Some thoughts on
A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women
Emma Southon
Oneworld 2023
One of my Latin teachers at school was a textbook case of testosterone poisoning, so on top of all the manliness in the ancient sources, he had to add an extra layer of testosterone with his made-up example sentences. I've always loved the language for its mathematical clarity and studied it for six years (against the wishes of my parents), but the male chest-beating and gender imbalance was less appealing to me. And then I went on to study sciences rather than Romance languages, Latin memories took a back seat. Nearly 30 years later I had the chance of revisiting the buried knowledge when one of my daughters became interested in learning Latin. As the course which the school had promised didn't materialise, I taught her to GCSE.
Now, another decade later, with a reasonably refreshed memory of all the manliness in the works of Caesar, Livius, Tacitus et al., I found it extremely enlightening to learn about 21 women who also shaped Roman history but somehow weren't mentioned in our school books. Or if they were mentioned, they only served as an trigger to launch men into action. Like a jigsaw that was previously missing half the pieces, Roman history makes a lot more sense with this addition. I'm only amazed this hasn't been done a generation earlier. While there are biographies of some of the women featured here, there is no work on Roman history across the 11 centuries until the fall of the Western Roman Empire where the significance of women is mentioned in any significant way. (At least Southon says she couldn't find any.)
Headline stars of the chapters include Augustus's daughter Julia (but not his wife Livia, who starred in the recent TV series Domina), four other Julias, the Brits Cartimandua and Boudicca, as well as the Syrian princess Zenobia. So we do get to travel the Roman world as well, with interesting insights into the more remote territories.
Even with the testosterone toned down, the history still contains a lot of senseless slaughter though. One of the other things that have changed since I went to school is that nowadays, classicists write about the ancient world without mincing their words regarding how batshit crazy many of the key events were. The overall tone is a bit like: What can you expect from a city founded by a guy who just murdered his brother. Family values and all that.
Southon's writing is very 21st century with generous pop-cultural references and swearwords, but I guess the Roman men who defined the history as we used to learn it in the 20th century deserve the reckoning that they get here - they were just effing insane and probably had way too much testosterone.
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