Mistresses, Slaves, and Roman Religious Rituals

While ancient Roman women were excluded from government office, they played key roles in many of the varied religious festivals and rites that marked the busy Roman calendar. In particular, many of these festivals served either to emphasize or to temporarily invert social distinctions among different groups of Roman women. While during the festival of Fortuna Virilis, both respectable matrons and lowly prostitutes may have bathed together, at the Matralia matrons first invited a slave woman into the ritual and then symbolically beat her and drove her out. In other rites such as the Matronalia and the Capronaria, matrons took on temporary servile roles in a Bakhtinian carnivalesque inversion, while their female slaves played at giving orders for the day.

These various rituals both highlighted and perhaps defused the central tensions of a slave-owning society in which free and freed Roman women oppressed female slaves while still themselves being subjected to a patriarchal system. Religious festivals became a means of publicly recognizing and rewarding female slaves for their hard work, bravery, and loyalty –the same virtues as those memorialized on Roman wives’ tombstones – while also differentiating between various different types of women. While there have been several studies of Roman female religious practices (Beard, Staples, Gage), no one has yet focused on how these rituals depict mistress-slave relationships. Through this study, we can begin to glimpse the sorts of difficult conversations that Roman slaves and their mistresses must have shared every day.