‘Facitis vobis suaviter’ (‘enjoy yourselves’) proclaims a woman in a banqueting scene in the House of the Triclinium (V.2.4) in Pompeii (CIL IV 3442a). Her voice is one among many that appear in Brenda Longfellow and Molly Swetnam-Burland's edited volume, which charts the dynamics of female agency in the Bay of Naples—primarily in Pompeii and Herculaneum—up until 79 c.e.
This well-illustrated volume comprises an introduction, thirteen essays, an epilogue, a collective bibliography and a general index. The essays are distributed over three sections: ‘Public and Commercial Identities’, ‘Women on Display’ and ‘Representing Women’. The contributions are commendably accessible, avoid jargon, and offer translations of ancient textual sources. The volume will be an invaluable teaching tool for undergraduate and graduate students studying Roman Italy and a welcome addition to the library of any scholar working on women in the ancient Mediterranean.
The contributors bring novel approaches and interpretations to well-studied evidence (including inscriptions, wall-paintings, honorific statues, monuments, buildings) as well as highlighting underused corpora (graffiti, sculptures from extra-mural tombs). They challenge preconceptions about women's roles and provide many avenues for future research.
In their introduction, the editors contend that ‘civic, religious, and funerary monuments built by and for women cannot be visually distinguished from those built by or for men’, nor can ‘the handwriting of a woman be identified in a graffito’ (2). This lack of differentiation has meant that previous scholars have often envisioned Pompeii as ‘a city inhabited by men’ (2). Women were rendered invisible as much—if not more—by scholarly myopia as the Vesuvian communities of antiquity. To remedy these problems, contributors adopt an interdisciplinary approach, a focus on female agency, an intersectional lens through which to view ‘women of a range of ages and social classes’ (3), and a principle of inclusion that reads ‘women into the picture’ (4). This admirable method might have been even more effective if there had been more explicit engagement with theoretical frameworks around female agency and intersectionality (and with their definitions and problems), but there is no doubting the contributors’ intentions and the value of their results.
Lauren Petersen's illuminating opening essay shows just how productive reading women back into the story can be. Revisiting the Temple of Isis (VIII.7.28) in Pompeii, she notes that scholarship has focused on the father of the young male dedicator N. Popidius Celsinus and not his mother Corelia Celsa. This even though Celsa's name appeared on the mosaic floor of the ekklesiasterion and in her son's cognomen (CIL X 848)! Such omissions efface women and ‘belong to a larger pattern of silences in the scholarship’ (13). Petersen demonstrates how source and archive reassembly can produce new narratives of a more heterogeneous Pompeii. Her challenge to ‘re-see’ ancient sources and to make women ‘integral to the city's material history’ is taken up by her fellow contributors (24).
The subsequent four essays explore economic and public roles for women in the Bay of Naples and beyond. Swetnam-Burland compares the epigraphic evidence for freedwomen nummulariae (money-handlers) in the familia Caesaris under Claudius and Nero (CIL VI 8639) with Campanian material evidence to argue that women of all social classes could possess substantial social and financial agency. Lauren Caldwell continues in this vein, maintaining that the peculium (allowance) and spinning and weaving work offered free daughters-in-power and enslaved women some opportunities for economic roles. Barbara Kellum contends that the public priestesses who dedicated public monuments on the east side of Pompeii's Forum (Eumachia, Mamia, Alleia Decimilla) innovatively drew on imperial precedents (Livia, Octavia) to ‘structure a monumental public persona’ (82). Earlier precedents from Republican Rome could also have been adduced (e.g. Publicia and a temple of Hercules: CIL VI 30899). Eve D'Ambra offers a reappraisal of the Forum Frieze in the so-called atrium of the estate of Julia Felix (II.4.3) and sheds light on subaltern identities and goals. She argues that Julia Felix commissioned a vision of market days at Pompeii's Forum that rendered visible the city's ‘working and commercial classes’ (102).
Contributors in the second section disclose the multifaceted ways in which women self-identified and were identified by others. Longfellow re-examines female portraiture in Pompeii, particularly funerary statues from extra-mural tombs, and considers how they served as precedents for later female honorific statues in civic spaces. Elaine Gazda closely attends to the Bacchic frieze in Room 5 of the Villa of the Mysteries, hypothesising that the faces, especially those of the ‘domina’ and ‘bride’, were portraits of individual household members. Erika Zimmermann Damer offers an important carto-onomastic foray into female names in the graffiti of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Her analysis indicates that such names appeared in domestic and public contexts throughout these cities, and that many non-elite and non-Roman women left their mark. Sarah Levin-Richardson uncovers the visibility of Pompeian prostitutes as they moved through the cityscape, obtained water from fountains and worked in the purpose-built brothel (VII.12.18–19). She also sheds lights on their various roles, speculates on their private lives, and situates them firmly in the ‘physical, economic, and social landscape’ (192).
Essays in the third section explore the relationships between idealised representations of women and their lived experiences in Pompeii. Jennifer Trimble considers the multiple possible responses of different female viewers to the banqueting scenes in the triclinium of the House of the Chaste Lovers (IX.12.6). Luciana Jacobelli identifies the woman drinking from an elevated rhyton in the banqueting scene in triclinium r of the House of the Triclinium (V.2.4) as its sometime owner: an educated courtesan who ‘in a free and autonomous manner had decided to use her house for parties and amorous meetings’ (225). Jessica Powers zooms in on an erotic marble relief from a tavern (VII.7.18), arguing that it had multiple meanings for the tavern's owner, clients and workers. Finally, Margaret Laird offers an arresting study of a corpus of graffiti drawings of women by non-professional artists, revealing their lack of conformity to images in elite media. She suggests that ‘the markers that we consider emblematic of Roman womanhood had limited appeal to the person on the street’ (264).
In her insightful epilogue, Allison Emmerson encourages future scholars to respond to Petersen's call to embrace ‘messiness, equivocality, and uncertainty’ and to recognise the full complexity of ‘the silences in our evidence’ (280). She maintains that scholarship on women in antiquity has demolished the ‘idea that the lives of Greek and Roman women are inaccessible from the present’ (280). In her view, future projects will reveal how ‘the silence of other groups likewise results from the questions we ask and the narratives we uphold’ (280). This reviewer wholeheartedly agrees.
Contributors to this volume are involved in essential and exciting work: the recovery of information about women's lives. More attention to what is meant by female (or other) agency and to intersectional perspectives on female categories and communities would, for example, have helped to explain further the gulf in agency between enslaved and elite women. However, this is a minor reservation. This volume offers innovative ways of looking at evidence, helps to correct the scholarly blindness of the past and unveils the diverse lives of the women who dwelt in Pompeii and Herculaneum.
