Stripping the Roman Ladies: Ovid's Rites and Readers

Abstract

Roy Gibson has brilliantly shown that women who follow Ovid's advice on dressing in Ars Amatoria 3 will resemble neither the traditional matron nor the stereotypical whore. For Gibson, Ovid encourages his female students to choose their hairstyles and clothes according to aesthetic rather than moral criteria. This substitution clashes with the spirit of the lex Iulia, which attempted to polarize women into two social categories: prostitute and mater familias. What is more, each group was to be identified with its own type of distinguishing dress: the stola and palla were the distinctive markers of respectable women, while prostitutes had to assume the toga. Ovid undermines the dress code of the Augustan legislation not only in his playful Ars but also in the more serious Fasti. Whereas the cults of traditional Roman religion tended to reinforce social hierarchies, Ovid, in his treatment of theVeneralia in Fasti 4, not only invites women of all social groups to common rituals, but also uses female nudity as a means of blurring the social and marital status of the participants.