Donna e città romana: identità civica e genere a confronto

Women can be identified as an essential component of civic communities within cities of the Roman Empire, despite their not being allowed to hold public offices (with the exclusion of the sacerdotal office). Such an important presence was visually represented through the erection of monuments (mainly statutes) publicly devoted to women, chiefly ob merita eius (an epigraphic formula describing financial intervention on their part to benefit the city), and the introduction of new honorific titles specifically for women, titles which customarily borrowed their lexicon from the family sphere and in the end created a true female civic patronage