Page - 23 - in Austrian Law Journal, Volume 1/2017

ISSN: 2409-6911 (CC-BY) 3.0 license www.austrian-law-journal.at Fundstelle: Peppe, Women and Civic Identity in Roman Antiquity, ALJ 1/2017, 23–38 (http://alj.uni- graz.at/index.php/alj/article/view/71). Women and Civic Identity in Roman Antiquity Leo Peppe*, Rome Abstract: In ancient Rome, free women were citizens, but the notion of civic identity is more suitable than that of citizenship for the study of the Roman woman. Her position in the society differs from the position of the Greek woman: more relevant in religion and law and more present in social, civic and judicial spaces. It was an important position but always subordinate to that of the man. The birth and establishment of Christianity will not change the relationship between a man and a woman. Keywords: Women, identity, citizenship, Rome, inclusion, complementarity. I. Foreword Almost fifty years ago, we saw the beginnings of a fruitful period of research on women in the ancient world, especially in Rome and, if we speak of the Greek world, in Athens. It is difficult to single out specific names or individual works that mark a major turning point, but it seems to me that two such fundamental shifts were made first by Kari Børresen in 1968 with Subordination et équivalence. Nature et rôle de la femme d’après Augustin et Thomas d’Aquin, and later by Sarah Pomeroy in 1975, with Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity, a book translated into numerous languages. To Børresen we owe the introduction of the term ”andro- centrism”1 in these studies and later, in 1991, the introduction of the term “Matristics”2, which was deployed in symmetrical opposition to ”Patristics”. It is clear that this academic interest reflected those social and political upheavals that we can place under the banner of the (second) feminist movement. What remains today is above all the * Leo Peppe is a retired full professor of Roman Law at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre, before he was profes- sor at the Universities of Pisa, Perugia and LUISS in Rome. This article is an extended version of the lecture held at the Institut für Rechtswissenschaftliche Grundlagen – Fachbereich Römisches Recht of the University of Graz on Nov. 9, 2016. Literature is quoted only when strictly necessary or just published. Up-to-date and extensive bib- liography in LEO PEPPE, CIVIS ROMANA. FORME GIURIDICHE E MODELLI SOCIALI DELL’APPARTENENZA E DELL’IDENTITÀ FEMMINILI IN ROMA ANTICA, 421 (2016). The author basically used for his translations THE DIGEST OF JUSTINIAN (Alan Watson ed., 1985); also useful have been BRUCE W. FRIER & THOMAS A. J. MCGINN, A CASEBOOK ON ROMAN FAMILY LAW (2004); The Loeb Classical Library, https://www.loebclassics.com/ (last visited Mar. 27, 2017). The kind colleagues Irmtraud Fischer, Christoph Bezemek, Volker Grieb, and Evelyn Höbenreich have my gratitude for their questions and sug- gestions made after my lecture. 1 Coined by CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, THE MAN-MADE WORLD; OR OUR ANDDROCENTRIC CULTURE, V. Masculine Literature (1911): “Within this last century, ‘the woman's century’, the century of the great awakening, the rising demand for free- dom, political, economic, and domestic, we are beginning to write real history, human history, and not merely mascu- line history. But that great branch of literature — Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and all down later times, shows beyond all question, the influence of our androcentric culture.” 2 KARI ELISABETH BØRRESEN, FROM PATRISTICS TO MATRISTICS: SELECTED ARTICLES ON CHRISTIAN GENDER MODELS (2002).