This chapter calls attention to the violence of everyday life in the Roman world as the backdrop to the more extraordinary violence of war. Drawing specifically on archaeology, which is poorly equipped, it is argued, to reveal war violence but well situated to reveal the unusual volatility of living in the Roman world, it describes the ordinary upheavals of daily life. In particular, it examines the archaeological evidence for volatility in domestic circumstances, in how one made a living, and the physical trauma experienced by working bodies.

This chapter examines the role of elite women as property owners and financial managers in the Late Roman Republic. It highlights how women, often perceived as temporary custodians of wealth, actively engaged in economic transactions, from land-ownership to commercial investments. While matrons such as Cornelia and ‖Turia’ were praised for their responsible management of wealth, others like Clodia and Fulvia were criticized, often as a tool for political delegitimization. Legal and social transformations, including increased autonomy in property management, enabled women to exert financial influence, sometimes even in political spheres. However, ancient sources frequently downplay or stigmatize their economic agency, portraying wealth as a destabilizing factor in gender and social hierarchies. By reassessing historical and literary evidence, this study sheds light on the complex relationship between Roman women, wealth and power, revealing their significant yet contested role in the economic framework of the Republic.

“War,” writes military historian Alexander Sarantis, “is largely a niche area rather than a mainstream concern of late antique and Byzantine studies, which tend to be dominated by theological, literary, artistic, and socio-economic themes.” The fact that war and warfare now occupy a “relatively marginal position in modern scholarship” reflects a number of shifts in the academic landscape, from the reframing of Late Antiquity as a period of change and continuity (rather than an epoch of decline) to the entrenchment of cultural history as the dominant approach in history departments across North America and Europe. And yet, even as military historians have dismantled stale theses about “military decay” as the root cause of the empire’s geopolitical fragmentation and show the late Roman army to have been a source of Rome’s extraordinary resilience, “their” topics of war, warfare, and the army nonetheless fail to resonate with most scholars of Late Antiquity. As Bryan Ward-Perkins wryly notes in his controversial 2005 book, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, “banishing catastrophe” has become a mainstream response to late antique narrative history. Where has war gone?

This chapter examines the evidence for the economic situation and legal rights of Licinnia, daughter of Publius Licinius Crassus Dives Mucianus and wife of Gaius Sempronius Gracchus. It is argued that she owned (probably as part of her dowry) the house on the Palatine where the couple lived together until Gaius Gracchus moved near the Forum in the last year of his life. The wealth Licinnia brought with her supported her married life and her husband’s prominent career. After her husband’s violent death and the confiscation of his property by the state, Licinnia retained her dowry and subsequently sued successfully for damages to her dotal property that had resulted from rioting. Licinnia’s experiences illustrate the economic and social independence of Roman women in the late second century BCE.

This chapter considers the role of elite women in the auctions of confiscated property during the Late Republic, particularly Sulla’s proscriptions of 81 BCE, and argues that elite women could benefit economically from civil war. While participating in these confiscations harmed the reputations of men close to the dictator, association with the proscriptions was even more damning for the women involved. Several of Sulla’s female relatives were said to have participated in the proscription auctions, with his Caecilia Metella branded as a sectrix proscriptionum or ‘auctioness of the proscriptions’. This label transformed elite women into distasteful, lower-class brokers of proscribed property, showing how the issues of inheritance and wealth raised by the proscriptions could influence female reputations. A comparison with the Servilia and Fulvia, later alleged female profiteers, reveals a continued discourse about the economic and political power of women who profited from confiscated property.

The volume introduction sets out the current debate on the role of women in Roman politics and the significance of wealth and draws attention to the understudied intersection between these topics, which is the justification for this volume. A summary of the volume sections then follows.

As in many pre-modern societies, in ancient Rome the use of and protection from violence acted as a blunt display of an individual’s power. When a person did violence to another, they manifestly had the power to do so. Violence not only creates social hierarchies, but it also protects them, and power, status and wealth, and the resources they commanded, played an important role in protecting high-status individuals from the threat of everyday violence and physical coercion, treatment more readily associated with those of lower status. But while we know this to be the case for the powerful men of ancient Rome, can the same thing be said to apply to powerful women? Through an analysis of the physicality of Roman power as it applied to wealthy women, both as agents and targets of physical coercion, at home and in public, this chapter argues that it can.

This chapter examines the presence of women in the Roman census and its socio-economic and political implications during the Republic. In the professio, citizens sui iuris had to declare their name, age, offspring, place of residence, occupation and properties. Viduae (a term including not only widows but also women who were no longer married) and women sui iuris also submitted census declarations. Special lists existed, for instance, of viduae and female wards, who were subject to specific taxes, namely, the aes equestre et hordiarium. This study explores the nature of the information recorded about female citizens in the census and the ways in which they were categorized. In sum, it argues that Roman female citizens should be included into a history of the census and taxation during the Roman Republic, rather than being treated as a marginal or overlooked group.

Ambrose of Milan’s funerary oration for Valentinian II (392 ce) confronts violence, civil war, and imperial authority, ultimately redefining the emperor’s body as a collection of relics. The oration’s ambiguity regarding the circumstances of Valentinian II’s premature and violent death was not merely a matter of political expediency; it also served as a rhetorical strategy to support Ambrose’s innovative treatment of the emperor’s corpse. By weaving passages from the Song of Songs into his oration, Ambrose evoked imagery resonant with same-sex desire, while presenting himself as the emperor’s guarantor – but in his very own way: as a “womanly” father and a lover mourning his beloved. In portraying Valentinian II as a selfless soldier-martyr, Ambrose rehabilitated an emperor who may have died by suicide and without the sacrament of baptism, while also redefining key imperial virtues at a time when they – and the empire – faced mounting challenges from both internal and external forces.

During the Roman Republic, almost all women without living fathers required the authorization of a male tutor (‘guardian’) for certain important legal and property transactions. This chapter examines the legal rules and lived reality of tutela mulierum (‘guardianship of women’) during the Republic. First, it outlines Roman women’s property rights and the circumstances in which a woman required her tutor’s auctoritas (‘authorisation’). Next, it considers the different types of tutor, how they were appointed and how these factors affected women’s financial freedom. Finally, it explores the variability of women’s experience of tutela, depending on the type of tutor(s) a woman had, as well as their personality and the nature of the transaction the woman wanted to perform. The chapter concludes that, although tutela might be a mere formality for some women, for others it could be a real burden and an impediment to disposing of their property as they wished.

Polybius Histories 31.25-28 is an invaluable account of the testamentary and dotal arrangements of the Aemilii Paulli and Cornelii Scipiones. The testaments encompass the introduction of the lex Voconia in 169 BCE and raise many questions about Roman women’s property rights. Does the increasing number of female heirs in the second century reveal a developing preference for female heirs? What kinds of property dispositions should be included in the study of female inheritance? How should the emphasis on Aemilius Paullus’ childlessness and legal rights of Aemilianus’ sisters be understood? This chapter argues that Roman society expected women to enjoy significant shares in their family’s estates despite the introduction of the lex Voconia; that Polybius’ point about the childlessness of Paullus demonstrates his understanding of Roman inheritance law; and, the comment that Aemilianus’ sisters lacked any legal right to Papiria’s property indicates the prosopography of the Aemilii Paulli should be revised.