Asking about spaces and opportunities for feminine action in the Roman world between
the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire leads us to wonder
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about the evolution of the woman’s place in the Roman society at this period. Spectacles
constitute both a major political place and an opportunity whose structures get set up
precisely at this time. However, it is also at that time that the women appear, in a quite
remarkable way, in the documentation relating to the spectacles. It seems reasonable
to relate this phenomenon with the transformations that the « system of spectacles »
knows then and that must fit under the global context of deep evolutions that affect the
Roman society between the first century BC and the first century AC. Rather than trying
to highlight, in one field of the public life, a larger phenomenon of women’s emancipation,
it is interesting to turn the reasoning over and insist on the mutations and evolutions
that transform the Roman society and allow new places of public expression and
public interventions to open. Those make a way for some less visible social categories.
Then we can wonder if women take advantage of those new intervention’s opportunities
in the public life and in which way. The women’s means of intervention in the spectacles
and their consequences are different according to the categories of women. So, we will
first take an interest in the opening of this professional world to women and its effects.
Then, we will go back on the exceptional interventions of aristocratic women in the
spectacles and the highly political dimension of this phenomenon.