https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/279 Entrées d’index fr 0 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 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/257 The article focuses on a Roman portrait of a young woman in the Metropolitan Museum of Art from the early second century C.E. The marble head, though striking for its beauty and high quality of craftsmanship, cannot be identified. It is also a fragment from a statue without an archaeological context or findspot. How do we approach a sculpture about which so much cannot be known? A visual analysis of related portraits, along with a discussion of the tradition of epitaphs, literary accounts, and artefacts of girls’ lives, such as dolls, suggest how maidens were commemorated and valued in Rome. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:36:16 +0200 jeu., 23 mars 2023 15:34:07 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/257 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/479 This paper examines Suetonius’ representation of Tiberius and sex on Capri at Vita Tiberii 43-44. Many of the features of Suetonius’ narrative move through normative elements of Roman sex culture: brothels and prostitutes, sex manuals, erotic paintings in domestic spaces, pederasty and elite garden spaces. But each element is reconstituted as something dehumanizing and dangerous in Suetonius’ telling. Tiberius constructs a radical sexuality, in which the closer an individual orbits the emperor, the more Roman notions of sex become deconstructed, atomized and reassembled in ways that expose a destructive and dangerous pathology. Nearly every structuring category that might delineate and demarcate Roman sexuality is distorted, obscured and blurred. Bodies are controlled and transformed. New functions and constructions of human embodiment are conceived. States of being become iterative replications of images imprinted in paint or on stone. Children become “bracelet workers”, little fishes or hybrid, hooved deities or woodland goddesses. Normative stages and transitions of human development are obliterated and replaced by an assemblage of activity that orbits the sexual organs of the emperor. Tiberius transforms traditional Roman sex culture and assembles an admixture of extreme and complex performances of a particularly disruptive and corrosive sexuality that confounds categories and frameworks. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:51:51 +0200 ven., 10 mars 2023 14:47:32 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/479