Gender, memory and identity are each the subject of scholarly focus these days – and all are huge topics with vast bibliography for the interested student; every conceivable permutation of the three topics may be found (in gender: masculinity; magic and gender; gender and ritual; in memory: memory and mourning; triumphs; and houses; in identity: identity in the provinces; in funerary monuments; in landscapes). The list of works is too numerous to mention here, but most recently have appeared Routledge's mammoth Women in Antiquity: Real Women Across the Ancient World (edd. S.L. Budin and J.M. Turfa [2016]); Imperial Identities in the Roman World (edd. W. Vanacker and A. Zuiderhoek [2020]) and Memory and Mourning: Studies on Roman Death (edd. V. Hope and J. Huskinson [2011]).
The current volume appears in the series Social Worlds of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (although not all the chapters focus on late antiquity) and is a Festschrift in honour of the sixtieth birthday of Katariina Mustakallio (University of Tampere, Finland). Gender, memory and identity are ‘three crucial concepts that considerably shaped the Roman empire and its culture through the centuries’ (p. 35) and also the subjects of Mustakallio's own work. (The choice of these topics excludes death, infirmity or childhood, Mustakallio's other research areas.) Missing is a list of Mustakallio's publications, as are any divisions within the table of contents by subject matter (although perhaps that was impossible), geographical area or chronological period. Some chapters present the reader with rather an abundance of English infelicities, which should have been caught by a copy-editor.
Festschriften are notorious for not hanging together well and being at times choppy and disjointed, and unfortunately this one is no exception. Several chapters merely present overviews of the current state of scholarship, a useful thing to have but unwanted by those who wish to read cutting-edge work on the topic. But there are also several excellent chapters, which are fascinating reads. Space and convention preclude me from setting out an outline of all the chapters; so I single out several for special mention only.
M.-L. Hänninen's chapter, ‘Religious Agency and Civic Identity of Women in Ancient Ostia’, shines a light on women in Ostia's religious life, focusing interestingly too on non-elite women being priestesses and public benefactors of religion, cults and collegia. She states that often we see a husband and a wife active in politics and religion or both active in religion (and this holds true for local elites and sub-elites). Women's religious agency was just as varied as that of men, and they participated in religion in many different ways in Ostia regardless of their backgrounds.
S. Joska's contribution, ‘“Show Them That You are Marcus's Daughter”: The Public Role of Imperial Daughters in Second- and Third-Century ce Rome’, blends memory and gender very well. Joska looks at the public roles of the daughters of the Antonine imperial family from two points of view: as actors in the public sphere and as objects of imperial policy and honours, concentrating on those daughters who had no official public role as Empress and Augusta. These imperial daughters held great dynastic potential from the start and were honoured even as young girls, becoming part of Roman cultural memory.
The chapter by M. Harlow and R. Laurence, ‘“At the Age of Nineteen” (RG 1): Life, Longevity, and the Formation of an Augustan Past (43–38 bce)’, examines Augustus’ boyhood and youth, and posits that Augustus’ actions and recollections were shaped by his interactions with considerably older Romans (such as Cicero and Atticus) and perhaps by his being referred to as puer by senators. Octavian may also have recalibrated the expectations the Romans had of attributing character traits or behaviours to people of different ages (p. 175): Harlow and Laurence remind us that the Forum of Augustus (dedicated in 2 bce) was actually begun by a youthful Octavian right after the battle of Philippi. Missing in this chapter is any consideration of Augustus’ portraiture, which remained youthful his entire life, but all in all it is excellent, especially the authors’ characterisation of the Res Gestae as the memories of a young man as an old man (p. 176).
R. Berg's piece, ‘Dress, Identity, Cultural Memory: Copa and Ancilla Cauponae in Context’, was the standout chapter for me, an excellent, tightly focused and well-researched article, as one has come to expect from this exciting scholar. Here she looks in detail at the dress of Roman women working in bars and inns (a neglected subject) in literary and iconographic evidence, from tucked-up tunics to mitrae, with an examination as well of the jewellery finds in several cauponae of Pompeii. Syrian clothing brought up a whole host of associations for the Romans, she finds (pp. 209–11), as well as girt-up clothing that recalled mythological figures such as Diana and Ganymede. She makes the important point (p. 206) that ‘many different types of female subaltern identities co-existed, identities that had to be claimed, distinguished, and communicated through combinations of behaviour and appearance’.
The last chapter is C. Laes's ‘Mental Hospitals in Pre-Modern Society: Antiquity, Byzantium, Western Europe, and Islam. Some Reconsiderations’. Laes expands on his work on disabilities in antiquity with a broad and fascinating look at the care of the insane across time and culture (although the chapter seems to have little to do with gender, memory or identity in the ancient world). Mental illness was recognised in the ancient world, and doctors thought it was treatable (p. 307), although no special institutions existed for confining the insane, and it is likely that family members took care of this (p. 308). He finds that scholarship on the establishment of mental hospitals in Europe has largely ignored the profound impact of demonology and possession in different cultures, and revisits the reasons why hospitals for the insane took so long to become established in the west (pp. 314–17).
This is an uneven volume, as many Festschriften are. But there are some valuable chapters for those interested in these three very wide topics within Roman society and culture.
