In keeping with this dignified position was the ideal character of the materfamilias.  Ideal we must call it, for it does not in all respects coincide with the tradition of Roman women even in early times; but we must remember that at all periods of Roman history the woman whose memory survives is apt to be the woman who is not the ideal matron, but one who forces herself into notice by violating the traditions of womanhood.  The typical matron would assuredly never dream of playing a part in history; her influence was behind the scenes, and therefore proportionally powerful.  The legendary mother of Coriolanus (the Volumnia of Shakespeare), Cornelia the mother of the Gracchi, Aurelia, Caesar’s mother, and Julia his daughter, did indirectly play a far greater part in public life than the loud and vicious ladies who have left behind them names famous or infamous; but they never claimed the recognition of their power.

This peculiar character of the Roman matron, a combination of dignity, industry, and practical wisdom, was exactly suited to attract the attention of a gentle philosopher like Plutarch, who loved, with genuine moral fervour, all that was noble and honest in human nature.  Not only does he constantly refer to the Roman ladies and their character in his Lives and his Morals, but in his series of more than a hundred “Roman questions” the first nine, as well as many others, are concerned with marriage and the household life; and in his treatise called Coniugalia praecepta he reflects many of the features of the Roman matron.  From him, in Sir Thomas North’s translation, Shakespeare drew the inspiration which enabled him to produce on the Elizabethan stage at least one such typical matron.  In Coriolanus he has followed Plutarch so closely that the reader may almost be referred to him as an authority; and in the contrast between the austere and dignified Volumnia and the passionate and voluptuous Cleopatra of the later play, the poet’s imagination seems to have been guided by a true historical instinct.

We need not doubt that the austere matron of the old type survived into the age we are specially concerned with; but we hardly come across her in the literature of the time, just because she was living her own useful life, and did not seek publicity.  Chance has indeed preserved for us on stone the story of a wonderful lady, whose early years of married life were spent in the trying time of the civil wars of 49-43 B.C., and who, if a devoted husband’s praises are to be trusted, as indeed they may be, was a woman of the finest Roman cast, and endowed with such a combination of practical virtues as we should hardly have expected even in a Roman matron.  But we shall return to this inscription later on.