492 Kathryn Lomas
as Forbis notes, female benefactors are honored in very similar terms to their male
counterparts, they played a less important and visible public role than men in these areas,
and therefore in the creation and manipulation of important symbols of both eliteness
andRomanitas.
There is also some evidence that there may have been a greater need for men to adopt
outward symbols of the new culture, such as Roman dress, names, or language, than
for women to do so. The funerary stelae from Padua, discussed earlier, depict the male
honorand in the dress of a Roman citizen, but the female honorand as dressed in local
pre-Roman costume. This is not an exclusively Venetic peculiarity, however. Studies of
changes in dress in other areas of the Roman empire, notably in Gaul and Germany,
have found a similar pattern, with rapid uptake of Roman dress for men, but a much
greater degree of conservatism in female costume, at least as presented in the visual
arts. How far these representations reflect the dress worn on a daily basis is unclear.
Finds of local fibula types in second–first-century burials in Celtic areas of Italy sug-
gest that local forms of dress were still worn in at least some contexts by both men and
women (De Marinis 1977), so the use of dress as a gendered form of group identity
may be less clear-cut than the funerary monuments imply. However, they are signifi-
cant because they represent the lasting public image that the deceased (or their families)
wished to project, and this seems to place the emphasis squarely on Roman dress but only
for men.
Similar gendered patterns can be found in the uptake of other aspects of Roman culture,
such as the use of Latin, or the adoption of Roman names. Latin became the language
of choice for public inscriptions in Italy in the period after the Roman conquest. Where
local languages remained in use as written languages, they tend to be found in private
contexts. In northwest Italy, for instance, Roman-style public inscriptions, written in
Latin language and alphabet and using Roman epigraphic styles and formulae, are found
from the second centuryBConward, and public inscriptions in the local language and
script quickly fall into disuse. Some of the grave goods from a second–first-centuryBC
cemetery at Oleggio, in contrast, are still inscribed in the local script and language long
after this has largely disappeared from public life—notably a pottery vessel inscribed with
the female name (or title)rikana—and some of these are from female burials or are
inscribed with female names (Häussler and Pearce 2007: 220–2). A similar pattern can
be found in the Veneto, where grave goods and funerary urns, a significant proportion
of which are dedicated by or to women, continue to be inscribed in Venetic during the
second and first centuriesBC, a period during which public inscriptions were becoming
more Romanized in form and Latin was becoming widespread (Pellegrini and Prosdocimi
1967: 221–90). How far these distinctions represent gender differences is unclear, and
it is possible that the evidence represents a distinction between private and public rather
than between male and female contexts. It may reflect a division between an increasingly
Romanized public epigraphic culture and the use of Latin as the language of public life
on the one hand, and the survival of non-Latin languages and epigraphic cultures for
private use on the other (Benelli 2001). Nevertheless, there may also be some element
of gendering, since men are likely to have had a greater degree of exposure to the public
culture of Latin epigraphy and more need to participate in it. In general, it seems that
gender does modify the impact and uptake of some key aspects of Roman culture. In
particular, there seems to have been a much greater emphasis on the adoption of the