Affiliation: Dartmouth
Roberta Stewart is a Professor of Classical Studies at Dartmouth College. She holds her degrees from Duke University (PhD), and the University of Michigan (BA), and she attended the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the American Academy in Rome. Her research interests include Roman coins, Roman priesthood, and Greek and Roman literature. Her current publications include “Gender, Class, and Slavery in Plautus’ Rudens in 1884 St. Louis,’” in Classical Antiquity, and a forthcoming publication “Witnessing and Poetic Receptions of the Experience of War: Homer, Doug Anderson, and Jehanne Dubrow,” In Just Classics, edited by E. Perry and D. Machado (University of Michigan Press). She is the 2024-2025 Metcalf lecturer for the AIA’s National Lecture Program.
Civil war is a moment of disruption that lays open the guts of a society’s discourses and values. When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE he became a legal “enemy of the state.” The coin imagery allows us to track that engagement, his propaganda during the ensuing war that stretched from Gaul and Spain, to Greece, Asia Minor, and to North Africa). These messages had profound effects, influencing the images of the coinage of his successors, both political elites and veteran colonies, and especially from his heir Octavian, soon to be Augustus. The coins reveal competing viewpoints on religious traditions and political exceptionalism, as well as Caesar’s awareness of history and attempts to relive or rewrite history.
Augustan propaganda conjured up Cleopatra as a threatening female outsider. This lecture brings the evidence of the coinage into the discussion of Cleopatra’s pearls, part of her self-representation as a powerful monarch. Her images were interpreted not only as markers of a woman who lavished attention on a luxurious lifestyle but one of threatening female sexuality. Tracking the iconography of Cleopatra and of defeated Egypt allows us to evaluate their Roman and Mediterranean associations in a medium of mass communication and so to see more clearly the Augustan claims about women and empire.
