did you know that Roman women did not have their own names like men, and that all the sisters of the same family were called the same, just by their surname? Or that they were incorporated into the labour market in traditionally “male” professions such as blacksmiths, bricklayers or shipwrights? Coinciding with the premiere on Movistar+ of the series El corazón del Imperio, created by Santiago Posteguillo and starring Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, we invite you to attend this round table discussion on the history of women in Rome with the participation of Patricia González Gutiérrez, author of the book Soror. Women in Rome, Israel del Santo, director of The Heart of the Empire, Sandra Escacena, actress of The Heart of the Empire and the journalist and author Elisa McCausland.

Violence against women is a social scourge of such magnitude that for decades numerous social movements, legislative advances and public policies have been developed to eradicate it. Although the abuse is committed in the home, it is necessary to visualise the role of women in history, to reflect the leading role they played in antiquity, “and to fill in the blank of the paper of the books that have always told the other side”. The history of Roman women has always been told by men, who labelled women’s behaviour in accordance with patriarchal customs as fury.

Bacchanals, a term with unmistakable resonances, a historical cliché with a solid foundation, but is it plausible? Nothing so Roman in the collective imagination as degenerate emperors and unbridled orgies… and yet bacchanals were rituals, ceremonies of worship to Bacchus, a god of salvation, offering hope of life after death.

So what was the truth behind the great Bacchanalia scandal? In 186 BC the Senate of Rome and the consuls launched a persecution against the followers of Bacchus, which became the first witch-hunt in the West. The unquestionable fact presents more shadows than light: did the Roman matrons lose their precious virtue by indulging in sex? Did the Roman adolescents immolate their virility in honour of Dionysus? Or was there fear in Rome of a pagan sect of mystical rites that would jeopardise the social foundations of the nascent Empire? Did the Bacchantes really hatch a conspiracy?

On the occasion of the presentation of the book, Women in Augustan times. Realidad social e imposición legal (Tirant 2016), the Museum is organising a round table discussion on different aspects related to women in this period of Ancient Rome.

On the occasion of the international commemoration of the bimillenary of the death of Augustus in 2014, various activities were held that took as a common thread the interdisciplinary treatment of women in the saeculum augustum. This monograph is forged in that specific context; thus, from the fields of Roman Law, History of Law, Literature, Ancient and Medieval History, Archaeology and History of Art, it brings together various research works on real women in the temporal and political frontier where two centuries, two systems of power converge: the Republic and the Empire, and two models of morality.

Roman women, admired, reviled or forgotten, spanning practically the span of a century, with the common denominator of their strong personalities and high cultural level; women who, according to the terminology of gender discourse, felt “empowered”.