Bread and circuses (c. AD 70–80)

Roman London was enlarged and enhanced in the years immediately following Vespasian’s accession in ways that corresponded with the known ideological goals of the new Flavian regime. As a consequence the city came to be characterized by an imperial architecture of ‘bread and circuses’. This involved the construction of a new amphitheatre for the conduct of games associated with the imperial cult and as the likely site of public executions. Watermills drawing on the latest engineering technology were installed to allow the large-scale preparation of flour to supply local bakeries. Early Flavian investment also involved the creation of new administrative facilities, perhaps including a mansio in Southwark, and new urban districts allowing military and veteran settlement. Cycles of subsequent investment hint at a correlation between building programmes in London and preparations for new campaigns of advance launched on the arrival of new provincial governors.

A Woman to Rule the World: Rome Personified in the Roman Republic

<p>Revitalised by Mussolini in the early twentieth century as a symbol of the ‘New Roman Empire’, Roma has endured a long history of national representation. Traditionally the figure of Roma is on the one side associated by historians with the Roman imperial cult and Augustus, and on the other by Numismatists as the helmeted female figure on the coinage of the Roman Republic. However, these figures are not presently considered one and the same. When describing this figure, Roma is considered a Greek innovation travelling west, which naturally discounts well over two centuries of Roman issued coinage. Roma inaugurated by Hadrian and previously manipulated by Augustus was not simply a Greek import, but a complex Roman idea, which, true to Roman form, incorporated native and foreign elements in shaping an outward looking signifier of Roman identity.</p>

A Woman to Rule the World: Rome Personified in the Roman Republic

<p>Revitalised by Mussolini in the early twentieth century as a symbol of the ‘New Roman Empire’, Roma has endured a long history of national representation. Traditionally the figure of Roma is on the one side associated by historians with the Roman imperial cult and Augustus, and on the other by Numismatists as the helmeted female figure on the coinage of the Roman Republic. However, these figures are not presently considered one and the same. When describing this figure, Roma is considered a Greek innovation travelling west, which naturally discounts well over two centuries of Roman issued coinage. Roma inaugurated by Hadrian and previously manipulated by Augustus was not simply a Greek import, but a complex Roman idea, which, true to Roman form, incorporated native and foreign elements in shaping an outward looking signifier of Roman identity.</p>

A Note on Religion

At the beginning of our era, after a battle on the Ionian Sea, Antony and Cleopatra took their own lives in Egypt, and Augustus was made an imperator by his senators . Roman emperors had sexual access to those senators’ daughters and wives, and to thousands of slaves. But they ran governments with help from their cubicularii, castrated civil servants. And they enforced an Imperial Cult: subjects made sacrifices to the emperor's genius, or procreative spirit; or they got disemboweled by wild animals, or decapitated. Then Constantine moved off from the Tiber to the Bosporus, and Europe was ruled over by a few. Lords covered the countryside with bastards, but passed on estates on to their oldest sons. Daughters and younger sons were put away in the Church, where some became parents, but most were reproductively suppressed: they were ἄνανδρος or anandros, or without a husband, and ἄγαμος or agamos, or without a wife. Heretics who objected got burned at the stake. Then the Crusaders expanded Europe to the East, and Columbus went off to the West, and politics, sex and religion became more democratic. Power was more widely distributed; more men and women had families if they wanted them, and monasteries emptied out. The Reformation followed the Roman Church, which had followed the Imperial Cult.

Imperial Women of Rome

This book explores the constraints and opportunities of the women in the Roman emperor’s family from 35 BCE, when Octavia and Livia received unprecedented privileges from the state, to 235 CE, when Julia Mamaea was assassinated with her son Severus Alexander. Historical vignettes feature Agrippina the Younger, Domitia Longina, and some others as the book analyzes the history of Rome’s most eminent women in legal, religious, military, and other key settings of the principate. It also examines the women’s exemplarity through imaging as well as their presence in the city of Rome and in the empire. Evidence comes from coins, inscriptions, papyri, sculpture, and law codes as well as ancient authors. Numerous illustrations, maps, genealogical trees, and detailed tables and appendices complement the text. The whole reveals imperial women’s fluctuating but persistent marginalization and lack of agency despite their potential, even as it elucidates Rome’s imperial power, legal system, family ideology, religion and imperial cult, court, capital city, and military customs.

Imperial Women on Coins and in Roman Cult

After an opening focus on Caligula’s three sisters Drusilla, Agrippina the Younger, and Julia Livilla, the first living women figured and identified on centrally struck coins, the chapter addresses coins as evidence for imperial women, and the connections of imperial women to Rome’s public religion and religious culture. Women themselves determined neither their numismatic depictions, nor the choice of deity or abstraction for the reverse of a portrait coin. Further examination delves into imperial women and imperial cult, as priestesses and as recipients of cult; women in oaths and vows; and reports linking them with Judaism and Christianity. Religion is the arena in which imperial women receive the most visibility and honor, but even here they had little agency and were sidelined.

Conclusions: Agency and Constraints

The extant evidence for imperial women reveals their general powerlessness and silence, starkly contrasting with anecdotes about their abuse of resources, influence, and privilege. Their relation to the emperor put them at the center of power, yet their gender, and the princeps’ dominance, prohibited them from exercising control. At the principate’s beginning, some disclosed their resources through patronage or personal adornment. Such displays were increasingly censured. Imperial women’s diminishing visibility in Rome, including at religious functions, paradoxically correlates with their increasing portrayal on central coinage. Although their roles in Rome’s imperial cult had positive effects for women in the empire, their own gains are harder to detect and their personal agency cannot be discerned in the available sources. Their investigation, however, uncovers a remarkable history that illuminates individuals and the principate as a whole, including its obstinate misogyny.