Censure of Powerful Women: Roman 'Monarchy' and Gender Anxiety (original) (raw)
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A Performative Approach To Women And Power During The Roman Republic
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
Powerless women in Roman Republic, a historical survey
CHAPTER 5: Powerless women in Roman Republic, a historical survey Marriage in Rome is a normal part of human life, but its definition and has by and large been a subject of controversy in anitquity. Although the roles within marriage were familiar to most Romans authors, still we can trace personal preconceptions and interests. Marriage was seen by some authors as an instrument of forging alliances and of strengthening the position of noble families socially, politically and financially. Literary authors had shown that political marriages were in decline and chose to question how much affection was created in arranged marriages. I will try to reconstruct the institution of marriage, its legal scope, roles and customs through a range of texts which I have singled out as the most representative mainly from the Triumviral period to the Early Principate. Before discussing the attitudes to marriage in Lucan and in other authors, I shall try to give a brief overview of the role and position of women in Roman society, and then try to place them into the social context of the time. The study of marriage cannot be separated from the study of women as Romans held that not men but only women can enter a matrimonium, a relationship, which makes them wives and mothers. In effect men were organising matrimonium and women were being organised into a matrimonium.
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.
Women, Ethnicity and Power in the Roman Empire
2000
This paper examines how Strabo's characterization of Pythodoris, a queen of mixed descent who ruled the region round Colchis at the margins of the Roman Empire, disrupts the tropes that regulated the representation of male and female rulers in classical antiquity. It begins by considering some of the prevailing ways in which the sexes were differentiated in the literature of this epoch, particularly in relation to political power. In the conclusion, it is argued that the destabilization, in Strabo's text, of the opposition between Greco-Roman and barbarian, by which the ethnic other was constituted, helps dissolve the ideologically motivated contrast between masculine Romans and feminized Asiatics, and thus simultaneously disarms the idea that women are incapable of ruling autonomously. One of the themes of the second conference on Feminism and Classics-and one that is becoming increasingly central to women's studies in general-is the proposition that the binary opposition between the sexes, as represented in social and literary discourse, is sustained in part by being implicated in other hierarchical polarities, such as race, age, the antagonism between native and foreign, or the local spatial tension between the domestic and the public sphere. 2 As Susan Stanford Friedman (1996: 18) writes: "One axis of identity, such as gender, must be understood in relation to other axes, such as sexuality and race"; Friedman advances what she terms a "new geography of identity" (22), in which "interactional analysis of codependent systems of alterity replaces the focus on binary difference," and invites critics to examine whether such systems, when they coexist in a text, clash or else "intensify each other in collaboration" (26). 3 The representation of gender roles within a given social discourse is thus a complex variable, at least within certain limits: the sexes may achieve symbolic parity, for example, in contexts where other structures of difference are temporarily disabled, even while they continue to be marked by extreme dimorphism in nearby domains. Tracing the turns of gender discourse in antiquity thus requires sensitivity to the way in which sexual polarities respond to or are imbricated with other regions of the social lexicon. The representation of these latter distinctions, in turn, may be ____________________ 1 I am deeply grateful to Isabel Moreno Ferrero for her comments on an earlier and much inferior draft of this paper, and for many suggestions and references; she was my guide to the Historia Augusta and to Florus. 2 This paper was originally presented at a conference on "Feminism and Classics," held at Princeton University in the spring of 1996. I am grateful to the co-organizers of the conference, Judith Hallett and Janet Martin, for having invited me to participate. The paper, revised and brought up to date, is published here for the first time, although an earlier version of it was made available on the internet, courtesy of "Diotima," at http://www.stoa.org/diotima. 3 I am grateful to Judith Hallett for bringing this remarkable essay to my attention.
Women in Antiquity: From Marginalization to Prominence
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.
THE STRENGTH OF ROMAN WOMEN THROUGH COINS AND A FEMINIST CRITIQUE FROM THE PAST TO THE PRESENT
THE STRENGTH OF ROMAN WOMEN THROUGH COINS AND A FEMINIST CRITIQUE FROM THE PAST TO THE PRESENT, 2024
This work aims to expose the public image of Roman women such as Fulvia, Octavia, Livia, Agrippina Major and Agrippina Minor, including the late Republic and early Empire (84 BC - 59 AD), through coin samples and written sources that exemplify their lives. The aim is to illustrate how these women improved their public images through duties linked to the imperial family, the Patronage, religion, and imperial propaganda. The written sources gave visions of values and showed social relations, the principles of property, individual rights and their duties in Roman society. These sources also confirmed that Roman women of this time were embedded in a hierarchy of power marked by boasting male rule. In the written sources, they were described in familiar environments, but with exceptions and malcontents, forming an opposition between the public and private worlds. The material sources, the coins with the portraits of these women, composed a formidable working tool, as they justified positions and consolidated powers within an aristocratic context of competition. As a movable monument, such objects promoted a wide audience, even far from the elite. They demonstrated that elite women achieved "apparent" prominence, building a social life that led to a certain political openness, which contributed to their being important authors of Rome's history. Women's changes at that time may have ensured a social change in all categories, especially in cultural constructions and political performances. This fact led Roman society to mould itself into a tangle of circumstances, in which the divisions of male and female became intertwined, demonstrating a social and gender complexity. However, the purpose of this paper was to explain, through iconographic analysis, what these objects wanted to communicate politically and in an identity manner. That said, the question was raised about the power and place of action of the feminine, since the “sexual habitus” could have marked the values between the genders. Both the material culture and the written sources analysed together were essential to prove this problematic, since the literature made the gender relations of the emperors and their women very explicit. Material culture, by demonstrating male power, also highlighted female power. In this way, the major importance of this work is the invitation to a reflection of the perception of the reality of the present, for an analytical approach in relation to the improved conditions of the Women's Studies of Antiquity, with a purpose capable of managing conscience and coherence of current feminine factors in contrast to the existence of a variety and similarity about the woman of the past.
Gendering the Roman Triumph: Elite Women and the Triumph in the Republic and Early Empire
Gendering Roman Imperialism, 2022
This chapter re-evaluates the relationships among elite women and the triumph in the Republic and early Empire (509 BCE–47 CE), demonstrating that during the Republic female relatives of triumphal generals were associated with and integrated into the triumph via the triumphal chariot, ancestor masks, funerals, and names, and that these associations continued and grew in the early Empire to encompass imperial innovations. We show that during the Republic and Empire some unmarried elite daughters accompanied their fathers in the triumphal chariot itself, that triumphal ancestor masks and painted images celebrated both patrilineal and matrilineal triumphal ancestry in elite houses, that triumphal ancestor masks were also present at public funerals for elite women and some of these funerals contained further triumphal themes, that some elite women were connected through their nomenclature to the triumph, and that in the Empire imperial women were increasingly integrated into and associated with the triumph, and some hosted triumphal banquets. We argue that through these associations elite women were invested and involved in the triumph, accruing status for themselves and their families. We conclude that female relatives of triumphal generals were beneficiaries of the triumph and that the triumph itself was fundamentally a family affair. N.B. Preview attached. Please contact me for a copy of the full chapter.