The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (59 page)

9. The American painter Benjamin West’s canvas
Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus
was unveiled in 1768, and earned him the patronage of King George III.

10. In Federico Fellini’s 1972 film
Roma
, a young boy at the cinema pictures the local pharmacist’s wife, described as ‘worse than Messalina’, greeting customers queuing for sex outside her car, and then gyrating on top of the vehicle in Roman costume.

11. By using a line drawing of a Roman bust thought to depict Messalina as the title-page illustration for their landmark publication on female criminology,
La Donna Delinquente
(1893), Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero implied that one could read the empress’s propensity for misdemeanour on her face.

12. The Gemma Claudia, possibly a wedding present to Claudius and Agrippina Minor. The jugate heads of Claudius and Agrippina Minor (
left
) are shown facing the bride’s popular parents, the deceased Germanicus and Agrippina Maior.

13. This relief of Agrippina Minor crowning her son Nero was discovered in 1979 at Aphrodisias, in Roman Asia Minor. She carries a cornucopia of fruit in her left arm, thus associating her with Demeter, Greek patron goddess of the harvest.

14. A story that Nero had his mother Agrippina’s belly cut open after her death, so that he could see where he had come from, gained popularity in the medieval period. This illumination is from a fifteenth-century manuscript of the
De casibus virorum illustrium
(
On the Fates of Famous Men
) by Giovanni Boccaccio.

15. A second-century terracotta tomb relief from Ostia showing a Roman midwife preparing to deliver a baby while another woman stands behind the birthing chair, supporting the labouring mother. Such chairs had crescent-shaped holes in the seat through which the baby could be received.

16. A jointed ivory doll found in the grave of a girl named Crepereia Tryphaena, who lived in the second century. Notice the adult proportions of the doll, with its wide child-bearing hips, and the hair styled in a fashion made popular by imperial women of the time, such as Marcus Aurelius’s wife Faustina.

17. Roman necklace with amethyst, garnet and topaz elements, dating to the second or third century. The question of how much jewellery a woman should wear was a fraught subject in the Roman imagination. Too much could imply a frivolous and greedy nature, too little could reflect poorly on her husband or father’s status.

18. This painted mummy-portrait of a richly jewelled woman from the Fayum district in Egypt makes a colourful contrast to official portraits of imperial women.

19. An ivory comb from a woman’s grave dating to the third or fourth century. It appears to be engraved with the woman’s name, Modestina. Many such items from Roman women’s dressing tables have been recovered, including scent bottles, make-up boxes and even a
calamistrum
(curling iron).