Women in Fragments: Alternative Histories of the Roman Republic

How have we gained knowledge about women in the ancient Roman Republic?Roman historians were uniformly male, as were most historians of ancient Rome until quite recently.In the historiography handed down to us by Enlightenment-era scholars, women generally played marginal and often sexualized roles, relegated to the footnotes by historians who assumed the Roman Republic to be fully androcentric.The evidence, however, suggests otherwise. In this detailed and insightful volume, Jessica H. Clark returns to the source material to gain insight into how Roman men understood the lives, roles, and contributions of the women they included in their histories of the Roman Republic.By reexamining the puzzle pieces of ancient literature, Clark proposes that the earliest Roman historians represented women in complex ways, revealing their appreciation of women's communities and women's engagement in the project of the Republic-in contrast to the attitudes assumed by scholars in the eighteenth and nin