Women’s social relations and mobility are the main focus of the fourth chapter. Ties of friendship and love, but also enmity and hate, figure prominently in the first part of the chapter. It includes inscriptions mentioning women setting up a statue for, or receiving one from, a male or female friend, providing for a friend’s burial or including friends in their own tombs (and vice versa), but also curse tablets in which women figured both as commisioners and as targets.The second part deals with women’s involvement in patronage, their various engagements with the voluntary associations (collegia) that shaped social life in Roman cities and their presence in the main centres of social gathering: the baths, the theatre and amphitheatre. The final part of this chapter deals with inscriptions testifying to women’s travels and migration, showing thatwomen travelled for various reasons, mostly with their families but sometimes on their own (with a retinue), over considerable distances. The chapter ends with foreign (non-Roman) women migrating to Rome and Italy.

This chapter selects some of the plentiful epigraphic evidence for women of the imperial family, ranging from the relatives of the emperor Augustus to the empresses of the Severan dynasty in the early third century AD. Starting with two prominent women of leading Republican families, who may be considered as forerunners of the women of the imperial family, the inscriptions are grouped together under three headings: life, death and deeds; titles and cult; wealth and staff. By throwing light on their public image, their public titles, such as mother of the army camps, their personal staff and their economic undertakings, inscriptions allow a more dispassionate view of imperial women vilified by the ancient literary authors, such as Livia, Messalina and Agrippina Minor, and shed some light on empresses neglected by the literary sources, such as the Matidias and Sabina. Inscriptions also attest to the friendship and benefactions of indivual empresses and the way they were presented as models for (female) citizens. In contrast to the deification and cult of some empresses, inscriptions also testify to the posthumous damnatio memoriae of other imperial women or their relatives.

The introduction sets out the aims and organisation of the book briefly overviewing women's representation in the various types of inscriptions and Roman burial customs. The introduction concludes by discussing practical issues on reading and interpreting inscriptions, on the PDF with the original texts and on women's traditional virtues, names and status indicators.

Inscriptions collected in this chapter demonstrate that women were employed in a wide range of occupations: not only were they engaged in gendered professions, as hairdressers, wet nurses and midwives, but they were also involved in more general vocations, for instance as physicians, albeit less frequently than men. Women were involved in trade and a limited number of crafts (primarily clothing and luxury production), and in education, entertainment and prostitution. Most working women we meet in inscriptions were freedwomen who had been trained as slaves. Their brief epitaphs advertise their professions as part of their social identity. Apart from funerary inscriptions, amphora stamps and painted messages on potsherds record the names of female ship owners and traders exporting wine and olive oil, brick stamps demonstrate their engagement as managers and owners of brick production and lead water pipes their management of lead workshops, graffiti advertise their services as prostitutes and wooden tablets their particpation in business transactions. Most testimonies are from Rome and the cities of Italy.

This chapter focuses on women’s roles as benefactresses section I), civic patronesses or ‘mothers’ section II) and on the public honours granted to them (parts III and IV), such as public statues and public funerals. Numerous women of wealth in the Roman West bestowed lavish donations on their cities from their own resources, thus acting as their cities' benefactresses. Some also provided other services, such as mediation between the city and men in power in Rome, and were officially co-opted as patronesses or ‘mothers’ of cities and civic associations (collegia). In recognition for their merits as civic patronesses, benefactresses (or priestesses, see Chapter 5) they could be granted public honours, such as public portrait statues and public funerals. The chapter closes with a sample of painted electoral programmata in Pompeii showing women publicly supporting a candidate for office section V).

Chapter 10 synthesises the central conclusions to be drawn from the analyses of preceding chapters with regards to the Hittite case study and early imperial networks more broadly. It then returns to the issue of imperial self-narration and the wider societal implications of its scholarly and popular reproduction: the telling of simple stories about the past.

This paper examines the Gens Augusta altar from Carthage dedicated by P. Perelius Hedulus, which is often said to replicate an image panel from the Ara Pacis, in order to understand the mechanisms by which imperial images were reproduced across the empire. Where conventional models have focused simply on image correspondence, I trace the movement of artists, architectural materials, religious concepts, and ideological knowledge in order to map out the diverse and distributed networks by which images circulated in the Roman empire. In so doing, the paper upends our traditional models that see Rome as a source of images that are then reproduced on the imperial periphery. Rather than a straightforward example of replication, I argue that the altar had no direct relationship to a particular Roman model, contending instead that the images on this altar were designed in Carthage and reflect the interplay between local social dynamics and imperial ideology.

A small group of altars to the Lares Augusti, set up by the vicomagistri of Rome’s urban neighbourhoods in the Augustan period, provides examples of imperial imagery produced by patrons of low social status. Their decoration shows the early effects of new Augustan motifs, but they are not merely examples of imagery trickling down from an original, central prototype. The patrons of these altars adapted and even invented images to express their relationship with the princeps for a local audience, and for viewers the altars were themselves sources of imagery, no less ‘official’ than any other source.

Chapter 8 focuses on a category of things that was, as I shall argue, only indirectly implicated in Hittite empire-making: the plain and visually standardising ceramic vessels that furnished Hittite households as well as state institutions. Taking another critical look at traditional assumptions which link craft specialisation and efficiency theories with the symbolism of plainness and notions of state control, I propose in this chapter a consumption-oriented explanation centred not on imperial intent or influence but on the commensal fashions of an increasingly globalising East Mediterranean and Near Eastern interaction sphere.

Chapter 5 argues that the Hittite imperial network was not only surrounded by such borderlands, but dissected along a series of contemporary political faults, which were materially produced and challenged by rock reliefs and other landscape monuments.

Chapter 1 sets the scene by arguing that far from things of the past, empires and imperialist desires present a fundamental aspect of today’s geopolitics and everyday experiences. The study of ancient empires, their discourses of sovereignty and material practices, then, is critical for understanding our own increasingly neo-imperial and neo-nationalist presents. The chapter surveys relevant theoretical developments in the study of past imperial networks and sovereignty more broadly, and outlines how the complex, messy, and often paradoxical developments that make up imperial histories can be conveyed in ways that do not reproduce imperial self-talk.