S2E9: Idols for Idling Eyes: The Female Form in Roman Art
With Dr. Caroline Vout
Can we trust Roman statues to tell us about real people? What were the differences between gods and humans in art? How much of a say did the emperor have over how Roman women dressed and lived their lives? Dr. Caroline Vout answers these questions and many more in the penultimate episode of Season 2, as we learn how the Romans put bodies on display.
“So many of these representations in antiquity, the real Greeks and Romans didn’t look like that, any more than we look like the airbrushed, filtered images that we have on the internet. ”
BIO
Dr. Caroline Vout is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge and Director of Cambridge’s Museum of Classical Archaeology. From 2019–2024 she held the Byvanck Chair at Leiden University. A prolific author, some of her books include Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome (2007), The Hills of Rome: Signature of an Eternal City (2012), Sex on Show: Seeing the Erotic in Greece and Rome (2013), and Classical Art: A Life History from Antiquity to the Present (2018). Exposed: The Greek and Roman Body (2022), won the London Hellenic Prize and has been translated into Spanish. Carrie has curated exhibitions at the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Henry Moore Institute. At the former, she recently curated Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body with Christopher Young and released an accompanying book with the same title. Carrie has appeared on “Woman’s Hour” and “In Our Time,” and contributed pieces to Apollo, Minerva, History Today, as well as the Times Literary Supplement and Observer.
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Introduction
[Podcast theme music plays]
Emily Chesley: Welcome to Women Who Went Before, a gynocentric quest into the ancient world! I’m Emily Chesley.
Rebekah Haigh: And I’m Rebekah Haigh.
Emily: Scholars, friends, and your hosts!
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Emily: In today’s episode, “Idols for Idling Eyes: The Female Form in Roman Art,” we talk with Dr. Caroline Vout about supermodels, killer makeup, and how the Romans put bodies on display.
[music]
Rebekah: In a dreamy scene in the 2005 Pride and Prejudice adaption, Elizabeth Bennet tours Mr. Darcy’s grand estate of Pemberley. She meanders through an art gallery filled with white marble statues, many of which are nude and sculpted in a classicizing style. Lizzy’s eyes drink in their forms: chests, buttocks, veiled faces, muscled arms. In the film, these smooth marble bodies suggest Lizzy’s own sexual awakening and increase her desire for Mr. Darcy. Viewing these bodies changes her.
Emily: In the Classical world, these sorts of marble statues were everywhere. In banqueting halls, bathhouses, marketplaces, temples, gardens, and homes. These statues reflected and potentially also shaped how Greeks and Romans understood themselves and their world around them.[1] Alongside the statues of generals, senators, emperors, and gods were depictions of the female form, sometimes prominent women but more often portraits of goddesses or muses. These were the images Romans looked at and subconsciously learned from throughout their lives. They were the magazines, window displays, and Instagram posts of their time.[2]
Rebekah: Representing women has a long history. Perhaps the oldest known representation of the human body is the Venus from Hohle Fels, a 40,000-year-old ivory carving discovered in a cave in southern Germany.[3] It’s a fleshy, nude, voluptuous woman with protruding breasts and a deliberately-exaggerated vulva. The statue reflects fertility and sexuality—important qualities if you’re a small tribe trying to survive to the next generation. As archaeologist Nicholas Conard says, “This is an extremely powerful depiction of the essence of being female.”[4] Thousands of years later, humans were still engrossed in the female form. In art and statues, Greeks and Romans imagined the ideal female body. Like the figures in Pemberley’s gallery or the Venus from Hohle Fels, we shouldn’t take Classical representations of the female form as reflecting real women. But these objects were still part of historical reality. Theytell us something about how women’s bodies were viewed, imagined, and controlled. In turn, these idealizations may have also shaped the lives that real women lived.
Emily: To live in the world is to be on display. When you choose how you want to present yourself, display can be an empowering experience. Supermodel Gisele Bündchen has celebrated what fashion photography can do, saying in an interview, “Fashion is fun because you get to play different roles, right? One day you feel a bit more sassy. A little more sexy. Some days you feel more tomboy-ish.”[5] Ancient women, too, might have created or enjoyed viewing works of art of female bodies. Maybe some Greek and Roman women could hold power within the equation, choosing it, participating in it, or reversing it. Archaeologist Mary Harlow reminds us, “We should allow women some room for agency rather than imagining them conforming to the stereotypes.”[6] We can’t foreclose the possibility that ancient women engaged these idealized portraits of themselves just like women today do through fashion editorials.
Rebekah: But when someone puts you on display, that’s a different story. Another supermodel, Kate Moss, has spoken out about feeling forced into showing more skin than she wanted and appearing topless in photo shoots against her wishes.[7] Display is an act of creating and controlling a body—often stylized, imagined, and idealized. Our conversation today isn’t necessarily about men putting women on display, though statistically speaking many of the works of art we’ll be talking about were probably created by male artists. Rather, our conversation is really about ancient society putting women on display: how they did it, when, why, and with what result.
Emily: The female body, so compelling in the visual culture of Greece and Rome, was also a site of danger.Roman women’s adornment in hairstyles, clothing, and jewelry was supposed to reflect order and self-control, the discipline and virtues they were expected to possess.[8] Howard University professor Molly Myerowitz Levine has shown that the braided, bound, and covered hair married Roman women wore symbolized the restrained nature they were supposed to have.[9] An overly-adorned woman was a social threat. Not only did her jewelry and clothing imply artificiality, but they also suggested, in the words of Classics scholar Fanny Dolansky, “vices such as extravagance, vanity, unchastity, and frivolity, all of which threatened the welfare of the family and the state.”[10]
Rebekah: Seneca the Younger, a Roman Stoic philosopher, expresses these anxieties about expense and immodesty in an essay about what brings down kingdoms: “I see pearls—not single ones designed for each ear, but clusters of them, for the ears have now been trained to carry their load; they are joined together in pairs, and above each pair still others are fastened; feminine folly could not sufficiently have overwhelmed men unless two or three fortunes had hung in each ear! I see there raiments of silk—if that can be called raiment, which provides nothing that could possibly afford protection for the body, or indeed modesty, so that, when a woman wears it, she can scarcely, with a clear conscience, swear that she is not naked” (Seneca the Younger, De Beneficiis 7.9.4–5, trans. Basore).[11] Men like Seneca thought it was better for the kingdom’s coffers, social morality, and family order for women to dress modestly and simply.
Emily: Beauty standards shift from decade to decade: from the androgynous slim bodies of the 1960s to the bootylicious ones of the early 2000s.[12] Rather than the Hohle Fels ideal of voluptuous, rounded forms, the ancient Romans seem to have preferred women with small breasts and wide, child-bearing hips.[13] Women kept their bodies smooth with things like creams, pumice stones, and even arsenic and quicklime.[14] Just as fleshy bodies showed a woman was not on the brink of starvation, something that was an ever-present reality for many, pale skin signaled she enjoyed a life of wealthy leisure out of the sun. A pale complexion could also signal that a woman was healthy and fertile.[15] “Learn, O women, what pains can enhance your looks, and how your beauty may be preserved,” proclaimed the Roman poet Ovid(Medicamina Faciei 1–2, trans. Mozley and Goold).[16] He named various questionable recipes for beautification like whitening with lead, which made the skin brighter than a mirror and removed freckles (Medicamina Faciei 55–74).[17]The trouble with these beautification products is that many of them contained arsenic, lead, and mercury.[18] Talk about dying for beauty![19]
Rebekah: We do have some hints that not all women loved these cultural norms—what they should wear and when. In the height of the Second Punic War (218–201 BCE) the Roman Senate passed a sumptuary law.[20] Similar to the laws that rationed clothing, metal, and food during World War II, the Lex Oppia tried to build up the state economy by forbidding women from wearing multicolored clothing, owning more than half an ounce of gold, and riding a carriage within a mile of the town except for a religious festival.[21] This wartime law remained in place for twenty years, well after the war had ended, and it prevented women from expressing their status and identity through personal adornment.[22] When some tribunes tried to keep this gendered austerity law in place, Roman women grew outraged and took to the streets in defiance. Cato the Elder, quoted in Livy, describes in scandalized tones how this “female cabal” blocked all the roads in the city and all approaches to the Forums. He warned that once men conceded to their demand, who knew what other freedoms Roman women would demand next! “As soon as they begin to be your equals they will immediately be your superiors” (Livy, History of Rome 34.3, trans. Yardley), he groused.[23] Despite his objections, women’s protests won out, and eventually the senators conceded.[24] This story offers a rare glimpse into how women responded to the control over their looks and public appearance.
Emily: There is power in displaying the body, and this was true across the ancient Mediterranean. From writing unflattering literary depictions of one’s enemies’ appearance to branding the foreheads of slaves.[25] The more power you had, the more control you could exert over other people’s bodies. And in the Roman Empire, ultimate power lay with the emperor. As our guest today will remind us, “All bodies were policed by an emperor…”[26]
Rebekah: Dr. Caroline Vout is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. She is also Director of Cambridge’s Museum of Classical Archaeology and has curated exhibitions at the Fitzwilliam Museum and at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. From 2019–2024 she held the Byvanck Chair at Leiden University. Some of her publications include Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome (2007), The Hills of Rome: Signature of an Eternal City (2012), Sex on Show: Seeing the Erotic in Greece and Rome (2013), and Classical Art: A Life History from Antiquity to the Present (2018). She curated an exhibition and wrote a book with Christopher Young, both titled: “Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body.” Of her many publications, the book we are excited to talk about today is Exposed: The Greek and Roman Body (2022), which won the London Hellenic Prize and has also been translated into Spanish. Carrie has appeared on “Woman’s Hour” and “In Our Time,” and contributed pieces to magazines such as Apollo, Minerva, History Today, and to the Times Literary Supplement and Observer. We are delighted to welcome her to the podcast.
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Interview
Emily: In the 4th century BCE, the sculptor Praxiteles created the first life-sized nude presentation of the goddess Aphrodite, which at the time was a scandalous thing to do.[27] In the statue, she seems to have just stepped out of the bath, reaching for a towel while coyly covering her pubic area with her hand. Replicas of this Aphrodite of Knidos proliferated across the ancient Greek and Roman worlds like the Venus de’ Medici, copied in the 1st century BCE. Now, this Roman Venus is one of the most-copied statues of all time. Later during the Renaissance it appears all over villas, illustrations, and English gardens.[28]
The body of this goddess of love has become a symbol of Classical culture and power and an object of desire in at this point millennia of reception. So Carrie, I’m curious, do these Classical depictions of goddesses like Aphrodite reflect what Greek and Roman society imagined as the ideal female body? Or if they represent more of a divine ideal, what was the human female body expected or desired to be?[29]
Dr. Caroline Vout (Carrie): I mean Aphrodite is just one of the goddesses to be embodied in sculptural form in ancient Greece and Rome. I mean, if you think about some of the others, you've got Artemis, for example, or you've got Athena, who's the goddess of war and wisdom always in her helmet. They're both goddesses of chastity. So they're very different from Aphrodite, and therefore that also demands a very different kind of body.
And I think none of these bodies, really, are very like real women's bodies. The Greeks decided pretty early on on a solution that was anthropomorphism. They decided to make their gods and goddesses look like men and women. But only up to a point. [laughs] Because ultimately, why was the Aphrodite of Knidos statue by Praxiteles so shocking, as you said so scandalous, back in the 4th century BC, if not because this was a female body depicted with no clothes on? And no respectable Greek woman at that time would have been depicted in public sculptural form without their clothes. So the moment you see a form like that nude, that makes that body an aberrant body, just as seeing Artemis in a little tunic running around with her knees bare makes her an aberrant body, just as having Athena with her helmet on makes her an aberrant body.
So in all sorts of ways these are really odd, [laughs] and they have to be odd because they're gods. And gods do gender—as well as all sorts of other things—very differently from humans.
At the same time, though, the form that is Aphrodite, what is that form all about if not fertility? And fertility is an ideal to which human women are held. And so in that sense she represents something that men want of their women. But when you consider the stories that say that the Aphrodite of Knidos is modelled on a prostitute, then that again complicates all of that. You know, these are stories designed to try and work out just where on the human-divine scale and on the ideal-aberrant scale bodies like this fit.
And of course, if you ask what mortal Greek women who—I mean the very few of them that get to be represented in marble and bronze look like—I've said they don't, they didn't look nude, but they're they're very bundled up, covered up, veiled, with their bodies controlled. So they're the complete antithesis to the bathing Aphrodite. And the bathing Aphrodite, of course, is not naked. She's nude. And there's a subtle distinction. [chuckles] You know, you're born naked. But you're, as a nude you're–- It's an artificial state parading at being natural. It's a very posed state, a very provocative state.
Emily: I mean, even thinking too about the effort that the sculptor goes into to create what something that looks effortless or having multiple sitters, you know multiple models potentially for one statue.
Carrie: I mean, there are stories then, that you're evoking, from antiquity that suggest that if you're trying to represent something as beautiful as Helen as Troy or something as exquisite and kind of unrepresentable as the Aphrodite, then what do you do? You don't just find one female model, you find a number. And you take what antiquity deemed the best bits of each of them to create something that is superhuman. And in the process of course you fragment women, and you fetishize their bodies.
But of course Aphrodite is interesting because she, you know, she's standing there without any clothes on in the temple of Knidos, which is the community that eventually dares to buy her. And they put her in a temple, the design of which enables an exploitation of her body so as to ensure she's seen in the round. And there she attracts the gaze in a way that you might think would objectify her. But actually, this is at a time when you've got myths about Actaeon and seeing Diana naked and then being turned into a stag and ripped apart by his own hunting dogs. So actually more [fatal? for] you the viewer to think that the power is with you and she's the object; she’s always in control.
Rebekah [understanding]: Mmhm.
Carrie: And that's why she can never be an ideal woman because an ideal woman would be under the control of men.
Rebekah: It's not just Greece and Rome where we find statues of naked goddesses. You know, in some of our earliest statues of female figures from Mesopotamia depict voluptuous, nude figures with prominent breasts.[30]And there are a lot of discussions: Are these goddesses? Are these regular women? Do they signify fertility? What's going on here?
There is a tension in this display of the nude divine body because as you said, this is not norm for real women. In the stately villas of ancient Rome and Greece, women were layering themselves with clothing, preserving their bodies for the men to whom they legally belonged. So given this expectation that real women were to be covered, why or under what circumstances was the regular female body depicted naked, essentially, or otherwise in art?
Carrie: Well in, I mean, in the Greek world, even before you have Praxiteles unveil his Aphrodite in the 4th century BC, you do have women without clothes depicted on pottery. Athenian pottery, for example. But pots of all sorts of shapes, but shapes which are usually thought to have been used at the male-only drinking party that was the symposium. The scholarship always talks about these as being images of sex workers because of the context being the drinking party. But of course these are not necessarily that because art doesn't map directly onto life. These are forms designed to stimulate and titillate. You know, who's to say that the man picking up the drinking cup in question didn't look at an image like that and think about his wife as much as, you know, the flute player that was sitting on the couch next to him. So you get women with that clothes in those sorts of contexts.
But I think as far as more public sculpture is concerned, some of the most interesting pieces that I can think about that explore this tension for you, are a group of sculptures that were made at the end of the 1st century AD under the Roman Empire. And we don't have contexts for all of them, but for the majority of them for which we do, they seem to be funerary in their function. And they are statues of real women. They have really kind of realistic, one might say even veristic—so kind of, you know, slightly jowly wrinkled— portrait features. And they have exquisite, Roman copied-from-the-imperial-court hairstyles. But rather than being bundled up, the artist has literally lifted the body of the Aphrodite of Knidos off the peg and plonked it in its glorious nudity onto [laughs] these women so that they wear the Aphrodite’s body like a costume. And you know, what on earth is that about in a world in which women enjoy slightly more freedoms than they did in the Greek world, but still were in the same sort of cultural context?
And I like to think that it is maybe peculiar to the funerary function that what you want in your funerary art is not necessarily to look at Fulvia as she was when she was alive, but rather look at her and sort of see that she has become ontologically different. That she has joined another world, maybe a better world, and you're almost watching her metamorphosize (if we can use that Ovidian word) in front of you into a form which the constraints of culture and society and societal norms didn't enable her to inhabit in life. I mean, that's just my way of reading those. [laughs] But they're a really fun component I think in this sort of debate.
Rebekah: What, then, was the regular way that women were depicted in statues when they're not wearing the body of the goddess? Were there certain norms or trends in the way that sculptures depicted the female form?
Carrie: Yeah, I mean, by the time you get to the Roman world, hairstyles are a massive thing. So when I was a child in England, all of my mum's friends had their hair cut like Princess Diana. And you know, [laughs] that, you know, you can see that in the Roman world. That that's why it's so hard often to know, when you find a head, whether you're looking at a head of an empress or a head of an imitator. And you get that same sort of problematic with the male line too.
But in terms of what they're wearing, I mean, in their portrait sculpture they tend to be dressed very conservatively.
How that then maps onto what they're wearing in life is far more complicated, as sumptuary laws prove. You know, if you're an elite woman in Rome, you're unlikely to want to go around wearing a very heavy, plain frock. You're gonna want something diaphanous and gorgeous to the touch. And you know, they did wear things like that. And you can see that actually from Pompeiian wall painting. You can see it there, that the exquisite colors, and you can see the sort of the way in which the pigment is applied to suggest the sort of seeing through as much as a seeing.
So it's about what the evidence enables us to access, but also what these sculptures were designed to do. And you know, any woman that had a public sculpture erected of themselves is a woman that's trying to play on a male stage. And, you know, using her wealth, maybe euergetistically to do good and to fund buildings and things. You know, she's going to want to look like every other respectable woman that came before her, really.
Emily: Something that you talk about in your book is that while we might assume naturally a male gaze lying behind these artistic depictions, there are some bodies of evidence that we can use to look at and try and recover a bit of women's self-perception. You talk about this silver casket from the 4th century CE made in Rome, and you think about how it seems to invert, or at least challenge, assumptions about male versus female gaze.[31] Can you tell us a little bit about this casket? And more broadly, what can objects like these reveal about female self perception in the Classical world? Basically I’m wondering, were women bodyconscious?
Carrie: As a scholar of antiquity, you have the problem that nearly all of the materials, written materials, that you work with are written by men. Having said that, I mean, we do have a 3rd-century poet from Locri in southern Italy writing about, you know, let's all go off to the temple of Aphrodite and look at the statue. [all laugh] You know, I think it was dedicated by a prostitute actually. So we do have these like, little glimpses.
And the silver casket that you are alluding to, you're talking about, is it's called the Projecta Casket, and it's now in the collection of the British Museum in London but it was found on the Esquiline Hill in Rome, where it had clearly been buried as part of a horde. And it is interesting because of its inscription around the lid, which tells you who it belonged to—Projecta, hence its name. But it tells us that Projecta and her husband lived in Christ. “May you live in Christ.” So it's a Christian box, and these are a Christian couple.
And on the front of it, it depicts a woman. Because of the inscription the, you know, it leads you to think that might be Projecta, or at least enables you to read Projecta into it. And she is seated, and attendants are bringing her a mirror. And she's clearly involved, you know, doing her hair like the latest empress or whatever. And of course, it's really shiny, this silver box. So as you stare at it, your own reflection is going to be kind of given back to you as the person who kind of picks it up and carries it. It's quite large, this, and is, we think, a toilet box used by a woman, or maybe a wedding gift or something like [that]. But what makes it even more interesting in Christian terms is that then directly above the woman who's involved in making herself look pretty, is a depiction of Venus holding a mirror. [chuckles] So there's a mapping, there's an alignment between the mortal female form and this immortal Other form that we were talking about before.
Given its function, you know objects like this probably are speaking to women users. And you know, when you say, “were women body conscious?” I mean inevitably. I mean, how could they not be in a world in which there is so much anxiety about women going out in public, and in which they are walking around ideally wrapped. You know this is a culture, there's no DNA tests, for example, so how do you prove that the child that any woman is carrying is yours, as a husband? That creates a self-consciousness about the body. It's part of being human, you know, [chuckles] as the Adam and Eve story shows us very well. It comes with knowledge, [laughs wryly] unfortunately.
Rebekah: The box kind of raises a lot of curiosities for me. Like, what were women using it for? Were they painting their faces? What were they trying to emulate as a standard for beauty, essentially?
Carrie: I mean, it's very, very hard for us to know. You know, we have found in graves plenty of cosmetic compounds. We’ve found, you know, little boxes that look as though they held makeup. We've got plenty of stories about the sort of moral dangers of applying too much makeup—especially as you move into the Christian period when bodies become soso much even more problematic than they were before, and shame ramps up to sin.
But you know, women were clearly routinely applying makeup. They were wearing wigs. And being blonde was a thing back then, just as it was in the 50s. And it is now. And they were probably also, many of them shaving themselves, their pubic hair. There's a limit to what one can do with the human body, actually. And you know [laughs] they were engaged in many of the same things with their bodies as we are now.
And it's just, it's quite hard– You know, we talked a bit about their aping of imperial hairstyles, and you can tell a little bit how fashions change from looking at the art. But we just have to look at paintings by Joshua Reynolds to know that what the people are wearing in the pictures isn't necessarily the absolute, you know, style of the moment. Representation and reality don't work like that. So this is, you know, it's hard to to be able to reconstruct it when, you know, a lot of what survives on makeup is moral diatribe.
Rebekah: A central area of your research is on eroticism and sexual pleasure in the Classical world. We’ve mentioned Pompeii. It’s famous for its frescos frozen in time by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. And among the images that have been preserved for us are many erotic ones from houses of sex work and bathhouses, like a man giving oral or women pleasuring themselves.[32] So what do erotic depictions of desire tell us about the sex lives of Roman women? Or what don’t they tell us?
Carrie: Yeah I mean, Pompeii is a really interesting case. Cause obviously Pompeii starts to be excavated really in the 18th century and on, and completely changes what everyone thinks the Greek and Roman world is. Because you know, [laughs] they've never seen it in glorious technicolour like that before. [Rebekah laughs] They've never seen objects like that before.
And you're right that so many of the structures in Pompeii are decorated with images of not just eroticism but the sex act, that initially excavators thought that this tiny town had just loads and loads of brothels. You know, sort of, you know, on every corner! Now of course, we now know that they're not brothels. (I mean, we have got a brothel at Pompeii.) But, you know, many of these other images that you're talking about were found, as you say, some in bath houses, but some in domestic settings and in houses of the elite.
What these representations are designed to do is different in each case. So if you're talking about something like the Suburban Baths, which is a bath house where you have it appears only the one changing room. (So maybe this was used by both men and women.) But they’re quite high up on the wall above what would have been shelves and maybe sort of locker structures in which the bathers put their clothes. You have, as well as numbers, you have sexually explicit paintings. And you mentioned the image of a man giving oral sex to a woman—which of course is a, is in Roman eyes a very debasing image. I mean, the man is squatting on the floor, and the woman is pictured larger than life. She seems to be in control. And this is– So this is– This image (along with the others in that space, some of which show more than two people having sex at the same time with each other), these are clearly all designed to be a bit too-too, a bit sort of, you know, extreme. And it's a joke. And it's, you know, it's, you remember where your clothes are by remembering (or dareyou remember, dare you rethink that kind of naughty-naughty picture). So I'm not sure they're telling you much about female desire, particularly. They're probably telling you about men's fear or society's fears, really.
Some of the images that you get in houses of the sex act are far more delicate than that. And interestingly, quite a few of them show the woman on top.
Rebekah: Hm.
Carrie: And some of them are really rather beautiful. Some of them less so, less intimate. But the fact that these pictures are there in elite houses, maybe in bedroom spaces, shows at least a willingness to confront the fact that women have sexual feelings too and sexual appetites. And so I think that's, you know, that's quite interesting.
In terms of what women really then felt, who knows. In terms of what went on in the bedroom, probably very similar to what goes on in the bedroom now. You know, Rome is interesting in that regard because you're getting so many of these pictures in, as I say, in— You know, it’d be like coming to my house and discovering that on the way up the stairs to use my bathroom I had images like that on the wall—that would be deeply peculiar in a post-Victorian world. But in Rome it was absolutely kind of normal. Less so, actually, images of male-male explicit sex.
I don't know whether you know the Warren Cup, which is a silver cup that is in the collection of the British Museum. It gets its name from the collector, Ned Warren, much of whose collection is now in the MFA in Boston. You know, that cup was bought by the British Museum. They paid over a million pounds for it, and it shows explicit images of male-male sex. But it's very, very unusual. I mean, there are some other vessels made of Arretine ware that show similar things. But actually, that vessel is not at all normal for Roman culture. Roman culture seems to prefer balancing male-male desire with male-female desire, or in the houses privileging the latter.
And, of course, female-female desire is something that is, that exists but is invisible in the visual record, more or less. There's a pot that I actually illustrate in Exposed from the Greek world which shows a woman kneeling in front of another woman. And it's very unclear whether or not she is shaving the other woman or whether there is something more intimate still about to happen. But images like this are extremely unusual. Extremely.
Rebekah: Although I suppose things like Sappho do give us sort of a literary lens into women's experience of pleasure and what they, you know, desire and hope for. It's a woman writing, who's talking about what she wants and anticipates for her own body.
Carrie: There's some really good– I mean there's an author called Herodas who's writing in the Hellenistic period, and he writes mimes. And one of those is about women talking about a dildo. And so, I mean there, so. And okay, that's very much kind of male imagination of what women get up to in the female space. [Rebekah laughs] But the fact that he is writing that mime, and that mime is presumably being staged in some way– I mean, that is giving you– That I think might surprise some people about ancient Greece and needs to be put, you know, into a picture with Sappho and all of these other things.
Emily: Talking about dress. We might naturally assume that dress is something personal or private. You know, it reflects your own tastes or your interests.
But something that you write about in your book is how women’s bodies and adornment were things that the state also worried about in Rome.[33] You share about the moment in 215 BCE where Roman women were forbidden from wearing two-toned garments and restricted from owning too much gold. Eventually down the line, as a result of this, protests ensued against the state; women go marching into the streets.
And then a couple hundred years later, Emperor Augustus exiles his own daughter Julia to an island and policed her life. He forbids her from drinking wine, wearing expensive clothes, and from having any visitors that he hadn’t pre-approved (Suetonius, Life of Augustus 65.3). Suetonius says Augustus demanded to know all her visitors’ ages, heights, and coloring, and distinguishing body marks so he could monitor what was going on. Could you tell us, Carrie, about some of the ways that the state tried to control or regulate women’s dress or bodies? And how did women embrace or resist these ideas?
Carrie: The state does regulate women's bodies. The state regulates all bodies. Sumptuary laws, laws which legislate on what you can and can't wear, and the cost of what you can and can't spend on—not just clothes, but on what you put into your stomach, for example—they're all designed to control everybody because everybody knows that displays of wealth equal power. And so if you curtail people's ability to show off, then you keep them in the shadows and in their little box.
There's also of course regulation that comes with the religious sphere. So some of the other regulations on what you can and can't wear which are particularly aimed at women, are about entry into temples, and they're tied up with pollution. And again, why? Well, because you don't want people to be competing with each other within a religious space. It's a distraction. It’s a distraction away from the attention you're supposed to be giving to whichever god it is that you're worshipping, but it's also a distraction away from the beauty and the very colourful beauty of a lot of the dedicatory statues that have been put up there (usually by men).
The example you mention of 215 is a bit odd in that 215 is obviously in the middle of the Second Punic War, and so Rome is at war with Carthage. And Hannibal is wreaking havoc across what we now call Europe. And it's in that context really that, you know, you need— The women are not contributing to the war effort. And so they're getting the harshest criticism for wandering around in clothes that show that money is being wasted when actually it needs to be put into something more important like protection of the state. Once the war is won by Rome, then if the sumptuary laws still exist it's because people are worried about morality in a world in which wealth is flooding into the city. I mean, once Rome starts to expand, once it defeats Carthage and then expands into the Greek world, it's bringing loads of materials back in triumph. And there come flowing into Rome and making Rome wealthier and wealthier. And then you're trying to keep everybody under control.
And once Augustus becomes emperor, you know, I think the kinds of ways in which he tries to control people's bodies, that's more sinister than I think we sometimes take it to be. It's all, it's usually written about as being, “It's all about Augustus is going back to basics. It's about morality and making everybody good, and making it all about a unified image of Romanness. And everyone should wear a toga to show how great Rome is, to make it look like the pages of Virgil’s Aeneid.”
But actually, you know, I see it as being more sinister than that. It's a way of making everybody equal. You know, if you make everyone wear a toga when they go to the theatre, then they can't put on their posh frock made of silk that they've just imported. And goes along with really quite strict adultery laws that mean that elites now have to wash their dirty linen in public. So it's not great.
But I think state regulation of women's bodies is just the tip of the iceberg, really. And in some ways a red herring because women's bodies are regulated, period. You know, just in absolutely every respect. I mean, women are getting married young, very young, and they're moving from the protection of their fathers to the protection of their husbands. If you think back to the classical Greek world, you're in a world in which the Hippocratic corpus of medical writing is basically prescribing sex with a man [Rebekah laughs] as a cure for any female ailment going. You know, what is that if not a sort of regulation and a curtailment?
Rebekah: [overlapping]Mhmm.
Emily: [overlapping]Yeah.
Carrie: In terms of what women thought about any of this, we just don't know. I mean, presumably they didn't like it very much. And there are hints, ten years I can't remember, after the 215 sumptuary laws, where women do kind of rebel against that. And again, you know, I think 42 BC there's, you know, Hortensia speaks up about the ways in which women are being taxed. So you get these glimpses of women being able to exert some sort of, I mean at least have a voice. But we don't know. I mean, this is a world in which by the time you get to Rome, women are citizens in some ways, but you know they can't hold magisterial office, they can't vote.
Rebekah: So how did the Greeks and Romans think about bodies that differed from the Aphrodite ideal?[34] Kind of coming back to this idea of the woman that you talked about who her jowls are showing, right. How did they think about aging, infirm, enslaved, maybe ill, maybe gaunt bodies? I have to imagine that this Aphrodite ideal—this voluptuous, polished, perfectly symmetrical ideal—was out of reach for most women, especially lower class and noncitizen women.
Carrie: In terms of how they thought about old age and disability, not very nicely. I mean terribly. They're very rude about old age. At the same time as respecting the experience that comes of being on the planet for a long time.
And they're very rude about any kind of bodies that they deem to be different from the norm that they have currently constructed.
Enslaved bodies are obviously a different category again, because they’re bodies that the Greeks and the Romans could do more or less anything to because they don't enjoy any of the protection that comes of being a citizen. They’re bodies that are of nature and not of culture. They’re bodies rather than people. And you know, I think it's in that book that I talk about, there's a Gortin law code from Crete that is actually one of the very few instances where sex by force is sort of highlighted as a separate category. And if I remember there, there's, it talks about the fine that you would incur if as a citizen man, you raped a free woman, and it's thousands of obols. But then if you're a free man and you rape a slave it's one obol. I mean I may have those figures slightly wrong, but that's, you know, that's kind of the tenor of the inscription.
I mean in terms of disability, bodies that are malnourished or you know, there isn't obviously very much of that representationally in the Greek world until you get to roughly the 3rd century BC, when kind of over the next kind of couple of centuries, artists get far more interested, even in monumental sculptural form, in representing a far, far broader array of physicalities. And not just physicalities, but physical states as well. Everything from drunkenness to sleep. And it's in that period that you get representations of people with kyphosis of the spine or POTS disease or as I said malnourishment.
And you know it's quite hard to know why then, really. But I mean, I've always thought that, you know, up until that point, representationally you represent your citizens as being the sort of linchpins of your city state. And you know what an Athenian looks like because you know that they look not like a Persian. [Rebekah laughs] Or not like a Spartan. Identity is always constructed in the face of the enemy. But then by the time you get to the 3rd century, Alexander the Great’s come and gone, and he's taken, you know, Macedonia and what that represents out as far as the Indus. And so the Persians are now in. What's the Other that you now have to construct yourself against? And what kind of being a Greek is, and what being an enemy is, is totally up in the air. And so that means what the human is, is also up in the air. And it's up in the air in a different way because Alexander was represented with little horns on his head as Zeus Ammon. And so it's like well, where are these boundaries? And it's as though artists are now really invested in exploring that in physical terms.
There’s an image of a drunken old woman in marble that survives in two monumental versions, one of which is in the Capitoline Museum in Rome and one of which is in the Munich Glyptotek. You know, these were really famous in Rome in the 18th century. They were already part of the canon. But then they kind of dropped out as Johann Joachim Winkelmann's view of Classical beauty took hold, and they were just not what Classical beauty looked like. But they are extraordinary. I mean, one of my colleagues here talked about the one in Munich as being like a fallen Aphrodite.
Rebekah: [softly] Ohh.
Carrie: You know, rather than her water pot, she's squatting on the ground with a huge flagon of wine. And yet her flesh is still very much on display. She's not nude, or naked. But she's, her dress is falling off her shoulders, and her breast is kind of partly exposed. And the artist is still enjoying every fold of flesh. It's just a very different kind of flesh, and a flesh that's aged. And a flesh that's got the ethical, the added ethical kind of dimension of a woman who clearly was once quite rich (because her dress is very beautiful and she's got rings on her fingers), but now squatting on the ground drunk.
Rebekah: I know there's a slight difference between Classical sculptures in Greece and Rome, where in Rome you sort of see depictions of important personages like the emperor depicted more, more gnarly sometimes, right [laughs], more lifelike. And is there a similar trend with depiction of women? Or is this limited to elite men in power? Whereas women you don't see sort of this trend towards more natural, more real-to-life depictions?
Carrie: Mm. So just before I answer that, just to say that these statues of, these two versions of this monumental drunken old woman I was talking about, although originally made in the period just after Alexander the Great, the versions that survive are both Roman.
Rebekah: Mmm. Okay.
Carrie: So whereas the originals would have been probably in a sanctuary, maybe to Dionysus the god of wine, the versions that we have were probably in a Roman garden. So that's interesting.
Rebekah: Yeah.
Carrie: But to go to your point about power. You're right that, I mean, it is the case that in the late Roman Republican period, elites are having themselves represented looking far more real than people had looked certainly in the Classical period in Greece. And that goes for both men and women. Although it is certainly the case that the men look far less airbrushed than the women. They are craggier, even, than the women.
And that veristic style (as we call it) —because it's still a style, even if these faces are based on life masks or death masks, they're still, you know, these patrons have chosen to look like that. And that's because they want a look that depicts the effort and experience that it takes to be a good Roman citizen. And Rome has the cursus honorum. You have to be a certain age, supposedly (although try telling that Octavian), [Rebekah laughs] to get any sort of the next point in the political ladder. And so because of that, they're putting a premium on. You can see their experience in their faces. And because that's playing out politically, it's inevitably going to be the case that it doesn't have to be as extreme in the women, I think.
But having said that, the women still do, you know, they have a bit of that, really to kind of co-join them to their husbands, I think. Because you don't want your women all to look absolutely kind of wrinkle-free and your men to look really– Otherwise they don't look like they’re from the same film!
Emily: Yeah, I'm thinking about what you touched on earlier about enslaved bodies being able to have anything done to them that their owners wanted. And thinking about this, layered with the fact that one of the crucial values of a woman's body for the Roman state was of course being bearing children. Augustus at one point rules that elite widows needed to remarry after a few years because he wanted them bearing children for the empire.
I'm reminded too about Diocletian's Price Edict where the emperor sets maximum prices for various goods and sales throughout the empire, and one of them is related to the selling of enslaved people. And he lists different maximum prices for different age brackets, and it varies by male and female, but the one age range in which male enslaved and female enslaved were set at the same price range was the eight- to sixteen-years age range. And there's an assumption among scholars is that this age range of women's bodies being worth more relative to their male counterparts is because of their childbearing capacities. And I mean, it’s especially sobering when you think that this is an eight- to sixteen-year age range.
Carrie: On the slaves' bodies bit and about these being bodies you can do anything to, I mean it is striking, I think, that Rome is not a culture where– You might have thought that given the elites like to show off, they might have tattooed their skin, for example. But they don't. But they do tattoo their slaves. They brand their slaves. People kind of say, “Oh, well in Rome you know it's not uncommon to, you know, earn your freedom, as it were. And then a lot of these freed people actually go on to become extremely wealthy.” But, you know, once a slave, always a slave, in some sense.
There's brilliant work being done by a young scholar in the Netherlands at the moment about, on skin. And I think they've done some work on just sort of how culture coped with this branding, you know, what a freedman did if he were branded. And I, you know, I don't know what the answer is because I haven't read the work yet. But it's a fascinating question.
Emily: So, if we look into the chipped mirror, let’s say, of Classical beauty standards, is there a reflection that can speak to our worlds today? Something we can take away for us?
Carrie: It's hard because ancient people were in all sorts of ways like us. And yet in all sorts of ways were completely unlike us. So I think I'd have to say it's probably the representations that can teach us something. Because so many of these representations in antiquity, the real Greeks and Romans didn't look like that, any more than we look like the airbrushed, filtered images that we have on the internet. And so, you know, representation is dangerous, and we need to re- sort of center it to have it be useful for us to think about what it means to be a human being, and not just try to live up to this unattainable ideal.
[music interlude]
Conclusion
Emily: The most famous female statue from Greco-Roman antiquity might just be the Venus de Milo, which now stands on display in the Louvre. The goddess of love tilts her head away from the viewer, her eyes averted. You might interpret her glance as modesty, shyness, or aloofness. You could also read it as subservient and submissive. Or maybe her glance was that era’s come-hither look.
What is considered erotic is culturally contingent. In Victorian England, to show one’s ankle was a scandal which an aristocratic woman who cared about her reputation would never risk. Brenda Ayres has pointed out that in that era, even the wooden legs of bed frames and pianos were expected to be covered, so risqué were the thoughts they could inspire![35] At roughly the same time on the opposite side of the world, though, traditional dress in Thailand was topless for women and men, with no sexual connotations at all.[36] An uncovered shoulder can read as sensual or insignificant, depending on the culture and social context. Just as dress and display change over time, so does the meaning we attribute to them.
Rebekah: Every generation creates standards of beauty that people then try to reinscribe onto their own bodies. Infamously, the Kardashians promoted large boobs, butt implants, and narrow waists. And people went under the knife to imitate it. In recent decades movie stars have all undergone the same surgeries to change the shape of their jaws, cheekbones, and lips to a degree that they start looking like each other.[37] The best-selling female recording artist of all time, Madonna, is an icon—in more ways than one. The 60-something popstar sparked controversy because of her dramatic cosmetic surgeries. One X user (@MAD0NNAARMY1) tweeted in 2023, “She’s still the moment and she looks so young.”[38] The Greeks and Romans didn’t have the same tools as we do to reverse aging with surgery, reshape bodies or bone structures, or photoshop blemishes away. But we seem to have had the same goals. Historian Emma Southon has noted that statues of Roman women never show them aging and never show them pregnant.[39] They’re frozen in time, and in a time before all the stresses of life start changing the woman’s body. Youth is our common denominator.
Emily: But what’s the cost of our youth? American essayist Susan Sontag once wrote, “The ideal state proposed for women is docility, which means not being fully grown up. Most of what is cherished as typically ‘feminine’ is simply behavior that is childish, immature, weak.”[40] She says men want girls, not women. Sontag wrote that in 1972, but she could just as well have published it last year. Think of the big eyes and tiny skirts drawn in Japanese manga, the Disney princesses who have no hips, and social stereotypes of giggly girls with high-pitched voices.
Rebekah: Ancient Rome didn’t have Instagram or Vogue or the Met Gala, but its streets and temples were its display cases. Most of the female bodies on display were goddesses. Venus and Athena. Diana and Juno. Not human “real” women, but idealizations. Frozen in time and therefore unaging.
We might never be the Disney princess or Madonna, but we too chase the dream of youth. Everyone worships their idols. Sometimes they just happen to be goddesses.
[podcast theme music plays over outro]
Outro
Rebekah: If you enjoyed our show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check out our website womenwhowentbefore.com, or find us on Twitter @womenbefore.
This podcast is written, produced, and edited by us, Rebekah Haigh and Emily Chesley. Our music is composed and produced by Moses Sun. The podcast is sponsored by the Center for Culture, Society and Religion, the Program in Judaic Studies, the Stanley J. Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity, all at Princeton University.
Emily: Thanks for listening to Women Who Went Before! And don’t forget:
Both: Women were there!
[theme music wraps up]
[1] This episode is primarily about Roman art, but Roman art adopted and adapted many forms from Greek art before it. Caroline Vout analyzes how and why Greek sculpture and paintings were imported into Rome, and with what results, in Classical Art: A Life History from Antiquity to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 43–70.
[2] By comparing Roman sculpture to modern performative displays of the female body we aim to emphasize the idealized and sometimes even fantastical elements of the depiction, not to suggest that such statuary reflected societal clothing designs—just as a Paris Fashion Week runway show does not usually reflect what a woman might wear to work in Pittsburgh. Caroline Vout cautions, we must remember these sculptures are works of art and made aesthetic and rhetorical maneuvers; they were “not mannequins from a leading Roman fashion house.” Caroline Vout, “The Myth of the Toga: Understanding the History of Roman Dress,” Greece & Rome 43, no. 2 (1996), 207–209, quote at 207.
[3] Nicholas J. Conard, “A female figurine from the basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany,” Nature 459 (2009), 248–252; and Melissa K. Stannard and Michelle C. Langley, “The 40,000-Year-Old Female Figurine of Hohle Fels: Previous Assumptions and New Perspectives,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 31, no. 1 (2021), 21–33. The Urgeschichtliches Museum Blaubeuren, which currently holds the figurine, has created a 3D scan that can be studied online: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/ice-age-art-human-figurine-venus-adf485c3e1fe41aa9f3794a88617510f.
[4] Andrew Curry, “The Cave Art Debate,” Smithsonian Magazine, March 2012, accessed 19 April 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20131029211621/http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Cave-Art-Debate.html.
[5] Malaika Crawford, “Interview: A Conversation With Supermodel Gisele Bündchen,” Hodinkee, 14 December 2023, accessed 19 April 2025, https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/a-conversation-with-supermodel-gisele-bundchen.
[6] Mary Harlow, “Dressing to Please Themselves: Clothing Choices for Roman Women,” in Dress and identity, ed. Mary Harlow (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2012), 41.
[7] Presented by Lauren Laverne, “Kate Moss, model,” Desert Island Disks podcast, BBC, 36 minutes, first aired 24 July 2022, accessed 19 April 2025, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0019jv2; and Leah Dolan, “Kate Moss opens up about the ‘painful’ side of modeling,” CNN, last updated 26 July 2022, accessed 19 April 2025, https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/kate-moss-painful-modeling-interview/index.html.
[8] Fanny Dolansky, “Playing with Gender: Girls, Dolls, and Adult Ideals in the Roman World,” Classical Antiquity 31, no. 2 ( 2012),268–276.
[9] Molly Myerowitz Levine, “The Gendered Grammar of Ancient Mediterranean Hair,” in Off with Her Head!: The Denial of Women's Identity in Myth, Religion, and Culture, ed. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz and Wendy Doniger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 102.
[10] Dolansky, “Playing with Gender,” 270. The quote in context reads: “[Roman] Women’s use of cosmetics and fondness for clothing, jewelry, and complicated hairdos were regarded not simply as deceptive, but degenerate and potentially dangerous. The adorned female body was linked to vices such as extravagance, vanity, unchastity, and frivolity, all of which threatened the welfare of the family and the state” (p. 270).
[11] Seneca, Moral Essays, Volume III: De Beneficiis, trans. John W. Basore, Loeb Classical Library 310 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 479.
[12] Amelia Serafina, professor at San Antonio College, breaks down some of these historic shifts in ideal bodies in a popular magazine: “Understanding Ideal Body Shapes Through History,” PureGym.com,17 October 2023, accessed 19 April 2025, https://www.puregym.com/blog/body-shapes/#:~:text=Female%20%2D%20Ancient%20Rome%20.
[13] Dolansky, “Playing with Gender,” 268–269; and Kelly Olson, Dress and the Roman Woman: Self-presentation and Society(NewYork and London: Routledge, 2008), 68–69.
[14] Susan Stewart, “‘Gleaming and Deadly White’: Toxic Cosmetics in the Roman World,” in Toxicology in Antiquity, vol. 2, History of Toxicology and Environmental Health, ed. Philip Wexler (Elsevier, 2014), 86–87.
[15] Stewart, “‘Gleaming and Deadly White’,” 81–82. Stewart points out a sad irony in this: “lead poisoning can also result in infertility; so much for the assumption that a pale complexion might indicate success in producing a healthy son and heir” (p. 82).
[16] Ovid, Art of Love. Cosmetics. Remedies for Love. Ibis. Walnut-tree. Sea Fishing. Consolation, trans. J. H. Mozley, rev. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library 232 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), 3.
[17] Ovid recommends a number of facial treatments. The one he specifically says will make a woman’s face “shine smoother than her own mirror” incorporates eggs, narcissus bulbs, honey, grain, crushed stag’s horn, and gum (Medicamina Faciei 55–68, quote at lines 67–68, trans. Mozley and Goold, 7).
[18] Stewart, “‘Gleaming and Deadly White’,” 79–88.
[19] See Emily Dickenson, “I Died For Beauty” (1890), Viva Press Books, public domain, accessed 28 July 28 2025, https://viva.pressbooks.pub/amlit1/chapter/i-died-for-beauty-ca-1858-1865-emily-dickinson/.
[20] The law was passed in 215 BCE.
[21] Livy, History of Rome 34; and Richard A. Bauman, Women and Politics in Ancient Rome (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 25–27. In an important contextual note, five years later (210 BCE), senators also surrendered their gold, silver, and bronze coins to the state treasury (Bauman, Women and Politics, 26).
[22] Bauman, Women and Politics, 31–34; and Vout, Exposed, 103. In 207 BCE, some women attended a military victory celebration adorned in lavish fashions, and some war-time economic measures were relaxed, but the Lex Oppia remained in place (Bauman, Women and Politics, 28).
[23] Livy. History of Rome, Volume IX: Books 31–34. Edited and translated by J. C. Yardley. Introduction by Dexter Hoyos. Loeb Classical Library 295 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 431.
[24] Livy, History of Rome 34.8.
[25] C. P. Jones, “Stigma: Tattooing and Branding in Graeco-Roman Antiquity,” The Journal of Roman Studies 77 (1987), 139–141, 152–154; Martin Dinter and Astrid Khoo, “Wounds prepared with iron: tattoos in antiquity,” Omnibus 25 (2018), 25–27.
[26] Caroline Vout, Exposed: The Greek and Roman Body (London: Wellcome Collection, 2022), 255, emphasis in original.
[27] Vout, Exposed, 85–88; and Caroline Vout, “Nudity,” in The Encyclopedia of Ancient History, 1st edition, eds. Roger S. Bagnall, Kai Brodersen, Craige B. Champion, Andrew Erskine and Sabine R. Huebner (Wiley Blackwell: 2013), 4824–4825.
[28] “Cast of Venus de’ Medici, ca. 1779,” Royal Academy, accessed 19 April 2025, https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/venus-demedici#:~:text=The%20Venus%20de'%20Medici%20is,bronzes%20were%20also%20immensely%20popular. For photos of various copies of the Venus de’ Medici, see this personal blog: “Venus de' Medici Displayed and Copied,” spenceralley.blogspot.com, 4 May 2016, accessed 19 April 2025, https://spenceralley.blogspot.com/2016/05/venus-de-medici-displayed-and-copied.html
[29] See, for example, Caroline Vout, “Gender Studies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Art and Architecture, ed. Clemente Marconi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 612–617.
[30] For some examples of these ancient representations, explore the online catalog from the Brooklyn Museum’s “The Fertile Goddess” exhibition, co-curated by Madeleine E. Cody and Maura Reilly, which ran 19 December 2008–31 May 2009, accessed 19 April 2025, https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/fertile_goddess.
[31] Vout, Exposed, 88–89.
[32] Vout, Exposed, 107–109.
[33] Vout, Exposed, 103, 253–356.
[34] Vout, Exposed, 165–173, 180–198.
[35] Brenda Ayres, “Scandalous Women Wearing Cloaks of Religion,” in The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture, eds. Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier (New York: Routledge, 2022), 131–132.
[36] Suchada Thaweesit, “Emotional clashes and female public nudity in Thailand,” Diogenes 63, nos. 1–2 (2016), 92–93. As a result of growing European influence, in the second half of the nineteenth century, King Mongkut and King Rama V ordered Thai women to start covering their torsos.
[37] Leanne Delap, “Famous Faces Are Morphing Into One Beauty Ideal,” The Kit, 22 December 2023, accessed 27 March 2025, https://thekit.ca/beauty/celebrity-beauty/ai-filters-makeup-celebrity-plastic-surgery/; and Olivia Petter, “Are we all going to end up with the same face?,” The Independent, 28 April 2024, accessed 27 March 2025, https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/beauty-features-same-face-instagram-b2534111.html.
[38] Vikki White, “Secrets behind Madonna's incredibly youthful face as she turns 66 today ‘but looks 21’,” The Mirror, last updated 16 August 2024, accessed 27 March 2025, https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/behind-madonnas-incredibly-youthful-face-33478267.
[39] Erin Migdol, interviewing Emma Southon, “What Everyone Gets Wrong About Women in Ancient Rome,” The Getty, 27 February 2024, accessed 19 April 2025, https://www.getty.edu/news/what-everyone-gets-wrong-about-women-in-ancient-rome/?fbclid=IwAR3lL2g0a0kxqX00c4E9-mfSCEJRC4MMqJcj17GzSMfAhH5XziSJdpcJI6o.
[40] Susan Sontag, “The Double Standard of Aging,” in On Women, ed. David Rieff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), 32.
-
Alley, Spencer. “Venus de' Medici Displayed and Copied.” Spencer Alley Blog. 4 May 2016. Accessed 19 April 2025, https://spenceralley.blogspot.com/2016/05/venus-de-medici-displayed-and-copied.html.
Ayres, Brenda. “Scandalous Women Wearing Cloaks of Religion.” Pp. 130–159 in The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture. Edited by Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier. New York: Routledge, 2022.
Bauman, Richard A. Women and Politics in Ancient Rome. New York and London: Routledge, 1994.
“Cast of Venus de’ Medici, ca. 1779.” Royal Academy. Accessed 19 April 2025. https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/venus-demedici#:~:text=The%20Venus%20de'%20Medici%20is,bronzes%20were%20also%20immensely%20popular.
Cody, Madeleine E., and Maura Reilly, co-curators. “The Fertile Goddess” exhibition. The Brooklyn Museum. Exhibition ran 19 December 2008–31 May 2009. Online catalog accessed 19 April 2025. https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/fertile_goddess.
Conard, Nicholas J. “A female figurine from the basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany.” Nature 459 (2009): 248–252.
Crawford, Malaika. “Interview: A Conversation With Supermodel Gisele Bündchen.” Hodinkee. 14 December 2023. Accessed 19 April 2025. https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/a-conversation-with-supermodel-gisele-bundchen.
Curry, Andrew. “The Cave Art Debate.” Smithsonian Magazine. March 2012. Accessed 19 April 2025. https://web.archive.org/web/20131029211621/http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Cave-Art-Debate.html.
Delap, Leanne. “Famous Faces Are Morphing Into One Beauty Ideal.” The Kit. 22 December 2023. Accessed 27 March 2025. https://thekit.ca/beauty/celebrity-beauty/ai-filters-makeup-celebrity-plastic-surgery/.
Dickenson, Emily. “I Died For Beauty.” 1890. Viva Press Books. Public domain. Accessed 28 July 28 2025. https://viva.pressbooks.pub/amlit1/chapter/i-died-for-beauty-ca-1858-1865-emily-dickinson/.
Dinter, Martin, and Astrid Khoo. “Wounds prepared with iron: tattoos in antiquity.” Omnibus 25 (2018): 25–27.
Dolan, Leah. “Kate Moss opens up about the ‘painful’ side of modeling.” CNN. Last updated 26 July 2022. Accessed 19 April 2025. https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/kate-moss-painful-modeling-interview/index.html.
Dolansky, Fanny. “Playing with Gender: Girls, Dolls, and Adult Ideals in the Roman World.” Classical Antiquity 31, no. 2 ( 2012): 256–292.
Harlow, Mary. “Dressing to Please Themselves: Clothing Choices for Roman Women.” Pp. 37–46 in Dress and identity. Edited by Mary Harlow. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2012.
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Cover Image
The Venus de Milo is one of ancient Greece’s most famous statues. Carved larger than life at 6 1/2 feet tall, this marble goddess was meant to make an impression! Scholars have debated her identity, but Aphrodite the goddess of love is the most widely-accepted theory—hence her name.
Image Attribution
Vénus de Milo, 2nd century BCE, Parian marble. The Louvre. Photo Wikimedia Commons, Mattgirling, CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Women Who Went Before is written, produced, and edited by Rebekah Haigh and Emily Chesley. The music is composed and produced by Moses Sun.
Sponsored by the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, the Program in Judaic Studies, and the Stanley J. Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University
Views expressed on the podcast are solely those of the individuals, and do not represent Princeton University.