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A study of women’s lives in the public sphere of the ancient city of Pompeii. Pompeii’s well-preserved remains provide a unique opportunity for the close study of ancient lives. Drawing on statues, inscriptions, graffiti, wall paintings, and the architecture of tombs, sanctuaries, houses, and public spaces, The Lives and Deaths of Women in Ancient Pompeii examines the public lives of women in Pompeii. Art historian Brenda Longfellow explores how historical women of all social backgrounds acted in public and exerted agency on behalf of themselves and others, ultimately finding that female initiatives in Pompeii were not only accepted but desired by the community to a greater extent than has previously been recognized. Longfellow centers her study on a few key women—including the city’s most notable female patron, Eumachia—and uses them to examine female roles in postmortem commemorations, civic patronage and benefactions, commerce, the priesthood, and the home. By following these individuals, Longfellow examines women’s lives in Pompeii in both abstract and concrete ways, allowing readers to better understand their importance to the city and society. The result is a groundbreaking book that foregrounds the agency of women in everyday Pompeii.

Literary evidence is often silent about the lives of women in antiquity, particularly those from the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Even when women are considered, they are often seen through the lens of their male counterparts. In this collection, Brenda Longfellow and Molly Swetnam-Burland have gathered an outstanding group of scholars to give voice to both the elite and ordinary women living on the Bay of Naples before the eruption of Vesuvius.Using visual, architectural, archaeological, and epigraphic evidence, the authors consider how women in the region interacted with their communities through family relationships, businesses, and religious practices, in ways that could complement or complicate their primary social roles as mothers, daughters, and wives. They explore women-run businesses from weaving and innkeeping to prostitution, consider representations of women in portraits and graffiti, and examine how women expressed their identities in the funerary realm. Providing a new model for studying women in the ancient world, Women’s Lives, Women’s Voices brings to light the day-to-day activities of women of all classes in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

In sanctuaries at Eleusis, Olympia, and Xanthos, second-century C.E. patrons built novel water features near traditional benefactions and sacred monuments; careful placement of these new water sources helped emphasize their historical and sacral relevance. Juxtaposed with the archaic treasuries at Olympia, the Early Classical Kallichoron Well at Eleusis, and the Hellenistic Grotto of the Nymphs at Xanthos, the latest additions to these sanctuaries incorporated a number of innovative architectural and display features—including large open-air basins and apsidal porticoes—that created a striking visual contrast between old and new. In each of the three sanctuaries, the strategic placement of the fountain emphasized the role of the new patron as guardian of long-standing religious traditions, while the arresting architectural form simultaneously maximized the visual impact of the fountain on thirsty worshipers and heightened the anticipation of the rituals that would be carried out in front of the monument.

As discussed in chapter 4, the Augustan period was a transformative moment for public accolades and recognition of elite women in Pompeii. The first honorific portrait statues of women date to this period, as do the first female funerary honors and permissions to use public land for private tombs. This elevated level of community honors accompanies or is accompanied by extraordinary civic and religious benefactions from the women of decurial families. In the discussion of honorific statues, we have already considered the enormous edifice that Eumachia patronized in the civic heart of Pompeii (fig. 4.15). With this complex, Eumachia not

Amedeo Maiuri, Superintendent of Naples and Campania from 1924 until 1961, described his mounting anticipation during the excavation of an extraordinarily large and grandiose tomb in June 1954 (plate 4: tomb 11 OS and fig. 2.1).¹ Working approximately 35 meters south of the Nucerian Gate, which led into Pompeii, Maiuri’s team first removed the dirt covering the top of the edifice, revealing the concrete core of what was once an enormous semicircular exedra measuring 13.5 m long and 5.65 m wide.² Stretching upward and above all the other tombs in the city, this exedra, which had a curved façade at

The tomb plot awarded to Mamia, which was discussed at the beginning of the last chapter, provides the best-known example today of a Pompeian woman singled out by the town council with permission to build a tomb on public land (fig. 3.1). Mamia’s picturesque schola tomb is located just outside the Herculaneum Gate and within 100 Roman feet of the city wall (plate 5: tomb 4 South). Thus, it stands on land controlled by the city, where legal burial required permission from the ordo. The women and men who received this permission seem to be noteworthy members of the community

In the previous chapter, we saw how the early monumental tombs built by Pompeian women, including those built by the freeborn Annedia (tomb 29 OS) and the former slaves Vertia Philumena (tomb 13 OS) and Flavia Agathea (tomb 7 OS), stand at the beginning of a flexible tradition that combines architecture, funerary equipment, and ritual in order to accomplish more than simply housing the remains of the deceased. These tombs also provided a focal point for rituals, by means of which family members and friends could honor and remember the dead. In addition, they served as physical beacons designed to

This chapter, with its focus on death and tombs, might seem more suitable as the endpoint of this narrative about the public lives of Pompeian women. But in reality, the necropoleis are an excellent place to begin, as it is here where we see the densest clusters and widest range of female activities in the community. Virginia Campbell has noted the unexpectedly high number of women referenced in the dedicatory inscriptions of Pompeian tombs as patrons, wives, mothers, daughters, freedwomen, recipients of civic honors, and even a concubine.¹ When other types of funerary inscriptions are included, like those on the

Before the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii in 79 CE, people had been living and dying in that city for centuries. And it is in the necropoleis (cemeteries) bordering the roads leading to Pompeii that some of these personalities and personal relationships most vividly come to life. For instance, the visceral grief of Mulvia Prisca could be felt in the rituals carried out on top of and alongside the lavishly decorated tomb she commissioned for her twenty-two-year-old son.¹ Facing the city and located just outside the Vesuvian Gate into Pompeii, this tomb takes the form of an altar