This volume represents a sustained contribution to L.’s engagement with women’s material and commemorative presence in Pompeii. Drawing on archaeological, epigraphical and art historical evidence, L. demonstrates that elite and freedwomen were integral to the operation of Pompeii’s social, religious, economic and commemorative life. L. proves that female initiatives were not marginal and shows how women’s patronage, property ownership and commemorative practices were embedded within and legible to the broader Pompeian community. Central to L.’s intervention is the sustained attention to women’s agency materialised in Pompeii and, crucially, to the ways in which that agency was recognised, negotiated and received by the wider urban community.
Lives and Deaths deepens the methodological agenda laid out in L.’s earlier co-edited volume with M. Swetnam-Burland (Women’s Lives, Women’s Voices [2021]), in what L. calls the ‘natural next step’ (p. 5). The book also engages with A.L.C. Emmerson’s (Life and Death in the Roman Suburb [2021]) reconceptualisation of the suburbium. And it builds on V.L. Campbell’s spatial and social framework in The Tombs of Pompeii: Organization, Space, and Society (2015), re-examining many of the same monuments through a gendered lens. While earlier scholarship has demonstrated women’s economic agency within Pompeii’s commercial landscape (E.A. Hemelrijk, Hidden Lives, Public Personae: Women and Civic Life in the Roman West [2015]; P.M. Allison, Pompeian Households: An Analysis of the Material Culture [2004]), L. shifts the focus from economic activity to the material and monumental forms through which women fashioned enduring public identities.
This archaeologically rich volume is broken down into five themes: funerary matters, civic honours, religious activity, domestic activity and business contributions to the local economy. Each chapter follows the material remains of Pompeii’s most active female contributors: Annedia, Eumachia, Mamia, Julia Felix and Holconia, while bringing into focus freed and enslaved women whose labour and networks underpinned these activities. Structured as interconnected case studies, the chapters build cumulatively, foregrounding the social positioning of elite and freedwomen through patterns of interaction, patronage and display. This book represents a methodologically confident contribution to the archaeology of women in Roman Italy.
The introduction contends that ‘female initiatives were not only accepted but desired by the larger community to a greater extent than has been previously recognised’ (p. 4). L. frames the book as an attempt to recover ‘instances when women operated in the public sphere and in ways that could complement or complicate their primary social roles as mothers, daughters, and wives’ (p. 6). L. defines agency primarily through material practice: women’s ability to financially commission funerary monuments, religious and civic buildings and activities, and employ labour. This materially grounded definition is consistently applied. Its analytical scope would have benefited from a more explicit engagement with the theoretical debates of agency and intersectionality.
Chapters 1 and 2 demonstrate that Republican women of freed and citizen status were among the earliest and most innovative tomb builders in Pompeii, inspiring the choices of subsequent women building in the first century ce. Through case studies including Alleia Decimilla, Naevoleia Tyche and Mulvia Prisca, L. challenges the long-standing interpretation of tombs as primarily competitive displays, framing them as public expressions of care, responsibility and communal belonging. L.’s observation that most passers-by were probably unaware of the patron’s gender, given the limited legibility of tomb inscriptions from the road, offers a compelling challenge to modern assumptions about gendered status performance.
The discussion of the Nucerian Gate necropolis in Chapter 2 develops this argument by demonstrating how freeborn (Annedia, tomb 29 OS) and former enslaved women (Vertia Philumina, tomb 13 OS) made architectural choices within evolving commemorative norms, allowing for experimentation, continuity and forms of display that were legible within the local community (p. 54). The comprehensive table of female tomb builders (pp. 26–7), detailing inscriptions, co-builders, tomb types and dates, is a useful resource.
The title of Chapter 3, ‘Eumachia and Her Neighbours’, sets up an expectation of sustained focus that the chapter does not fully meet. Eumachia’s tomb is not addressed in detail until late in the chapter and then only briefly, a choice that sits uneasily alongside L.’s repeated critique of earlier scholarship for sidelining Eumachia’s funerary interventions. The surrounding contextual material is valuable, but the chapter’s structure risks reproducing the marginalisation it seeks to challenge.
Chapter 4 will feel familiar to readers of L.’s earlier work on funerary and honorific portraits (‘Contextualizing the Funerary and Honorific Portrait Statues of Women in Pompeii’, in: B. Longfellow and M. Swetnam-Burland [edd.], Women’s Lives, Women’s Voices [2021]); rather than making a sharp departure, it extends and further contextualises that work, shifting the emphasis from visual precedent to long-term strategies of recognition and communal acceptance. L. convincingly shows how, by constructing religious and monumental complexes on their own land, with their own resources and with the approval of the local ordo, Mamia and Eumachia enacted forms of civic participation resonating with Augustan ideals of piety and moral reforms.
Chapters 6 and 7 shift the focus to domestic and economic activity. L. demonstrates how household religion provided a key space for women such as Julia Felix and Sutoria Primigenia (I.32.2) to act as agents in household ritual by pairing their juno (protective female spirit) with their husbands’ genus (protective male spirit) in domestic lararia (shrines). L. further shows how circular painted tondo portraits in the Houses of Terentius Neo (VII.2.6) and the Garden (V.3), often positioned near lararia, depicted women with attributes that resonate with goddesses, including uncovered heads, upright posture, direct gaze and objects signalling literacy. Read together, L. argues that these images functioned as public-facing articulations of household identity when women conducted business (p. 202).
In discussing domestic portraits L. notes that scholarly attention has privileged male portraiture associated with the imagines (ancestral masks made only for elite men), but material evidence from Pompeii suggests that women and other family members were also displayed within the household. L. misses an opportunity to engage with L. Webb’s work ‘Gendering the Roman imago’ (in European Network on Gender Studies in Antiquity [2017]), which shows it was women who, upon marriage, brought ancestral imagines into their husbands’ households, either integrating them into an existing lineage display or introducing them where none previously existed. This would have demonstrated that women were actors in domestic ancestral performance. Her discussion of work-related imagery in the tablinum of Julia Felix’s house, depicting writing implements and money bags, offers a persuasive challenge to assumptions of male agency as the primary driver in representations of commerce (p. 209).
Throughout the book L. claims that modern Eurocentric understandings of ancient women’s social and economic agency in Pompeii have been shaped by an over-reliance on Roman elite male literary sources and the persistent marginalisation of material evidence. She is critical of interpretations that assimilate women, such as the freedwoman Naevoleia Tyche, to the fictional literary freedman Trimalchio (p. 105). L. is right to observe that their material remains have often been subsumed into institutional or ideological analyses rather than examined as evidence of gendered strategies of commemoration and religious and economic interventions.
With its clear prose, extensive appendix of female tomb patrons and careful integration of archaeological, epigraphic and visual evidence, The Lives and Deaths of Women in Ancient Pompeii is an ambitious and valuable contribution to the archaeology of women in Roman Italy. It will be of particular interest to scholars of Pompeii, Roman gender studies, economic studies and funerary archaeology, and it is accessible enough to be used effectively at upper undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
