The-People-Who-Are-Men: Livy’s Book 7 Construction of the Populus Romanus

Abstract:This article examines Livy’s deployment of women and gendered language in his second pentad, particularly Book 7, and suggests that Livy consciously explored how the shift from an aristocracy of birth towards one of merit reshaped expectations of men’s and women’s behavior. Livy increasingly constrains women’s roles and develops military service as key to Romans’ political education, whereby the proper development of Roman men is inseparable from their experience on campaign. Livy thus presents the expectations of gendered civic participation not as essential or obvious, but as something to be explained as part of the maturation of Rome’s fourth-century Republic.