Answer

Cultural Values in the Roman Republic

The principal values which the Roman republic believed their ancestors had established covers what one may refer to as status, respect, faithfulness, and uprightness. The values have several distinct effects on Romans’ behaviours as and attitudes. Depending on the social and cultural contexts, Roman values usually overlap and interrelate, resulting in good morals or ethics. Ovid and Livy display strong, although opposed, reaction to sex and marriage. Ovid constantly deploys an insensitive male viewpoint and obliterates individuality as well as the role of women. Marriage or motherhood was expected amongst the Roman women. According to Ovid, marriage was ordinarily liberating for women because married women enjoyed much freedom compared to a woman who lived under her father (Tursi, 2017). The Roman wives had freedom of movement and were often seen as equal in males’ society. On the other hand, Livy believed marriage put women under their husbands and denied them the opportunity to move freely as the domestic works were too many.

Ovid provided a broad overview of women’s lust for sex, claiming that the female gender was easily controllable through their sex drive. Livy, on the other hand, stated that women were sex-crazed, making them “wild” and hard to control. In spite of the diverse approaches, the two authors saw the female gender as “wild” and “sex-driven”, a radical comparison to the proportional rationality attributed to the Roman men. Ovid and Livy believed that the Roman institutions worked essentially hard to expand the freedom of women. For example, the law granted women exemption from guardianships for any free-born woman who had at least three children and freed all women with four children (Tursi, 2017). This law greatly expanded the freedom and rights of women in Rome.