From the powerful Empress to the Forgotten slave, the Museum of Romanness, Nîmes, traces the course of these women with multiple faces and questions their role in antiquity.
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The exhibition. Carrier of a pejorative charge in French to the point of sometimes qualifying a boss of Bordel, the word “matrone”, in ancient Rome, the wife and the mother model referred to the opposite. It is in this ideal figure and, by extension, instead of the woman in the Roman society, that devotes the new temporary exhibition of the museum of Romanity, in Nîmes (Gard). An exhibition designed by the galleries of the Offices in Florence, from which the vast majority of the rooms presented, mostly busts and altars come.
The purpose focuses on the i and ii e centuries, and consequently on the first imperial dynasties. The concept of matrone, already standard of reference during the monarchy and the Republic, then knows an important evolution. Domiseda (woman who is at home) and lanifica (the one who files the wool) finally go out of the home. As explained by the Commissioner of Exhibition, Italian Novella Rabini, a specialist in the status of the female in Rome, “it is the Emperor Auguste who will update the figure of women, involving them in public spaces which are male spaces. They can now play a public role in society, which was not the case under the Republic. “
Do we understand: This emancipation concerns above all the women of the elite, who benefit from a certain freedom of action but also of a real education. The exhibition thus has the bust of a woman holding in her left hand a roll of papyrus, refined culture symbol and access to scholarship. Another good example, that of the altar that a certain Genicia grape pupils to her husband … a former slave she has freed.
Power games
Everything does not happen to idylyly. Although some women drop the imperial title of Augusta of their living and diva, that is to say of goddess, to their death, the games of power to which some people can cost them expensive, as it is The case for the two agrippine, the old and the young, at the century: the first dies during the exile that the Tiberian Emperor and the second imposes on him, his daughter, is murdered On the order of his own son, Nero.
Finally, there are those who refuse to comply with the virtuous matrone model, faithful wife and exemplary mother. We would like to not quote the curse found on the back of an altar, addressed to a woman party with her lover after poisoning her husband (adultery and poison often went hand in hand in the accusations made to women): “that nails and a spart rope tighten his neck and the boiling pitch burns his evil chest. “In this register of counter-examples to the matrone, it will be noted that the exhibition of Nîmes fails to evoke the most famous Roman of the I century, whose name, by Antonomase, now refers to a woman with depraved morals: Messaline.
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