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| From The Comic History of Rome |
I've been looking further into mothers in the ancient world. I remembered Cornelia Africana, mother of the Gracchi, from a passage in Wheelock's Latin. I can't find the page, but it's a simplified version of this:
Valerius Maximus 4.4:A companion matron who was staying with Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, was showing off her jewels, the most beautiful of that period. Cornelia managed to prolong the conversation until her children got home from school. Then she said, "These are my jewels."
Cornelia's sons, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, served as tribunes in the late second century and were both assassinated, Tiberius for redistributing land among the plebeians and Gaius for granting citizenship to Italians living outside Rome.
Their mother, widowed young, was lionized for never remarrying, for directing her sons' education and for writing powerful letters to her sons that were later circulated as a collection. Only two fragments of survive today. I will quote the longer fragment, from a letter to her son Gaius when he was tribune:
“You will say that it is a beautiful thing to take on vengeance on enemies. To no one does this seem either greater or more beautiful than it does to me, but only if it is possible to pursue these aims without harming our country. But seeing as that cannot be done, our enemies will not perish for a long time and for many reasons, and they will be as they are now rather than have our country be destroyed and perish. . . . I would dare to take an oath solemnly, swearing that, except for those who have murdered Tiberius Gracchus, no enemy has foisted so much difficulty and so much distress upon me as you have because of the matters: you should have shouldered the responsibilities of all of those children whom I had in the past, and to make sure that I might have the least anxiety possible in my old age; and that, whatever you did, you would wish to please me most greatly; and that you would consider it sacrilegious to do anything of great significance contrary to my feelings, especially as I am someone with only a short portion of my life left. Cannot even that time span, as brief as it is, be of help in keeping you from opposing me and destroying our country? In the final analysis, what end will there be? When will our family stop behaving insanely? When will we cease insisting on troubles, both suffering and causing them? When will we begin to feel shame about disrupting and disturbing our country? But if this is altogether unable to take place, seek the office of tribune when I will be dead; as far as I am concerned, do what will please you, when I shall not perceive what you are doing. When I have died, you will sacrifice to me as a parent and call upon the god of your parent. At that time does it not shame you to seek prayers of those gods, whom you considered abandoned and deserted when they were alive and on hand? May Jupiter not for a single instant allow you to continue in these actions nor permit such madness to come into your mind. And if you persist, I fear that, by your own fault, you may incur such trouble for your entire life that at no time would you be able to make yourself happy.”
The letter is skillfully written and milks the rhetorical question to death in the best Roman fashion. But Judith Hallett (in Women Writing Latin) argues that Cornelia does not merely rival the rhetorical skills of male authors, but that her letter is a model of "maternal motivational speaking" that influenced Livy and Vergil:
Cornelia's letter to Gaius, which articulates Roman political values that include a concern for families and their emotional needs, is a radical document. Its author's priorities differ greatly from those inculcated by Roman patriarchal tradition, which pitted political against familial and emotional concerns. We should also note that ….. [t]he Roman literary figures and historical personages who gave voice to these priorities in the generations after Cornelia include men as well.
However difficult it is to reconstruct the historical Cornelia in detail, she must have been fierce and a little scary. I'm becoming more and more enamored of the Romans' lack of sentimentality, and their notion of the 'ideal mother' is no exception.
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