A Roman Women Reader: Selections from the Second Century BCE through Second Century CE

This selection of Latin readings, drawn from texts in a variety of genres across four centuries, aims to provide a comprehensive and accurate picture of the images and realities of women in Roman antiquity. Depicted in the readings are both historical and fictional women, of varying ages and at different stages of life, from a range of social classes, and from different locales. We see them dramatized—sometimes in their own words—in the roles the women actually played, as wives and mothers, friends and lovers. This Reader differs from others in showing women in explicitly erotic roles, in drawing some of its passages from “archaic” Latin, and in encouraging a variety of critical approaches, all suitable for its intended college-level audience.

Special Features

• Introduction to the study of Roman women
• 780 lines of unadapted Latin text in 21 readings, drawn largely from literary sources (Plautus, Cato the Elder, Cornelius Nepos, Livy, Aulus Gellius, Cicero, Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Petronius, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, Sulpicia, Martial, Juvenal), with a few from inscriptions and other documents
• Notes at the back and complete vocabulary
• Suggested reading; time line
• 3 illustrations