Women in Fragments: Alternative Histories of the Roman Republic

Women in Fragments: Alternative Histories of the Roman Republic

How have we gained knowledge about women in the ancient Roman Republic? Roman historians were uniformly male, as were most historians of ancient Rome until quite recently. In the historiography handed down to us by Enlightenment-era scholars, women generally played marginal and often sexualized roles, relegated to the footnotes by historians who assumed the Roman Republic to be fully androcentric. The evidence, however, suggests otherwise. In this detailed and insightful volume, Jessica H. Clark returns to the source material to gain insight into how Roman men understood the lives, roles, and contributions of the women they included in their histories of the Roman Republic. By reexamining the puzzle pieces of ancient literature, Clark proposes that the earliest Roman historians represented women in complex ways, revealing their appreciation of women’s communities and women’s engagement in the project of the Republic―in contrast to the attitudes assumed by scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She attributes those scholars’ assumptions to the social and political circumstances of their own times and indicates how these assumptions continue to inform our own perceptions of Roman women―and therefore Roman society more generally. This study ultimately uncovers not only the women of the Roman Republic but also how modern preconceptions have distorted their image and the stories we tell about ancient Rome. “A clear-eyed yet optimistic assessment of our extant, mostly fragmentary, historical sources on women in the Roman Republic that offers compelling evidence for women’s integration within the Roman civic body. A must-read for all of us who teach Roman political history as though only men made it.” ― Alison Keith, author of Engendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic Jessica H. Clark is an associate professor in the Department of Classics at Florida State University. She is the author of Triumph in Defeat: Military Loss and the Roman Republic and a coeditor of Brill’s Companion to Military Defeat in Ancient Mediterranean Society .