Hortensia (2nd Century BC.)

Hortensia was the first known female jurist and the first to practice law. The daughter of the Roman consul Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, she is chiefly known for a brilliant speech made at the start of the Second Triumvirate in 42 BC.

The triumvirs Octavian, Mark Antony and Lepidus had passed an edict requiring the 1,400 wealthiest women in Rome to appraise their assets and pay a tax to pay for the new civil war. Women who hid their assets or falsified the appraisal would be subject to heavy fines. Julius Caesar’s assassins had gathered their forces in Greece, and Octavian and Mark Antony planned to launch an attack against the dissidents to be partially funded by this new revenue.

The women opposed the edict and enlisted Hortensia to plead their case to have the tax repealed before the triumviral court. Upon failing to gain entry to the courthouse, the women went to the forum, where Hortensia delivered her speech to the triumvirs before a crowd. The triumvirs ordered their lictors to remove the women, but the crowd protested and clamoured to hear Hortensia’s words.

Since Valerius Maximus first defined the group of women who lodged the complaint as an ordo matronarum, historians have debated whether the term referred to a political association tantamount to the male ordines (represented by Hortensia through a legal action) or if, in contrast, the opposition to the tax arose spontaneously without a legal foundation. In any case, the exclusively female organization of this ordo matronarum to oppose a tax considered unfair was an exception at a time when women were generally excluded from politics. In fact, women’s exclusion from government was one of Hortensia’s main arguments against the controversial tax: women could not be burdened by the financial consequences of political decisions in which they had not been involved (such an idea might be viewed as an avant la lettre application of the “no taxation without representation” principle). As for earlier precedents in which women had contributed their wealth to fund past wars, Hortensia underscored that in those cases the women were supporting war efforts against external enemies, such as the Punic Wars against Carthage. In contrast, the contribution the triumvirs were now requiring would be used in a civil war to attack other Romans (meaning the taxpaying women could well have relatives on both sides of the conflict). Hortensia’s speech was thus also marked by a certain pacifism, at least with regard to the need to end violence within one’s own political community.

Ultimately, through her eloquence, determination, and persuasiveness, Hortensia convinced the triumvirs to reduce the number of women required to pay the new tax from 1400 to 400. To offset the resulting deficit, a separate tax was levied on freedmen with holdings worth more than one hundred thousand denarii.

As a result of Hortensia’s success, however, another edict was soon passed, prohibiting women from representing others in court, thereby effectively barring them from practicing law from that point onwards in Ancient Rome.

The following is an excerpt from Hortensia’s speech:

‘You have already deprived us of our fathers, our sons, our husbands, and our brothers, whom you accused of having wronged you; if you take away our property also, you reduce us to a condition unbecoming our birth, our manners, our sex. If we have done you wrong, as you say our husbands have, proscribe us as you do them. But if we women have not voted any of you public enemies, have not torn down your houses, destroyed your army, or led another one against you; if we have not hindered you in obtaining offices and honours, – why do we share the penalty when we did not share the guilt? Why should we pay taxes when we have no part in the honours, the commands, the state-craft, for which you contend against each other with such harmful results? “Because this is a time of war”, do you say? When have there not been wars, and when have taxes ever been imposed on women, who are exempted by their sex amongst all mankind? Our mothers did once rise superior to their sex and made contributions when you were in danger of losing the whole empire and the city itself through the conflict with the Carthaginians. But then they contributed voluntarily, not from their landed property, their fields, their dowries, or their houses, without which life is not possible to free women, but only from their own jewellery, and even these not according to the fixed valuation, not under fear of informers or accusers, not by force and violence, but what they themselves were willing to give. What alarm is there now for the empire or the country? Let war with the Gauls or the Parthians come, and we shall not be inferior to our mothers in zeal for the common safety; but for civil wars may we never contribute, nor ever assist you against each other. We did not contribute to Caesar or to Pompey. Neither Marius nor Cinna imposed taxes upon us. Nor did Sulla, who held despotic power in the state, do so, whereas you say that you are re-establishing the commonwealth.’

Classical sources:

Appian: Roman History, Book IV, 5.34

Valerius Maximus: Factorum et dictorum memorabilium, Book VIII, 3.3

Modern sources:

Bauman, R.A. (1992). Woman and Politics in Ancient Rome. London: Routledge.

González Estrada, L. (2018). La mujer como exemplum. Subversión, desafío y resistencia en Valerio Máximo. Panta Rei, 73-91.

Höbenreich, E. (2005). Andróginas y monstruos. Mujeres que hablan en la Antigua Roma. Veleia, 22, 173-182.