The TRUTH About Ancient European WOMEN
Many negative ideas about woman in the ancient past are put forward by various people purporting to follow a "Bronze Age" mentality. Yet what was the actual place of women in the Bronze Age? Were women actually as powerless in the past as some people imagine?
13
sexual double standards, according to Caesar chastity was as important to the Germanic male as
the female.2
Cornelius Tacitus, a Roman living in the first century AD, also wrote about the invading
barbarians in his essay about the Germans titled Germania, which he wrote in 98 AD. The
intention of Tacitus’s work was to chastise the Romans by comparing them to the morally and
physically superior Germans. So, while his work is important, historians must view it to some
extent as propaganda. Although he had never actually traveled to Gaul and Germany; he still
provides information about the Germans. His information about society is so different from
Roman society that it be genuinely German.
Tacitus illuminates the importance of women in his essay about the Germans. He
recorded the volatile emotions that wife and kin inspired in these warriors. In the Germania,
Tacitus stated: “It is considered a crime to limit the number of children or to put to death any of
the children born after the first, and there good customs have greater influence than good laws
elsewhere.” In another section of the Germania, he wrote: “and what is a particular incitement to
bravery, neither chance nor a miscellaneous grouping brings about the cavalry or infantry
formation, but families and clans; and close by are their dear ones, whence are heard the wailings
of women and the crying of children. These are each man’s most sacred witnesses, these are his
greatest supporters: it is to their mothers and to their wives that they bring their wounds; and the
women do not quake to count or examine their blows, and they furnish sustenance and
encouragement to the fighters.” Wemple has said of this era that Germanic men valued the aid
of their wives, but considered their daughters expendable. While she is right about the
2 Wemple, “Consent and Dissent to Sexual Intercourse in Germanic Societies from the Fifth to the Tenth Century”
in Consent and Coercion to Sex and Marriage in Ancient and Medieval Societies, ed. Ageliki E Laiou (Washington:
Dumbarton Oaks, 1993 pp 227-244), 242; Caesar, Conquest of Gaul, 143.