This book examines representations of the Egyptian goddess Isis in various Roman literary texts, such as love poetry, epic, occasional poetry, historiography, rhetoric, philosophy, and the novel. Isis provides a unique opportunity to fruitfully examine the nexus of ethnicity and gender to gain important insights into how Roman authors responded to, shaped, or understood these intersecting identities. The goddess emerges as able to inhabit simultaneously several ethnic categories, such as Greek, Egyptian, and Roman. As a female deity, she is both a universal mother and a victimized other, offering a sense of belonging to different individuals and groups in the globalizing Greco-Roman world from the first century BCE to the second century CE. My analysis demonstrates the complexity of all these identifications and contributes to our understanding of the popularity of Isis in Roman literary texts and Roman thought more generally.

The photograph of Vassiliki Panoussi was taken by Stephen Salpukas.