Material Girls

There has been a recent flurry of research that explores how tools and object/human interactions affected daily life in the Roman world (Van Oyen 2016; Green 2015a; Eckhardt 2014). Other scholars have also focused on how architecture, wall-paintings, and landscapes created and maintained social interactions and gender performances (Green 2015b; Severy-Hoven 2012; von Stackelberg 2009; Grahame 1997). My paper builds on these studies, but it investigates the literary and visual expressions of resistance to elite culture in images of work involving food preparation and production.

This paper examines the role of the use and display of ritual implements in the construction of identity by and for Roman women. It draws together current strands of scholarship on Roman women’s religious activity (DiLuzio 2016, Takács 2008, Schultz 2006) and the importance of dress and visual insignia in communicating gender and status (Harlow 2012, Olson 2008, Edmondson and Keith 2008).

In antiquity, as in the contemporary world, shoes were a key element in the visual language of self-presentation and self-fashioning. As markers of age, gender, status, and identity, shoes eloquently communicated who a person was and, in some cases, who s/he wished to be. For instance, an elegant black leather woman’s sandal found in the praetorium in Vindolanda not only indicates the presence of women at this Roman military fort, but also tells us something about its owner: first and foremost that she was someone who could afford this luxury item.

Curse tablets served as a ritual outlet for private concerns, and thereby provide a unique perspective of the intimate anxieties of the average Greek citizen. In particular, they gave women in a dire situation an opportunity for a private, personal mediation with their world. The constructed and fictional empowerment given to women in certain literary sources more fully emerges in these ritual artifacts, which presented practitioners with an opportunity to assert control over their domestic and social statuses.

After learning the death of Heracles consumed by the poisoned robe, Deianeira rushes inside the palace to kill herself. But before entering the thalamos, she bids farewell to one or several object(s) named by a generic noun (ὄργανα, ‘instrument’ or ‘tool‘, 904-906). This pathetic expression of affection towards what seem to be familiar object(s) has no parallel in narratives of a character’s death in tragic drama. Why does the messenger mention such a detail? What are the ὄργανα that provoke Deianeira’s tears? How can we interpret the stress put on the haptic contact (ψαύσειεν)?

This paper examines the role of the peplos (robe) as a signifier of female identity in Sophocles' lost tragedy Tereus (ca. 430 BCE) and its reception from Euripides' Medea and Demosthenes' Funeral Oration to Ovid's Metamorphoses and Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon (Gantz, Liapis, Salzman-Mitchell, Segal).