Women in Roman Republican Literature: The Use of Mulier in Sallust and Plautus

Language and word choice are critical tools that allow an author to communicate how they want the audience to receive and think about a character or situation. Authors often will use colloquialisms or euphemisms to imply something about the characters that either cannot be said or is not appropriate to say. This is especially true of words used for women. There are several Latin words meaning ‘woman’ or ‘female’. In this thesis, I focus on the most common three: mulier, femina and puella. Because these terms can implicitly comment upon the social positions of characters, their fundamental meanings are foundational to my ultimate argument that Plautus and Sallust use terms for women in significant and marked ways. The social reality of Roman women seems to be at odds with how they are represented in Latin literature. The difference between a woman who is a femina or a mulier seems to be one based on morality. As I will show in my studies of the way Plautus and Sallust use mulier, this difference can be related to a woman’s attitude towards sex, or reflective of behavior to which men object