Hidden Lives Public Personae

By its in-depth discussion of women's civic roles in the towns outside Rome, this study offers a compelling new vision of Roman women's integration into their communities and contributes to a more comprehensive view of civic life under the Roman Empire.

Roman cities have rarely been studied from the perspective of women, and studies of Roman women mainly focus on the city of Rome. Studying the civic participation of women in the towns of Italy outside Rome and in the numerous cities of the Latin-speaking provinces of the Roman Empire, this books offers a new view on Roman women and urban society in the Roman Principate. Drawing on epigraphy and archaeology, and to a lesser extent on legal and literary texts, women's civic roles as priestesses, benefactresses and patronesses or 'mothers' of cities and associations (collegia and the Augustales) are brought to the fore. In contrast to the city of Rome, which was dominated by the imperial family, wealthy women in the local Italian and provincial towns had ample opportunity to leave their mark on the city. Their motives to spend their money, time and energy for the benefit of their cities and the rewards their contributions earned them take centre stage. Assessing the meaning and significance of their contributions for themselves and their families and for the cities that enjoyed them, the book presents a new and detailed view of the role of women and gender in Roman urban life.

This study discusses women's participation in civic life in the cities of Italy and the Latin-speaking provinces of the Roman Empire from the late first century BC to the late third century AD (roughly the Roman Principate). Excluding empresses and other women of the imperial family, it focuses on the civic roles of non-imperial women in Italian and provincial towns on the basis of a corpus of approximately 1,400 inscriptions and, to a lesser extent, honorific portrait statues

By their social and material context as markers of graves, dedications and public signs of honour, inscriptions offer a distinct perspective on the social lives, occupations, family belonging, mobility, ethnicity, religious affiliations, public honour and legal status of Roman women ranging from slaves and freedwomen to women of the elite and the imperial family, both in Rome and in Italian and provincial towns. They thus shed light on women who are largely overlooked by the literary sources. The wide range of inscriptions and graffiti included in this book show women participating not only in their families and households but also in the social and professional life of their cities. Moreover, they offer us a glimpse of women's own voices. Marital ideals and problems, love and hate, friendship, birth and bereavement, joy and hardship all figure in inscriptions, revealing some of the richness and variety of life in the ancient world.