Women's Socioeconomoic Status and Religious Leadership in Asia Minor: In the first Two Centuries C.E.

2. Wealthy Women and Household Status

2 Wealthy Women and Household Status I have argued that determinations of women’s religious status depend on understanding women’s status in such socioeconomic institutions as the household, patronage, and slavery. In this chapter I investigate relationships among household position, socioeconomic status, and religious status for (relatively) wealthy women who lived in Asia Minor in the first two centuries of the common era.1 Studies of households have contributed through analysis of women’s status in terms of honor/shame, family relationships, or gendered spheres of activity, yet we still need a more comprehensive understanding of how women’s socioeconomic positions varied within households. In contrast to most of the earlier studies, this one draws upon inscriptions and iconography as well as literary texts, and it highlights differences in representations of women with respect to their households. Instead of harmonizing different portrayals of wealthy women, my approach highlights tension and variation in order to make status distinctions more visible. Understanding women’s religious status depends on understanding their status in households since some religious groups met in households and some texts associate household organization with the organizational structures of religious groups.2 The household was the primary socioeconomic unit throughout society. In a preceding chapter I discussed affinities between the household and imperial politics in terms of governing hierarchies and the Augustan propaganda of paternalism and concord or peace. Household relations were also fundamental to the legal regulation of property transfer in marriage and inheritance.3 Taking note of these political and legal aspects of the 1. By “households with property,” and “wealthy women,” I refer to people who occupied a middle position on Friesen’s poverty scale, somewhat above subsistence level but well below imperial elites (discussed in the preceding chapters). This group had the resources to carve funerary monuments and to leave records of their property transactions in legal sources. 2. I return to this in the following discussion. 59 household both underscores the importance of determining women’s household status and foreshadows some of the complexities that arise in this investigation. Accurate interpretation of texts that associate women’s status in religious groups with households must take into account socioeconomic, political, and legal dimensions of households. Thus I seek to analyze the sources with reference to the model of kyriarchy, a comprehensive representation of Roman systems. In kyriarchal structures of socioeconomic and political status, women who had access to socioeconomic resources enjoyed a relatively high (elite) position. I will argue that socioeconomic status varied further within this group with factors such as age, legal and marital status, ethnicity, education, and training. Where legal status can be determined, the women in this chapter were freeborn (but the sources do not always distinguish between freeborn and freed persons). Nearly all freeborn women married early in their childbearing years.4 Demographic studies indicate that elite women often survived their older husbands to become widows.5 I examine representations of propertied wives and widows in order to investigate relationships between women’s household status and their socioeconomic status. Analysis of these representations suggests possibilities for historical understandings of wealthy wives and widows in religious texts. My sources for the study of wealthy wives and widows include iconography, inscriptions, and literary texts. I have selected texts that indicate that wealthy women’s household status impacted their religious status. I highlight the two letters of Ignatius to religious groups in Smyrna and the status of freeborn women in households.6 In these texts, we see both unmarried women in households without men as well as married women in their husbands’ households.7 In order to interpret these texts, I have chosen inscriptions and images that portray wealthy women’s households in antiquity. I analyze representations of freeborn wealthy women in households in funerary inscriptions, funerary iconography, Xenophon’s Oikonomikos, and legal 3. Octavian (Caesar Augustus) himself was adopted by Julius Caesar, a move that facilitated the transfer of privileges, property, and status. 4. Ann Ellis Hanson, “Widows Too Young in Their Widowhood,” in I, Claudia II: Women in Roman Art and Society, ed. Diana E. E. Kleiner and Susan B. Matheson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 151. 5. See the discussion in Hanson, “Widows Too Young,” 150–51. 6. These are Ignatius’ To the Smyrneans and To Polycarp. 7. While 1 Timothy is another text that discusses both wives and widows, the household situation of the widows in this text is somewhat less clear than it is in the two letters...