We should include in our classroom the women that constitute Julius Caesar’s family tree and his relationships with women beyond his notorious affairs with Servilia and Cleopatra. Caesar’s surviving writings follow the authorial tradition of excluding women, perhaps understandably as they did not accompany him on the battlefield. To the Roman mind, women’s lives did not warrant public exposure except when they were in violation of the mos maiorum. Although we have little information about individual women’s activities, and in many cases even their names, through marriage and parenting women set examples and expectations for male behavior and aspirations. Caesar’s life and actions give us a light by which we may see some women who would otherwise have remained invisible.
