jJohn Smith is braver than me. Classicist and feminist activist, she describes a male guide at the Palazzo Massimo in Rome in a description of one of the women of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. “That's in the evidence,” he protested, to which Smith responded that he probably knew them well. His infamous phrase provides the title of his book.
His 1989 classic included a chapter on ancient Rome, The Misogynists, but inspiration for a large-scale study came from the British Museum's Nero exhibition in 2021, which aims to “question the traditional narrative of a ruthless tyrant, revealing a popular Nero”. . This revisionism, Smith proposes, rarely extended to the wives, sisters, daughters, and mothers of emperors, who were always depicted as shrews, scheming pitchforks, or amorous wolves. Consequently, he begins to tell alternative stories of 23 Roman noblewomen.
Each episode begins with a major spoiler describing the subject's fate. First came Augustus' three wives. Livia (made famous by Robert Graves' performances of I, Claudius and Sian Phillips in the 1970s television adaptation) and Scribonia died of natural causes, while the cause of Claudia Pulchera's death is unknown. The following is a list of atrocities: beatings, starvation, rape, poisoning, beheadings and torture. Nero's wife, Poppia, bleeds to death from a blow to the stomach while she was pregnant, a particularly gruesome death. Nero's subsequent seduction and castration of a young man who looked like her is often cited as evidence that Nero loved and missed his girlfriend, rather than seeing humans as changeling, as Smith maintains.
Elite men didn't fare much better in those days, exiled or going to war, or having the choice between suicide or murder. When Smith uses the term bloodbath, he means it literally (the hot water helped the blood flow faster in the open veins). But men had more agency, they were not given as tokens in the status game or forced to be born in underdeveloped bodies (girls could marry much older men from the age of 12). One of Smith's most surprising observations was the tradition of not distinguishing women's names; A version of Drusilla Drusus, her father, Agrippina of Agrippa; Sisters may have similar names. The author strives to give personal life to the dizzying parade of Julias, Antoninas and Livias.
Smith takes aim at modern historians (not all of them men) who mindlessly repeat ancient slanders and reread the evidence to explain misconceptions. He creates his own translations, combining them with Latin, sometimes to vivid effect, as when Caligula describes what he observed of his own sisters: “Often he fornicated with his terrible companions.”
His most provocative and controversial strategy was to relate the misdeeds of the Roman emperors to contemporary crimes, pointing out how little had changed. Thus the fate of Claudius's much younger wife, Messalina, whose name has been the name of lust for centuries, is linked to the corruption of the grooming gangs. A sexual interest in Nero's mother, Agrippina, led Smith to note that “mother-son incest” was a common Internet search and that her matricide was the Sandy Hook killer's first victim. Meanwhile, Nero's habit of sexually abusing his wife Octavia is a sinister echo of the “rough sex” defense of murder. “You don't have to be a Roman emperor to escape scary women,” Smith observes wryly.
Daisy Dunn's latest book aims to recover the place of women in a traditionally male-centered narrative of the vanished biblical world, measured significantly in its pages about imperial Rome. While Smith's Claudius is indifferent to the murder of his wife Messalina, for Dunne he is “in denial.” Dunn Julia the Elder dies “probably of hunger”; Smith gave no such warning. Sources can be read in different ways. However, in this exciting read, the “nymphomaniac” scandal can safely be solved.
