The legend of the Sabine Women is
traditionally related with a narrative simplicity that belies how complex the
whole event would be in practice. What happens is: Romulus--ancient Italian
heir to a kingdom that lacked a population--was on the market for some people
to be king of. He founded a site called the Asylum that is supposedly located,
if you visit Rome today, in a little corner between the Musei Capitolini, the
Vittorio Emmanuele monument, and the steps that lead down to the Roman Forum.
The site was soon populated by a band of outlaws, bandits, and other
undesirables--people who had made themselves unwelcome elsewhere--but, somehow,
no women. Romulus, cunningly detecting that the lack of women might impede his
kingdom’s population growth, put on his hat as a municipal planner and devised
a method for finding wives for his citizens. He invited the citizens of a
neighboring kingdom, the Sabines, to attend a religious festival, kind of a big
church picnic--sack races, softball game, big barbeque. Except that in the
middle of the biggest event, Romulus gave a signal to his men, and they all
leapt up and carried off all the women in sight. (These are great glorious
legends as related with pride by Roman authors. You can look them up in Livy’s
history.
Cicero tells the same story, but has the
grace to dismiss the mass rape as “intrepid, but a little bit boorish.”) At any
rate, the Sabines go home incensed that their women have been stolen and suit
up for war. Apparently this takes longer than you would think, because when the
two armies finally meet on the battlefield, they are persuaded to stop fighting
by the abducted women and their new sons, who dolefully march onto the
battlefield to intervene. Everyone is so moved by the women’s tears that they
agree to merge into one kingdom and live happily ever after.
You can always point to those babies, which
have gestated at lightning speed, as an element of pathos exaggerated to the
point of ridiculousness. Ovid says that, when the babies are carried onto the
battlefield, some of them address their grandfathers as ‘papa’--or at least are
made to seem as if they are. Since most babies I’ve met don’t start talking (in
any meaningful sense of the word) until at least six months, this would have
the Sabines at home fuming for more than a year, certainly long enough when you’re
waiting to avenge yourself on the bandit who kidnapped your daughter. What did
the Sabines think was happening while they were gone?
But in my mind, the more shocking element
was those women, sweeping onto the battlefield in tears to beg their fathers
not to kill their rapists. I’ll grant that if some guy kidnaps a woman for the
specific purpose of providing himself with a wife and holds her hostage for
over a year, she might very logically have a child at the end of it--that’s
ordinary brutality and I don’t question it for a minute. But then for the
woman--and not just one woman, but apparently every single kidnapped and raped
woman--to defend her rapist’s crimes against her and her family? That is the
greatest strain on my suspension of disbelief.
But then, we’re within the realm of
mythology. Maybe every single woman fell in love with her kidnapper and all of
those babies were the product of consensual sex. (By the way, we can safely
assume that all of these women are no older than fifteen or sixteen: one of the
canonical details about the Sabine Rape, which is crucial to its legitimacy
within the Roman patriarchal structures, was that all of the women kidnapped
were unmarried virgins. Certainly no one was kidnapping another man’s wife!)
Maybe every one of those “marriages” turned out perfectly peachy, and there was
never any need to worry about these bandits and lowlifes, who were unwanted in
society in general, and who were considered so undesirable that they had to
abduct wives by force, raping and abusing the women they kidnapped. The women
were devoted to them! Or was there another motivation?
There is a more obscure source, a Greek
historian whose work is now only preserved in fragments, that actually explains
this apparent devotion, although this aspect of the story is omitted from the
native Roman sources. According to this legend, Romulus gathered the Sabine
Women and proposed a lottery: for the first woman to bear a Roman child, he
would present a golden pendant--for her son. The prospect of this prize
presumably motivated the women to cooperate with their captors in the endeavor
of advancing the Roman state. If you find the idea of these women consenting to
sex in captivity for the sake of some measly trinket tawdry and degrading,
perhaps you would prefer the upstanding Roman version found in Livy. There
Romulus, addressing the Sabine Women, makes no promises of monetary
compensation for sex and childbearing, but simply informs the women that it will
be an honor for them to bear Roman boys and sends them home.
Even after all that, the person I felt
worst for in the middle of this was Tarpeia. She is one of the more popular
characters in the saga of Romulus, in the sense that her story is told by several
Roman authors across a number of genres. She certainly was not well-liked; in
fact, her name is used as a byword for deceit and treason. In the few initial
skirmishes before the Romans and Sabines met on the battlefield, Tarpeia
famously betrayed Rome from inside its walls. Maybe she fell in love with the
Sabine general, maybe she did it merely for financial gain; in any case, she
secretly made a deal with the Sabines: she would unbolt the gate and let them
in if they would give them what they wore on their arms--i.e., their golden
bracelets. When she did let them in, they decided that they despised her
treachery so much that they would punish her for it, but apparently not so much
that they would forebear to take advantage of it. Unbuckling their shields from
their arms, they hurled them at her and crushed her to death under their
weight. They then rushed into the city, invading as planned.
Now, we can debate later whether Tarpeia’s
demand for golden bracelets is any more base or tawdry than the Sabine Women’s
willingness to have sex in exchange for a golden pendant, but I only want to
ask: where did Tarpeia come from? Because we’ve already established that only
men showed up at the Asylum willingly. If Tarpeia is old enough to be
bargaining with the invaders, she must be one of the kidnapped women. Moreover,
she is the only one of the kidnapped women who, to my mind, has a normal,
relatable, defensible reaction to being kidnapped and raped: she hates it! She
has no sympathy for her captors! She feels that she owes no loyalty to Rome and
decides, quite intrepidly and independent-mindedly, to work against the city
from the inside. It’s atrocious to condemn Tarpeia as the metonym for treason,
when she had no voluntary affiliation with Rome in the first place, and even more
atrocious for her own countrymen to kill her in exchange for her help. Tarpeia’s
story is certainly a tragedy, but not because she betrays her countrymen;
rather, because her countrymen betray her.
No comments:
Post a Comment