Gender and Alterity in Provincial Portraiture: Reconsidering the Isiac Grave Reliefs of Roman Athens
Putting Isiac Portraits in a Provincial Frame
This article re-examines Athenian funerary reliefs that depict women in Isis’s dress. Previous work focused on these sculptures’ cultic and art historical implications but has not considered their meaning in a colonial context. During the Roman Empire, provincial communities often depicted women in local, ethnic, or otherwise differentiated costumes, while men employed Greco-Roman dress. Similarly, in Athens, several women wear the Egyptian goddess Isis’s dress, while their male companions wear common Greek dress. This paper argues that Athenian reliefs use this gendered pattern of dress to negotiate competing yet complementary identity claims within a Roman colonial context. This analysis suggests that cult membership allowed some Greeks to employ Empire-wide patterns of self-representation in their portraiture.