IX. Religion

Extract

Old thought-patterns die hard: three centuries after the guardianship of women was formally abolished, both halves of the Roman empire legislated to restrict the rights of clergy to receive legacies from women. The West showed more anxiety about property being left away from the rightful heirs, the East about clergy who used religion as a pretext for entering the houses of women not of their family. Great heiresses, like Olympias in Constantinople or Demetrias in Rome, could divert their riches to the church, refusing to perpetuate a family line or to benefit the imperial house.

Religion had always been the one area in which women might have non-family duties. This is not to say that religious duties were likely to conflict with family commitment. Two famous counter-examples, the Antigone of Sophocles and the Bacchae of Euripides, do not prove the point: in both, women are forced out of their proper behaviour-patterns because the man in charge fails to recognize an obligation to family, city, and gods.