sehepunkte 26 (2026), Nr. 2

Cristina Rosillo-López / Silvia Lacorte (eds.): Cives Romanae

This edited volume has its origins in the October 2022 conference "Ciudadanas: las mujeres romanas en la República", organized by Cristina Rosillo-López at Seville's Universidad Pablo de Olavide. The conference brought together ten scholars from Spain with eleven from a truly international mix of countries (including Sweden and Australia) to examine the question whether Roman women in the Republican era can be considered citizens. Or put another way, should we firmly reject the old notion that women's exclusion from institutional politics equals their absence from civic life?

The answer is a resounding yes. Over the course of nineteen papers - all but two of the conference participants contributed to this book - we find the argument that, though Roman Republican women could not vote in legislative and electoral assemblies and were excluded from political office, they were legally viewed as citizens and practiced as such. Citizenship in Rome was a legal status guaranteeing certain rights (including access to the civil law and owning, managing and inheriting property), duties (paying taxes when required), and civic inclusion (whether it be in the census or in state rituals). The evidence is lavish for Republican women engaging in each of these core aspects of citizenship. Their inability to vote or hold office does not mean that they did not belong to Rome's political community. Indeed, Roman citizenship was not fundamentally defined by political participation.

Susan Treggiari, who was the keynote speaker at the 2022 conference, opens the book proper and sets the tone for the nearly 500 pages to follow: in Rome during the historical period, women were always citizens. The second chapter, by Aglaia McClintock, reminds us that, according to Roman tradition, the first female citizens were Sabine foreigners integrated through marriage. Detailed evidence for women's civic membership in Rome is then presented in this volume across its three major divisions ("Citizenship", "Political Agency", and a shorter, more diffuse section on "Spaces, Memory, and Community"). The overarching conclusion is persuasive, that Rome's women in the Republic not only held citizenship, but actively performed it.

Six of the chapters are in Spanish, one in French, and the rest in English. A main theme of the book is that maternal transmission of citizenship was a core principle in Roman law, which in turn made women fundamental to the continuity of the whole civic order. Even in the case of illegitimate children, their status followed the mother; a Roman woman who manumitted an enslaved individual created a new citizen. Roman women also were legal subjects, capable of initiating suits or to be prosecuted in a public court, able to appear and indeed speak in proceedings, and even appeal decisions. On the whole, one gets the impression that closer reading of our ancient sources will reveal female actors in the realm of the law that modern scholarship has overlooked.

Of course, not all women's experience of citizenship was the same. It mattered, as the contributors show, whether one was freeborn or freed, urban or provincial, elite or of a lower social standing. In a particularly welcome chapter, Estela García Fernández complicates the picture by reminding us of the innumerable women with "Latin" (as opposed to full Roman citizen) status, seen especially across the western provinces in the later Republic and then into the Empire. These women were by origin peregrines, and became full Roman citizens only if a close male relative reached a magistracy in their community. A woman with 'ius Latii' had a hybrid legal condition: for instance, unless she married a Roman citizen, her children remained Latins. But that status still granted significant social and economic rights, at least within the framework of the local civic law. The evidence (almost exclusively epigraphic) on this understudied group places the privileged and transportable status of full 'cives Romanae' into high relief.

A further recurring theme is the ubiquity of women's informal political influence in the Republic. Multiple chapters reconstruct key forms of their behind-the-scenes family strategies, crisis interventions and diplomatic negotiations. Collective appearances in public by elite citizen women had a special impact in the political sphere, and (as Kathryn Welch shows) seem integral rather than exceptional to Roman civic life. The most effective instances are those where the group found representation in a powerful orator, best seen in the case of Hortensia in 42 BCE (discussed in some depth in four different chapters), who presented the claims of 1400 wealthy women against a Triumviral tax.

Taken together, the individual contributions of Cives Romanae produce a coherent and compelling understanding of women's varied and important roles in the civic order of the Roman Republic. The volume's main argument is a valuable one, that women's citizenship in Rome was differently structured from that of men, but indispensable for the functioning of many crucial elements of the state.

Numerous case studies fill the book, some understandably repeated by different authors, including from the legendary or early Republican periods. Particularly instructive is Henriette van der Blom's discussion of female oratory - or more exactly, how women might speak up to intervene in civic affairs, whether in public or in more private contexts. Van der Blom gathers almost 20 such orators into a group biography, with ample discussion of how Cicero, Valerius Maximus and Appian treated the phenomenon of women's rhetoric in Rome. Also of high value is Carla Rubiera Cancelas' sustained examination of the verse funerary inscription of the freedwoman Larcia Horaea of Minturnae (ILLRP 977), which leverages what the text says about the path taken toward civic respectability to form more general conclusions on the citizen status of ex-slaves.

One small quibble. In this thick volume, surprisingly one finds just two references to the work of Friedrich Münzer (1868-1942), and none to his hundreds of individual articles on Roman Republican women for the Pauly- Wissowa Real-Encyclopädie. Taken together, Münzer's work remains our most important compendium of source material on individual 'cives Romanae', and also offers a significant measure of critical analysis of the evidence. For instance (relevant to pp. 208-209), Münzer made a good case for considering Livy's story (8.18) of a Sergia and Cornelia as the protagonists in a poisoning case of 331 BCE as a late annalist's fabrication based on events of Cicero's consulship. "The question arises", wrote Münzer, "whether, in this account, Sergius Catilina and his most distinguished associate, Cornelius Lentulus, are meant to be alluded to. Compare also a certain Q. Fabius as the informant of the conspiracy in both cases" (RE IIA 4 [1923] col. 1721 s.v. Sergius 49).

The co-editors and their distinguished international team of contributors are to be congratulated for producing a book of central importance for the study of women in antiquity. The main connecting (and convincing) argument, that citizenship cannot be reduced simply to the act of voting, clearly has implications for periods well beyond the Roman era. Women's suffrage is a comparatively recent phenomenon, pioneered at the national level (with important exclusions) by New Zealand in 1893 and Australia in 1902, with struggles unfolding globally through much of the twentieth century, and indeed - in some political environments - up through the present moment.