https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1372 Entrées d’index fr 0 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1440 In 20 CE, Aemilia Lepida was tried before the senatorial court. When the court recessed for a holiday, she rallied support by referring to her Pompeian ancestry, choosing as her venue the theatre built by her great-grandfather Pompey himself. Accompanied by a group of fellow elite women (clarae feminae), Lepida entered the theatre and invoked the imagines of her great ancestor with tearful lamentations. Based on a close reading of Tacitus’ Annales 3.22, this article focuses on his descriptions of the strategies Lepida adopted and discusses how she used her connection to Pompey to support her case and argue that the physical setting of Lepida’s appeal to the people contributed to its meaning and that she in essences was asking for a trial by the public opinion. It will demonstrate how women could use their agency in negotiating public space, with a sensitivity to social conventions of the Roman imperial elite. jeu., 04 janv. 2024 11:18:42 +0100 mer., 17 janv. 2024 10:05:41 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1440 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/550 This article provides a gender perspective on the Roman imago, the male ancestor mask, by arguing that imagines were deeply entangled in elite women’s lives in the Republic and Empire. When an elite woman was a filia, they were a vivid and didactic presence in the atrium of her natal home. When she was a nupta and uxor, copies of her patrilineal and matrilineal imagines were transferred from her natal home to her marital home. When she was a matrona and mater, her marital home could accrue more imagines when her male relatives attained the aedileship (or the higher curule magistracies) and she herself could use them didactically with her children. If an elite woman’s marriage was dissolved by death or divorce, any surviving children might inherit copies of her bridal imagines. When an elite woman died, a pompa imaginum could be part of her funus. Finally, a female maior and her patrilineal and matrilineal imagines could constitute and signify elite identities. I argue that these imagines and accompanying tituli could function as an inheritance and dos for an elite woman, and as a deposit of symbolic capital, embodying her social position and status. The imagines were an important mechanism for transferring elite female social position and status between families, and an elite woman’s own commendatio maiorum. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:57:10 +0200 lun., 16 oct. 2023 15:45:13 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/550