🦋

i touched her thigh and death smiled ♐︎♊︎♊︎

[vanilleflwr]

JOHN WILLIAM WATERHOUSE

Spring Spreads One Green Lap of Flowers (1910) / The Soul of the Rose, aka My Sweet Rose (1908) / Thisbe (1909) / Undine (1872) / Cleopatra (1888) / Windswept (1903) / Psyche Opening the Door into Cupid's Garden (1903) / Ophelia (1894) / Circe Invidiosa (1892) / Lamia (1909)

[classicfilmsource]

The Private Life of a Cat 1946 | dir. Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid

[kylieverzosa]

often I find myself recalling, and with what ease, certain words spoken to me, some on the balcony with the moon as witness, others at that window I shall always look upon so gladly, with all the many endearing and gracious acts I have seen my gentle lady perform …

Pietro Bembo in a letter to Lucrezia Borgia c. 1503

[wonder-worker]

While Kleopatra VII is the most well-known Ptolemaic queen, she was not the oddity of feminine rulership that she is often represented as, and, instead, her power was predicated on a long line of female achievement. [...]

Just as with the royal women who came before her, Kleopatra VII received a Greek style education, which allowed her to interact in and excel at the politics of her day. In fact, she is the Ptolemaic queen whose education is the most explicitly referenced in the ancient sources (see, for example, Plut. Vit. Ant. 27; Cic. Att. 15.15). She also must have built an extensive network of philoi who helped her govern the kingdom over the course of her long reign. For instance, her philos Apollodorus is named by Plutarch, but he also indicates that she had many others when he says that Apollodorus was the only person “among her friends” (τῶν φίλων) that Kleopatra permitted to go with her to Caesar at their first meeting (Plu. Vit. Caes. 49).

Similarly to her predecessors, Kleopatra was referenced in the dating protocols utilized during the various periods of her rule, and they also shed light on her induction into the dynastic cult and the various epithets she adopted. Kleopatra ascended to the throne at the death of her father in 51 BCE (iBucheum 13; Porph. in Eus. Chron. 1.167-168, ed. Schoene; Strab. 17.1.11), and thereafter took on the epithet Thea Philopator [...] in honor of him. She may have been appointed as Ptolemy XII’s co-ruler during the last year of his reign, from 52-51 BCE, in the same pattern as Kleopatra Berenike III and Ptolemy IX, so the transition from father to female-heir was a smooth one, at first. Although Kleopatra and Ptolemy XIII ostensibly inherited the throne together, as a ruling pair, the documents of the year 51 BCE list only Kleopatra’s name, and the dating protocol makes use of the feminized form of the verb “to reign” (βασιλευούσ̣ης [...]), demonstrating that she was the dominant ruling figure (iBucheum 13; iGFayum 205; PSI 10.1098). Her brother, with the help of his philoi, contested her rule in 50/49 BCE, and she was expelled for a time in 48 BCE (Caes. BCiv. 3.103).

In 47 BCE, Kleopatra was placed back on the throne with her younger brother, Ptolemy XIV, by Caesar after the events of the Alexandrian War (Strab. 17.1.11; Porph. in Eus. Chron. 1.167-169, ed. Schoene; Ps.-Caes. BAlex. 33.1-2; Dio Cass. 35-44; Suet. Jul. 35.1; App. Civ. 2.90). In an effort to uphold Ptolemaic tradition, they likely married at this time (Dio Cass. 42.44) and were inducted into the dynastic cult as the Theoi Philopatores kai Philadelphoi [...]. From 47 BCE until her brother-husband’s death in 44 BCE, Kleopatra was again the dominant co-ruler, as demonstrated by papyri and the dating protocols in which Kleopatra’s name was placed before that of Ptolemy XIV (P. Oxy. 14.1629; Appendix C). Afterwards, from 44 BCE until her death, she co-ruled with her son, Ptolemy XV Caesarion (OGIS 194; BGU 14.2376; SB 4.7337 = THI 5), but again, in this arrangement, she served as the dominant co-ruler.

Her role as dominant queen was also demonstrated by the hieroglyphic titles she was presented with on temples. At the temple of Montu at Hermonthis, accompanying scenes of the birth of Ptolemy XV, Kleopatra was granted the title hk3.t (“ruler”) and two female Horus names [...]. The title “ruler,” which had been utilized by many of her predecessor provided her with cultic visibility and authority. Her Horus names, which had previously only been granted to the most powerful queens of the dynasty, including Berenike II and Kleopatra III, acknowledged both her assumption of kingly prerogatives and her standing as one of the most politically active and authoritative queens of the dynasty.

In her monumental depictions, Kleopatra VII unquestionably emulated the powerful women that came before her. The stele iGFayum 205 (= Louvre E. 27113), which is dated to July 51 BCE, depicts Kleopatra VII offering to Isis, and in the carving, Kleopatra is portrayed as a male pharaoh in a pointed kilt and pharaonic double crown. Bianchi points out that this is likely because the stele was carved for Ptolemy XII before his death and then repurposed for Kleopatra VII, but it also neatly fits Kleopatra in with the masculinized imagery utilized by Hatshepsut, Kleopatra III, and Berenike IV. It also demonstrates Kleopatra’s early intentions to rule as a dominant power and to take on kingly attributes, as she did throughout the course of her reign.

Much like Kleopatra III, Kleopatra VII was depicted making offerings to the gods alone in temple scenes, including at Kom Ombo where she is depicted presenting Ma’at to the gods. In fact, of all the Ptolemaic queens, Kleopatra VII was depicted twenty-five times alone before the gods, more than any of her predecessors. And, although previous queens had been depicted offering to the gods alone, the presentation of Ma’at had hitherto only been conducted by male pharaohs, even when they were junior co-rulers. Accordingly, in these scenes, Kleopatra was using the example of previous queens, but she also built on their achievements by taking that traditionally male motif, the offering of Ma’at, on herself, demonstrating her superior power.

This combining of queenly and kingly prerogatives is echoed in the scenes where Kleopatra VII appeared with Ptolemy XV, and, again similarly to Kleopatra III, her image was carved before that of her son, such as on the mammisi of Hermonthis. In these scenes, although depicted with kingly powers, Kleopatra was also depicted with the traditional queenly headgear of Ma’at plumes and solar disk that assimilated her to Isis and Hathor. In fact, many of the scenes at Hermonthis, both those of her alone and with her son, strive to associate Kleopatra with Isis and Hathor in their roles as mother and child-bearer. So, it seems she was aware of both the kingly attributes she was portraying and the queenly traits she wanted to emphasize in order to put forth the strongest image of her rule. In other scenes, including at Dendera, Kleopatra VII is depicted wearing Arsinoe II’s unique queenly crown. This not only shows her attempt to associate herself with one of her most powerful predecessors, but it can also be interpreted as her attempt to take for herself the kingly attributes with which Arsinoë had been depicted.

Overall, Kleopatra VII’s greatest achievement is that she co-ruled for the entirety of her reign, but, because of the extensive authority and dominant power she wielded, she is remembered as a basilissa-regnant. That she is remembered this way, even after the character assassination undertaken by later Roman authors, speaks to the incredible authority she wielded and the powerful imagery she built for herself, since many of her greatest achievements were later covered up or twisted by propaganda.

— Tara L. Sewell-Lasater, Becoming Kleopatra: Ptolemaic Royal Marriage, Incest, and the Path to Female Rule (Dissertation, University of Houston, 2020)

[city-of-ladies]

"Here’s what we know about Julia Felix: she lived in Pompeii from at least 62 CE. She was possibly illegitimate but was definitely not a member of the social and cultural elite. She worked for a living setting up and running a very interesting business and, by 79 CE, she had planned to shift her focus from managing a business to owning property. We know all these things because twentieth-century excavations at her business uncovered an advert, carved in stone and attached to the external wall of her huge building. It reads:

"To rent for the period of five years from the thirteenth day of next August to the thirteenth day of the sixth August, the Venus Bath fitted for the nogentium, shops with living quarters over the shops, apartments on the second floor located in the building of Julia Felix, daughter of Spurius. At the end of five years, the agreement is terminated."

This find illuminated the building it was attached to, bringing what otherwise looked like a very large anonymous domestic house into dazzling focus. With this description of the purpose of each room written by the owner herself, archaeologists and historians could see the site through a whole new lens and they realised that they had discovered a Roman entertainment space for the working middle classes. It is, so far, a completely unique find and it is magnificent. It offers us, as modern viewers, two amazing things: a little glimpse into the lives of the commercial classes of the Roman Empire who are so often completely and utterly invisible, and a brutal reminder that so much of what we ‘know’ about Roman women in the Roman world comes from rules concerning only the most elite.

We’ll do that second part first, because it’s the least fun. Roman written and legal sources are pretty universal in their agreement that although women could own property, they could not control it; they had no legal rights, could not make contracts and were to be treated as minors by the legal system for their entire lives. In order to buy or sell property women required a male guardian to oversee and sign off on any transactions. This is a basic truism of women in the Roman Empire, repeated ad nauseum by sources both ancient and modern including me, and it is undermined by Julia Felix’s rental notice. 

The rental ad makes it pretty clear that Julia Felix is the owner-operator of a business complex including public baths, shops and apartments (there’s more too, as we’ll see), and she doesn’t seem to require anyone else to help her rent it out. She names her father – sort of; ‘Spurius’ might just mean that she is illegitimate – but this is effectively a surname, a personal identifier to differentiate her from other Julia Felixes in the area. It doesn’t mean her father was involved. Furthermore, the use of her father’s name as an identifier suggests that Julia didn’t have a husband and was either unmarried or widowed in 79 CE. The strong implication of her advert is that Julia Felix was an independent lady, a honey making money and a momma profiting dollars who could truthfully throw her hands up to Destiny’s Child.

We will never know if Julia escaped the flames and choking ash of 79 CE, fleeing as it swallowed her business and her home, but one discovery, made on 28 January 1952, suggests that she didn’t. The archaeologists, led by Amedeo Maiuri, uncovered on that day the skeleton of a woman who had fallen while running across the garden during the disaster. It’s clear this fallen woman was well off, because she was wearing a lot of gold jewellery. She carried four gold half-hoop earrings and wore four gold rings. Two of these rings were particularly expensive; both contained a red carnelian gem, one carved with a figure of Mercury, the other with an eagle. Around her neck she wore a necklace of gold filigree, dotted with ten pearls and hung with a green pendant. Someone stole both the necklace and earrings from the Pompeii Antiquarium in 1975 and no one, somehow, had ever bothered to photograph them so all we have are descriptions but the rings that survive are fine and expensive. The woman who wore them – was wearing them when she died – had real money to buy these objects and the woman who wore them did'nt leave Pompei in time.

 Moreover, when she was found it was clear that at the moment of her death she was heading not towards the street or towards safety, but towards the shrine to Isis in the garden where all the most valuable possessions were kept. The valuable possessions that Julia Felix grafted for and maybe couldn’t bear to leave behind. There’s no way to tell whether this skeleton is Julia Felix, whether these bones once stood and looked at the plots of land Julia bought and made plans, or whether they belong to a looter or a chancer or someone just caught out. But it’s nice to pretend that Julia Felix, who shaped the city’s roads around her dream and offered respite and luxury to workers and made a tonne of money doing it, died and was buried with the place that still bears her name."

A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire, Emma Southon

[ladyniniane]

"Early medieval chroniclers, who would probably not have read Plato or Aristotle as they were not translated into Latin until the thirteenth century, often documented the exploits of warrior women without particular comment. The Abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable (c. 1092–1156), wrote that ‘it is not altogether exceptional among mortals for women to be in command of men, nor entirely unprecedented for them even to take up arms and accompany men to battle’. The Bishop of Rennes, Marbod (c. 1035–1133), praised the biblical Judith for beheading Holofernes and taking up arms against her enemies. Yet from the thirteenth century onwards, roughly contemporaneous with the translation and circulation of Aristotle and Plato, chroniclers and clerks began to express increasing levels of surprise and outrage at women who participate in military activities."

Medieval Women and War Female Roles in the Old French Tradition, Sophie Harwood

[diioonysus]

edwardian & victorian era women

[die-rosastrasse]

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

British, 1828-1882

Joan of Arc Kissing the Sword of Deliverance (1863) & Joan of Arc (1882)

[coochiequeens]

Womens history just got richer.

When the deeply patriarchal Romans first encountered Celtic tribes living in modern-day France and Great Britain in the first century B.C.E., their reaction to the roles of the sexes was one of surprise and dismay. The tasks of men and women “have been exchanged, in a manner opposite to what obtains among us,” wrote one Roman historian.

New evidence from Celtic graves now confirms that at least one part of Britain was a woman’s world long before the Romans arrived—and for centuries afterward. One ancient British tribe known as the Durotriges based its family structure—and perhaps property inheritance—on kinship between mothers and daughters. Men, meanwhile, left home to live with their wives’ families, a practice known as matrilocality that has never been seen before in European prehistory.

The work, published today in Nature, helps explain why women in Iron Age Britain are often buried with high-status grave goods such as mirrors and even chariots, says Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich archaeologist Carola Metzner-Nebelsick, who was not involved with the research. “It’s a fantastic result,” she says. “It really helps explain the archaeological record.”

Ancient histories—not least Julius Caesar’s 50 B.C.E. account of invading Gaul—hinted at female empowerment among the Celts. “They wrote about it because they found it so weird,” says Trinity College Dublin geneticist Lara Cassidy.

Many modern historians assumed the accounts were exaggerated; they dismissed rich female graves from the time as outliers. But over the past few decades, archaeologists comparing burial practices at hundreds of Iron Age sites from Britain to Germany began to think there was a kernel of truth to the Roman reports.

The Durotriges cemeteries, located in the far south of England near the city of Bournemouth, offered a way for Cassidy and her team to investigate. Burials there began around 100 B.C.E., roughly 150 years before Roman forces invaded the island. Unusually for Iron Age Britain, the tribe didn’t cremate their dead. Instead they buried them close to home, in the hills surrounding their farmsteads.

Whereas men were laid to rest with a joint of meat and perhaps a pot containing a beverage to sustain them on their journey into the afterlife, Durotriges women are often found with elaborate offerings including mirrors, combs, jewelry, and even swords. “If you judge social status by burial goods, then female burials have vastly more than male,” says Bournemouth University archaeologist Miles Russell, a co-author of the new paper.

Over the past 4 years, researchers sequenced DNA from dozens of Durotriges skeletons in a set of cemeteries in Dorset, England. By matching identical fragments of genetic material from different individuals, they reconstructed a family tree that spanned six generations—many of whom were female descendants of a single female founder. Two-thirds of the people in the kin group buried in the cemetery shared a rare type of mitochondrial gene, a form of DNA inherited only from the mother, including some of the men who shared the same female ancestor.

Other genetic evidence from the Durotriges cemeteries pointed to matrilocality, showing that men joined the clan from other families. “Women are staying close to family and are embedded in the support network they’ve known since childhood,” Cassidy notes. “It’s the husband who’s coming in as a stranger and is dependent on the wife’s family.” Women were evidently a force to be reckoned with in this part of Iron Age Britain.

Archaeologists have found that members of Great Britain’s Durotriges tribe often buried women with more grave goods than men.Miles Russell/Bournemouth University

Such patterns could help explain finds elsewhere in the Celtic world, where women were sometimes buried with rich grave goods or even chariots. “We’re thinking this could have been quite widespread,” Cassidy says.

To gather further evidence, she and her colleagues re-examined previously published genomes from more than 150 sites in Britain and Europe stretching back to the Stone Age. Starting around 500 B.C.E., the diversity in people’s mitochondrial DNA declined, the team found, suggesting more of them shared the same female ancestors. There was no matching decline in the diversity of Y chromosomes, which are passed from fathers to sons.

That suggests communities across Britain were anchored by specific female lines, with men marrying in from outside. “The signal they see in [the Durotriges] case study can be reproduced in other British sites,” says Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology archaeogeneticist Joscha Gretzinger, who was not involved with the work. “That’s quite a smoking gun.”

The study is part of a growing use of DNA to reconstruct genetic kinship in the deep past—and use it to shed light on the structure of past societies. University of Liverpool archaeologist Rachel Pope says the research is starting to highlight the wide variety of social organization people practiced in the past, something archaeology has hinted at over the past 2 decades.

Some of the earliest kinship studies using ancient DNA, for example, showed that Stone Age farmers in Britain and France living in the fifth millennium B.C.E. were organized patrilocally, with women leaving their homes to marry while men stayed put. The new data from Durotriges suggest that by the Iron Age, 4000 years later, something had shifted. “This is quite exciting,” Pope says. “There are moments in time in which societies seem to have a lot of high female status.”

[thefunnythingaboutpeople]

Have you ever really thought about how when you look at the moon, it's the same moon Shakespeare and Marie Antionette and Van Gogh and Cleopatra looked at.

[lunavdam]

Like all-fire 🪿🍬

[bebemoon]

dilara findikoglu 🐚

[silverscreencaps]

Black Narcissus (1947) dir. Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell

[goryhorroor]

my favorite genre of women is running from creepy castles/houses

[mikelogan]

LISA FRANKENSTEIN (2024) dir. Zelda Williams

[werewolff]

[sictransitgloriamvndi]

[beyourselfchulanmaria]

Sebastian Pether (British, 1790-1844)