Daily Life of Women in Ancient Rome

"This book is about the "daily life" of Roman women in the largest sense of daily life - the larger experiences of life from birth and childhood, through marriage and the family, the economic activities, public roles, pre-Christian religion, and the universal experiences of death and mourning. The focus of this book is on relatively "ordinary" women - including women of the upper classes - and away from "extraordinary" women such as the relatives of aristocratic politicians during the late Republic or the empresses and women of the imperial family during the Principate. This book uses documentary sources as well as literary ones; two inscriptions have already been quoted from the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, a collection of hundreds of thousands of Latin inscriptions on stone that have been reconstructed, transcribed, and published. Other documentary sources are discussed in this chapter. They are more likely to represent women's own voices and display the agency that women had within the framework of Roman society"--