#i was thinking about this in the context of ancient greek/rome where marriage of teenage girls to men twice their age was considered ideal

[fillejondrette]

the very common practice of girls and young women being married to adult/older men has imo played an underacknowledged role in reinforcing patriarchy. for one thing, if a girl is married off at 14, she has little opportunity to develop an identity or interests separate from her husband. secondly, it makes male domination within marriage seem "natural." a teenage girl with little to no education or experience of the outside world will naturally feel intellectually inferior to a 30 year old man, no matter how mediocre he may be. he can therefore control her more easily, and mold her to his tastes.

[handweavers]

top 5 historical figures :3

there are sooo many i’ll just list the ones i find most interesting at the moment and most of them are roman bc i’ve been reading a lot about the ancient mediterranean lately :3 i tried to make it short but....well

1. the gracchi brothers (late roman republic) - tiberius gracchi was a tribune (basically a bureaucrat) who tried to institute land reform bills to combat the extreme wealth inequality and financial crisis plaguing the poor of rome that would redistribute land to poor people and limit the amount of land that could be owned by one person and the senators literally beat him to death in the street with their bare hands. his brother gaius then became a tribune and tried to do the same thing as well as pushed for the government to give subsidized grain to the urban poor so they wouldn’t starve to death all the time and the senators had him beheaded. they were later greatly admired by left radicals during the french revolution and later lenin in russia.

2. julie d’aubigny (late 17th century france) - sword-slinging bisexual opera singer who wore men’s clothes and seduced many men and women across europe. fell in love with another woman while working as an opera singer and the girl’s family found out and sent her to a convent, julie followed and set the convent on fire and ran away with her girlfriend. like a million things happened after her life was wild but this paragraph from an article on her makes me scream: “her career in paris was interrupted after she attended a court ball in men’s clothes and kissed a young woman on the dance floor, for which insult she was challenged to a duel by three different noblemen. she told each of them she would meet him outside, fought them all at once, and beat them all. but given that louis had outlawed duels, she had to flee to brussels, where she became the lover of the elector of bavaria. he found her a bit too much to handle after she stabbed herself on stage with a real dagger, and offered her 40,000 francs to leave him alone. she threw the coins at the feet of his emissary and stomped off to madrid in a huff.” queen

3. elagabalus (roman emperor c. 218 ce) - this short-lived syrian emperor ascended to the throne aged 14 and was very very very probably a trans girl. i’ll use she/her pronouns bc while i really don’t know how she would have identified within our current framework historical context blah blah blah literally....as a trans person... elagabalus was trans. elagabalus named herself after the latin version of the name of the syrian sun god, and became “notorious” for dressing as a woman, decked in wigs, makeup, and fashionable frocks. she married four women and a male athlete, and also fell in love with her charioteer, a slave named hierocles. elagabalus apparently “delighted to be called the mistress, the wife, the queen of hierocles,” preferred to be called a woman, and reputedly offered to reward any doctor who could give her bottom surgery to have a vulva. she didn’t really care about the roman religion and replaced several roman deities including jupiter with syrian gods. she was also reported to have engaged in sex work, and lavished favours on male courtiers. she was known for being “extremely eccentric and decadent” and she was assassinated in 222 ce aged approx. 18 years of age. modern historians and contemporary writers of her time have been incredibly cruel to her but i think she was really cool and i like that she just did whatever she wanted, and she really didn’t deserve to die like she was literally just a teenager. also think its incredibly funny that she didn’t give a fuck about the roman pantheon and just played around with it and added all of her syrian gods to it and got rid of the roman ones and when it pissed off all of the senators she was like “so????” we stan

4. al-khayzuran (abbasid queen-mother, wife, and slave c. 8th century ce) her story is really complex and fascinating but basically, she was of yemeni arab descent and was sold into slavery before becoming the favourite concubine of the abbasid caliph al-mahdi and mothering two children who would go on to become caliphs themselves. during the reign of her husband and her two children, she was their de-facto co-ruler and involved herself in politics outside of the harem (women’s quarters), which was unusual for the time. this article on her is really good and this bit summarizes her well: “harun al-rashid (r. 786-809), arguably one of the greatest of the abbasid caliphs, is well known to many historians and history enthusiasts for his deeds and for presiding over the “golden age” of the abbasid caliphate. however, his mother, khayzuran, does not lay as much claim to fame as her illustrious son, despite the fact that she was the power behind his throne (while she lived) and that of his father and brother before him. during her life and career khayzuran rose from the status of slave to becoming the caliph, al-mahdi’s (r. 775-785), favorite concubine, and then his legal wife and a queen in her own right who wielded an immense amount of political power and whose wealth was second only to that of her husband’s in the entire caliphate. this feat was impressive not only because khayzuran was able to elevate herself from slavery to royalty, but also because she did it during an era when social mobility, for both men and women, was very limited or in most cases impossible.” also, one of my favourite bits of info about her: when her son, caliph al-hadi, disrespected her and threatened to have her favourite son (harun al-rashid) killed and attempted to assassinate her, she secretly had HIM assassinated by getting some of her pretty female slaves to seduce and then smother him with pillows, which made harun al-rashid caliph of the abbasid empire.

5. as always......hadrian (roman emperor c. 117-138 ce) - he was born in roman spain and became emperor after trajan, and is considered one of the last “good five emperors” prior to the decline of western rome. he spent most of his reign travelling across the empire basically as a tourist, wanting to learn as much as possible about everything, and constructing new buildings as he went including hadrian’s wall in brittania. he had “an insatiable curiosity about everything and everybody. the christian writer tertullian called him omnium curiositatum explorator, an explorer of everything interesting. that curiosity was bred of a keen intellect and an anguished spirit.” he was interested in astrology, greek poetry, and considered himself an “aesthete” who would climb mount etna and jabal agra (in sicily and syrian antioch respectively) just to watch the sun rise. he wore a beard in the greek style even though he was mocked by his senators (but the beard would become a trend that future emperors would follow) and they considered him to be complicated and often paradoxical - he could be extremely kind and also very cruel, loud and rapacious and yet gentle and compassionate, rational and logical and yet completely irrational, etc. his marriage was childless, likely because he was gay and not at all interested in women. he developed an intense relationship with a turko-greek youth antinous, who later died under suspicious circumstances and hadrian’s grief was so immense he had thousands of statues erected for him and immortalized him in the roman pantheon of gods. to this day people across the former roman empire still find statues of antinous, accidentally digging them up in their backyards. in extreme contrast, he was also the emperor who suppressed the bar kokhba revolt in judea, basically wiped judea off the map and replaced it with the region of syria palestina, and this war resulted in the deaths of thousands of jewish people, and those who survived were sold into slavery or exiled. this event basically created the concept of jewish people as a diaspora, the major exile. this was the only major war or conflict during his reign - the rest was notably peaceful - but it was one of the bloodiest in roman history and the consequences of it are still extremely relevant. i find him a really fascinating historical figure as a result of all of these paradoxes and because he was ultimately responsible for one of the most consequential actions in world history.