Where it was once commonplace for scholars, citing the military marriage ban instituted by Augustus, to deny any substantial female presence in Roman military communities, especially within the fortified castra itself, subsequent scholarship picking up speed over the last four decades has demonstrated the far more substantial place of women in these communities. With Women and the Army in the Roman Empire, editors Lee L. Brice and Elizabeth M. Greene aim to present the products of these decades of scholarship, in particular to demolish decisively the notion that women were excluded from Roman forts or confined to the vicus. The volume accomplishes this intervention effectively and, in the process, serves both as a valuable primer for readers less familiar with the study of women in Roman military sites and as a useful methodological toolbox for those interested in further research on the topic.
The volume begins with two chapters by the volume editors, alternating lead author position, which together lay the foundation for the volume. Ch. 1 lays out the essential premise: the long presumption of older scholarship, that women, whatever their status in the vicus, were rare to non-existent in the castra and thus marginal to the Roman army, has been decisively overturned, but that the space this has created for fruitful exploration of women’s roles within military communities has not yet been fully exploited. Ch. 2 follows this with an effective and thorough historiographical essay chronicling the emergence of the subfield studying this topic.
The volume’s remit thus set, the remaining chapters set about exploring particular aspects of the theme. Ch. 3, by Brice and Georgia Tsouvala, discusses the role of elite women in the camp, particularly in managing a parallel social hierarchy of women, connecting elite and non-elite military households. Ch. 4, by Sara E. Phang, considers the interaction of wives in the Roman military community and imperial ideology, arguing persuasively that Trajan’s crackdown on adultery among the military elite was an extension of Trajanic imperial ideology, which presented the Roman army as an extension of the imperial family and thus adultery within it as an injury to the position of the emperor.
The next two chapters offer approaches to using epigraphical and archaeological evidence to chart the place of women within Roman military communities. In ch. 5, Alexandra W. Busch and Greene use the unusually ample epigraphic record of the military garrison of Rome to chart the social networks of these soldiers and their families, noting that soldiers in Italy, perhaps unsurprisingly, seem to have been substantially more embedded in familiar networks and their wives more deeply connected to the soldiers’ social circle of comrades than soldiers on the frontier.
Ch. 6, by Penelope M. Allison, offers a case study of four Roman sites on the Rhine–Danube limes, demonstrating how archaeological evidence can be used to establish the presence of Roman women within the castra itself and the roles they might fill. Allison is laudably frank about the interpretive difficulties of ambiguous evidence, rendering her argument more convincing but also making this chapter a valuable tutorial on best practice for using archaeological evidence to chart the place of women in military sites. Of particular interest, Allison argues for women’s participation in industrial and professional roles within these four sites, with objects associated with women appearing in areas associated with cloth production, metal-working and medical care.
The next two chapters concern women moving with the army. Tatiana Ivleva builds on previous work examining the evidence for the mobility of families of soldiers migrating from Britain in ch. 7, while in ch. 8, Lien Foubert traces the mobility of women connected to the Roman army in Egypt, making use of the wealth of textual sources Egypt affords. Foubert demonstrates that even when soldiers were deployed in inhospitable posts in desert environments, they remained connected to female members of the military community, though wives generally resided in the more comfortable cities and travelled to and from them, whereas sex workers appear to have moved from garrison to garrison.
Ch. 9, by Greene, presents an overview of the evidence for the involvement of women in religious activities in these contexts, arguing that women visibly participated in rituals closely connected to the Roman army, including elite women acting as ritual attendants (camillae), while less elite women appear as participants in strongly militarily associated cults like that of Jupiter Dolichenus. Ch. 10, by Julie Langford and Christina Hotalen, returns to the question of imperial ideology, examining the changing use of the title mater castrorum for women in the imperial family; they note the title’s shifting use from signalling the holder’s role in legitimating imperial succession to reflecting the power of figures like Julia Mamaea and finally persisting in official usage as a standard honorific used by subjects to curry favour during the chaotic late third century.
The final chapter by Conor Whately extends the volume into Late Antiquity, arguing for the clear presence of women in the Eastern Roman armies of the sixth century; he notes that while soldiers’ families, with the exception of very elite figures like the empress Theodora or Belisarius’ wife Antonina, were excluded from armies actively on campaign, there is ample evidence for women in military settlements on the eastern frontier. The chronological extension of the volume into Late Antiquity is welcome, but the leap from the first three centuries c.e. to the sixth speaks to the relatively uneven nature of both the evidence and scholarship on the topic, mostly focused on the first three centuries c.e. and on the western limes at the expense of the east.
While the volume adopts a formal definition of the Roman ‘military community’ from Simon James (in S. James and M. Millett (eds), Britons and Romans (2001), 77–89) which includes not just military households but also a wide range of non-combatants, including those outside of the soldiers’ households, much of the focus in this volume remains on soldiers’ wives. However, as the chapters by Allison and Foubert capably demonstrate, many of the women present at Roman military sites had relationships that were substantially economic in nature as craftworkers, sex workers, sutlers (victuallers and other camp merchants) or other service-providers, although these are, admittedly, often less archaeologically or epigraphically visible.
However, that small critique is not to diminish the present volume, which represents an important and very welcome contribution to the study of women in the Roman military community. The volume also includes a useful collection of maps at the front, and several chapters make effective use of greyscale images, all of which are well reproduced in the physical volume. Students will benefit in particular from the first two chapters, which present a thorough historiography and status quaestionis on the topic, while many of the later chapters will prove valuable to scholars, providing not only solid contributions to our understanding of the place of women in the Roman military community, but also example methods for how to explore the question of women connected to the Roman army in the context of a particular archaeological site, literary or epigraphic corpus.
