Women’s Lives, Women’s Voices: Roman Material Culture and Female Agency in the Bay of Naples

This volume offers a bold and creative approach to recovering the experiences of women in the Roman world. The collection includes thirteen papers that were originally presented at the Third Annual Symposium Campanum at the Villa Vergiliana in October 2018. The authors demolish long-standing assumptions about the limitations of the material record, casting women as active participants in their communities.Following a brief introduction by the editors, Lauren Hackworth Petersen (chapter 1) argues that modern scholars have contributed to “silencing” Roman women by privileging certain kinds of sources and adopting the perspective of upper-class men. She calls on scholars to reevaluate what counts as a reliable source and shift their attention from elite men to the position and movements of women and other marginalized people. The remaining chapters take up this challenge.Molly Swetnam-Burland (chapter 2) shows that women of all socioeconomic statuses engaged in financial transactions of various kinds—counting money, keeping accounts, and lending or investing their money to generate interest—often without the intervention of a male intermediary and in spite of the claims of the jurists that women were prohibited from acting as bankers. Women in the Roman world could exercise significant financial agency.Lauren Caldwell (chapter 3) argues that the peculium—a fund allocated to children and slaves by the male head of household—may have enabled daughters from wealthy families to operate their own weaving businesses. Caldwell’s chapter helps us to imagine the spaces where weaving activities took place and pushes us to consider weaving both as a symbol of feminine virtue and as an activity with economic benefits for women and their households.Barbara Kellum (chapter 4) explores how the public priestesses Eumachia and Mamia employed an Augustan-inspired imagery of prosperity in their buildings in Pompeii’s Forum in order to highlight their own wealth and contributions to the economic life of their community. Based on an intriguing new identification of a pair of portrait statues, Kellum suggests that a third public priestess, Alleia Decimilla, may have been the patron of a restoration of Pompeii’s Macellum in the first century CE.Eve D’Ambra (chapter 5) offers a detailed discussion of the large entertainment and recreation complex owned by Julia Felix, whose role as manager of her own business affairs is confirmed by a painted advertisement on the building’s façade. D’Ambra suggests that Julia Felix’s gender and social status may have influenced the design and decoration of her complex, including especially the extraordinary Forum frieze, which depicts Pompeii’s working and commercial classes, both male and female.Brenda Longfellow (chapter 6) compares the honorific statue of Eumachia to earlier portraits from extramural tombs. Her fascinating analysis traces the ways in which funerary statues emphasized familial relationships and represented their subjects as virtuous, modest, and dignified, even when they did not use the popular pudicitia type. At the same time, funerary portraits and inscriptions could highlight other aspects of a woman’s identity, such as an interest in writing or an affiliation with a particular neighborhood, giving us clues about how these women saw themselves.Elaine K. Gazda (chapter 7) likewise investigates female self-presentation in her reassessment of the frieze in the Villa of the Mysteries. Based on a fresh analysis of the physiognomy of the figures, Gazda argues that they are portraits of individuals who were members of a domestic Bacchic thiasos. She suggests, moreover, that the frieze was commissioned by the young woman depicted as a bride in honor of her mother, the seated figure on the west wall, who may have been deceased at the time of her daughter’s marriage.Erika Zimmermann Damer (chapter 8) offers a “radically inclusive” catalog of graffiti naming or addressing women in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Her “carto-onomastic” approach demonstrates that women’s names were inscribed across both cities in both public and domestic contexts. The names themselves provide tantalizing clues about language preference, cultural and ethnic identity, and social status. Most were non-elite, allowing us a glimpse of women who are generally unseen. Zimmermann Damer argues that some graffiti were inscribed by women, encouraging us to consider how women could write themselves into the landscape (and written record) of the Roman world.In one of the volume’s most creative chapters, Sarah Levin-Richardson (chapter 9) brings Pompeii’s prostitutes out of the shadows, focusing on visibility in places where sex was sold as well as in the city’s streets and civic spaces, where female prostitutes may have run errands, picked up clients, and visited friends or family. Her careful analysis of the graffiti, art, artifacts, and layout of the purpose-built brothel allows us to imagine the embodied experiences of the women and girls who sold sex in this space.Jennifer Trimble’s contribution (chapter 10) invites us to consider women as viewers of art in Pompeii’s House of the Chaste Lovers (IX.12.6), a mill and bakery with a residential suite in the back. Trimble suggests a range of possible female viewers, exploring how a woman’s social position may have influenced her response to the scenes of relaxation and pleasure depicted in the building’s triclinium.Based on a reexamination of the paintings from Pompeii’s House of the Triclinium (V.2.4), Luciana Jacobelli (chapter 11) argues that the house was owned by a “courtesan,” an independent woman who entertained clients on her own terms. In the triclinium, she is depicted raising a rhyton and inviting her guests to enjoy themselves. In the small cubiculum adjacent to this room, painted scenes featuring Diotima, Corinna, and Sappho project an image of “feminine intellectual prowess” that lends additional support to Jacobelli’s claim that the house was owned by a woman.Jessica Powers (chapter 12) provides a meticulous description of an unusual erotic relief from Tavern VII.7.18 in Pompeii. She argues that the fragment originated as part of a lavishly decorated marble vessel and was later reused to create an impression of luxury in the tavern’s modest dining room. Like Trimble, Powers imagines how viewers may have responded to this image. Her thoughtful discussion demonstrates that material culture can speak to us about non-elite Romans and enslaved people, even when we don’t hear from them directly.Margaret L. Laird (chapter 13) examines drawings of women made by amateur artists, which demonstrate a complete lack of interest in the visual elements that typify portraits produced by professional artists. This suggests, Laird argues, “that the markers that we consider emblematic of Roman womanhood had limited appeal to the person on the street” (p. 264). While drawings of women are not common, Laird’s careful analysis illuminates what this underutilized body of evidence reveals about the place of women in “the mindscape” of ordinary Pompeians (p. 248).This is a rich and thought-provoking collection. The contributors use the imagination as an analytical framework while basing their research on a rigorous analysis of the material evidence. Readers will gain a deeper and more expansive understanding of the lives of Roman women and a sense of optimism about the future of the discipline. As Allison L. C. Emmerson writes in her epilogue, the innovative methods employed by the contributors can and should be taken up by other scholars to give voice to women and other marginalized groups in Roman society.