The Role of Women as Municipal Matres

The focus of this chapter is the use of the titles mater and parens , awarded to prominent women as means of describing relationships between them and civic communities. Women could play important roles in the public life of Roman cities in the West, and some of them were rewarded with the title mater . The chapter discusses on a small group of Latin inscriptions that attest to the use of the terms mater or parens to indicate an institutional relationship between the woman mentioned in the inscriptions and the town. In the towns of the Roman Empire we find few attestations of matres municipii or coloniae . All of these are in Italy: one or two are found in Rimini, one in Sentino (the woman is called mater municipalis ), and one in Teramo; a female parens municipii is documented in Foligno. Keywords: mater municipalis ; parens ; Roman cities; Roman women