Goodwin Award Citation 2006

Kristina Milnor

Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus:  Inventing Private Life

Oxford University Press, 2005

‘Never judge a book by its cover’, we are told:  but the impulse is all but irresistible in the case of the volume which I am delighted to present to you, along with my fellow committee members Patricia Rosenmeyer and Richard Martin, as our choice for the 2006 Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit.  The theme of the book is domesticity and private life, and on the dust-jacket is a painting by Rubens of a breast-feeding woman.  Nothing very remarkable about that.  But Gender, Domesticity and the Age of Augustus, by Kristina Milnor, is not your grandfather’s book about domesticity and private life, and the cover just described is not the mother-and-infant scene your grandmother would have chosen for it.  The recipient of the breast in this picture is an adult, is bearded, and (in case that isn’t enough) is tied up hand and foot; he is not the woman’s child but, as it happens, her father.  And with this last twist we can come full circle and recognize that the image on the cover is in fact an image of domesticity, not one of debauchery or worse.  The young woman is Pero, whose father has been unjustly imprisoned and condemned to starve to death; the daughter saves his life by visiting him in his cell and nursing him with the milk from her breast.  Valerius Maximus tells the tale; and an ancient forerunner of Rubens’ painting, preserved on the wall of a small room in the house of Lucretius Fronto in Pompeii, is the focus of one of the many rich stories which Kristina Milnor tells about the constitution of Roman private space as part of the theatre of Roman public life.  But the cover illustration may also serve as a kind of emblem of the book’s characteristic technique of argument:  a familiar theme is made strange, and is then made familiar again. 

‘Early imperial culture worked extremely hard to make domesticity invisible, to make it unquestioned, natural, and transhistorical’, writes Milnor; and her own book works no less hard to historicize domesticity, to question and denature it.  Her tour takes in Augustan architecture on the Palatine, domestic space in Vitruvius, and homes invaded by death-squads in recollections of the Triumviral period.  History takes shape not just via Livy and Tacitus but via Valerius Maximus and Seneca the Elder; Musonius Rufus is tested against Columella.  No term remains uninterrogated; even ‘The Age of Augustus’ in this book becomes ‘an idea rather than a chronological moment’, and an idea which in some ways takes on greater urgency after the death of Augustus himself.

This is not a book dominated by a single grand design, but one which defines, probes and teases its subject in multiple ways throughout.  It gives pleasure in the liveliness and energy of its thinking, and in its broad range of approaches taken.  It challenges our assumptions in its consistently intelligent engagement with some of the best current writing in our field.  It takes risks, engaging in debates with related disciplines and enlarging the kinds of question which can be applied to this central period in Roman history.  It is above all a generous book, which opens things up rather than closing them down, and which puts into the hands of its readers a splendid set of tools for future work. 

Respectfully submitted,

Stephen Hinds

Chair, Committee on the C.J. Goodwin Award of Merit for 2006