This is the first book-length study to reconstruct the role of women in the epic poems of the Flavian period of Latin literature. Antony Augoustakis examines the role of female characters from the perspective of Julia Kristeva's theories on foreign otherness and motherhood to underscore the on-going negotiation between same and other in the Roman literary imagination as a telling reflection on the construction of Roman identity and of gender and culturalhierarchies.