Women in the World of the Earliest Christians

Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life

Cohick, Lynn

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781441207999
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Lynn Cohick provides an accurate and fulsome picture of the earliest Christian women by examining a wide variety of first-century Jewish and Greco-Roman documents that illuminate their lives. She organizes the book around three major spheres of life: family, religious community, and society in general. Cohick shows that although women during this period were active at all levels within their religious communities, their influence was not always identified by leadership titles nor did their gender always determine their level of participation. The book corrects our understanding of early Christian women by offering an authentic and descriptive historical picture of their lives. Includes black-and-white illustrations from the ancient world.

1
Women as Daughters

In modern Western culture, a baby daughter often conjures up pictures of lacey pink dresses and ribbons and bows. For some ancient authors the birth of a daughter foretold a life of anxiety and fear of public shame. For others, daughters heralded the hope of a son-in-law. Raising daughters involved different goals and potential pitfalls than raising sons—most prominently, the family’s concerted effort to keep her pure and chaste until marriage. Because marriage was so important to the social prestige of the two families involved, daughters played an important role in advancing their family’s honor. Some literary evidence suggests that daughters could be tools in the family’s pursuit of greater prestige, but it is unclear how complicit the daughters might be in their “exploitation.”

Jewish literature such as Joseph and Aseneth1 portrays indulgent parents acceding to their daughter’s wishes. Pseudo-Philo’s Liber antiquitatum biblicarum retells the story of Jephthah’s daughter (Judg. 11) and invents a mother to care for her condemned daughter. In the apocryphal book of Tobit, Sarah’s mother, Edna, sheds tears on her daughter’s wedding night. From Egyptian papyri letters, we overhear common chitchat between mother and daughter. Jewish and gentile fathers show relative interest in their daughters’ lives and mourn their deaths. The literary and documentary evidence reveals a range of attitudes toward daughters, most of which transcend a Jew/gentile divide, except in the singular case of infant exposure. No evidence suggests that Jews participated in this common gentile practice.

Second-century AD Roman monument of a girl with what looks to be a doll in the upper left edge (Photo courtesy of Mary Harrsch/flickr.com)

In general, a work that is proscriptive and literary tends to be more negative about daughters, while funerary inscriptions and letters, written with a particular daughter in mind, generally are more positive about the girl and about daughters as a whole. This makes sense given the honor/shame culture that permeated the Greco-Roman world. In this cultural matrix, women carried the burden of potentially bringing shame to the family through their unchaste behavior. Thus, as a group, girls were a potential danger to the family’s reputation. But individual daughters who acted within the social norms could be proudly praised, as they contributed to the social respect of the family.

Daughters and Fathers in Non-Jewish Sources

Not surprisingly, there is more evidence about fathers’ relationships to their daughters and about sons’ connections with their mothers than about mother/ daughter bonds. Roman writers comment on how daughters resemble their fathers. Cicero brags that his daughter has such family devotion, such modesty and intellect—she is “the image of my face and speech and mind.”2 Valerius Maximus, also from the first century BC, notes about the father Q. Hortensius that his daughter had her father’s eloquence: “Quintus Hortensius lived again in the female line and breathed through his daughter’s words.”3 Such sentiment underscores the family pride expressed by fathers about their daughters.

Eulogies on inscriptions and in texts also reveal the affection and importance daughters held. In a letter to his friend Marcellinus, Pliny the Younger shares the bereavement of their mutual friend Fundanus, whose thirteen-year-old daughter died. He recalls with great sorrow how affectionately she would wrap her arms around her father’s neck, how diligently she would study, in what a dignified manner she carried herself, even in her final illness. Invitations to her wedding had been sent, but instead of celebration, the family faced a funeral.4 A first-century BC Latin inscription from Rome records a moving eulogy wherein a father memorializes his daughter, a young wife. “(The altar of) Minucia Suavis, wife of Publius Sextilis Campanus. She lived 14 years, 8 months, 23 days. Her father Tiberius Claudius Suavis (put this up).”5 Notice that it is her father, not her husband, who erects the funeral bust in her honor. This likely reflects the predominant type of marriage at this time, the sine manu arrangement, in which the husband did not gain complete authority over his wife. She remained part of her father’s family, and so it was not uncommon for her father (or his family) to take responsibility for her burial. Also of note is her age, just under fifteen years old. She likely died in childbirth, the killer of so many women at this time. The love of a daughter held public currency such that Quintilian could lament after the death of his wife (at age eighteen) that “her death was like the loss not merely of a wife, but of a daughter.”6

The Power of the Father

The power of the father (patria potestas) is perhaps nowhere as apparent as in his role in accepting or rejecting his child at birth. In a quasi-official ceremony, the child would be placed before the father, and if he lifted it up from the ground, he signaled his willingness to accept responsibility for rearing the child.7 If he did not pick up the newborn, it was cast out of the family. The same power was held by slave owners (male and female) over their slaves’ children. Mothers who were not in a licit marriage (which meant the child was not legally the responsibility of the father) could decide themselves whether to raise their baby. If a wife was divorced or widowed while pregnant, the baby when born would be raised (or rejected) by her husband’s family. If the newborn was rejected, it was either killed directly (infanticide) or exposed. If the latter, it might be rescued and raised by someone else (usually as their slave) or die from the elements and animals. The father himself did not actually place the child outside the house—that was done by another household member, perhaps a slave or the mother. There is no record as to how the person abandoning the child would feel; we can only guess that the emotions would be at best neutral, at worst devastating. Although exposure was technically not the same as infanticide, historians debate how many exposed infants lived through their childhood. Certainly the risk was great that abandoning the child would lead to its death.

Both male and female children retained the legal status of their birth, if it could be proved; therefore, a freeborn exposed infant, though raised as a slave, was technically free.8 Legal cases concerning status claims of exposed children were argued regularly. Generally, the father wished to reclaim a child (who might be an adult now) that he had earlier exposed, while the one who rescued the child wanted compensation. The law upheld the father’s right of patria potestas, even though he had previously chosen to expose the infant; the rescuer was not owed money to cover expenses in raising the child. If the birth father was dead, the child’s mother (or a female relative) could bring a claim against the rescuer to free the child. One curious case is that of Emperor Vespasian’s wife, Flavia Domitilla. Suetonius tells us that she was originally of Latin rank, not a Roman citizen. She was later declared a freeborn citizen of Rome after her father, Flavius Liberalis, brought a suit before the court. It is possible that she was abandoned (or sold) at birth and raised as a slave until she was reclaimed by her father.9 Suetonius also tells the story of the grammarian Gaius Melissus, who was exposed at birth due to a disagreement between his parents.10 He was cared for and well educated by the man who retrieved him, and was given as a slave to a certain Maecenas, a kind owner who valued Melissus’s work. Though his mother later claimed the boy was freeborn, he chose to remain Maecenas’s slave. Subsequently he was freed and won Augustus’s favor.11 In a final example, the Christian author of the Shepherd of Hermas identifies himself as a foundling: “The master, who reared me, had sold me to one Rhoda in Rome.”12 In his next sentence, he implies that he was freed, for he notes that after many years he met her again.

The situation could get complex, as in the case of a man who divorced his pregnant wife and married another woman. The first wife apparently did not inform her ex-husband of their child but exposed their son, though (curiously) he was raised with his father’s name (and thus was likely not a slave). When the father died, without any other children, the mother (his first wife) and the father’s mother brought forth the child as the man’s legitimate heir who was entitled to inherit the estate. Ironically, in this case the question was the status of the deceased man’s slaves. They were freed at his death, but now with the heir present, their manumission was revoked, for they were part of the son’s inheritance.13

Infant Exposure and Infanticide

The story of the divorced man and the son of his first wife highlights several complexities in the practice of infant exposure and its connection to other family customs and Roman law. First, note that the divorced wife apparently circumvented the father’s prerogative of accepting the infant. Perhaps she guessed that he would charge her to expose it and decided to do so on her own terms. The fact that the paternal grandmother knew of the son’s existence suggests that the women attempted both to conceal and control the child’s upbringing until events were favorable for his paternity to be known. They probably benefited from the son’s inheritance, assuming that he would care for them. That divorced wives were given permission to expose infants is found in an annulment contract from first-century BC Alexandria, Egypt. Here we read of a pregnant widow who has renounced claims on her deceased husband’s family. They in turn give her permission to expose the child and to marry again.14

A second point is that parents might have expected to eventually reunite with their child. This implies both that they did not expect the child would die from being set out of their house and that they supposed someone would raise the child.15 This expectation might be overly optimistic, but the fact that some children were left with tokens (rattles, for example) that could identify them suggests the parents hoped to reclaim them. More negatively, the token could be explained as a burial amulet, indicating that the family expected the child to die. Ironically, the apparent ease with which parents could reunite with exposed children might have encouraged the parents’ decision, in the hope that when their situation improved, they would be reunited. 16 Presumably, if the parents wanted to reconnect with the child later, they would take care that he or she was rescued by a family who would not then sell the child.

Related to this is a third point, namely that for the parents to reunite with the child, they needed to know of their child’s whereabouts. This implies that someone in the household (parent, relative, house slave) followed up on the person who rescued the infant, suggesting that exposed infants might be raised fairly close to their birth homes.17 The evidence, however, is meager. The rescuer’s profile varies—he or she could be from a local family, or a slave dealer. The person who chose to raise the child usually had only the outlay of a wet nurse—less expensive than buying a slave. In a few years, the child would be able to help in the household, and if no one claimed him or her, the rescuer had secured a slave at low cost. We saw above that Melissus was highly trained by his rescuer, who likely profited when he gave (sold?) the child to Maecenas.18 Frequently a slave dealer picked up the infant to raise and later sell, often as part of the sex trade.

Sometimes the infant was abandoned in an area that had traffic or was known as a place where unwanted infants were left. At other times a less-inhabited place was chosen, presumably so the child would die. The danger of the child dying was real in either case, for an unprotected newborn has no defenses. We should assume that even with the hope that the child would be found, a parent knew that death was a genuine possibility. Parenthetically, we should note that infant mortality rates for nonexposed children raised by their parents was extremely high; perhaps as many as 50 percent of children did not live beyond age five.19

INFANT EXPOSURE DEFENDED AND DEFAMED

What reasons might underpin the decision to expose or to kill a newborn? Ancient authors often point to the relative health of the infant, as a weak or deformed infant of either sex might be killed. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing in the first ce...