Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus Inventing Private Life [Hardcover]

The age of Augustus has long been recognized 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. Kristina Milnor 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 Columella, she 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 Roman public life.

Introduction
1. Reading and Writing Gender on the Augustan Palatine
2. Other Men's Wives: Domesticity and Display in Vitruvius' `De Architectura'
3. Women, History, and the Law
4. Domestic Disturbance: Talking about the Triumvirs in the Early Empire
5. Natural Urges: Marriage, Philosophy, and the Work of the House
Epilogue: Burning Down the House: Nero and the End of Julio-Claudian Rule

Kristina Milnoris Assistant Professor of Classics, Barnard College, Columbia University.