Race, Gender, and Queenship in Book 2 of Vitruvius’s de Architectura

Abstract:This paper engages with intersectional feminist theory to explore how Vitruvius’s story about the Carian queen Artemisia II in Book 2 of De Architectura illuminates first-century B.C.E. Roman attitudes of hostility towards non-Roman women in spaces of political power—especially given what would have been the recent defeat of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII. The paper has two goals: first, I argue that first-century B.C.E. accounts of queen ship configure Artemisia and Cleopatra as raced and gendered embodiments of opposition to the idealized image of Roman imperial masculinity. Second, I demonstrate how race-oriented feminist frameworks can productively bear on historical analyses and classical studies.