It was 195 B.C., the Iberian Peninsula saw the arrival of 50,000 soldiers sent by Rome to control the Hispanic provinces and the consul who commanded them, Cato, took the easternmost city of the Vascones, Iacca, in the Aragonese Jacetania. Unaware, very probably, of these events, in Rome -according to the historian Tito Livio- a great group of women took the forum to make visible their civil service examination to the Opia law that since 215 B.C. imposed restrictions to women in the exhibition of jewels. This protest movement, due to its success - since the law was abolished despite the civil service examination of the most traditionalist sectors of the Senate of Rome - has been used recently to draw an image of Roman women that is very different from the ideal assumed by women 2,000 years ago and the one shown in ancient sources. Roman women took pride in, essentially, dedicating themselves to family service and housework. With the expressions domum seruauit - "I served my family"-, lanam fecit - "I worked the wool"- a Roman epitaph summarizes this ideal and the space in which it was developed: the dwelling, the domus. In fact, the qualities that should adorn a woman in Rome were called domestica bona, "domestic virtues". Among them -and they are recalled by Tacitus or Pliny- modesty, piety, affability, loyalty -to family and children, the virtue of obsequentia-, strength of spirit, chastity... And, although it may seem shocking, these values not only remained in the ideal of aristocratic literary production, but were assumed by society. This is demonstrated by the allusion to them in many epitaphs that women from any corner of the Empire received from their grieving relatives.

With this context as a background, that of women confined to domestic affairs, with hardly any possibility of assuming public positions -beyond the aristocratic priesthoods of Vesta and the imperial cult- but influential and visible through their relationship with their husbands, getting to know the women who, in Roman times populated the lands of present-day Navarre is not an easy task. The texts of the ancient writers did not bother to portray them and the archaeological documentation, very rich in some of the sensational Roman cities of our land, hardly offers us light on two aspects that -as Tertullian would affirm already entered the II century A.D.- were fundamental in the visibility as femina maxima, as "excellent woman", of any Roman woman: the ornatus and the cultus. The former referred to skin and hair care and the latter to grooming staff. The excavations of Andelo (Mendigorría) or Santa Criz de Eslava have provided us, for example, with beautiful bone combs, carnelian or jet ring settings, gold pieces forming part of complex earrings -crotalia-that tinkled in the ears of the ladies who wore them and for which, as was the case with the necklaces, the ornatus were used to decorate the ears of the women who wore them and for which, as was the case with the necklaces of the women who wore them, as it happened with the necklaces, pearls and emeralds brought from Asia were imported, like the one that some years ago we were able to verify in the Basque city of Los Bañales de Uncastillo (Zaragoza) or, simply, as in a beautiful necklace of Andelo, the precious stones, the gemmae, were imitated with beads of vitreous paste, glass or copper. Examples of these jewels can be seen in the exhibition areas of the aforementioned sites where fusayolas and ceramic loom weights or bone needles also illustrate the textile activity, so common among Roman women . In the Museum of Navarre there is a registration from Gastiáin, in the valley of Lana. In that place there must have been a city of essentially Celtic population as it was the one that occupied the bordering lands of the current Basque Country. In that registration Annia Buturra was represented. She did it in a summary funerary portrait that crowned her epitaph decorated with combs, mirrors and other elements of what the Roman juridical sources called ornamenta muliebra, "feminine ornaments".

The inscriptions are, in fact, our best source to know details about the life of women in Roman Navarre. If they always constitute a primary document about ancient societies, in this topic they are absolutely decisive, they give life to some of our protagonists showing the tremendous social inequalities of the Roman world and they always tell beautiful stories. The place of Santa Maria de Pamplona exhibits, in fact, the replica of a beautiful funerary stele from one of the necropolis of Pompelo where the names of some of the first documented "Pamplona" women, Festa, Rustica and Stratonice, from the 2nd century AD, appear. The Museum of Navarre, for its part, offers us what may be the first "Navarrese" marriage represented in art: that of Eminianus and Anna joining hands in a stele as crude as it is touching. It is thanks to the inscriptions that we know that some women from cities like Cara (Santacara) or Pompelo (Pamplona) were wives of important notables who served the Roman administration in the provincial capital, in Tarraco (Tarragona) where their husbands held the flaminate, a priesthood elected by an assembly composed of representatives of all the communities of the province Tarraconense, one of the largest in the Empire. Thus, Postumia Nepotiana, of Cara, was, around 130-180 A.D., wife of the flamen Titus Porcius Verrinus and Sempronia Placida, native of Pompellus, was the wife of Gaius Cornelius Valens in the time of the emperor framework Aurelius. As such she was named flaminica, priestess of the emperor, receiving public honors in the provincial forum. From her husband we know that he paid the expenses of a very expensive embassy of the province to the emperor who, at the time, was in Pannonia, Serbia. To that same influential elite, but on a local scale, must have belonged Sempronia, daughter of Firmo, documented in a registration of Cara but native of Andelo and that belongs to a family, that of the Sempronios, that, in Andelo, counted among its members with, at least, an aedile, Sempronio Caro attested in a plate in bronze also in the Museum of Navarre.

If the woman should be the guarantor of excellence and family prestige, should "take care of the house" -tueredomum-and "serve the children" -inseruireliberos-, as Tacitus recalled, it is logical that some of them promoted in their rustic properties great monuments to exalt the members of their family. If this is what Atilia Festa did in Sádaba (Zaragoza), not far from Los Bañales, in a monument that is still imposing today, so must have a Valeria in the vicinity of Santa Criz. Moreover, of the more than thirty Roman funerary inscriptions preserved in the Museum of Navarra, almost half were promoted by women. This not only speaks to us of their greater life expectancy, but also illustrates how they were committed to making their lineage visible and at the same time showing off their fecunditas, their "fecundity" as women. A singular case is that of Antonia Criseida who, in the necropolis of Santa Criz, the only one that today can be visited in situ in Vascon territory, dedicated a large monument to her husband Athenion who held in the city the position of dispensator, a public lender of whom, normally, the sources ponder his extraordinary wealth. Logically, there are cases in which it is the sons, like Lucius Emilius Seranus in Andelo, who honor their mothers, in this case Calpurnia Urchatetel, whose cognomen refers to the vernacular languages -various and not only the Basque one- spoken in Vascon territory. It should not be discarded that the crowning in sandstone that exhibits the Museum of Navarre next to the happily recovered togado of Pompelo and that still conserves two prints for statues -one of them with part of the bronze calceus-, belonged to a double statue, of a man and his wife, members of the elite of the city of the Carenses. Apart from some representations of divinities from Sangüesa or Los Arcos, the still meager Roman sculptural repertoire in Navarre -except for the sensational group of Santa Cruz- does not yet include representations of these elite women.

If that obsequentia with respect to the husband and that pietas, that "devotion", with respect to the children, was reflected in public tributes, both qualities were also present in the private sphere and, in particular, in two universes that marked the daily life of Roman society, which, according to Cicero, believed that everything was governed by the intervention of the gods in the lives of men. We refer to the funerary and votive spheres. A beautiful registration from Eslava, which can be seen in the sensational archaeological exhibition promoted by the local City Council, presents us with a woman of Celtic name, Araca Marcela, asking the local god Peremusta - the "great god", deus magnus - for her health, but also for the health of "her own". There are cases in which the woman intervenes with members of her family for apply for the divine favor -as Festa did with Lacubegi in Ujué but also with Jupiter- and others in which the woman appears as the only promoter of the vote as Neria Helpide who honored Cibeles in San Martín de Unx or Emilia Paterna who did the same with Losa in Lerate. The habit of the woman promoting the funeral honors of husband and children, as mentioned above, can be seen in a very familiar tone, paradigmatic, in an epitaph of Marañón where a certain Doitena honors her father-in-law, framework Cecilio Flavino, and her husband, framework Cecilio Flavo, aged sixty and thirty-five years respectively. But also in many other examples.

The evocative power of the Roman world, of its authors and protagonists, survivors of a past that, in the West, has shaped us culturally, has often been underlined. But it had, logically, its shadows. Perhaps the life of many of its women, also in Navarre, would not withstand the aesthetic judgment of our time. But historians do not improve society by disguising historical reality or twisting it to sweeten it, falsifying it, but by bringing to the present those who were the protagonists of a different past but which interests us as a past and making its protagonists, in this case women, visible. Their lives continue to tell us stories in the objects they used, in the spaces in which they lived and in the inscriptions they promoted or received. Approaching these lives through the latter and letting them speak is one of the great satisfactions of the official document historian of antiquity.