Lisa A. Hughes

Unveiling the veil: cultic, status, and ethnic representations of early imperial freedwomen

ABSTRACT To corroborate that the veil was the standard mode of dress that symbolized pudicitia (virtue or chastity) for Roman matrons during the Augustan period (27 BCE—CE 14), scholars have frequently turned to the ancient material record, especially funerary monuments depicting freedwomen. In this article I demonstrate that there are several difficulties with the evidence and methodological approaches applied to this corpus of evidence. I offer a new approach to show that questions that anthropologists and historians of religion are currently asking about veiling in the Muslim world can be used to formulate the basis for the wide-ranging representations of ancient Roman veiling practices. This coupled with a reevaluation of both the iconographic and epigraphic evidence on Italian funerary monuments of freedslaves reveals various cultic, social, and ethnic factors that may have influenced depictions of Roman freedwomen with or without the veil.

Morals, piety, and representations of veiled women in augustan rome

Dress, religion, and identity have been the focus of legal debates in Europe and more recently in North America (e.g. Quebec). In France the burqa has allegedly promoted the subjugation of women, which is seen as encroachment upon laïcité or the separation of church and state. In Quebec, the government is seeking to ban the burqa in a specific context, the environment of government workers. This proposed legislation is seen by many as undermining the fundamental freedom of conscience and religion set by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. These current issues offer an excellent segue into the roles head coverings have played historically for participants in religious rites. In ancient Rome, for example, head coverings, which took a variety of forms and were not necessarily always the preferred sartorial choice, could offer a means of promoting forms of identity for certain women and men. To better address this point, the temporal focus of the discussion will be the Augustan age (27 bce–14 ce): a time when the leader, Augustus, known as “first among equals,” was responsible for restoring the fallen republic—a leader who attempted on several occasions to bestow traditional views on morality and piety through social legislations. Sculpture depicting veiled women from the Augustan age is often seen as an embodiment of these reforms. It therefore offers an interesting case study to construe what is believed to be normative practice in daily life (Sebesta 1997). Modest head and body coverings on these works essentially have become a symbol of domestic propriety and proper moral conduct especially for aristocratic élite married women—a status symbol purported to have gone hand in hand with the concept of pudicitia (sexual restraint) (Langlands 2006). The Ara Pacis or “Altar of Peace,” originally located in Rome’s Campus Martius,1 is a valuable, yet extremely controversial piece of evidence, used to document social, political, and artistic developments— especially developments related to political and cultic representations of in Augustan Rome (Rehak 2001). Bas‐reliefs celebrating both Rome’s mythical past as well as members of the imperial family and senatorial élite make up the exterior walls of the enclosure. Noteworthy are the procession scenes found on the north and south sides of the enclosure because of the portrayals of the Emperor Augustus, his wife, Livia, and other select members of the imperial family (but certainly not all) with their heads veiled. Livia with head veiled and body modestly covered appears in her so‐called guise of the ideal of the pious, chaste wife on the south frieze (Figure 1). Despite the fact we see both