Round table. Aware of the need to vindicate the role of women as active agents in history, the Feminist Research Institute of the UCM, in collaboration with the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, presents a Gender Itinerary on women in Ancient Greece, which deals with the construction of female identity, their spaces, gestures and tasks and the models of behaviour assigned to them. This reading is part of the project External link, opens in new windowItineraries for WomenExternal link, opens in new window External link promoted by the MECD and the Institute for Feminist Research to recover the memory of women in museums.

From archaic times in Greece, we have news that women participated in the Dionysian cults organised by the polis, in menadic rites and in mystical cults. The activity “With strips and madly: maenads and bacchantes on the run” aims to approach this reality from different perspectives and to show, through texts and iconography, the rites in which women took part, the functions they performed as worshippers and priestesses, the clothes, adornments and attributes that identified them as followers of Dionysus, the setting of the rites and the state of enthusiasm and delirium that the bacchantes reached in some cases.

Dra. Francesca Cenerini (Università di Bologna).

Cycle “Dialogues with the classical world”, September 6 to December 20, 2017.

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”.

International Museum Day. Museums for equality: diversity and inclusion.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights and, endowed with reason and conscience, should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948)

Human beings are equal but also very diverse: different backgrounds, ethnicity, gender, language, beliefs, culture… It seems that this diversity has often separated and set us against each other instead of being a source of richness and mutual understanding.

The pieces in the Museum are an expression of different eras and cultures. We invite you to discover in these videos some aspects related to diversity in some of them. History can thus be a starting point for reflecting on these same issues in our present.

There is no doubt that, in the history of humanity, women have played a leading role, ignored or despised, which we are gradually discovering and highlighting.