Ancient “Sugar Mommies”? Why Men Queued at Their Doors

Think of the biggest building in your town. Who paid for it? Most people have no idea.

In the Roman town of Pompeii you would have known. The name was carved across the front of the largest building on the main square. It was a woman's name, Eumachia. She paid with her own money.

So were there rich women in the ancient world who paid for men and got something back? Yes. But it was not hidden and it was not shameful. It had a name, rules and a morning queue.

How a Roman woman got money

On paper it looks impossible. She could not vote, hold office or command anything, and for a long time she needed a male guardian to approve what she did with property.

There were large gaps.

• Marriage. Roman marriage often kept the money separate. What she brought in stayed hers.
• Inheritance. Roman men died young and often. A widow kept what was hers.
• Three children. A woman with three children could be released from her guardian. That was written into law to encourage larger families.
• Freedom. Many wealthy women had been slaves. Once freed, they could trade. Loan records from Pompeii survive with freedwomen's names on them as the lenders.

What she spent it on

Eumachia's building may have been a cloth market or a guild hall. We are not certain. We are certain who paid, because she said so across the front.

She dedicated it in her son's name too. The building was an advertisement for him. She was buying her son a political career.

The cloth workers put up a statue of her inside, at their own cost, and called her their patron. That was a real position, not a compliment.

Julia Felix, in the same town, owned a whole block. After an earthquake wrecked the public baths, she opened her own to paying customers and rented out flats. Her advertisement survives, offering a five-year lease.

The morning queue

Rome ran on the morning greeting. Every morning, men who needed something queued at a rich person's door, as clients.

In return you might get money, dinner, a job, a word to the right person or your legal bills paid. You paid it back by supporting them in public, walking with them so that people saw the crowd.

The person at the door could be a woman. Pompeii is covered in painted election posters, and plenty are signed by women. They could not vote. They campaigned anyway. One says that a candidate's grandmother asks you to elect him.

So a woman with money had men who owed her, openly, with her name on the wall.

Freedom came with a debt

Women owned people, and freed them, as men did. A freed person was not simply free. They became the client of the person who freed them, owed them work and support, and often took their family name.

The tie worked both ways. A patron who wanted a successful client helped with money, contacts and work. That is how some freed people became rich.

One woman in Pompeii, probably a freed slave herself, built a large tomb carved with a ship coming into harbour. She made room in it for the people she had freed.

What Roman men thought

Roman writers complain about rich women constantly: too loud, too clever, spending on the wrong things.

Those are jokes written by men for men. They describe what those men found annoying, not how women behaved. The complaint is almost never about morals. It is about money that is not under a man's control.

You do not write jokes about a thing that is not happening.

The honest limits

This is a small number of very rich women. Most Roman women had nothing like it. They worked, and their names are mostly gone. Nothing here makes Rome good for women. In most ways it was brutal.

The short answer

Not in the way the phrase means today. What existed was bigger and completely open: a public system with a name and a queue, where support went in both directions. And the woman's name went on the building, in stone, on the main square.