Uncanny Mothers in Roman Literature

While the study of gender in ancient Greece and Rome has become mainstream within Classics, until relatively recently maternity has constituted a sort of blind spot for scholars, due, perhaps, to the overwhelming weight given to the father in Roman law and ideology. Rome, after all, is the “Daddy” of patriarchal societies, a legal and economic system built on the concept of patria potestas, or paternal power, which, as Richard Saller has noted, has traditionally “provided the pattern of patriarchy in European thought.”¹ Moreover, compared to other premodern periods, such as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the real, historical