A Rome of One's Own
The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“Clever, bold, and refreshingly feminist; readers will be engaged and entertained to the very end." (Booklist)
This wildly entertaining new history of Rome uses the lives of 21 women to upend our understanding of the ancient world, from the acclaimed author of A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
This is a history of women who caused outrage, led armies in rebellion, wrote poetry; who lived independently or under the thumb of emperors. Told with humor and verve as well as a deep scholarly background, A Rome of One’s Own highlights women overlooked and misunderstood, and through them offers a fascinating and groundbreaking chronicle of the ancient world.
The history of Rome has long been narrow and one-sided, essentially a history of “the Doing of Important Things.” And as far as Roman historians have been concerned, women don’t make that history.
From Romulus through the political stab-fest of the late Republic, and then on to all the emperors, Roman historians may deign to give you a wife or a mother to show how bad things become when women get out of control, but history is more than that.
Emma Southon’s A Rome of One’s Own is the best kind of correction. This is a retelling of the history of Rome with all the things Roman history writers have relegated to the background, or designated as domestic, feminine, or worthless.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Southon (A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) surveys 1,100 years of Roman history in this expert and wittily conversational narrative. By profiling 21 relatively unknown women, Southon presents a "whole new history" that is "closer to the version the Romans told themselves." Skillfully parsing sometimes limited and biased sources, Southon depicts her subjects as complex human beings. Hersilia, a Sabine woman kidnapped by the Romans (c. 750 BCE) who became Romulus's wife, is the first woman to appear by name in a Roman text. She may have prevented a full-scale war between the Romans and Sabines when she spoke publicly about how she and the other kidnapped Sabine women had adjusted to their new lives, which bound the two groups into a familial relationship. Julia Felix, who probably died in the 79 CE Vesuvius eruption in Pompeii, made money as a property owner, demonstrating the possibilities of independence for adult, single, middle-class women of the Roman empire. Claudia Severa's affectionate letters to Sulpicia Lepidina in 100 CE show life in a Roman military outpost in northern England as more social and familial than depicted in male-centered histories and provide a window into female friendships. Southon's crisp characterizations, snappy assessments of existing histories, and breezy narrative style will enchant fans of ancient history and women's history. It's a delight. Illus.
