ABSTRACT
For the relatively few women who were members of the Roman elite, the last two centuries of the Republic brought significant and, for the most part, welcome change. Despite efforts to curb their inheritance rights, Roman noblewomen came into possession of sizeable fortunes, and increasingly were able to administer them with minimal interference from their husbands or guardians. These changes, it should now be clear, were both an unexpected and in some masculine quarters, at least - unwelcome result of Rome's prolonged and highly profitable transmarine warfare. Still, it should always be remembered that these campaigns also routinely required the conscription or voluntary recruitment of scores of thousands of Italian peasants. Rome's far-flung wars of conquest, therefore, could not help but affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of free-born but less privileged and thus completely anonymous Italian women. Many of these, it is safe to assume, also experienced unprecedented independence in this period - but in economically more vulnerable circumstances. It is these women, so many of whom must have lived at or near the economic margins of Italian society, who are the subject of this chapter.
