Allia Potestas

Allia Potestas was a freedwoman from the Roman town of Perugia who lived sometime during the 1st–4th centuries AD.

[1] In 1912, workmen who were making a foundation for a garage on the Via Pinciana in Rome found at a point 2 meters below the street-level a marble slab bearing a long inscription.

[1] This unusual inscription is not easy to classify, and its extravagant praise has been taken by some scholars for irony.

The first focuses on Allia's virtues, describing her as extremely hardworking – "always the first to rise and the last to sleep... with her woolwork never leaving her hands without reason".

The second extols her beauty with semi-erotic descriptions of her body and notes that she lived harmoniously with two lovers.

Finally, the author laments her death and promises that she "shall live as long as may be possible through [his] verses.

"[1] The epitaph shows many of the stock characteristics of sepulchral inscriptions; it dwells on the unfairness of fate, the beauty and household virtues of the deceased, the grief of the bereaved, etc.

[1] Most surviving epitaphs portray their subjects in a more, from a Roman perspective, ideal light.

Women in Rome were expected to be "devoted to housekeeping, child bearing, chastity, submissiveness, and the ideal of being all her life univira (one-man woman)".

Regardless, most scholars agree it is no older than the 1st century AD, due to the apparent Ovidian influence.

Cruel lord of death and stern Persephone, why do you snatch away what is good and let the worthless remain?

Strong, honest, frugal, upright, most trusty of housekeepers, neat in the house and on the street, well-known to everybody, she could face every task by herself.

No other woman's face was of such ivory-like brightness, they say; her breasts, white as snow, showed their slight form.