Provincial Women in the Roman Imagination

This paper explores the expression of identity of non-Roman freedwomen in the funerary monuments from Roman Britain in the second and third centuries C.E. During these centuries, the visibility of women on funerary monuments increased, whereas in the first and second centuries C.E. funerary monuments, which are valued primarily by non-native Britons to define their identity and social standing in an area controlled by members outside of their own culture, displayed iconography lauding a male’s military career.

Scholarly interest in the brief appearance of the Judaean queen Berenice in Suetonius’ Life of Titus has been concerned with establishing the facts of Berenice herself (Macurdy 1935) or of the political situation in Rome at the end of Vespasian's reign and the beginning of Titus' (Crook 1951, Rogers 1980, Braund 1984), but she is also an effective symbol of foreign power and territory brought into the heart of Rome. As such, she fits within the narrative motif of embodied empire that Suetonius deploys in his Lives.

In introducing Boudicca, Tacitus explains that the Britons do not consider sex in choosing their leaders (Tac. Agr. 16.1; cf. Tac. Ann. 14.35.1); yet Boudicca’s sex is central to her identity as a non-Roman dux femina. This paper argues that Boudicca’s use of exempla in Tacitus and Dio is a powerful means by which she demonstrates that her method of leadership is more worthy of emulation than that of the Roman imperial family. Tacitus’ Boudicca assimilates herself to Republican Roman models; Dio’s Boudicca compares herself to female leaders.

This paper focuses on how Livy uses the Carthaginian noble woman Sophonisba not only as a way perpetuating a cultural stereotype in regards to the Romans’ greatest national enemy but also as a morally didactic and generally essentialist warning to control the behavior and agency of Roman women. In so doing, we can glean a sense of the moral imperatives involved in Roman gender relations and the propagandists of the Augustan age as they passed these imperatives on to future generations of Roman men, and through them to Roman women.

Whenever one culture exerts power over another, there exists the possibility of (and anxiety about) the values and standards of the more dominant culture supplanting the traditional ones of the other culture, either forcefully or by willing adoption. In the context of the Roman Empire, this process is patently apparent in the mid-2^nd century CE writings of Apuleius, who illustrates his clear adoption of, and even preference for, many traditional Roman standards over those of other cultures, especially Greek and his native African.