LEO PEPPE, EVELYN
HÖBENREICH, PATRIZIA
GIUNTI, VALERIO MAROTTA
Discussion* of the book of Leo Peppe, Civis Romana**
* During the Annual Meeting on Christian Origins of the Italian Centre for
Advanced Studies on Religions (CISSR), Bertinoro, FO, September 29, 2017.
** Leo Peppe, Civis Romana. Forme
giuridiche e modelli sociali dell’appartenenza e
dell’identità femminili in Roma antica, Lecce, Edizioni Grifo,
2016.
University of Roma Tre
Initial
Presentation
I wish to thank the conference organizers
for offering my book this important opportunity for presentation and
discussion. I am also grateful to my illustrious colleagues who have agreed to
come here and speak: they are scholars of Roman law with whom I have shared a
long academic friendship. We have discussed our research on many occasions, we
have had and have numerous interests in common and in fact their names account
for a significant portion of the bibliography at the end.
I will start from the certainty that my
book was born out of the convergence of different stages in my research, which
I will list briefly.
I was invited to give a paper at the 17th Colloquium on Latin Linguistics[1] in
2013 and this led me to prepare a short file on citizenship as one possible
topic to at least mention on this occasion. In the end, I did not use this file
but it did represent a valuable opportunity to reconsider the issue: a
fundamental issue in both the ancient world and in our own times.
At around the same time, the colleague
Maria Bravo Bosch invited me to participate in a collective volume on women at
the time of Augustus. I had been interested for some time in a key character in
some parts of Cicero’s Against
Verres, Chelidon: this forced me to carefully reread the entire corpus of
these orations and I realized that it was full of female figures, of interest
from every angle. As a consequence, this essay[2]
became a general study of women in the Against
Verres, in other words during the period around the first quarter of the
1st century BC. Duly rewritten, this article later became an important chapter
of my book, chapter IV[3],
since it allows us to present a fairly accurate legal and social cross-section
of Roman society as a whole at this point in time.
Finally, and this was the crucial
development, Evelyn Hobenreich asked me to participate with her, as scholars
engaged with Roman law and the status of women in Rome, at a conference on
women from antiquity until the present, held on 6 May 2014 at Özyeğin
University in Istanbul and organized by Havva Karagöz[4]. Much
of the conference was devoted to the status of women in Turkey: the Turkish
women speakers included prominent figures in these legal and political
struggles such as Nazan Moroğlu.
Given the current situation in Turkey, my thoughts are with these
extraordinary women. To return to the conference, which was enormously
interesting for us, the fact that it took place in Istanbul in front of this
specific audience led me to go beyond the superficial understanding of this
world that we all have and read up on it and more generally on the Islamic
world and its many facets. These were the years of the so-called ‘Arab
spring’. My book owes a great deal to this interest in the Islamic world
and its culture, as I will discuss later on. Already then I approached the
status of women in light of a broad notion of citizenship, leading me to
entitle my lecture ‘What
Citizenship for the Roman Woman?’[5].
At this point Evelyn Hobenreich, to whom
I will remain eternally grateful, repeated a proposal already hinted at in
previous years, that I should write a book on this topic for the series of
which she was general editor, the Colección Leda belonging to the
network of the same name for gender studies and the history of Roman studies. I
accepted at once, for various reasons: Evelyn herself and the members of the
network, the series’ orientation towards gender studies and above all the
fact that there was room for a study within the context of the research that I
have just outlined.
This was not a new research field for me;
it originated with two studies dating as far back as the 1980s, followed by
others in subsequent years. I will say a few words about these two research
projects, because the underlying approach of the book presented here today
actually dates back to those now distant years.
In the late 1970s I was asked to write the entry
‘Popolo (diritto romano)’
for the Enciclopedia del diritto[6],
delivered to the publishers in 1982; examining the Roman sources on the concept
of populus it became evident that,
though the Roman woman was certainly a civis,
her place in the populus was unclear
given that women were excluded from all political roles. The question was therefore
not, at least for me, whether or not women belonged to the populus, but how they
belonged to it: in other words a problem of inclusion rather than exclusion.
This was the starting point for my 1984 book, Posizione giuridica e ruolo sociale della donna romana in età
repubblicana[7], words that in gender studies would be translated as
‘the place’. Initially this book had a mixed reception, outside
Italy and – especially in academic environments – within Italy.
Outside Italy, some reviews stressed what was missing or a number of statements
that were considered insufficiently motivated;[8] these
criticisms took a highly traditional approach and in any case failed to take
into consideration that this was not a handbook but a book with a message, so
to speak. In fact this was not immediately apparent for the very simple reason
that the academic environment to which I belonged was highly traditional and
espoused that continental European ‘formalistic legal approach’
that some exponents of more recent Anglo-Saxon historiography still continue[9] to
criticise in scholars of Roman law from this geographical area. A masked
message, but not a completely hidden one: Suzanne Dixon at least, who was
starting to publish her first studies at around this time,[10]
concluded her review in 1987 [11] by
saying: “The author shows an unusually sound grasp of feminist analytic
modes and of sophisticated economic and sociological lines of reasoning. He
combines these with a thorough and intelligent knowledge of the law and the
ancient sources (literary and juridic)”. Certainly I was guilty of some
naïve mistakes and perhaps some approximations, but this was a time at
which strictly technical and legal approaches to the status of women remained
highly traditional and very few books attempted to depart from this
methodology; I should mention first of all L'ambiguo
malanno: condizione e immagine della
donna nell'antichità greca e romana by Eva Cantarella, a
legally trained scholar who covered both the Greek and the Roman worlds; L’ambiguo malanno, of 1981, was
published in English to great acclaim in 1986 with the title Pandora’s Daughters. The
Role and Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity[12]; also in 1986 Jane Gardner published her
Women in Roman Law and Society[13].
Again in 1986, Joan Scott published her famous article[14]
posing the question: “What is the relationship between the laws about
women and the power of the state?”[15].
In the same1986, Ronald Syme published The Augustan Aristocracy[16], where the 13th chapter is the study Princesses and Court Ladies[17], which starts with a sentence that has become famous:
“Women have their uses for historians”, even a “celebre
battuta”[18], a well-known joke. To me the sentence
is more significant if one makes a larger quotation, as in the case — for
instance — of Takacs[19], who uses the sentence for the exergum of her book, in this form:
“Women have their uses for historians. They offer relief from warfare,
legislation, and the history of ideas; and they enrich the central theme of
social history … Ladies of rank … are a seductive topic. Ronald
Syme, The Augustan Aristocracy”[20].
In this context, my book was one of the first attempts
at a primarily legal approach to the status of women in its more specific
aspects, a fairly original attempt given that in 1992 Richard Bauman described
it as “a pioneering work”[21].
In Italy, my book gradually established
itself and it is now commonly viewed, alongside the publications of Eva
Cantarella, as the start of Italian research on the legal status of women in
Rome[22].
Over thirty years passed between 1984 and
2016, the year when Civis Romana was
published and it would be true to say that in this field the world has truly
changed. In 1984, second wave feminism was still relatively recent and had
certainly produced important books in the historiography on the status of women
in antiquity such as that by Kari Borresen of 1961 [23],
which introduced the concept of androcentrism to our field[24], or
that by Sarah Pomeroy of 1975 [25]
However, we were still a long way from the surge of studies that has produced
in-depth analyses in every field, using inscriptions in a far more broad and
fruitful way, thanks in part to new information technologies.
Thirty years ago my starting point was
the position of the Roman woman in the populus:
today, in the globalized world, where people move around and their status is
often uncertain, inclusion/exclusion seem to be interpreted primarily in terms
of citizenship. But in the legal terminology, citizenship is actually a simple
concept, as long as we restrict ourselves to describing the prerequisites for
enjoying possession of it: a legally well-defined notion but restricted by
reference to the content of the book, its legal and social aspects. Far more
complex is the examination of the countless legal situations and social
relations that may derive from being a citizen: the combination in a given
individual of everything defining that individual’s civic identity.
Consequently, whilst in 1984 I chose for
the title the formula ‘Posizione giuridica e ruolo sociale’, today
– basically coherently – I decided to accompany the aspect of
citizenship evident in the expression civis
Romana[26], with both the legal forms
most congenial to my background and the potential forms taken by the
coexistence, its social models. However, I did not tackle legal forms and
social models in their infinite potential forms, but with respect to two
fundamental reference points that make up an individual in a society: belonging
and identity. Belonging is – as a legal concept – the fundamental
essence of the right to citizenship, but it is also a belonging to social
structures; identity is what characterizes each of us as an individual, above
all in the form of social identity. A belonging and identity specified as
female, as characteristics of the civis
Romana. So almost naturally the Roman terminology for the status of women
was the fundamental starting point, as an indicator of the needs expressed by
society.
As concerns the structure of the work,
this was very different from the book of 1984, which went up to the end of the
Republic, albeit with some mentions of later periods where necessary; the
treatment now covered the entire sweep of Roman law, from its origins to late
antiquity. Again, this was not a handbook, nor was it intended to be, but in
contrast to 1984 it now covered the whole longue
durée of Roman law, attempting to highlight continuities and changes
in the status of women. In structuring the book, which covers a period of 1300
years, I made an unusual choice in discussions of this issue: I started not
from the beginning, but from the time of Plautus, dealing with the earliest
period in the final chapter. This is certainly not a customary choice, but is
explained by the fact that on many occasions, starting from my first monograph
of 1981 [27], I have tackled the problems
of the monarchy and the earliest centuries of the Roman republic and am
therefore aware of the extent to which these problems may lead to results that
can be very interesting, but also highly questionable. I did not wish the
shadow of uncertainty to be projected over everything that I said afterwards,
so, after some general considerations, I began with the time of Plautus.
Certainly the most obvious novelty in the
contents of the book compared to that of 1984 is the attention devoted to late
antiquity and Christianity for its importance in this period. The status of
woman in Christian thought and practice, starting from Jesus himself, was a
fascinating theme and entirely new to me, since I had previously not dealt with
it specifically and comprehensively[28] and
I discovered a vast and extremely interesting bibliography. For this chapter I
was extremely lucky: I found a text of the Ambrosiaster[29] in
which the theological problem of the nature of women was resolved using the
legal exclusions proper to pagan Roman law, thus providing a very helpful
textual reference framework.
Q. 45.3: Quomodo enim potest de muliere dici, quia imago
dei est, quam constat dominio viri subiectam et nullam auctoritatem habere? Nec
docere enim potest nec testis esse neque fidem dicere nec iudicare: quanto
magis imperare!
In conclusion, I will return to what I
said at the start and the importance for this book of my readings on
contemporary Islamic societies. The attempt of the Tunisian Islamic party in
August 2012 to overturn the ongoing reform of the Tunisian constitution was
enlightening for me in terms of its terminology: the proposed text (of art. 28)
read: “the State ensures the protection of the rights of women, under the
principle that they are complementary to men within the family and partners to
men in building the nation”. I note that in Arabic ‘complementary
to men’ means ‘adjunct to men’. In the conclusions of the
book[30],
this terminology led me to specify the notion of unequal complementarity as
fundamental to understanding the status of women in the Roman world, in other
words a form of necessary and encouraged social integration, but not of
equality. Often, for antiquity, we use the notion of complementarity, but
without pausing to specify which of many possible meanings is attributed to it.
I think that the notion of unequal complementarity provides a good key to
interpreting the entire history of the inclusion/exclusion of Roman women in
law and in society.