Imperial Women of Rome by Mary T. Boatwright - Review

March 2026

By Owain Williams

For several countries around the world, such as the United States of America and Germany, March is Women’s History Month. While I appreciate the intention behind this event and others like it, I personally feel that such events actually have the unintended consequence of further marginalising the groups being highlighted by making history related to them distinct from History. That said, it is a good opportunity for me to review a book I have been meaning to read for several years now.

Mary Boatwright’s Imperial Women of Rome: Power, Gender, Context, first published in 2021, with the paperback edition published in 2024, explores the position of imperial women, meaning “those who shared marriage or immediate family with the emperor” (p. 2), within the Principate (30 BC – AD 235). Boatwright is less concerned with the specifics of imperial women’s lives in the Roman Empire and more interested, as the title suggests, in the interplay between imperial women’s power, the constraints of their gender, and their position within the context of the developments of the Roman Empire. After all, imperial women were at the centre of power in the Roman Empire, in close proximity to the emperor, but constrained by their gender from wielding any formal power themselves. As such, Boatwright examines “the mores, laws, and evolving structures of the most significant functions and venues of imperial women” (p. 3), such as women’s relationship with the law, their presence in the city of Rome as exemplified through monuments bearing their names, their positions within the imperial family, and their relationship with the Roman army.

As with women throughout antiquity, the literary sources for Roman imperial women pose a problem. The increased visibility of women at the imperial court meant that they faced greater criticism, which is disproportionate “to the general scarcity of evidence for these women” (p. 6). What evidence there is, especially in the literary sources, is often “inadequate” or “tendentious” and “generally indifferent to women and children, especially girls” (p. 6), and full of “loaded rhetoric and terms” (p. 7). For instance, Strabo, writing during the reign of Tiberius, noted how both Octavia and Livia were responsible for commissioning buildings in Rome (5.3.8), but both Suetonius and Cassius Dio claim that Augustus was responsible for such works, attributing them to his sister and his wife out of modesty (Suetonius, Augustus 29.6; Cassius Dio, 49.43.8, 56.40.5). What are we to make of this discrepancy? While Boatwright does note where the sources likely exaggerated and possibly even wholly manufactured imperial women’s activities, as is the case with Julia Domitia (pp. 47–50), such source criticism is not the focus of the book. Instead, Boatwright examines such evidence for what it tells us about attitudes towards imperial women. In the case of attributing buildings previously ascribed to Octavia and Livia to Augustus, for example, Boatwright writes how these changes “reveal growing unease with imperial women’s autonomy and visibility” (p. 186). The literary sources are supplemented with law codes, coins, and statues.

What emerges from Boatwright’s discussion about imperial women is fascinating exploration of a position that appears to have remained largely static across nearly 300 years. While there were changes to imperial women’s position, such as the creation of the title Mother of the Camp, first ascribed to Faustina the Younger under Marcus Aurelius, these tended to build from more general trends. All in all, despite ancient authors’ hand wringing about their proximity to power, imperial women were just another subject of the emperor, who “controlled an imperial woman’s privileges” and “undoubtedly structured her other activities” (p. 288). Just as literary sources used women to reflect the qualities or failings of imperial men, the emperors themselves did so, too, using imperial women to reflect a stable ruling family that conformed to Roman traditions. For example, legal cases against imperial women “conveniently demonstrated that the emperor was not above the law” (p. 61).

Imperial Women of Rome provides a useful companion to Olivier Hekster’s Caesar Rules (Cambridge, 2023), together offering a comprehensive portrait of the Roman imperial family, providing an interesting contrast between the largely static position of imperial women and the constantly evolving position of imperial men. Yet like Hekster’s Caesar Rules, this book assumes that the reader will have a strong grasp of Roman history. For those that do, Imperial Women of Rome will surely be insightful, not just illuminating the lives of Roman imperial women, but also their place in the wider Roman world.