The Woman in the Street

Although ignored in current treatments of Roman political culture, women were active in the streets of Rome and throughout Italy in the war-torn mid-Republic. Comedy is the best contemporary witness, developing as it did from the 270s BCE onward. City sackings entailed rape, enslavement, loss of kin, and the movement of refugees across Italy, and the resulting issues inflect the content of comedy, emblematized in a slave-woman’s fake jewelry in the shape of the goddess Victoria. Comedy addresses women in the audience, while, onstage, women move through the city and participate in political actions and discourse, laying claim to rights. In Livy’s later accounts of the Punic Wars, women appear in religious worship and reacting to war news, demonstrating bereavement like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They even join in the fighting, in ways seen in Vietnam and Northern Ireland, or as Cicero’s wife Terentia defended her own home.

Cosmetics in Daily Life of the Ancient Mediterranean

This chapter probes papyri and other relevant sources for evidence about the cosmetics salutiferously employed by men and women of the Roman province of Egypt in order to preserve the natural attractiveness of their faces and bodies with all their parts intact. We hear about shopping lists from Nemesion, collector of money taxes for Julio-Claudian emperors at Philadelpheia (Fayum), for top-grade Italian rose oil and cubes of silphium, as well as warnings from both Xenophon and Galen about the deceptiveness of makeup, hair dyes, and artificial enhancements to the person, as opposed to salubrious exercises and restorative, cosmetic preparations.

Social Laws and Social Facts

Cassius Dio asserts that the emperor Augustus’ social legislation arose from an imbalance in numbers between men and women among the Roman elite. This chapter considers how this statement has been understood in historical readings of the laws. It also argues that Dio’s assertion should be seen instead as one more instance of the ways that the legislation not only gives us access to knowledge about women’s lives but also attempts to generate more “knowledge” and questions about them. The chapter utilizes feminist epistemology in its discussion of legal and social matters. It is interested in facts as well as the absence of facts in locating women in ancient narratives.

Power and Patronage

Artemisia II is credited by all extant ancient sources with initiating the building of the Mausoleum, the tomb of her husband and brother, Mausolus, that was listed as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Yet a number of scholars have denied Artemisia’s agency and instead given credit to her husband-brother for planning the Mausoleum. This essay seeks to rethink such trends in modern historiography while simultaneously exploring Artemisia’s motives for building the Mausoleum and throwing lavish funerary contests for Mausolus. Mausolus had been an unpopular ruler who levied heavy taxes and repressed several rebellions. After his death, Artemisia sought to rehabilitate Mausolus’ reputation to ensure her own sovereignty as the ruler of ancient Caria.

Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave

This chapter argues that Phaedra’s false accusation of rape, laid against her stepson in Euripides’ tragedy Hippolytus, has contributed to the widespread belief that women frequently lay such false allegations. The classic status of this play, as of its famous adaptations by Seneca and Racine, has kept the story of Phaedra’s lie at the center of the cultural radar and produced many imitations in popular culture. The gender stereotype that women are unreliable witnesses and custodians of truth has, however, been challenged recently both by the philosopher Miranda Fricker and by campaigns against workplace sexual harassment. By making Phaedra in this play virtuous in other respects, compared with her portrayal in Euripides’ lost Hippolytus Veiled and that of Stheneboea in his lost Stheneboea, Euripides threw the spotlight sharply on her vindictive act of perjury. But when studying and performing these ideologically laden dramas, we must remember that they are fictions.

Female Athletes in the Late Hellenistic and Roman Greek World

This chapter provides a synthesis and analysis of the epigraphic, literary, and artistic evidence of women’s participation in athletic events and venues following the Roman conquest of Greece in 146 BCE and during the early Roman Empire. In conjunction with the literary sources, the epigraphic and artistic record makes clear that women participated in athletics, although it appears that their competitions did not always receive the attention that their male counterparts did. Some of them participated in multiple festivals over a period of years in footraces and mousike contests, while others engaged in the more “masculine” competitions of the pyrrhic dance, hunting, and wrestling. These were women whom we should not expect to transition from doing the chores at the mother’s house to winning at Panhellenic games without some kind of regular training, and who regularly attended and became members of the gymnasium and the palaestra.

Introduction

The book’s introduction discusses both the content of the entire book—the individual chapters—and the early professional career of Sarah B. Pomeroy, who serves as the book’s inspiration. Pomeroy helped to establish the field of the study of women in Greece and Rome with her groundbreaking book, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves. Discrimination against women (challenged in the Melani legal case against CUNY), including professional consequences for being pregnant, made Pomeroy’s early career at Hunter College a challenge. The introduction reflects on Pomeroy’s use of the term “conceive” in Goddesses for her intellectual work and connects that with the conception of pregnancy that impacted her early career. The interdisciplinarity Pomeroy championed in the field of women in antiquity is showcased in the individual chapters of the book, which are briefly summarized.

A Century of Women’s History from the Papyri

This chapter surveys the study of women based on papyrological evidence, a subject to which Sarah Pomeroy has made major contributions. Beginning with the first articles on women in the papyri a century ago, the historiography is presented first chronologically, down to the growth of feminist scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s, and then by subject for the past third of a century. Ancient legal studies, social history, the study of the economy, the development of Late Antiquity as a field, and the emergence of gender studies have all played important roles. The finds of papyri outside Egypt have broadened the subject beyond its Egyptian focus. Although quantitative investigations, based especially on the census returns from Roman Egypt, have played a central role, it is likely that microhistorical studies will be a more fertile direction in the future.

The First basilissa

This chapter focuses on the life and career of Phila (c. 350–294 BCE), daughter of Antipater and first of the many wives of Demetrius Poliorcetes, the first woman to whom the title of basilissa (a coinage of uncertain meaning formed by putting a feminine ending on the Greek word for “king,” basileus) was applied. It considers why she served as the prototype for so many other aspects of the role of royal women in Hellenistic monarchy. It argues that the critical role her husband and father-in-law Antigonus played in the formation of Hellenistic kingship, the ways in which Phila’s actions and titles mirrored theirs, as well as Phila’s function as a legitimator of her husband’s rule of Macedonia (because she was the daughter of Philip II’s and Alexander’s general Antipater) are the primary reasons she became an exemplar of the role of women in Hellenistic monarchy.

Augustus and the Economics of Adultery

This chapter examines Augustus’ legislation criminalizing adultery in the light of first-century BCE social arrangements that allowed Roman noblewomen to manage property without interference from their husbands and sometimes with little input from natal kin. During and after the Second Punic War (218–201 BCE), concentration of wealth in female hands had triggered major legal changes and produced a corresponding shift toward marriage sine manu (“free” marriage). By the end of the Republic, the phenomenon of legally independent (sui iuris) women controlling their finances, especially with purely nominal oversight from tutors, created apprehension among husbands without a say in their wives’ dealings and arguably contributed to widespread concern over female sexual license. Responding to such anxieties, Augustus’ adultery law imposed economic penalties upon convicted women that, in addition to serving as deterrents, probably facilitated the transfer of property out of irresponsible (female) hands into the hands of those more deserving.