Ummidia Quadratilla,
17th September, c30AD,
The problem with putting together the lives of women in ancient Rome is the almost total lack of narratives written from their own point of view. Outside of graffiti, almost all the narratives we have are written by elite men and even when the speeches of famous women are repeated, such as that of the Warrior Queen and rebel, Boudica, they are rhetorical exercises written by men for other men to read in which the narrative speaks only of the glory of conquest and victory through the eyes of whatever bloke is pretending to be her.
So, when you go about piecing together the lives of ancient women, you have to do so through other means and those means are nearly always incredibly fragmentary. That doesn't mean that extrapolating from those fragments is impossible and when we apply other factors to the story in terms of what we know about how Roman society treated women - not very well, as you could probably guess - then we can start to build up pictures of what some of them must have been like from what seems like scant sources.
In legal terms, women had very few, if any rights that extended beyond those of their husbands or guardians, even if this distinction became less obvious in the empire, where everyone lived under the rule of one man. The Imperial period also allowed women to take more prominent positions, as wives and mothers of emperors, than they ever had under the Republic, but that greater exposure didn’t manifest itself in greater rights. Again, it’s impossible to paint a full picture of the lives of women because history ignores both their narrative and their actual voices. It’s very much a man’s world and the history of it is written from a man’s viewpoint. Women are incidental to their own narratives and when they do appear in the story, it’s as a bitch, a witch or a whore. Women don’t get their own metanarratives in history unless they are snake-haired monsters, snake-hipped enchantresses or Machiavellian schemers out to ruin the greater plans of men.
What we can see is a world in which their rights are severely curtailed and their absence from the wider narrative tells volumes about how this patriarchal society treated them. They were controlled and corralled from birth until death and they were expected to act in ways in public that adhered to extremely restrictive codes.
The social status of a woman relied entirely on that of her husband or her nearest male relations. Even though in the late Republican and early Imperial periods, women had begun to gain a measure of financial freedom, the law offered them very little in terms of practical freedom, certainly within the family. Widows could gain more freedom than most, but even then, they were expected to be restricted by a male guardian.
Pliny the Younger tells a tale (Letters, 7.24) of an extraordinary widow named Ummidia Quadratilla who was born probably around the 17th of September and lived to be nearly 80, dying some time in the reign of Trajan (98-117AD). She was not only exceedingly rich but lived her life exactly how she wanted, much to the evident embarrassment of Pliny and his ‘friend’ (conspiratorial wink), her grandson Ummidius Quadratus, whom Pliny described as ‘extremely beautiful’. Make of that what you will.
Quadratilla has spent most of her life a widow, raising Quadratus in her household and although it is not expressly mentioned, he is almost certainly her guardian, otherwise her independence would have been made clear. Quadratus also inherits the majority of her estate in a will that Pliny probably helped write. A woman's guardian would normally be the closest male relative on her father's side and as no other male heirs are named in her will, that only leaves Quadratus as the candidate to be her guardian.
She keeps a 'troop of pantomimes' in her house:
"He lived in the family of his grandmother, who was exceedingly devoted to the pleasures of the town, with great severity of conduct, yet at the same time with the utmost compliance. She retained a set of pantomimes, whom she encouraged more than becomes a lady of quality."
This widow, who was devoted to the pleasures of the town, nevertheless keeps her grandson under 'strict conduct'. It's clear who the boss is, even if he is legally the boss. She also, shockingly, has her own troop of pantomime actors. Actors, dancers and gladiators are on the same social strata as prostitutes - they are people who sell their bodies and in doing so give up the normal rights of citizens. What's more, they dance for her in private and when they do, she sends the grandson away for his own good:
"But Quadratus never witnessed their performances, either when she exhibited them in the theatre, or her own house; nor did she exact his attendance. I once heard her say, when she was commending her grandson's oratorical studies to my care, that it was her habit, being a woman and as such debarred from active life, to amuse herself with playing at chess or backgammon, and to look on at the mimicry of her pantomimes; but that before engaging in either diversion, she constantly sent away her grandson to his studies"
When she wanted to be alone with the actors, she sent Quadratus away to finish his studies with Pliny. She wanted some 'alone time' with them.
The inference here is very obvious. All the dancers in a pantomime troop would have been male, young and not wearing very much. She might have been very interested in their dancing ability, but that's not all she was interested in, else why send Quadratus away?
She also lets the troop of male dancers perform in public, sometimes, where Pliny and Quadratus go to watch them for the first time:
"As we were coming out of the theatre together, where we had been entertained with a contest of these pantomimes, "Do you know," said he, "this is the first time I ever saw one of my grandmother's freedmen dance?""
Not only that, but he recounts the audience's reaction to the dancing, in which they copy the rather 'enthusiastic', not to say the outright bawdy reaction of Quadratilla, shockingly in public, to the dancing of her 'boys'.
"...they would rise up and clap in an excess of admiration at the performances of those pantomimes, slavishly copying all the while, with shrieks of applause, every sign of approbation given by the lady patroness of this company."
It's hard not to imagine Quadratilla at the theatre, standing up, hollering and hooting in delight at the performance of her private troop of scantily clad male dancers.
The rest of the letter, written to Pliny's friend, Senator Titus Paetus Germinius is about what a good boy Quardatus has been and how, now his grandma has died, he has inherited the majority of her wealth and her home. It's a reference letter that's trying to distance the young man from her excesses and saying that although he tried to control her, he couldn't and that her 'shameful' behaviour shouldn't reflect on his chances of a career in public life.
Quadratilla herself tried to keep it from him, too, by sending him away, but she was clearly determined to spend her money and her life in exactly the way she wanted and neither a snotty little grandson nor his mate Pliny were going to ruin it for her. They could have her money and her house when she was dead and, in the meanwhile, if they didn't like it, the door was over there.
In all my years of studying and writing about Roman history, Ummidia Quadratilla remains one of my favourite characters, which is saying something for someone about whom we know very little. The brief extracts of her life from the letters of Pliny paints a picture of a woman who lived in, perhaps, the most patriarchal society humans have ever constructed and yet did so entirely on her terms, with her own money, in the company of as many half-naked men as she could muster. And not only did she celebrate it in private, she celebrated it in public, too. If anyone didn't like it, they could kiss her wealthy old pantomime troop-owning ass.
No likeness of her is known, but she was probably the daughter of Gaius Ummidius Durmius Quadratus, who was governor of Syria and died in 60AD. She paid for the construction of the amphitheatre at Casinum, modern-day Cassino and it was there she was buried in a magnificent mausoleum, the remains of which are still there to this day.
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