A gendered landscape: Roman women's monuments, patronage, and urban contexts in Pompeii, Isola Sacra, and Aquileia (Roman Empire)

This dissertation examines the funerary inscriptions and tombs commissioned by women, either individually or in conjunction with others, at three sites, Aquileia, Isola Sacra, and Pompeii and presents a corpus of these monuments and inscriptions in the appendices. The goals of this investigation are two-fold: to uncover women's agency within the necropoleis that flanked the approaches to every Roman town; and to examine the choices that women made as tomb commissioners.; This study demonstrates that female patronage translates neither into gendered style and iconography on the monument nor into gendered language in the sepulchral inscriptions. Rather than emphasizing gender-appropriate activities and qualities, the funerary monuments commissioned by Roman women for themselves and others emphasize socio-economic status and familial ties. While the form and decoration of female-commissioned tombs differ from site to site, within each site their monuments are similar to those commissioned by men. Like their male counterparts, female patrons emphasized social status through a variety of tactics, including the language of the inscription, the size and location of the tomb, the tomb's form, and its decoration.; While female-commissioned funerary monuments were not visually "gendered," other patterns are visible within the corpus, including a distinction between ante-mortem and post-mortem tombs, similarities in the types of relationships commemorated, and the intentional demarcation of social status. These patterns are illustrated by the examination of select monuments within the catalogued corpus, including the tomb of Eumachia and the tombs of Naevoleia Tyche and Gaius Munatius Faustus at Pompeii; tombs 29, 100, 55, and A at Isola Sacra; and the lateral portrait altars from Aquileia.; The use of tomb types that differ both from site to site and from city-Roman tombs supports a heterarchical model for status display, one in which multiple avenues for self-presentation exist simultaneously in Roman society. In the context of Roman tombs, the application of a heterarchical, rather than hierarchical, model allows us to see that groups within the Roman world, distinguished by location, social class, profession, or gender, constructed and used rankings and markers that had meaning and significance within their own community.