Preface

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199235728.002.0006

Front Matter

Preface

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https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199235728.002.0006

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vii–x

Published:

March 2008

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These days, in Europe and America of the early twenty-first century, we tend to take the language of private morality as a natural, normal aspect of political discourse; we now expect our civic leaders to make repeated reference to the virtues of ‘traditional’ homes and families—even while they take action in their public and private lives which undermines the very values they espouse. It was this, in part, which led me to this project: I was struck by the eerie coincidence between the terms in which I had been taught to understand the moral restoration of Roman society under Augustus and those which I was reading in the newspaper every day. I had long believed one of the great credos of the feminist movement, that attention needs to be paid to the private sphere and the work, primarily done by women, which allows it to function. The attention which it was receiving from both right and left as ‘family values’, however, was not what I had had in mind. The family, I knew, was an institution, and thus had all of the merits and difficulties of other institutions. Yet as far as I could tell, the family being described by politicians—in its perfect selflessness, absolute acceptance, and unbreakable bonds of loyalty and love—did not describe the familial experience of anyone I knew, or anyone I had ever met. This in turn led me to wonder, not just what politics lay behind the invocation of domestic values as a civic concern in the modern day, but what lay behind it in the age of Augustus. As a historian, I had long been unsatisfied with the explanations which are traditionally offered for the loud trumpeting of traditional values in early imperial ideology; as a feminist, I distrusted the motives of Roman patriarchy in celebrating women’s roles within the home; as a feminist historian, I wanted to know more about the conditions under which ancient Roman women were living and what changes, if any, had accompanied the shift from republican to imperial governance. And as a citizen of modern western civil society, I saw in an investigation of the Augustan period the chance to question, from a historical distance, how and why a culture goes about constructing an idea of the family which is profoundly different from the reality of the family, and how and why that construct may be used to support actions which Xy in the face of the genuinely productive values (selflessness, acceptance, loyalty, and love) which it is supposed to represent. It was from these different perspectives, and in furtherance of these different interests, that the following study of gender and private life was produced.

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