Cristina Rosillo-López and Silvia Lacorte’s Cives Romanae: Roman Women as Citizens during the Republic brings together nineteen scholars whose contributions collectively seek to challenge the long-standing assumption that Roman women were ‘second-class’ citizens during the Republican period. This ambitious goal is undertaken across three separate themes. First, ‘citizenship’ is reconsidered through a much broader lens than the conventional focus on voting rights and military duties. Attention then turns to the ‘political agency’ of cives Romanae, particularly their ability to shape public affairs in matters ranging from legal disputes to questions of taxation. The final section, dedicated to ‘space, memory, and community’, further broadens the scope by engaging with some of the most recent historiographical trends, notably the Spatial Turn and Gedächtnisgeschichte (‘memory studies’).

The volume opens with an introductory chapter where the editors establish there is ‘no room for doubt: Roman women were citizens’ (9). They also include a table that classifies the main categories of citizens — men and women sui iuris, freedmen and freedwomen, adult men and women under their father’s potestas, orphaned boys and girls, Vestals — in order to assess each group’s rights and obligations using six criteria: suffrage, military service, eligibility for public office, taxation, potestas and property management. The resulting overview is an illuminating picture of how modern scholarship has disproportionately focused on the first two criteria at the expense of the others. This further underlines how the rights and duties of Roman women were no more restricted than those of other citizens, such as adult men under their father’s potestas and proletarii (15).

These preliminary considerations are then developed in the first thematic section, ‘Citizenship’, which opens with Susan Treggiari’s observations about the absence of any surviving testimony about free Roman women not being considered as citizens. Her chapter examines the relationship between citizenship, marriage and bearing legitimate children in Livy’s narrative of the Sabine women and Gaius’ Institutes. Aglaia McClintock examines the transmission of citizenship both within and outside the legal framework of conubium, drawing attention to the asymmetry in how men and women passed on their legal status. Estela García Fernández turns to the various groups of Latin women, ranging from the first citizens of the colonies in Cisalpine Gaul to members of the native communities who were granted the ius Latii by Pompey Strabo in 89 b.c.e. Carla Rubiera Cancelas investigates the effects of manumissio on enslaved women who thereby acquired both freedom and citizenship. The transition not only conferred citizenship upon libertae but also a degree of respectability comparable to that of freeborn women, particularly through their conduct towards members of the familia. The section concludes with Amy Russell’s persuasive argument that women played a fundamental role within the populus Romanus, while Giulia Vettori highlights the significance of dowries not only for Roman families but also for the Republican state itself.

The following section, which explores women’s ‘political agency’, begins with Kathryn Welch’s study of Livy’s matronae. She argues that Mommsen’s Römische Geschichte adopted a far more critical stance towards women’s public visibility than the Roman historian did himself. Henriette van der Blom analyses cases where women addressed public audiences and concludes that female oratory was generally associated with more personal concerns than those of a political nature. Lovisa Brännstedt connects evidence of female defendants in trial proceedings to the rights of free Roman women to initiate legal action as well as to appeal to the people. Kit Morrell highlights women’s interest in legal matters that affected them while being allowed, to some extent, to influence new laws and senatus consulta. Cristina Rosillo-López pertinently demonstrates that women sui iuris were subject to taxation in Rome, Italy and the provinces. Elena Torregaray Pagola traces women’s involvement in Roman diplomatic practice all the way from the city’s foundation to the ages of Cornelia Africana and Octavia, emphasising their recurrent portrayal as mediadoras como en salvadoras (‘as mediators and as saviours’, 312). Pilar Pavón focuses on the lives of three prominent women, Aemilia Tertia, Cornelia Africana and Sempronia, whose personal fortunes (and misfortunes) were closely tied with those of their families as well as of the Roman Republic. Through the case of Aemilia Lepida, Frédéric Hurlet explores the informal political influence of Roman women at the end of the Republic while also establishing how this could bring scrutiny from the emerging imperial power.

The volume’s final section explores how women’s civitas was expressed in civic spaces as well as through collective remembrance and communal belonging. Ana Mayorgas examines the changing forms of female commemoration from archaic Rome to the late Republic, tracing both their origins and constraints. Francesca Rohr Vio investigates legal definitions of citizenship with socio-anthropological perspectives that emphasise the expectations surrounding motherhood for citizen women. Lewis Webb examines the ordo matronarum, from its origins in the third century b.c.e. to its subsequent development as a way of exploring the ‘performance of female citizenship’ (427) in Republican Rome. Lidia González Estrada further expands the discussion with the religious involvement of women from Italian communities to the preservation of the pax deorum. The book concludes with a chapter by Carmen Alarcón Hernández which draws together the main themes and is followed by indexes of persons and subjects.

The volume’s principal strength lies in the coherence and the quality of its chapters. Each contribution convincingly advances the editors’ central question. There is, however, a difference in the extent to which each chapter breaks new ground. Those by Rosillo-López and Morrell particularly stand out for their ground-breaking arguments, the former offering a compelling reassessment of women’s contribution to the Roman taxation system and the latter identifying specific contexts in which women could influence legislation and senatus consulta. By contrast, other contributions, notably those of Treggiari, Pavón and González Estrada provide an authoritative overview of the existing historiography. Yet these chapters are no less significant in their value for a volume of such breath and ambition. They are all equally significant to its key objective of challenging the still widespread ‘all-male model of Roman political culture’ (21) in both popular and scholarly literature, a point made clear from the opening pages. When taken as a whole, Susan Treggiari’s opening assertion that ‘the question of whether Roman women were citizens is laid to rest by this book’ (45) can only be acknowledged as correct.