Page - 34 - in Austrian Law Journal, Volume 1/2017

ALJ 1/2017 Leo Peppe 34 There is no doubt that the Roman woman was a civis from the very beginning. Nevertheless, the inclusion of a woman into the community as a civis among cives works on two fundamental, inalienable levels, insofar as we can distinguish between them: a functional level, relating to pro- creation and everything gravitating around it (such as the rules of matrimonial exchange be- tween groups), and a symbolic level, religion. We will discuss religion below. However, at this point it should be stressed that the role of a woman in Rome was to have children and raise them, and to manage the interior of the house in a subordinate condition to the head of the family, the pater familias, who was generally the hus- band or his father, a Quiris and a potential soldier. This is the original structure of the Roman family and the relations arising inside and out of it. For many centuries, almost until 90 BCE,46 the Roman woman could confer Roman citizenship on her children: the general rule, governing the citizenship of a newborn, was that in a fully valid marriage (iustae nuptiae) the newborn gained the citizenship of the Roman husband at the mo- ment of conception. Even outside this type of marriage, if the woman was Roman but her hus- band was not, her child was also Roman. VI. But where did the Roman community and Roman women meet? Three different situations emerge: religion, civic spaces, taxation. If we speak about taxation, here I can only say Roman women paid taxes. This obviously entails numerous presuppositions that differ, depending on the period and the sums of money involved, and, in particular, the adequate legal capacity of women and the existence of tools for enforcement and for calculating the tax base. 1. Religion Religion played a truly central role, whereby its rites aimed to preserve the pax deorum, harmony with the gods. Religion could be private and public, and the harmony between the gods and the community was seen as the foundation for the well-being of the Roman state. And in the city’s religion, women played a fundamental role. To illustrate, for almost a thousand years the most important priest in Rome was the Flamen of Jupiter. However, he had to have a wife, known as the Flaminica. Whilst the Flamen held his post because he had been elected, the woman was a priestess only because she had married a Flamen. If she died, the Flamen was divested of his office. The Flaminica also performed some tasks of importance for everyday life. Moreover, she had to wear a special hairstyle and perform a solemn sacrifice of a ram to Jupiter every week on market days. Moreover, at the Ides in mid- month, her husband had to sacrifice a sheep to Jupiter. These were obviously fertility rites on behalf of the whole community.47 46 In other words, until the issue of the lex Minucia, inverting the rule: the son of a Roman woman and a foreigner will be a foreigner; for later developments see GIOVANNI PUGLIESE, ISTITUZIONI DI DIRITTO ROMANO 370 (3d, 1991). 47 CELIA E. SCHULTZ, WOMEN’S RELIGIOUS ACTIVITY IN THE ROMAN REPUBLIC 81 (2006): ”Rather than discussing the flaminica and the flamen as two separate entities, the flaminate should be viewed as a single priesthood that required the ser- vices of a married couple.” On the Flaminica see L. Peppe, Storia di parole, storie di istituti: sul diritto matrimoniale romano arcaico, STUDIA ET DOCUMENTA HISTORIAE IURIS 123, 188 et seq. (1997).