ABSTRACT
Julia Domna is one of Roman history’s most famous women of culture; in fact, she is the final point of a study that takes Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi three and a half centuries earlier, as its beginning. Not that she did not have successors in the later Empire: Domna’s association with philosophers was not unlike the situation at Rome from the 380s to 410, when aristocratic Christian women gathered around Jerome or Pelagius; of course allowance has to be made for her special position as empress. But what does her culture amount to? The prime items in Domna’s cultural life are her education, as far as we can assess it, her friendship with the celebrated sophist Philostratus, member of a distinguished family originating in Lemnos that produced literary men in several generations,1 the biography of Apollonius of Tyana that she urged Philostratus to write, and above all her being the centre of a ‘circle’ of eminent literary men and a significant patron. Of this extreme views have been held, at first romantic and exalted and, it must be admitted, sensationalist, more recently severely reductionist.
