La murena “con gli orecchini”: leadership maschile e agency femminile fra tarda repubblica e prima età imperiale

A passage from Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia contains news of an unusual circumstance, to say the least: in the piscina of a villa in Bauli, located near Cape Misenum, not far from Baia, Antonia Minor, wife of Drusus Major (I), is said to have adorned with a pair of earrings a moray eel of which she was particularly fond, and the fact is said to have had such a resonance that, for this reason, many people went to visit the famous holiday resort. The fact, at first glance, could be ascribed to one of the innumerable extravagant news items collected in Pliny’s monumental work, but, in reality, it lends itself to multiple and layered levels of interpretation and allows for increasingly complex exegetical insights concerning the moray eel as a socio-cultural marker in the gastronomic sphere (§ 2), fish-farming as status symbol and the affective proximity of the piscinarii towards certain fish species in particular (§ 3) and, above all, the female agency exercised in the political sphere during the Tiberian and Vespasian periods within the domus Augusta (§ 4).