Audio-Visual Roman Women: Gender, History & Screen Media

by Maria Wyke (Editor), Filippo Carlà-Uhink (Editor), Monika Wozniak (Editor), Martin Lindner (Editor)

Overview

This open-access book is an interdisciplinary and transnational study of how screen media can shape our perception of Roman women and project present gender inequalities onto them. Maria Wyke and Monika Wozniak explore a range of representations that have given life to Roman women through a multisensory experience of history as image, movement and sound, starting from the 1900s through to the 2020s (from the arrival of cinema to the ascendance of video games). This book asks: what sources do screen media draw on for their Roman women (given the scarcity of suitable ancient material), how are they assembled aesthetically and ideologically using the specific devices of such media (from camerawork to gameplay), and who are they made by and for (especially in terms of gender)?

Each chapter investigates the diverse ways these representations interlock with the social position of women at the time in which they were made, and consider to what extent they have responded to the emergence of feminism, the revisionist scholarship on ancient women that emerged in the mid-1970s, and the rise of the #MeToo movement from 2006. The challenge of creating authentic yet compelling portrayals of Roman women is greater than ever, in a media culture marked by anti-feminist rhetoric and a wide gap between our ancient sources (where female agency is tightly constrained) and current expectations for powerful women in popular culture. The volume will therefore provide a stronger platform on which to build the Roman women of the future.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by University College London.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350461833
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	01/08/2026
Series:	IMAGINES - Classical Receptions in the Visual and Performing Arts
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Maria Wyke is Professor of Latin, University College London, UK. She has written extensively about the ancient world on screen including Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema and History (1997), The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations (2000), and Caesar in the USA 2012).

Filippo Carlà-Uhink is Professor of Ancient History at Potsdam University, Germany. His main research areas are the social and economical history of Late Antiquity, the history of the Roman Republic, the cultural history of ancient Rome, with a particular attention for space concepts and the construction of space, and the reception of antiquity in modern media. He is co-editor of Bloomsbury Academic's series IMAGINES - Classical Receptions in the Visual and Performing Arts, and editor of Caesar, Attila & Co. Comics und die Antike (2014) and, with Irene Berti, Ancient Magic and the Supernatural in the Modern Visual and Performing Arts (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

Monika Wozniak isAssociate Professor of Polish Language and Literature at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy.

Martin Lindner is Lecturer in Ancient History and Curator of the Tom Stern Collection film archive at the University of Göttingen, Germany.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments

1. Introducing Audio-Visual Roman Women, Monika Wozniak (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy) and Maria Wyke (UCL, UK)

Part One: Feminising Ancient Rome in Screen Media (1900s to 1960s)
2. Feminising Ancient Rome: Women at the Cinema from the 1890s to the 1930s, Maria Wyke (UCL, UK)
3. A Threefold Feminine Divinity: The Female Characters in Messalina (1923), Stella Dagna (former archivist at the Turin National Cinema Museum, Italy)
4. Spicing up Lygia in Quo Vadis (1951): The Development of Female Characters from Script to Screen, Monika Wozniak (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy)
5. Screening the Elite Roman Female's Gaze of Desire, Monica Silveira Cyrino (University of New Mexico, USA)
6. Caesar's Daughter: Lucilla on Screen, Martin M. Winkler (George Mason University, USA)
7. Poppaea's Eroticisation in Cinema, Nuno Simões Rodrigues (University of Lisbon, Portugal)

Part Two: Screen Media in the Light of Feminism (1970s to 2020s)
8. Women Who Hit the Screen: Female Gladiators in Film and Television, Patrycja Rojek (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland)
9. Dramatic Persona: Livia Drusilla in A World of Television Antiquity, Radoslaw Pietka (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland)
10. British Women in a Roman World: Female Figures in Audiovisual Works About the Ninth Legion, Panayiota Mini (University of Crete, Greece)
11. A Practitioner's Tale: History and the Performance of Roman Women in HBO's Rome, Jonathan Stamp (television documentary maker and historical consultant)
12. Mothers, Murderers and Mistresses: Empresses of Ancient Rome (2013): A Feminist Turn?, Fiona Hobden (Open University, UK)
13. Between Myth, History and Popular Culture: The Character of Ilia in the TV Series Romulus (2020-22), Konrad Dominas (University of Adam Mickiewicz, Poland)
14. Powerless and Powerful Language in Domina, Luca Valleriani (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy)
15. El corazón del imperio (The Heart of the Empire, 2021): Transgressions of Gender Norms in a Docudrama on Roman Women, Oskar Aguado-Cantabrana (University of the Basque Country, Spain) and Patricia González Gutiérrez (independent researcher)

Part Three: New Media & Consumer Agency
16. An Expedition into Agency: The Portrayal of Roman Women in Expeditions: Rome, Kate Cook (King's College London, UK)
17. Rewriting Televisual Monsters: Livia and Atia in Fanfiction, Amanda Potter (Open University and University of Liverpool, UK)

Notes
Mediography
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

This is reception history at its finest. The book takes the reader on a voyage through film history and different genres from the days of silent movies to modern TV shows, through literature from 19th century novels to modern fan fiction. Deciphering the cross-media entanglement of Roman women in these sources offers revealing insights into how these women were and are stereotyped, but also empowered.” —Anja Wieber, Independent Scholar, Germany

From the Publisher