Ekaterina S. Dorozhkina

Teaching and Learning Specialist of the Department of World History of the Faculty of History

Russian State University for the Humanities

(Moscow, Russia)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2024-3-24-38

Abstract. The article explores the peculiarities of the establishment of the imperial family women cult and the formation of their iconography in the 1st – early 3rd centuries AD Roman Empire. Historiography considers the imperial cult as a political phenomenon that was typical for that period, while its sacral and religious aspects began to be covered in studies much later. It was only in the 10s of the 21st century that an active study of the imperial family women cults began. Scholars have considered this sphere in the context of the imperial cult general problematics, and many theses are debatable and topics are understudied. The study covers the period from the 20s BC to the first quarter of the 3rd century AD – a time of the active imperial cult iconography development during the Principate. The basis for the study is numismatic sources of the 1st – 3rd century AD, namely commemorative coins with images of deified imperial family women. The author aims to identify the degree of similarities and differences between the visual traditions of the imperial cult and the imperial family women, as well as to identify the peculiarities of honoring women within the imperial cult on the basis of visual sources. The analysis of different types of coinage reveals distinctive features of the iconography of the deified imperial family women: in the studied pictorial tradition, images of goddesses and divine personifications associated with fertility and prosperity were actively used, while symbols of the state were usually used when the woman in the image was associated directly with the emperor. The author explains this as follows: although women exerted some political influence at court, their cults did not affect the civil aspect of the cult of the emperor. They were mainly concerned with the fertility and prosperity of the imperial family and, as a consequence, of the entire state.
Keywords: imperial cult, Roman Empire, numismatics, Principate, imperial family women.

Full text of the article (PDF)

For citation: Dorozhkina, ES 2024, ‘Imperial Family Women Cults in Roman Empire of the 1st – early 3rd century AD (according to numismatics)’, Tula Scientific Bulletin. History. Linguistics, issue 3 (19), pp. 24–38, http://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2024-3-24-38 (in Russ.)

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