05. Matronae in domo et in re publica agentes

Secondo il mos maiorum, la virtù del pudor vincolava le donne nella dimensione privata. Norme e tradizione impedivano loro qualsiasi ruolo istituzionale, militare o civico. Eppure le condizioni precarie e molto particolari della Roma del II e I secolo a.C. sconvolsero temporaneamente i confini fisici e soprattutto ideologici della domus, consentendo alle donne di agere in re publica, un periodo temporaneo ma estremamente significativo per l’azioni femminile, quanto per la vita politica e pubblica dell’Urbe. In un tempo di violenti scontri intestini, gli uomini furono allontanati dai luoghi del potere in tale numero e con una sistematicità tale da far sì che le loro mogli, madri, figlie e sorelle si trovassero nella condizione di sovvertire l’ordine pubblico nel tentativo di sostituirli o supportarli. Spesso tali interferenze femminili con la vita pubblica terminarono con la delegittimazione, altre volte il vincolo della pietas giustificò l’operato delle donne, preservandone l’immagine. Questa raccolta di saggi ha il doppio scopo di definire un fenomeno molto complesso e contemporaneamente di esaminare la condizione femminile al tramonto di un’epoca di trasformazioni.

The funeral speech known as laudatio Turiae is a well exploited source for the political and social history of Rome. Especially focused here is the section which narrates the meeting between the anonymous wife and Lepidus the triumvir, in 42 BCE, and the mistreatment the woman suffered as she tried to obtain the restitutio of her proscribed husband. The scene is described in the text with a language which still betrays, several decades after the fact, and at the peak of the Augustan era, persistent bias against Lepidus.

The meaning that matrimonial dynamics have acquired in the development of the late republican political conflicts and in parallel the role played by the matronae in those contexts have been repeatedly explained, both in a prosopographic key and from the gender studies perspective. However, more or less recent historiography does not seem to have given particular importance to the peculiarity of the circumstances and modalities that in the last century of the Roman Republic accompanied the planning of marriages and their dissolution. A careful analysis of the cases of repudium involving key figures such as Silla, Pompey, Caesar, Cato of Utica, Cicero, Antony and Octavian reveals that the reasons underlying their decisions to break their marriage bonds were not always consistent with earlier practice. This was witnessed in paradigmatic terms by memorialist and antiquarian sources (Valerius Maximus and Gellius), according to whom the dissolution of a marriage would be allowed in the case of female sterilitas or would not be considered inappropriate in the case of licentious behaviour of the women. Nonetheless, certain episodes involving the above mentioned major figures of the late Roman Republic denote a use dictated by a concern for protecting their public image and their need to regain the faculty of contracting new marriages that would be politically or financially more advantageous. Overall, the male tendency to make an instrumental use of repudium, in the context of marriages contracted from time to time according to contingent convenience, in addition to revealing a marked change from the older tradition, can be considered a direct reflection of the unilateral nature of the dissolution of marriage in Roman practice. It is also an indication of the reduced scope for action of the matronae, occasionally forced away from their domestic domicile by their spouse, despite their important role in the context of marriages arranged in view of the utility of marriage in the public sphere.

A.A. Barret, in his book of 2002, describes Livia as the ‘First Lady of Imperial Rome’, in order to illustrate the exceptional nature of the role played by the wife of Augustus within the new political and social context of the empire, suggesting that she was the first woman to assume this role. Augustus’ choices concerning the wife reveal his will to gradually ensure for Livia a prominent position within the new political reality and to strengthen the public role of women of his gens in the new political con-text. For her role as mother of Augustus’ heir and for her longevity, she benefited from this experimentation, however ancient evidences show that the main subject of this process was Octavia Minor, sister of Augustus. Through the analysis of some specific aspects of her action (the role as mediator and as patron, the matrimonial strategies concerning her children, the active role in the urban development of Rome) this paper tries to show how the role of first ‘First Lady’ can be given to her.

Terentia, the wife of Cicero, is one of several women dramatically involved in their husbands’ political affairs during the years of civil wars. Many of Cicero letters, addressed both to her both to Atticus, give us a vivid picture of a matrona who, left alone in Rome with two sons, among many difficulties of all kinds, must with courage and fortitude, agere in domo to handle all the problems of everyday life, exacerbated by a lot of financial difficulties and also by the not easy relations with the son in law Quintus or the engagement of their daughter Tullia with Dolabella, but must also agere in re publica to urge political and economic support for her husband and to solve intricate property questions, as the fictional liberation of slaves or the restitution of the land on which stood her house.

The Kore-type - with its versions, derivations, and contaminations - occupied an important position in the sequence of female statues in Roman Cisalpine Gaul. This type was clearly included among the types in common circulation all over the Roman World, with a particular concentration in the eastern part of that territory, during the Julio-Claudian dynasty. From an artistic point of view, the quality of the statues is not particularly high and, in generally, a thin veil of classicism is evident. It is notable, however, that this type was not reserved for exclusive use by the imperial family but was also adopted by local élites.

This paper aims at showing how Flavius Josephus represents three major networks of political influence between women: the first between Alexandra, mother of Mariamme and Cleopatra; the second between Salome, Herod’s sister and Livia; and the last one between Berenice and Antonia. Josephus shows these networks operate, namely through messengers and letters, and establishes a kind of feminine political network, parallel to men’s relationship, but sometimes involving men as well. The most important constatation is that Hellenistic women and Roman women of the Principate used the same kind of network, all over the Roman world: political action for women went through the same channels, in both the Hellenistic and imperial courts.

This paper aimed to examine the positions adopted by Antonia Minor and dictated by political reasons on the occasion of the death of her oldest son, Germanicus and her only daughter, Livilla. The presence of Antonia during her son’s public funeral and posthumous honours is attested by the epigraphic evidences of the Tabula Siarensis and the SC de Cn. Pisone Patre, although Tacitus records her absence (Ann., III 1-3). Allegedly, the daughter Livilla helped her lover Sejanus in poisoning her husband Drusus the Younger and, according to Cassius Dio (LVIII 11, 7), Tiberius handed Livilla over to her mother, who starved her to death: in this act, Antonia Minor seems to exercise a right of the paterfamilias, the power of life and death over his children. Her authority perhaps derives from her status of univira, a woman who had only one husband throughout her life, and from her blood ties with Augustus and her kinship with Tiberius. Hence Antonia Minor is portrayed as consistently loyal to the dynasty.

Each of the ancient Roman matronae was given, from the sources available to us, a special type of praise: Lucrezia the modesty, to Marzia gravity, the ardor of married Porcia, a sober “festevolezza” to Claudia, to Giulia the grace. One of “Cornelia” is praised - XVII - for the strength and generosity of spirit, the other for the sweetness of manners and words. Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, is described by Tacitus as an example of the ideal mother, who raises “good children”. As this pattern of mother has influenced the later sources? And until this female model is exploited? How real was the influence of the matronae on the education of their children? Considerations slip of the concept of motherhood by the testimony of Tacitus “revised” by Saint Jerome.

Asking about spaces and opportunities for feminine action in the Roman world between the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire leads us to wonder - XVI - about the evolution of the woman’s place in the Roman society at this period. Spectacles constitute both a major political place and an opportunity whose structures get set up precisely at this time. However, it is also at that time that the women appear, in a quite remarkable way, in the documentation relating to the spectacles. It seems reasonable to relate this phenomenon with the transformations that the « system of spectacles » knows then and that must fit under the global context of deep evolutions that affect the Roman society between the first century BC and the first century AC. Rather than trying to highlight, in one field of the public life, a larger phenomenon of women’s emancipation, it is interesting to turn the reasoning over and insist on the mutations and evolutions that transform the Roman society and allow new places of public expression and public interventions to open. Those make a way for some less visible social categories. Then we can wonder if women take advantage of those new intervention’s opportunities in the public life and in which way. The women’s means of intervention in the spectacles and their consequences are different according to the categories of women. So, we will first take an interest in the opening of this professional world to women and its effects. Then, we will go back on the exceptional interventions of aristocratic women in the spectacles and the highly political dimension of this phenomenon.

This paper aims to analyze the cultural level and the possibility of economic and social action reached by the matrons belonging to the élite at the end of the Republic. So, I focused on the study of a specific case, the life of Cerellia, whose name is known thanks to seven Cicero’s letters, written between 46 and 44 BC (from ad Fam. XIII 72 to ad Att. XV 26), and thanks to the limited information available in the literary sources. Unfortunately, had gone almost completely lost the famous Epistulae ad Caerelliam, the only letters written by Cicero to a matron – except those sent to his first wife Ter- XII - entia and his daughter Tullia – which had been published. Anyway, according to the analysis of available data it will be possible to delineate the socio-economic context of Cerellia and to infer some general characteristics of the life of contemporary women. First of all, she owned a remarkable fortune – as many matrons of Late Republic – and administered it without a tutor, thus entering in contact with prominent figures, such as Cicero himself and his friend T. Pomponius Atticus. Secondly, she had a fine and wider culture, with interest even in philosophical debates, a prerogative not commonly attested for Roman women. Although we haven’t direct information about her family, Cicero’s letters allows us to suppose a kinship between Cerellia and Publilia, the second wife of the great orator. Further epigraphic investigations had allowed to reconstruct a possible family tree for the correspondent of Cicero, as a member of the first family of the gens Caerellia who was able to enter into Senat (CIL, VI 1364). Finally, this analysis will allow us to consider Cerellia as a typical member of the senatorial-equestrian élite and to elect her personal story as the normal condition of contemporary matrons.

This paper concerns the figure of Servilia, a matrona who lived in the late Roman Republic and who was the mother of M. Junius Brutus, the half-sister of Cato of Utica, the mistress and close friend of Julius Caesar. During her existence, she was the focus of a web of relationships with politicians belonging to different parties. In particular, the study aims to reconstruct her political behaviour ‘behind the curtain’ during the historical events which occurred after Caesar’s assassination, when she played a very important role for the Caesaricide faction, until the death of Brutus and Cassius. The analysis of literary sources, in particular Cicero’s corre-spondence, allows to underline, on the one hand, the actions that qualify her as a woman extra mores, though legitimized by the pietas that she displayed in her son’s interest; on the other hand, the use of traditionally masculine media, especially the verbal one, which alienates Servilia from the feminine canon of the mos ma-iorum but which justifies her enterprise because of the particular historical context of the late Roman Republic.

This paper analizes the new role of women in the new domus Augusta and at the beginning of the Roman imperial society, expecially Livia, Augustus’ wife, called Iulia Augusta after the dead of her husband.

Some funerary altars of Aquileia dating in the 1° century AD show images of women inspired, in attitude, attributes and gestures, by Greek stelai of classical and Hellenistic periods. These figures do not belong to the traditional repertoire of north-Italic ateliers, and are widespread in different forms also in the funerary art of several Roman provinces. This paper follows the traces of these philhellenes matronae, investigating the geographical spread of their tombs, the chronological framework, the relationship - XIV - with the type and the iconography of the monument, and finally the meaning of this particular phenomenon.

During the age of Late Republic the women scope of action cover also the public contest, like the forum, where usually the men spent the politically life and that traditionally were the sole male enjoyment. The paper allowed to analyse if the presence of matronae in metters of res publica brings them to appropriate over time even in communicative mode indispensable to such kind of activities. Thanks to the historical sources we considered three of the most representative events, dated between 43rd and 42nd b.C.; we analyse the figures of Fulvia, Giulia and Ortensia, representatives of the Roman aristocracy in a period of innovation. Our propose it is also to study similarities and differences between these kind of facts, the evolution of female rule and the question of dependence in the late republican events and in proto and meso republican age focusing the reability of sources.

This paper has the objective to give a general vision of the new conditions of the women’s public and political action in the I century b.C. At those times the frequent civil wars took far apart many men from institutional life and allowed matronae to act in politics. When do women act in politics and which is the typology of their actions? Do women act in private background, that now has become even politics’context, or do they act in public background? Through which instruments, and overall through which languages, do matronae act their strategies? Which role do they act, between the need of conforming and the boost for development, the male models of political action and previous female experiences in public life? This paper evidences specific cases of matronal interferences in political life, which offers advices about who this phenomenon in this chronological context has became so common and popular.

The contribution focuses on some female figures, known through some Ostian inscriptions, who were able to connect their own name, as well as that of their male counterparts, to many areas of civic life through the construction, enlargement or restuaration of public buildings, the offering spectacles and the creation of foundations - XV - for the public good. These women show us the level of wealth they had attained and, on the other side, by the choice of the type of munificence, they reflect the choices of the matronae of the Roman aristocracy and of the imperial domus.

The aim of this work is to study, if possible, the influence exercised by those female relatives of the Roman knights known in the last decennia of the first century BC. At that time, the equestrian order still did not have the legal definition created by Augustus. Even though women in Imperial times did never belong to the equester ordo, they played a crucial part in social promotion of their male relatives, through their weddings or wealth. This is the role we intend to highlight in Italy and in the provinces, even if we are aware of the complexity of this work, due to our sources (mainly literary, instead of epigraphic) and the available evidence.