Animus Classics Journal: Vol. 1, Issue 1

household task and a representation of her chastity and temperance, values
evoked and reinforced by Livy’s text. Ovid describes the same scene, first
emphasizing that Lucretia encourages her maids, “by dim light … spinning
their allotted stints of yarn,” but later makes clear that she herself is
spinning, for she “drop[s] the stretched yarn,” while mourning her absent
husband. 32 He evokes the tireless lanipenda, then reminds us that Lucretia
is a virtuous wife missing her husband, weeping as she spins. Stories about
Lucretia make her the original, perfect domiseda, and deepen the connections
between spinning and the chaste, hardworking, devoted Roman female
ideal.
Tanaquil, or Gaia Caecilia, equated spinning with virtue but also
genesis. She was Tarquinius Priscus’s wife, so famed for her spinning and
lanificium that “the wool on [her] distaff and spindle … was still preserved
in the temple of Sancus,” and a robe she made for Servius Tullius was in the
shrine of Fortune. 33 As wife to and spinner for Roman kings, her spinning
was part of the creation of Rome, and its tools were actually holy. Arguably,
a society’s creation story is one of its ideal forms of creation, and
Tanaquil’s spinning was important enough to pass on to future generations.
She is also associated with weddings—she was said to have woven the first
tunica recta, the bridal outfit 34 —and not just the customs related to wool.
Plutarch believed the marital formula “Where you are Gaius, there I am
Gaia” evoked Gaia Caecilia, “a fair and virtuous woman” whose sandals
and spindle were dedicated in the temple “as tokens of her love of home
and of her industry respectively.” 35 As weddings are a simple metonymy for
fertility and the children born from it, Tanaquil and her sacred spinning can
be associated with this creation as well. Spinning for her household, which
women did every day, also connected Tanaquil to marriages and the actual
foundation of Rome.
But spinning was not just the domain of perfect wives and housekeepers;
it was also the occupation of the female storytellers of literature.
Book 4 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is framed by the Minyades, royal sisters
who, instead of joining into Bacchic rites in their city, “are carding wool
within their fastened doors, / or twisting with their thumbs the fleecy yarn,
/ or working at the web. So they corrupt / the sacred festival with needless
toil, / keeping their hand-maids busy at the work.” 36 Every type of lanificium
women might do—carding, spinning, weaving, and managing—is contained
in a few lines, which must have evoked images of mothers, sisters,
and wives who did the same work. But their lanificia and being domisedae
do not make them good citizens, since they are corrupting sacred festivities;
this is not the association Ovid intends. Instead, their wool-working is the
backdrop to their storytelling. One sister suggests telling a “novel tale” to
lighten work, “and swiftly as she told it unto them / the fleecy wool was