Woman in the Mirror: The Rhetoric of Adornment in the Roman World

Abstract

The modern study of the female body in the ancient world is largely a study of reflections. In the metaphors of modern criticism, we do not gaze directly upon women of flesh and blood, instead we see women only indirectly in the mirror of discourses composed almost exclusively by men. 1 Thus two recent collections of essays on women in antiquity have stressed our confrontation with male constructions of the female by employing the terms ‘reflections’ or ‘images’ in their titles. 2 In this chapter I wish to survey some literary and visual texts of the Roman world which themselves articulate the female form as an image constructed in a mirror. For the Roman texts which describe the practice of female adornment, whether in a philosophical, medical, historical, comic or satiric context, hold up a mirror to the ancient world in which we see a woman who, before her own mirror, displays a body that has been ‘made-up’. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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