Transcript
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Eleanor Evans (1:19)
Joan, thank you so much for joining us on the History Extra podcast today to talk about your new book. Unfortunately, she was a nymphomaniac and I think we have to start with your eye catcher. Could you please start by giving listeners the story behind this?
Joan Smith (1:34)
Yes. So I've been going up and down to Rome quite a lot, doing research for the book and looking at one of the advantages of writing at this period is that there are a lot of images of women, so we know what they look like as well as what happened to them, which is an innovation in Roman history. So I was in the Palazzo Massimo, which is in the center of Rome, and it's one of the great national museums. And I was looking at there's a very famous upstairs room where they have very, very beautiful frescoes on the walls, come from the house of the first Empress Livia at Prima Porta, which is about 14 kilometers north of Rome. And it's an amazing survival from the first century B.C. and so I was looking at the frescoes and an Italian guide came in with an English party and he started explaining who the various people involved were. And he said, you know, these frescoes were in the house of Livia. She was the first empress. She was married to Augustus, the first emperor. They were married for more than 50 years and they loved each other very much, which point my ears pricked up because I don't think that's true. But they never had a child together. And in fact, Augustus only had one child, Julia, with his first wife. And unfortunately she was an infomaniac And I was rather aghast at this, so I said, excuse me. And he looked at me, and I said, well, first of all, Julia's mother wasn't Augustus first wife. You've missed out Claudia Pulchra, who's very important because she's the stepdaughter of Mark Antony. And it was a very important political alliance. And then he divorced her and married Julia's mother, Scribonia, who's in fact his second wife. And she wasn't an information. So he looked at me and he said, it's in the sources, signora. And of course, I know the sources very well because I'm halfway through writing my book. So I say, I think you're referring to Seneca's famous essay De Beneficiis on Benefits, where he says that although Julia was probably the most recognizable woman in the entire Roman Empire, you know, regularly going to gladiatorial shows and athletic contests, everybody would have recognized her. And she lived in a palace that, despite that, she was so crazed for sex that she went down every night into the Forum and sold sex to every passing barman and gladiator. And he looked a bit nervous at this point. And I said, and can you explain this to me? So Julia is famously fertile. So she has five children with her second husband, Agrippa, one child who dies with her third husband, Tiberius, and she's only in her early 30s at this point. This is after her separation from Tiberius, and she never gets pregnant again. So how did she manage that? And he said, well, maybe the source is exaggerated. And I said, yes, but maybe the source has made things up, because they're always telling things through a lens of Roman misogyny. And then he said, well, Julia was exiled for something. And I said, yes, and Pliny the Elder tells us it was consilium parakedae, which means a plot to assassinate her father. And so there's a very good argument for suggesting that her exile was political. And then I realized the entire room had gone silent and everyone was staring. And so I said, anyway, I'm writing a book about all this, so I'll leave you to it. And he looked at me, he said, I look forward to reading it through gritted teeth. And I said, oh, well, you learn quite a lot. So I actually went back a few weeks ago when I was in Rome and hung around, hoping he might appear. I could tell him about the book, but there was no sign of him.
