Female Cult in the Struggle of the Orders

Coré Ferrer-Calatayud, 2018

The objective of this paper is to investigate the involvement that women in Republican Rome could have had in matters alleged to be enjoyed exclusively by men, concerns such as politics and finances, with the ulterior aim of revealing actual social realities, formerly ignored and disregarded. Previous studies focused largely on women's domesticity, fertility, and the preservation of a stainless behavior as a result of the exempla outlined by ancient authors such as Livy, Vergil, Plutarch, and Appian, male writers who lived on the edge of time between the precepts of the Republic and the brand-new outset of the Principate. By using an innovative approach based on Judith Butler's performativity, we will be able to explore Roman women's identities and their closeness to an actual but traditionally obscured power. Resumen: El objetivo de este artículo no es otro que el de investigar la implicación que las mujeres de la Roma republicana podrían haber tenido en asuntos que, supuestamente, solo eran disfrutados por los hombres, como son la política o las finanzas, con la finalidad de des-cubrir realidades sociales auténticas que habrían sido ignoradas hasta

KONSTANTINOS MANTAS Athens 1η the last two decades, there has been a continuous seήes ofpub!ications ?~ the .subject ofwomen ίο antiquity, as a resuJt ofthe transfoπnationoffem mlsm ΙΩ western Europe and Ν. Ameήca. from a radical, semi-utopian free dom moνement to a 'respectable', semi-compromised part of the social and cultural establishment. The shrinkage of other fίelds for research is due to the fact that nothiog, or almost nothing new, can be written about areas such as ciIizens ϊπ c!assica! Athens or slavery ίη antiquity, and Ihis may haνe helped the deνelopmeot of this trend.'

Transactions of the American Philological Association, 2011

This article explores the evidence for women and gender in the Forum Romanum, investigating (primarily through literary sources) women's use of this space, and (primarily archaeologically) historical women's signification there by images and structures. The illustrated analysis proceeds chronologically from the Republic to the early third century c.e. Authors report women's presence in the civic Forum as abnormal, even transgressive through the Julio-Claudian period. The paucity of women's depictions and patronage here until the second century c.e. echoes constructs of Livy, Seneca the Younger, Tacitus, and others. The mid-imperial Forum, however, marks changes in Roman ideology as well as topography.

Provincial Women in the Roman Imagination Organizer: Paolo Asso, University of Michigan Sponsored by the Women’s Classical Caucus of the APA Presenter: Shelley P. Haley Title: "Re-presenting Reality: Provincial Women as Tools of Roman Social Reproduction This paper focuses on how Livy uses the Carthaginian noble woman Sophonisba not only as a way perpetuating a cultural stereotype in regards to the Romans’ greatest national enemy but also as a morally didactic and generally essentialist warning to control the behavior and agency of Roman women. In so doing, we can glean a sense of the moral imperatives involved in Roman gender relations and the propagandists of the Augustan age as they passed these imperatives on to future generations of Roman men, and through them to Roman women. Consequently Sophonisba, and, by extension, all provincial women become tools in the moral agenda of the Romans and there is no real interest in the social location or particularity of women outside the Roman social construct and framework. The theoretical approach I use in this paper is that of critical race feminism (hereafter CRF.) This critical stance grew out of critical race theory (CRT) which was first developed in the field of jurisprudence and law. After a brief explication of CRF, I show how it is an important framework for evaluating race and gender constructs in ancient Rome. However, for the purpose of this abstract, I will give a brief overview of CRF and how I will employ it in examining Livy and Sophonisba. Quite succinctly, CRF is a feminist intervention within CRT. In addition, CRF constitutes a race intervention in feminist discourse, in that it necessarily embraces feminism’s emphasis on gender oppression within a system of patriarchy. CRF, like feminist theory, draws on notions of formal equality, and dominance/inequality. In addition, and most importantly for this paper, the narrative methodology (i.e., story-telling) figures prominently in CRF, just as it does in feminist discourse. While CRF has strands that derive from CRT and feminism, it also has made a major analytical contribution in its position of antiessentialism. CRF provides a critique of the feminist notion that there is an essential female voice, that is, all women feel one way on a subject. CRF highlights the situation of women of color, whose lives may not conform to an essentialist norm. A concept linked to antiessentialism is what has come to be called intersectionality. In her critique of the legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon’s “dominance theory,” CRF theorist Angela Harris states, “Despite it’s power, MacKinnon’s dominance theory is flawed by its essentialism. MacKinnon assumes, as does the dominant culture, that there is an essential ‘woman’ beneath the realities of differences between women…In dominance theory, black women are white women, only more so” (Angela Harris, “Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory,” 36. In Adrien Katherine Wing, Critical Race Feminism: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2003). Employing the antiessentialist framework of CRF, I argue that in order to advance his moral, nationalistic and patriotic agenda, Livy is strategically essentialist in his narrative about Sophonisba, and in ignoring her multiplicative identity, Sophonisba becomes a Roman woman, “only more so.” Indeed, we learn more about the crisis in the social construction of gender in the late Augustan age than we do about the construct of gender in Carthaginian ruling classes

Classical Review, 2022

The question central to B.'s book, at its simplest, is: did imperial women have power? And the simple answer is: yes, they did. Not in the same way as their male relatives did in the patriarchal society that was ancient Rome, but they possessed visibility in the public sphere, both within and outside the city of Rome, influence over official decisions made by their male relatives and control of their own finances, including the use of their personal funds for the public good (publica munificentia). Their elite status afforded these women prominence and privileges inaccessible to women of lower social standing. Yes, their power and status were due primarily to their relationship to their ruling male family members (fathers, brothers, spouses and sons) and the public promotion of those men, but, nonetheless, possess power they did. One has only to think of a recent US presidential administration in which the daughter of the President (and her spouse) held significant positions of influence and power although neither she nor her spouse held elected political office. Sometimes official and legal definitions - often B.'s focus - do not encompass actual practice. Problematising the answer to this simple question provides B. an opportunity for the creation of a book-length study, which treats related issues thematically rather than diachronically. Given the span of time that the book encompasses, from the Late Republic to the Severan dynasty (roughly 30s BCE to 235 CE), the answer to this question is complex, as habits and trends constantly change over time, even over a period of several years, and often from one ruling dynasty to another. So, for example, the wife of Augustus, Livia, after her posthumous adoption by her late spouse, was referred to as 'Julia Augusta' after 14 CE. Other extraordinary privileges were granted to her at that time, namely a priesthood in the new cult of divus Augustus and accompaniment by a lictor. That the title of 'Augusta' did not carry these privileges for other, later imperial women (with the exception of two near-relatives, the Julio-Claudians Antonia the Younger and Agrippina the Younger) is a case study that highlights what was a localised trend for one particular dynasty rather than one that had any significant or meaningful continuity over time (see Table 1.1, p. 33). B., after adducing copious amounts of evidence that likely took years to assemble, repeatedly denies that the imperial women had power. For example, Chapter 5, one of the book's strongest chapters, maps onto the city of Rome (1) imperial women's public activities and visibility, and (2) monuments that mention their names or otherwise evoke the memory of these individuals in the public sphere. There are 41 pages of evidence. And yet the chapter's conclusion begins with the following sentence: 'The assembled evidence indicates that imperial women were not much in public in Rome, either in person or associated with buildings and statuary' (p. 207). Such rapid shifts between the attitudes of 'optimist' and 'pessimist' (terms coined by A. Richlin, 'The Ethnographer's Dilemma and the Dream of a Lost Golden Age', in Arguments with Silence [2014], pp. 293-4, and discussed below) in the study of ancient women not just here, but throughout the book and the tendency to leap across centuries, often within a single paragraph, to compare women from various dynasties on a particular issue, often make the narrative hard to follow.

Short survey of extant sources discussing females during early Imperial Rome.

Classical Review, 2007

Melilah: Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies (1759-1953)

Despite the fact that royal women in Antiquity played a major dynastic role, historical accounts either ignored them or mentioned them merely as appendages to kings. Beginning in the 1970s, a major change transpired due to the impact of women's and gender studies. Numerous studies on the role of royal women in Antiquity were published, shedding light upon previously unknown women. This new understanding of royal women in Antiquity has implications for historical scholarship and its methodologies as well as for attitudes towards contemporary female leaders, who can be viewed as a continuation of an ancient tradition. The escalating interest in royal women in Antiquity from the 1970s onwards has launched a plethora of studies bringing to light the varied roles and actions of royal women that were previously obscured. 1 This new knowledge has not only contributed to a better understanding of the role of women in Antiquity but also of the events and processes in which these women played a major role. June Hannam points out another effect of these historical studies: The writing of women's history has always been closely linked with contemporary feminist politics as well as with changes in the discipline of history itself. When women sought to question inequalities in their own lives they turned to history to understand the roots of their oppression and to see what they could learn from challenges that had been made in the past.