tgiFHI | Alicia Jiménez, “A more impressive sound through a tongue not her own”: ancient Roman Female Honorific Statues and the mechanisms of representation

tgiFHI is a weekly series that gives Duke faculty in the humanities, interpretive social sciences and arts the opportunity to present their current research to their departmental and interdepartmental colleagues, students, and other interlocutors in their fields.

On January 23, 2026, we will host Alicia Jiménez, Associate Professor of Classical Studies.

Do things stand for people or should we allow them to stand for themselves as recent manifestos (symmetrical archaeology) have claimed? To investigate this question, this paper examines widely replicated female honorific statues from the Late Roman Republic and the early Roman empire (1st century BCE - 2nd century CE). There are three main reasons: because they did actually stand for people and were considered replicas of specific bodies in the past; because in fact they are not exact doubles of individuals, since they were "mass-produced" using a limited set of types throughout the Mediterranean and lastly, because these statues are representations of one of the social groups consistently silenced by the ancient sources and archaeologists alike: women, even if they certainly represented elite women. In this talk, I intend to go beyond the problem of women's visibility in antiquity and tackle questions not only of absence/presence, but also of whether certain forms of presence may actually function as mechanisms of invisibility. In that sense my paper explores the extent to which these stone personifications of ideal femininity gave voice or muted women by speaking for them in ancient monumental porticoes, fountains, theatres, and funerary monuments.

Alicia Jiménez has interests in postcolonial theory, ancient Roman imperialism and the material traces of violence in the creation of the western provinces of the Roman empire, with a special focus on the Iberian Peninsula (Hispania). She is author of Imagines hibridae. Her second book, Imitation and Power in Ancient Rome: an Archaeology of Mimesis (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), is an investigation on how shapes, images and objects are transmitted and replicated in provincial contexts and the power dynamics enmeshed in imitation processes.

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