This book explores the role women played in the lives of Roman cities outside the capital, using a range of epigraphical and archaeological evidence, supported by literary and legal material. H. sees this book as ‘a complement to the more lively and sensational stories of highly placed women in the literary sources’ (p. 343), but this does an injustice to her groundbreaking account of women's civic participation in the provincial western empire. The chapters cover women's activities as priestesses and religious officials, benefactresses, prominent social figures, patrons and ‘mothers’ of cities, and idealised dignitaries in public spaces. H.’s interpretation of previously scattered inscriptional evidence reshapes our ideas about female visibility in the life of cities and women's place within the social networks of the towns they lived in.
The book's analysis focuses on a corpus of 1,400 published honorific inscriptions, dedications and epitaphs that H. gathers together for the first time. The key information for these texts is presented in a series of tables at the back of the book. Each entry identifies the named woman, the date, the ancient site where the text was found and the standard corpus where each inscription is published (e.g. CIL, AE) as well as other information relevant to the civic activity on display such as the priesthood recorded. Chronologically, the inscriptions span the late first century to the late third century a.d. The geographical range covers all the western Roman empire, including Africa Proconsularis, Numidia, Mauretania Caesariensis and Mauretania Tingitana.
H.’s careful analysis of her sources explodes a wide range of suppositions about women's civic participation, such as the idea that a woman would only be honoured because of her relationship to an important man (p. 337). Although she warns against an ‘overly optimistic’ view of women's urban activity (p. 339), she makes a quietly confident case for women's participation in the public sphere as autonomous agents. She also emphasises that while the epigraphical evidence is rich with unexploited information, it only tells us about the public presentation of women, not their actual lives. For instance, the inscriptions offer little insight into duties associated with individual female priesthoods, but do reveal both the range of positions and the prestige associated with them. This book overturns assumptions about the strictly demarcated worlds of the male forum and the female domus, revealing a richer interplay of social networks and activities as recorded in the urban landscape.
In her introduction, H. explains her focus on the broader trends of the inscriptions now they have been gathered into a single corpus. Issues of dating and inscription location are dealt with in each chapter, giving the book a synchronic structure. This approach makes it easy for a reader interested in one particular topic to focus on relevant material. Where issues reappear in multiple chapters, such as differences in provincial inscription trends, they are presented in such a way that the material feels fresh rather than repetitive.
Chapter 1 handles the major methodological concerns that underpin the work, including the Roman concept of public and private, the influence of wealth and class on the evidence, the impact of ‘Romanization’ (allowing for the problems associated with this terminology), and what allowance needs to be made for ‘the epigraphic habit’ and its impact on the numbers of inscriptions preserved from any given time period. H. argues that different opportunities were available to women living outside Rome and that the dominance of Rome in the literary evidence should not obscure what was going on in provincial towns.
Chapter 2 offers a welcome overview of women's religious roles in civic priesthoods beyond the ubiquitous Vestals. H. has defined ‘civic’ in this context as ‘priesthoods in cults that were organized by the city council or that were exercised on behalf of the city as a whole’ (p. 40), which seems a reasonable way to corral a set of evidence that has little uniformity over its chronological and geographical spread. Female priesthoods appear to have been strongly grounded in their local communities, and as such it is almost impossible to offer generalisations about them; while priestesses tend to be women of considerable wealth and status, serving female deities, H. identifies plenty of exceptions. Her discussion of chastity as a requirement of religious service is particularly helpful. Despite the limits of inscriptions in helping us reconstruct what priestesses actually did, the corpus reveals the richness of religious activity involving women outside Rome and the prestige associated with women holding such positions.
Chapter 3 turns to civic benefactresses. H. marshals her evidence to test a number of common assumptions about female euergetic behaviour, mostly arising from the belief that they acted just like men. She limits her corpus to inscriptions where a woman is the sole or joint benefactor, excluding examples where a man and his entire family give a gift; this still results in 338 inscriptions, which are a treasure trove in themselves (I was fascinated to discover that there is only one library recorded as given by a woman). The evidence reveals women's participation in the full range of possible benefactions, from religious buildings to infrastructure to public statues and games. The chapter closes with a discussion of female munificence, the factors that produced it and the significance of its very public display.
Chapter 4 examines the evidence for women's social networks and civic associations. H. combines the inscriptional and literary evidence to reveal women's involvement in collegia, both in their own right and in association with their male relatives. The role that the collegia played in burial and commemoration of its members seems key here, and a discussion of all-women collegia is most welcome. The chapter's concluding discussion of the Order of Matrons at Rome gives us the best evidence we have for understanding groups of elite women which seem to mirror the Order but have only left brief inscriptions in the towns where they were based.
In Chapter 5, H. considers women's roles as patronesses and ‘mothers’ of cities and associations. She establishes a distinction between a patroness (expected to bring social capital for engaging with civic administration) and a mother (more likely to be an insider and expected to contribute financially and practically towards the organisation), although both were prestigious for the women who held them. The motives behind accepting these positions are hard to recover and would have differed in each individual case. What seems clear is that the role of patroness and mother legitimised and enabled female power and presence within otherwise male institutions.
Chapter 6 closes the book with a broad consideration of how women were represented in public space, focusing on public honorific statues and funerals given to women as well as the dedicatory practices of women themselves. Conventions of portraiture play into acceptable notions of expressing female authority, as well as the traditional Roman civic virtues prominent women were expected to embody. The representation of women in public spaces serves to reinforce expectations of female civic behaviour, and as such idealise rather than reflect reality. Nevertheless, the range and scope of commemoration reveals that participation of women in their local communities was a recognised and respected feature of civic life.
H.’s command of her material and its social context pulls together a wide range of hitherto dispersed evidence, presents its implications clearly and compellingly, and offers a new model for understanding women's activity in Roman urban contexts. The tables of evidence offer considerable potential for further study and debate in and of themselves. To have this material in one place is a major boon for teaching and research around gender in the Roman world. The volume will be of considerable interest to scholars and graduate students working on any of the areas covered by individual chapters or broader questions of civic life in the provinces.
