POWERFUL MATRONS - Vio, Francesca Rohr

- The mos maiorum stated that only men could hold magistracies and military office, operating in the spaces dedicated to the cityÆs politics ù the senate, the popular assemblies, the courts, the Forum. Women, on the other hand, were obliged to conform to traditional behavioural models which excluded them from any form of political activity. Nevertheless, in the 1st century BCE, the emergency situation of the civil wars led some women to undertake political initiatives. This opportunity arose from the Roman matronsÆ contingent need to represent and replace the men who until recently had managed the cityÆs politics, and to safeguard the ruling power among the families on which the oligarchic system was founded. Their contemporaries and subsequent historiographers often found ways to justify these womenÆs actions in order not to compromise their familiesÆ reputations. To that end, certain legends, recast during the Late Republic and the Early Principate, identify authoritative precedents that would legitimise womenÆs initiatives in the present. This book studies the protagonists, the methods, the aims, the conse