Gender, Epigraphy, and Mobility in the Roman World: Recovering Female Migrants and Travelers’ Voices in the Roman provinces during the Principate

This paper aims to address, through epigraphy, the relationships between gender identities and mobility in Roman Antiquity, with a focus on female mobility in the Western Empire during the Principate. It will analyze the methodology leading to identifying women travelers and migrants in inscriptions, and will show that this documentation, albeit fragmentary, sheds light on female experiences of mobility. Epigraphy reveals that two main factors played on women’ ability, or obligation, to take the road: slave traffic and family migration. 

Research into mobility and migration in Roman Antiquity has been particularly dynamic over the last twenty years (Moatti; Moatti, Kaiser, and Pébarthe; Demougin and Navarro Caballero; Ligt and Tacoma; Tacoma; Isayev). However, unlike for other historical eras (Green), gendered approaches to these phenomena have rarely been employed. Scholars have focused on the importance of studying movements of women in order to compare female and male mobility in the Roman period (Foubert 2011; 2013; 2016; Bruun; Le Guennec). These seminal works challenge the “social caging” weighing on Roman women (Woolf, after Mann). The idea that their horizon was (or rather should be) limited to the boundaries of their homes appears in Ancient literature apropos women from the elites (Parker). However, it is not consistent with a broader approach to documentation, which attests female mobilities, from temporary travel to permanent migration, throughout the whole spectrum of Roman society.

This paper will contribute to this historiographical renewal through a wide-ranging epigraphical investigation. It will be based on inscriptions, mostly epitaphs, mentioning women who moved, and often migrated, to and between Western provinces during the Principate. This provincial focus will allow me to make comparisons with studies dedicated to Italy (Isayev) or to the city of Rome (Noy; Ricci; Le Guennec).

Firstly, I will address methodological issues impacting on the analysis of female mobility in inscriptions I am studying. While these difficulties also pertain to male travelers/migrants, I will show that they appear particularly severe in the case of women, for reasons regarding both the gender distribution of epigraphical production in the Roman world and the conditions in which women often travelled or migrated: that is, as wives. In the corpus, wives’ commemoration is regularly overshadowed by their husbands’: in this case (which in provinces mostly pertains to the households of Roman soldiers), there is often no way to tell, without further information, whether the spouse of a migrant was a migrant herself, or a local.  

The second part of the intervention will summarize conclusions drawn from the investigation. Mobile/migrant female identities (analyzed on the basis of types and motives of movement, origins, age and marital status at the time of the journey) will be addressed. I will show that in provinces, as in Rome or in Italy, the commemoration of women far from their region of birth originates firstly from constrained mobility linked to slave traffic. But a second push factor is more specific to women in provincial contexts: family migration linked to the movements of Roman army through the Imperium Romanum.