Mary R McHugh | Gustavus Adolphus College (original) (raw)

Papers by Mary R McHugh

Classical Review, 2022

The question central to B.'s book, at its simplest, is: did imperial women have power? And the si... more 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.

Plato at Syracuse: Essays on Plato in Western Greece with a new translation of the Seventh Letter by Jonah Radding, 2019

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Antiquity in Popular Literature and Culture, 2016

The World of St. Francis of Assisi Essays in Honor of William R. Cook, 2015

Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, 2014

Seduction & Power: Antiquity in the Visual and Performing Arts, 2013