Chapter Five - Self-fashioning

Summary

This chapter focuses on funerary portraits from Roman Athens that depict women dressed as Isis as a method of self-fashioning: a process of using the body to embed oneself in existing categories, groups, and narratives. Using literary and artistic evidence, it argues that these women are probably initiates, and that the monuments promoted Greek viewers’ identification with the cult. Setting these images in a provincial context, it also suggests that the portraits make claims on both cult-specific Athenian, and more general Mediterranean-wide, forms of status.