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Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private Life

Online ISBN:
9780191712883
Print ISBN:
9780199235728
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private Life

Kristina Milnor
Kristina Milnor
Assistant Professor of Classics, Barnard College, Columbia University
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Published online:
1 January 2010
Published in print:
27 March 2008
Online ISBN:
9780191712883
Print ISBN:
9780199235728
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

The age of Augustus has long been recognised as a time when the Roman state put a new emphasis on ‘traditional’ feminine domestic ideals, yet at the same time gave real public prominence to certain women in their roles as wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. This book takes up a series of texts and their contexts in order to explore this paradox. Through an examination of authors such as Vitruvius, Livy, Valerius Maximus, Seneca the Elder, and L. Junius Moderatus Columella, the book argues that female domesticity was both a principle and a problem for early imperial writers, as they sought to construct a new definition of who and what constituted public life in the early Roman empire.

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