Women In Alexandria And Pompeii

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Compare and Contrast One Aspect of Two Roman Cities

During …. , women in the Roman Empire …. Egypt’s capital, Alexandria, was a city with a population of … thousand people, while the Italian city of Pompeii had a population of …. thousand. To examine the role of women in Roman society, I will need to investigate the literature that survived from the period. This essay will compare and contrast the role of women in Alexandria and Pompeii.

The Roman Empire regarded males higher than they valued female children, with a daughter’s chances of being reared being less than her brother’s (Ref 1). If a father decided his new-born daughter was not to be reared, there was no law to prevent him from offering it to the Gods by exposing the child on a …show more content…
Some girls from wealthy families may have had private tutors or gone to school, however the education ranged from music and singing to literature and philosophy (Ref 1). However, women were unable to vote, hold positions in parliament or hold priesthoods, and, as a rule, took no part in public life (Ref 1). “Women worked through private influence” (Ref 1).

Since most evidence of the roles of women in Roman society is for the upper classes, the lives of women not from the upper classes can only be guessed at from inscriptions and literature. Letters allow us to interpret their conversations and language, however, how genuine or accurate they are in relation to Roman life is debatable. In a male-dominated social system, the influence and interests of women outside their households was not to be publically acknowledged. Both Alexandria and Pompeii …, however, …. A quote from the article …(Ref 1)... sums up the role of women in Roman society: “While a woman’s relatives are alive, she is never free from slavery”.

As a dowry was required for the marriage of a daughter, poorer families may have exposed their daughters in order to not be required to pay out large sums of money.

“It does not appear that women were in a position to make a free choice” “There were no career women” (Ref
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