Free A History of the Wife by Marilyn Yalom Page B

her husband, whereas it was never acceptable for a husband to be sub- ordinate to his wife. 45 “Chaste” for a husband may have merely meant that he conducted himself discreetly, whereas for a woman pudicitia was to be taken literally.
    Fidelity to a dead spouse was praised on the part of a widow, despite the laws that penalized women under fifty who refused to remarry. There was even a special honorific term— univera —for the woman who married only once. No one expected the same of a widower. A widower might marry immediately upon the death of his wife, but a widow was expected, out of respect for her late husband, to wait ten months—a period later increased to twelve months and then to two years.

    Before leaving the ancient world, we shall take a brief look at homosex- uality among the Romans, who were almost as tolerant as the Greeks, especially during the late empire. According to historian John Boswell, there were “many same-sex couples in the Roman world who lived together permanently, forming unions neither more nor less exclusive than those of the heterosexual couples around them.” 46 Nero, the flam- boyant Roman emperor who ruled from 54 to 68 C . E ., went so far as to marry two men, sequentially, in public ceremonies. Suetonius wrote of Nero’s first homosexual marriage: “Having tried to turn the boy Sporus into a girl by castration, he went through a wedding ceremony with him—dowry, bridal veil and all—which the whole Court attended; then brought him home, and treated him as a wife. He dressed Sporus in the fine clothes normally worn by an Empress and took him in his own litter... through the Street of Images at Rome, kissing him amorously now and then.” 47 He later also married his freedman Doryphorus. Nero forced the Imperial Court to treat his male brides with the same courtesy bestowed upon his three heterosexual wives
    (first Octavia, whom he divorced on a trumped-up adultery charge and then put to death; then Poppaea, who died three years later; and finally Statilia Messallina.)
    Homosexual weddings seem to have increased during the first and second centuries, but were outlawed in 342. Some of the reactions to these ceremonies sound very much like those voiced today by conser- vatives facing gay and lesbian commitment ceremonies, domestic part- nerships, and the possibility of legalized marriage. For example, Juvenal, in his mordant Satire 2, exclaimed: “Look—a man of family and fortune—being wed to a man!” And in that mocking tone for which he became famous, he spoke of having to attend a friend’s wed- ding, still “a small affair,” but one he feared would prefigure a groundswell of increasingly public same-sex weddings.

    . . . . Such things, before we’re very much older, will be done in public—in public, and will want to appear in the papers! These brides, however, are racked by one intractable problem: they cannot conceive, and hold their husbands by having a baby. 48

    For all his mockery of male/male relations, Juvenal painted an even worse picture of heterosexual marriage in his Satire 6 aimed at Roman wives. Indeed, between the perils of matrimony and the pleasures of a male lover, Juvenal asked: “don’t you think it better to sleep with a little boy-friend?/ A boy-friend doesn’t argue all night or ask you for presents as he lies beside you... .” 49 With Roman wives guilty of every form of treachery and debauchery, according to Juvenal, marriage was nothing more than a “noose” for a man to stick his “stupid head” into.
    As for same-sex unions between women, there is no longer any doubt that Roman writers were familiar with lesbianism and invariably condemned it as “monstrous, lawless, licentious, unnatural, and shameful.” 50 While Roman culture was relatively tolerant of eros between men, it was consistently hostile to love between tribades —the Latin term for lesbians. Nonetheless, female homosexuality may have been as much a part of Roman