The lex Voconia and Cornelia’s Jewels

Expensive jewelry was overtly considered in ancient Rome a symbol of female integration in society. Excluded from public offices, women never rebelled. The only time they protested was in 195 BCE when they supported the repeal of the lex Oppia passed in 215 BCE during the Second Punic War. The law forbade women from owning and wearing jewelry and colorful garments. Cato the Censor tried strenuously to defend the statute but Roman women occupied the streets and did not disperse until the law had been repealed unanimously. Aemilia, wife of Scipio Africanus, was a emblem of all Cato hated and he feared: a rich and independent matron who paraded through Rome with her expensive attire. Aemilia died a few years after the lex Voconia passed in 169 BC. This statute supported once again by Cato the Censor prevented citizens enrolled in the first class of citizens to establish as heirs women. According to Roman law scholars the law applied only to male citizens. But through Aemilia’s succession, one of the most ancient attested in literature, I attempt to demonstrate that it prevented not only men but also women from choosing a woman as heir. Thanks to the lex Voconia a rich woman could not prefer a daughter to a son. She could not escape by making a will to the ancient rules of intestate succession that always preferred the relatives in the male line. The law prevented a woman from being heres, heir, in the full meaning of the term of her father or mother’s estate, and especially of the forms of power associated with it. The symbolic value of this provision would cross the centuries to modernity. Aemilia had obtained her enormous estate from her husband by a will and she was forbidden from establishing as heirs in a will her two daughters Corneliae. Emilia was thus forced to establish as heir her adopted nephew: Scipio Aemilianus, her brother’s son. Nevertheless, she was able to bypass the law disposing that Scipio pay to her daughters, two dowries so huge as to appear as portions of the estate. Scipio paid the sums but gave Aemilia’s famous and expensive jewelry to his mother thus depriving the two daughters. This complex succession explains the famous exemplum on Cornelia who replied to a matron boasting her jewels as the most beautiful of the century: “These are my jewels” (Haec ornamenta sunt mea) by showing her sons, the Gracchi. The matron perhaps was provoking Cornelia given the Roman bewilderment for this intricate succession and the lost jewelry. However, Cornelia answered opposing a social integration based not on a subordinate role but on the awareness of her specific function of educator of children.