Introduction

Flute-girls, bearded Celtiberians, runaway slaves, mantled Greeks, and drunken priests of Cybele: Roman cauponae and popinae were places for variegated encounters, and, as such, intriguing subjects for Latin poets and satirists. Bars and inns of the Roman Empire have likewise been a fruitful subject for much recent research, as loci for mingling different social, economic, and gender categories, at the crossroads of local and foreign, private and public, moral and immoral. The identities of women working in such an environment as hostesses (copa, caupona, domina cauponae) or waitresses (ancilla, ministra), with statuses ranging from freeborn and freedwomen to foreigners and slaves, are highly interesting, because they are located ambiguously in a grey zone between Roman social categories.

In this paper, the identities of women working in bars and inns will be examined through their dress and appearance. Roman clothing was profoundly meaningful and hierarchical, full of biographic details relative to gender, age, marital status, wealth, and morals. In Barbara Kellum's words, a Roman ‘was what he appeared to be’. As a system of signs, the dress was a boundary marker between different social classes and ethnic groups. Nathan Joseph's idea that dress is made up of a series of layers of signs, more or less perceptible by others, is fundamental for the theoretical basis of the present study, together with the concept of cultural memory.