Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
Do you think the Rape of the Sabine Women actually happened?
My own take is that it's got about as much truth behind it as the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. And that the real truth behind this myth is in how Roman women and men saw themselves, rather than what actually happened.
But you tell me.
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--|PW|--
The Poussin picture, passed out as a postcard sized print for 5th grade art class, certainly made an impression, though. And increased our vocabulary. You gotta love those nuns!
A group of young men established a city, they had no women, the other people around them would not let them marry their women, so they captured some women and made them an offer to be their husbands without forcing them. They offered the women property rights and protection. Then when the Sabine men and the Romans got into a war over the whole thing, the women ran into the battlefield and inserted themselves between their new husbands and their fathers and brothers.
Could it have happened that way? Yeah. But parts of it have never added up to me. Although I've often wondered why Hollywood's never done anything with it (unless you count Seven Brides for Seven Brothers).
Sort of a permanent rule of history. Lose the war, lose your daughters to the winners. Win the war, and bring home some fresh bloodlines to the old family homestead.
The downside? You've got to wonder; in later years, after the Roman republic and early empire spread their wings all across the Mediterranean basin, what did the Roman women think of this arrangement?
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
The Romans had a huge thing about the honor of women and their central importance in the family and in the raising of children (including the boys). Legends like that don't survive for thousands of years unless people (not just men) find a story compelling.
Marriages were almost always arranged things anyway. Kidnapping a woman and talking her into marrying you without her family's consent would be a dramatic scandal not a sexual one. Indeed, such tales are still highly popular in Romance novels--just ask The Queen.
What's more interesting than the historicity of actual events is why the accounts were preserved. That tells you more about past cultures (and present ones) than speculating whether specific events actually happened or not.
--|PW|--
The Roman stories contradicted one another in many respects. That did not bother the Romans. Literal history was much less important to the ancients.
The tales were adopted and/or adapted for various purposes. Wealthy politicans openly used theater to build popular support. Reinventing one's family history was routine.
About the views of Roman wives: family status was paramount. Marriage signified an alliance of two families more than an union of two individuals. So divorce or infidelity within one's class was a serious matter. Divorce and family law was a big factor in the war that followed Caesar's murder.
So a wife was overly concerned when her husband raped abroad (no pun intended) or kept a mistress, if it wasn't done within one's social circle.
So a wife was NOT overly concerned
But the bit about giving women the choice? Women interposing themselves on their foreign husbands' behalf?
I don't think that's an entirely fair objection, to go back slightly on my own skepticism.
I think it's a very modernist and, once again, rather sexist interpretation to simply assume that the men of history were by and large such brutes and rapists that they didn't see women as humans. While of course this attitude did exist, the presumption seems to be that it was the norm.
Was it? I'm not so sure.
Do most men today--I said most men--really want women in their homes who they have to slap around every day and rape in the bedroom every night? And would most women--I said most women--really put up with that for long without doing things like killing the men in their sleep or strangling their unwanted children to death or killing themselves if that was really just how brutish everything was, or is?
We all seem biased to just nod our heads and sagely agree with a bunch of assumptions about men-as-brutes, women-as-victims, which really don't make sense to me.
So what was the point in history when this woman-as-perpetual-victim, man-as-perpetual-brute, change? Where was the paradigm shift wherein suddenly women were not routinely treated that way? Has the entirety of recorded history before, say, the women's sufferage movement, really been that way?
What does that say about the women of history if we really accept that as a fair assertion as to how things routinely were?
Mind you I've often said it's strange how modern liberals and conservatives admire the Romans because they were really an incredibly cruel and brutal people in many many ways. Which they were. But still--should we really accept at face value that women were just powerless commodities?
I don't believe that's true even in Saudi Arabia today, although I deplore some of their practices toward women deeply.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.