Much of the material contained within this volume will be familiar to R.’s readers, as the book is a collection of material formerly published in a wide range of venues from 1981 to 2001, revised and updated, with new bibliographies. R. writes to ‘commemorate the lives of Roman women’ (p. 3) and ‘to make women visible in [the] past’ (p. 4), but this book is also a fascinating history of feminism in Classics in the 1980s and 1990s, as for each chapter she relates the circumstances surrounding its production. With a few exceptions, I have been familiar with most of the material in this volume for years; what is delightful and fresh are the accounts of the circumstances in which the various chapters were written and the methodological instruction R. gives for women's historians. This book is, therefore, a valuable primer on how to write the history of ancient women.
In the introduction R. notes that students ‘need gender theory in their toolbox’ (p. 10) because they are asked to read classical texts as canonical. She lists nine ways to look for Roman women (everything from seeking out fragmentary female authors to learning to read inscriptions). The apposite title of the book refers to the fact that concerning Roman women we have mainly silence from the mostly male-authored literary sources and that there are, consequently, methodological problems in writing women's history. Thus by far the most important requirement for students of the ancient world is to ‘learn to argue’ (p. 12) with this silence.
Chapter 1, ‘Approaches to the Sources on Adultery at Rome’, begins with a background of how R. came to write the piece (it grew out of her dissertation on ancient invective). She carefully outlines the caveats of utilising legal, historical, moral anecdotes and rhetorical exempla, gossip and slander, and satire/related genres, and underlines that such juxtaposition of low and high evidence is a ‘must for any historian’ (p. 38). Obvious contradictions between sources abound; ‘clearly, the degree of sexual freedom and attendant risks [posed by adultery] depended on who, when, and where you were’ (p. 60).
Chapter 2, ‘Invective against Women in Roman Satire’, was written as a result of a growing unease amongst feminists in early 1980s Classics that ancient male-authored texts were actually about men rather than women (up to then, such texts had often been treated as reportage). As R. points out, Roman satire tells us little of women, but much about male fear and anxiety (p. 69). Satire (like jokes and graffiti) perhaps operated within Roman society to control women and define normative sexuality (p. 69). Misogyny in texts perhaps does not tell us much about women, but does tell us ‘what women had to put up with’ (p. 6).
Chapter 3, ‘Julia's Jokes, Gallia Placidia, and the Roman Use of Women as Political Icons’, includes more fascinating personal history and the beginnings of feminists’ use of theory as applied to the study of ancient women. The piece examines the witticisms reportedly uttered by Augustus’ daughter Julia, collected by the fifth-century author Macrobius. The jokes actually reflect perceptions of the empress Gallia Placidia's power in the fifth century and her self-control in procreative sex (pp. 102–7); R. concludes that Macrobius manipulates the images of both Julia and Gallia Placidia for political ends (p. 108). ‘This way of using the past to write about the present is a characteristically Roman way of telling truths too dangerous to express explicitly’ (p. 83).
Chapter 4, ‘Sulpicia the Satirist’, deals with female writers in Roman antiquity and their rarity in the literary record. The Sulpicia referred to was a writer ‘of whom only two lines remain’ (p. 113; in the scholia on Juvenal). The ‘outstanding fact about Sulpicia is the exceeding oddness of a woman writing satire, or erotic iambics, in this culture’ (p. 127). Chapter 5, ‘Reading Ovid's Rapes’, first appeared in R.’s edited volume Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome (1992) and deals with Second-Wave feminist views on pornography and rape. Ovid is, problematically, part of the canon. She notes that content is an essential part of the text: ‘a text about rape may also be about something else, but it is still a text about rape’ (p. 135).
Chapter 6, ‘Making up a Woman’, begins with another personal essay, about R.’s experiences working with groups of scholars across disciplines (which led to the publication of Off With Her Head! [edd. H. Eilberg-Schwartz and W. Doniger] in 1995). R.’s thesis is that make-up is disgusting, put on over something disgusting (a woman's body; p. 176); in the large body of texts containing cosmetic recipes in Ovid and the Elder Pliny, make-up is of repellent ingredients: crocodile dung, scum, smelly wool grease (pp. 183–9). I have taken issue with this elsewhere (K. Olson, Dress and the Roman Woman: Self-Presentation and Society [2008], pp. 66–8), but this piece contains my favourite line of modern writing about Roman women: ‘what must Roman face cream have been like, we wonder, if your rival would not notice that a lizard had been killed in it?’ (p. 188).
Chapter 7, ‘Carrying Water in a Sieve: Class and Body in Roman Women's Religion’, gives details of Roman women's religious practices and events. Small religious rituals were an important part of female daily life, the ‘small practices that bespeak an underlying world view’ (p. 199). Roman women's cults show a preoccupation with the female body: chastity, lactation, the nurturing of children, marriage; breast milk and menstrual blood were thought to possess curative or harmful uses (p. 202). Evidence from the CIL ‘leaves us in no doubt that women were active in public cult throughout Italy’ (as priestesses in the imperial cult or that of various goddesses, as worshippers and dedicators; pp. 207–19). Appendices consist of a list of priestesses in Italy from the CIL and a list of dedications by women.
Chapter 8, ‘Pliny's Brassiere’, which grew out of a project on Roman witches, concerns the encyclopedist's ‘medicinal uses of the female body’ (p. 247). Many of Pliny's recipes are for fecundity (although he does give recipes for abortifacients and emmenagogues; p. 256). Chapter 9, ‘Emotional Work: Lamenting the Roman Dead’, examines mourning behaviours for women and the work of the dead; mourning is ‘a low-class job’ (p. 276). Mourning was part of women's everyday experience and as such is ‘a big part of history’ (p. 268). Chapter 10, ‘The Ethnographer's Dilemma and the Dream of a Lost Golden Age’, began with a panel entitled ‘Feminist Theory and the Classics’ at the APA (now SCS) in 1990. The ‘dilemma’ of the title is that we need to see things through others’ eyes but are functionally unable to (and how do those outside the structures of power and language find a voice in which to speak?, p. 298). R. notes that our way of reading ancient texts cuts us off from meaning, from the social implications of texts (p. 293). Much of the chapter is given over to an interesting view of divisions within the academy: the optimists/essentialists and the pessimists/constructionists (p. 294). Thus scholars who study women in antiquity may see in their subject the longevity of patriarchy (pessimists) or the ability of women to resist by means of their own culture (optimists, p. 313). R. also covers the important shift from ‘women’ to ‘gender’ within the discipline (pp. 301–2).
As R. notes, ‘there is something revolutionary about knowing the past’ (p. 317). She calls, crucially, for Classicists to step up and make ancient history known outside the academy; to connect the scholarly journals and the streets. This book is ‘a remembrance of the lost world of Roman women’ (p. 267), and the chapters within should be obligatory reading for all historians of ancient gender. ‘Our future depends on keeping faith with our past’ (p. 317).
