The Dangers of Female Mobility in Roman Imperial Times

Abstract

Recent work on mobility and migration in the Roman empire offers many useful insights into the dynamics of ancient travel, even though the subject of women and travel specifically has been addressed in only limited, albeit useful, ways.2 Though women’s opportunities for stepping out of the house and travelling on a short or long journey were much more restricted and limited in range than those of the mobile man, Roman imperial women did travel more often than we used to think. Yet the image of the woman who centres her life on her family and restricts her daily activities to those within the domestic walls was an ideal that never lost its power and attraction in Roman society, even in imperial times, when the changing political and social circumstances gave especially upper-class women more opportunities for stepping into the more public (and male) sphere of politics and power. The traditional ideal of domestic focus for Roman women is the framework within which senators were asked to evaluate the proposal that Aulus Caecina