Introduction

This chapter scrutinizes the limits of women's agency and authority in the Roman world during the first four centuries CE. I will contextualize the public activities of women of the local elites with the agency of women of less prominent status, who were influential in their own social contexts, local communities, and neighbourhoods, even if they were never honoured or commemorated by their home patriae. Indeed, while recent studies, especially by Emily Hemelrijk, have shown that women of the local elites had an important role as benefactresses and patronae in local urban contexts,1 little attention has been paid to the down-to-earth authority that women of more modest backgrounds had. I will also argue how the visibility of women's public participation (to modern scholars) depends on and is limited by the Roman ideas of the proper spheres of feminine agency.

I am interested in the women's agency especially at the fringes of the Roman legal influence and on the borderline of the public and private spheres. In the context of the Roman society, the concepts of ‘public’ and ‘private’ are far from clear-cut: sometimes they can even denote two ways of looking at the same phenomena.