This is complicated by the fact that the Romans to a large extent did not themselves necessarily recognize how the political and social role of women was changing.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“Today, much of what we have left to attest to these remarkable individuals is the skewed and judgemental record of the Roman historians who preserved in such disparaging detail how the Roman world perceived women and their place in society. In their accounts these women found their greatest challenge. That says so much about the world they lived in, and by the same token our own where women are still presented with prejudice and obstacles their Roman forbears would recognize only too well. Above all, they understood that power has to be taken. No one was going to give them power, and everything would be done to deny it to them. Despite all the restrictions of Roman society they managed to buck the trends, assert themselves by using the opportunities open to them as women, and change the history of the Roman world for good or ill, even if many were made to pay a terrible price.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“Women suffered from huge disadvantages in the Roman system, but some also enjoyed a lateral access to power and influence precisely because they were women. This is easily overlooked when focusing on the formal exclusion of women from political office. Nevertheless, when they shared power with emperors, sought power in their own right or simply asserted themselves, these women were exposed to the same or greater risks than the men.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“No other Julio-Claudian woman was memorialized in the same way; for the most part they were simply too notorious. Their stories were generally confined to the works of Roman historians like Tacitus who indulged themselves by providing as much detail as possible about their shortcomings. This way Julia the Elder, Messalina and Agrippina the Younger entered popular lore as destabilizing and villainous characters. The empresses of the Flavian period (69–96) and the second century are mostly opaque figures. Vespasian’s wife Domitilla had died before he became emperor. Only Domitian’s wife Domitia Longina came close to significant power when she plotted against her husband. Titus (79–81) had no empress, having divorced his wife Marcia Furnilla some fourteen years or so earlier. Their daughter Julia’s husband was executed by Domitian in 82. Remarkably Julia Titi proceeded to become Domitian’s mistress and was named Augusta.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“For much of the second century the imperial male line consistently failed but instead of relying on a female bloodline discriminating adoption was used instead. This minimized the chances of a succession crisis and also indirectly ensured that the female line of descent was sidelined.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“It was only the circumstances of the failed male bloodline that had allowed the Julio-Claudian women so much dynastic significance. The way in which this happened again under the Severans is of crucial importance in helping us understand what circumstances were necessary for women to become powerful in the Roman Empire.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“The story of the Julio-Claudian women covers several decades strung out along a key line of descent from Julia the Elder down to Agrippina the Younger. They established all sorts of precedents but it was the failure of the imperial male bloodline that had magnified their importance and provided opportunities. Once those circumstances changed and discriminating adoption became the mechanism of succession the significance of the women of the imperial family was marginalized. It was not until the Severan period in the early third century that once more the failure of the male bloodline provided an opportunity for a female dynasty.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“When describing Agrippina’s death (which occurred in 33), Tacitus was moderately acerbic about her. She was, he said, ‘impatient of equality and greedy for mastery’ and as a result had let her masculine-style ambition take over the normal female frailties. 74 In short her only real crime was to be a woman in a world of men, run by men for the benefit of men.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“That Livia was able to manipulate Augustus is beyond doubt. He trusted her and sought her advice. Tacitus suggests she shared her husband’s cunning, and her son’s hypocrisy. 20 It was not so much a criticism as an acknowledgement of her ability to control affairs behind the scenes. After all, as a woman and as Augustus’ wife she had in theory no agenda of her own and no rivals to pursue.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“However, even this raises the interesting question of how her reading was managed, especially as the evidence for women’s ownership and use of books or libraries is very limited. It seems there is not a single instance in any ancient source that refers to a woman using a public library, even though women were known to act as patrons of such institutions.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“Fulvia’s career made her a legitimate phenomenon. She had contradicted everything expected of a Roman woman, especially as a woman of quality, even though her conduct after Pulcher’s murder ought to have made her widely admired as the embodiment of a dutiful wife. She had had devoted husbands, but she was not regarded as beautiful (she was said to have one swollen cheek).”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“The acerbic comments of Roman historians were founded in a long-established distrust of a woman who had the temerity to move outside her sphere. They flaunted their satisfaction at her ignominious end and completely ignored the way she stood by her husbands. 41 Such women represented a threat to male power. This invoked a sense of fear easily excited by tales of women who challenged the natural order.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“It was expected that the materfamilias domina, far from retreating into the shadows as her Greek equivalent did, should take a full and active part in company and be a prominent part of the household. The contrast with Greek women was something first-century BC Romans were proud of. 30”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“The materfamilias ran the domus (the ‘household’) as the domina for her husband. The word domina means literally ‘mistress’ and was the title used to refer to the mistress of the household and ladies of status. This was how the women of the Julio-Claudians were referred to and addressed, whether empresses or not. The domina was central to the household’s spiritual and everyday welfare, her identity being subsumed into that purpose.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“Exploring the dynamic between tradition and change when it came to the role of women as powerful and influential figures is an essential part of understanding the evolving nature of the Roman world. This is complicated by the fact that the Romans to a large extent did not themselves necessarily recognize how the political and social role of women was changing. If they did, then there is some evidence that they suppressed or ignored it.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“More complex, and beyond the scope of this book, is the extent to which the Roman world’s preoccupation with the violent domination of women, slaves, prisoners and animals had a disturbing psycho-sexual foundation. 8”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“Women in the Roman world were both trapped and liberated by the Roman political and legal system.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“Women of high status were habitually used in arranged marriages to form social, political and economic alliances between families and had little say in what happened to them. However, women could also exert enormous informal power and control.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“The role of women in the Roman world was both sharply defined and strangely ambivalent. Women had no formal political role: they could not vote or hold office. They were defined by their relationship to the men in their families, as wives, mothers or sisters.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“The lack of formal political status turned out in some ways to be an advantage under the Empire. Women in the imperial family became a prominent, even dominant, part of the regime’s image but were not restricted by the limitations of office. Moreover, some of them began to challenge what was expected of them by the forces of conservatism.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“However, women could also exert enormous informal power and control.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“Indeed, no reigning emperor would father a son and successor until Marcus Aurelius over 150 years later.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“Antony had amply proved just how catastrophic it could be to drop one’s guard. He was regarded more with pity than anything else. The vitriol was reserved for the female villain of the piece to avoid openly admitting that a Roman man of Antony’s status could have fallen so far. Cleopatra thus served a symbolic and allegorical function.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“The Julio-Claudian reliance on the female line was successfully obscured at the time because from the dictator Caesar right through to Nero the fiction of a father-son succession was manufactured with great success largely by using the system of adoption.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“It was the female route that legitimized the claim to dynastic descent by the successive male rulers even if the details and nature of each succession differed according to circumstances. Oddly, the real extent of the dynastic implications of Poppaea’s death appears to have excited little notice among ancient and even modern historians, as well as the more general issue of the vital importance of key female members of the imperial family to the dynasty’s survival. 2 The failure of the male line was a major factor throughout Roman imperial history. Very few emperors succeeded their blood fathers to rule in their own right as opposed to serving as a co-ruler. Even fewer of these were succeeded in turn by their own sons.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“The first emperor to be so was Vespasian (69–79), by Titus (79–81). The first emperor to be succeeded by a son born during his father’s reign was Marcus Aurelius (161–80), by Commodus (180–92).”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“the only reason there was a Julio-Claudian dynasty at all was because the bloodline was almost exclusively transmitted down through the women. Not one of the Julio-Claudian emperors was succeeded by his son. 1”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“Even Livia, whose loyalty and wifely chastity appear to have been beyond reproach, was depicted by Tacitus as scheming and murderous simply because she acquired and used power in a society that denied women access to political status and legal authority.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“the second longest-lasting dynasty in Roman history, that of the Severans, was also largely dependent on the female bloodline for its existence.”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

“The women of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the longest-lasting in Roman history, have proved popular topics in the past and present, either in the form of individual biographies or books that feature a series of shorter lives. 1 Even though the only reason the dynasty survived was because of the female bloodline, there has not, to this author’s knowledge, been any attempt to write a narrative history of the period in terms of the women of the imperial Julio-Claudian family and their milieu. 2”
― Guy de la Bédoyère, Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome