The ancient Romans never really behaved like they do in our imaginations. I’m not talking about their big modi operandi, about war and peace, invasion, political decision-making and so forth. I mean in their day-to-day human interactions. This struck me most forcefully a few years ago, when I realized that the standard form of greeting between elite Roman males was a kiss. I don’t know what I had previously thought they had done (not a handshake, that’s for sure), but there is no doubt that historical accuracy would demand that movies were full of Romans pecking each other on the cheek, or maybe something more intimate. This week, I found myself thinking a bit harder about the Romans crying, after Rachel Reeves wept in the House of Commons. (I had taken a quick look at the tears of the Romans before, but my sights were now more specifically on gender differences in their rules for weeping.)
Reeves’s tears were greeted by a predictable dispute on social media. On the one side were those of us who took the view that men and women had different ways of expressing distress – and anyway, it might be no bad thing if male politicians cried more often. On the other were those who thought that it was a clear sign that she wasn’t up to the job. It was along the lines of “if you can’t keep your tears in, get out of the front line”, “look what happens, when you have a woman in charge of the country’s finances” or “keep your blubbing at home, dearie”.
After making my own contribution to this “debate”, I went back to the deep history again. Of course, it turns out that the cultural norms of tears are much more varied and complicated than we assume (and there is a good online article on Roman crying here, plus a big collection of essays on the subject, which will tell you all you need to know). But the basic answer is that, despite some philosophical anxiety about displays of emotion, elite Roman men cried a lot and were not generally ridiculed for it. It was, for example, taken as a tribute to Julius Caesar’s sensibility that he wept when he was handed the severed head of his rival Pompey. Elsewhere, they cried as they delivered pathetic speeches, they cried on embassies and, like Caesar, they cried almost in sympathy with their defeated enemies (Scipio Aemilianus shed tears at the destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE, though with a twist – he was reflecting that in due course that would be the fate of Rome too). On one occasion the audience at the games, probably mostly male, cried when they watched the wounded elephants in the arena, and their attempts to escape.
The bottom line is that Roman men were much bigger blubbers than Roman women, whose crying was by and large restricted to the context of death and funerals. But Roman women, too, could be the victims of their gender. While tears poured out of male tear ducts with no reproach, if women wept outside the funerary sphere, it could be treated as a sign of their innate weakness and lack of control, and why they weren’t fit for a public role.
It was much the same story with Reeves.
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