ABSTRACT
The education of Roman women is veiled in obscurity. Ancient sources do not pay much attention to it and modern historians, when addressing the problem at all, usually restrict themselves to vague generalizations, such as that Roman women of the late republic were ‘inconspicuous in intellectual life’, that ‘upper-class women could be well-educated’, or that ‘the majority of women within the aristocracy must have been, in the cultural sphere, as highly educated as their brothers’.1 These general and, sometimes, contradictory statements are not founded on any systematic investigation; rather, they are imprecise impressions, usually based on one or two well-known examples of educated women which are repeated again and again in modern studies and are quoted as if representing Roman upper-class women in general. In spite of the continuous interest in the study of ancient women during the last twenty-five years and the earlier wave of interest in this subject around the beginning of this century, no modern study is devoted to the education of Roman (upper-class) women, its aims, impediments and controversies, and to the place of women in the educated society of their days.2 The present study is an attempt to remedy this omission.
