Were Roman women done dirty by modern translations?

Summary

History Extra Podcast: "Were Roman Women Done Dirty by Modern Translations?"

Release Date: May 20, 2025
Host: Eleanor Evans
Guest: Joan Smith, Journalist and Author

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of the History Extra podcast, host Eleanor Evans engages in an enlightening conversation with Joan Smith, a journalist and author who has recently published a book challenging the longstanding negative portrayals of elite women in ancient Rome. The episode delves deep into the Latin sources that have shaped our understanding of these women and examines how modern translations may have perpetuated damaging stereotypes.

Challenging Traditional Narratives

Joan Smith begins by recounting a pivotal moment during her research in Rome. While examining frescoes at the Palazzo Massimo, she confronts an Italian guide who inaccurately describes Julia, Augustus's daughter, as a "nymphomaniac." Disputing this characterization, Smith highlights the discrepancies between the guide's account and historical records.

"When I challenged the guide's assertion that Julia was a nymphomaniac, I was met with staunch disagreement. He insisted it was in the sources, but I knew the sources differently." [00:01:19]

This encounter underscores the pervasive issue of mistranslation and misinterpretation of ancient texts, particularly those by historians like Seneca, Suetonius, and Tacitus, whose works have been foundational yet biased.

The Impact of Translation Bias

Smith emphasizes the significant role translators play in shaping historical narratives. She critiques Robert Graves's translations and adaptations of Roman histories, noting how his sensationalist approach has cemented harmful stereotypes about Roman women.

"Graves not only translated the '12 Caesars' but also wrote novels like 'I, Claudius,' which painted Livia as an arch-villain accused of multiple murders—most of which have no historical evidence." [06:28]

Smith argues that such portrayals have overshadowed the true complexities of these women's lives, reducing them to one-dimensional characters driven by uncontrollable desires.

Reappraising Historical Sources

With a background in Latin, Smith undertakes a meticulous examination of original texts to uncover the biases embedded within them. She reveals how ancient historians often portrayed women in a negative light, reflecting the misogyny of their times.

"Going back to the original Latin texts, I found that the negative descriptions were often exaggerated or misrepresented in translations, particularly by translators like Robert Graves who added their own biases." [05:06]

Smith's approach involves reinterpreting these sources to present a more balanced and accurate portrayal of the Julio-Claudian women, challenging centuries-old misconceptions.

Life of Elite Roman Women

The discussion transitions to the societal structures of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, highlighting the precarious position of elite women who, despite their visibility in public life, wielded little actual power.

"Women in the Julio-Claudian period were highly visible—appearing on coins, statues, and in public processions—but they had almost no power compared to their male counterparts." [08:13]

Smith explains that these women were often used as pawns in political alliances, married off at young ages, and subjected to high mortality rates due to early childbirth.

Case Studies: Julia, Scribonia, and Agrippina

Smith provides detailed case studies of prominent women to illustrate the harsh realities they faced:

• Julia: Augustus's daughter, married multiple times at a young age, faced exile, and suffered personal tragedies, including the loss of her children.

  "Julia was exiled to a tiny island where she was separated from her children and subjected to harsh conditions. This personal tragedy is often overshadowed by unfounded accusations of her being a nymphomaniac." [04:44]

• Scribonia: Augustus's second wife, mischaracterized as a "nagging" spouse due to mistranslations.

  "In reality, Scribonia was a heroic figure who supported her daughter Julia during her exile, contrasting sharply with the modern portrayals that diminish her role." [19:13]

• Agrippina: Faced murder and betrayal, illustrating the extreme dangers these women navigated.

  "Agrippina's nine pregnancies and her ultimate murder by her son Nero highlight the brutal lengths to which these women were subjected." [18:43]

Modern Implications and Conclusions

Smith draws parallels between the historical treatment of Roman women and contemporary issues of gender-based violence and misogyny. She emphasizes the importance of critically evaluating historical sources and translations to understand the true experiences of these women.

"The horrors faced by these women in ancient Rome are not just historical footnotes; they reflect ongoing patterns of violence and control that persist today." [22:08]

Smith advocates for a more skeptical and informed approach to historical narratives, encouraging listeners to question and reexamine established accounts.

"I want people to be more ready to ask questions and understand that these women were real individuals who faced immense suffering, not just characters in a sensational story." [31:06]

Key Takeaways

• Reinterpretation of Sources: Original Latin texts offer a more nuanced understanding of Roman women, free from the biases introduced by later translations.

• Misogyny in Historical Accounts: Ancient historians often depicted elite women negatively, a trend that has been perpetuated by modern translators and authors.

• Agency and Autonomy: Despite their visibility, Julio-Claudian women had minimal agency, serving as political tools rather than independent actors.

• Modern Reflections: Understanding the historical mistreatment of women provides insights into contemporary gender issues and the importance of challenging biased narratives.

Conclusion

Joan Smith's in-depth analysis and reexamination of historical sources shed light on the true lives of elite women in ancient Rome, debunking long-held myths and challenging the negative stereotypes perpetuated by modern translations. This episode serves as a crucial reminder of the importance of critically engaging with historical narratives to uncover and honor the authentic experiences of those who have been marginalized by time and bias.

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This summary captures the essence of the podcast episode, highlighting the critical discussions between Eleanor Evans and Joan Smith while excluding all advertisement segments and non-content sections.

Transcript

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[Eleanor Evans]

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]

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.

[Eleanor Evans]

That's quite the mic drop moment. And your book now is here. It's looking at Reappraising the sources around 23 elite women of the Julio Claudian dynasty. Joan, I wonder if you can take us into the process of looking again at these sources. What work were you doing? What were you doing to reappraise these women's reputations and ideas about them?

[Joan Smith]

Well, my degree, fortunately, is in Latin, which is how I came to want to do this book. So I was lucky. I came from a working class background, but I went to two grammar schools where you could learn Latin, and I went on to do it at university. So I'd actually realized when I was doing Latin, a level that there was a kind of very profound misogyny around Roman historians. And when I decided to do this book, I thought, instead of relying on translations, because, you know, Suetonius, Tacitus, all these people, they're famous historians, we have translations of them. I thought, I'll go back and look at the Latin. And immediately the bias springs up at you, because what they say about the empress tends to be taken at face value. What they say about the women is very, very pejorative. But to make things worse, there's then later translators into English actually put their own spin on it, particularly with poet Robert Graves, who he translated Suetonius Lives of the Caesars for the Penguin Classic series. In fact, his is the current translation that if you just go into a shop and ask for bookshop, that's what you'll get. And he put his own very, very misogynist spin on it. And I realized that that had been picked up by any number of modern authors who simply haven't questioned what's in the original sources. So I was really fortunate in a way, because I have the Latin to go back and read it myself, and I know the text quite well from doing a degree in it, and it gives you a completely different story.

[Eleanor Evans]

Let's stay on the Robert Graves example then, because as you say, his translation and his novels and the adaptation of his work is the lens through which many people may come to the Livia. For people unfamiliar, can you briefly introduce what people think they know about her? What's her enduring reputation, and what do you find that's different?

[Joan Smith]

So a lot of people who didn't have the opportunity to study Latin at school, they're reliant on translation. And Robert Graves not only translated the 12Cs as he was a classicist, but he wrote I Claudius and Claudius the God and his wife Messalina. And for many people, that is their way into this period. They've either read the novels which came out in the early 1930s and. Or they've seen the very, very famous and celebrated BBC adaptation of the novels with Sian Phillips and Brian Blessed. And you can actually still see it to this day, though it was, I think, back in the 1970s. And what Graves did was he created an incredibly sensational account on top of the sensational account that's in the ancient text. So in his books, in his novels, he accuses Livia of eight murders, and seven of those people were not murdered. And the one who was wasn't murdered on her orders or by her. So what he's done is create her into a kind of arch villain, which is a story that, you know, a lot of readers like, you know, they know about Lady Macbeth, the idea that powerful men have been manipulated by women in the background. I mean, Graves even accuses her of sending a poisoner to kill her younger son, Drusus, when he died very young, because he fell from a horse in Germany and he was basically dying. And Graves accuses her of sending a doctor, her own doctor, to finish off her own son because he wanted to restore the Republic and overthrow her husband. There's no evidence for this, but, you know, that's what most people believe about Livia.

[Eleanor Evans]

So if Graves is giving one portrayal there, there's also something particular about the nature of women's lives in this period. Elite women's lives, I should say, in the Julio Claudian dynasty, that puts them in a certain position in society. Can you share with our listeners what is it about this period that drastically changes life in this way?

[Joan Smith]

So it comes at the end of decades of civil war in Rome. So the Republic, which had lasted for 500 years, was an oligarchic form of government. In Rome, the senators ran everything, and there was a group of elite patrician families who ran everything. But there were nominally elections every year for the consuls and so on. So at the end of this civil war period, the most famous bit of it, of course, is the assassination of Julius Caesar after he made himself dictator for life. So you then get a continuation of those wars, and then the person who comes out on top is Caesar's great nephew Octavian, who then reinvents himself as Augustus. And he's really the last man standing after these terrible, catastrophic wars. And what he does is he's becoming a king, in effect, a monarch. But he doesn't want to say that because there's a great dislike in ancient Rome of the whole idea of kingship. So he invents himself as a kind of Princeps FIRST CITIZEN It's a fiction, but in order to kind of distract from that, he makes a cult around his family. And that means that women for the first time emerge into the public sphere in a way that they hadn't visually been, you know, throughout Roman history. So sudden you have the Arapachus Romani, which is the great Augustan temple in Rome which was created about 13 BC from memory. It has a procession of all Augustus's relatives on it, including the women. And the women were, I mean he deified some of them. The women then became, they were on coins, they were visible. And it's actually ironic because in the republican period women had had a different role. So although we don't know what they looked like, they actually got involved in the fighting. Mark Antony had five wives and three of them were very, very involved in politics, including the final one, Cleopatra. That doesn't happen in the. It's a very different period, the Julio Claudian period. So suddenly you have these women who are incredibly visible, who would have been recognizable being carried through the streets of Rome in a litter, but they have virtually no power. And the dynasty used them to try and establish itself and it wasn't very good at it. Augustus was actually really terrible. I mean I argue in the book that he was probably sub fertile. He only had one surviving child and she wasn't a son, she was a girl. And so what you get is a series of marriages as these men are trying to create a dynasty which sort of limps on. There's five Julio Claudian emperors and then is ended by Augustus great great grandson Nero. So women are suddenly there, they're walking around the city, their faces are familiar, their statues are familiar, but they have almost no power compared to the men in the dynasty.

[Eleanor Evans]

I think this point about agency is really important to understand because thinking about the ages of these women, we're not talking about women in many cases when we think about their marriages and their childbearing, they're doing it at an age in childhood themselves. What conclusions can we draw there?

[Joan Smith]

Well, so the age of marriage for girls in Ancient Rome was 12. For boys it was 14. And they were very, very valuable marriageable properties, particularly if they were in the ruling family. So they would be married off at 12 or 13 if that husband was killed in battle or died because you know, they were periodically fever swept through Rome, natural causes, things like that. The father would then find somebody else for them to marry. So Augustus daughter Julia is married for the first time. I think she's 14 when she's married to her cousin Marcellus, he then dies in a fever that sweeps through Rome and almost kills Augustus, actually, who does survive. He then marries Julia to his great friend and General Agrippa, who's 25 years older than her. They have five children. He then dies in his 50s prematurely. She's then married to Tiberius, who at this point by now is her stepbrother as well. So the women keep being married off girls, as you say, and one of the problems with that is that they get pregnant very young. So it's not that these men marry, who are usually in their 30s or 40s, that they marry a 12 or 13 year old girl and don't touch her, they have sex with them. And so you have girls giving birth at 14 and 15 when the pelvic girdle is not big enough to support a birth. So you have very high perinatal mortality. I mean, we know that around 1 in 50 women died in child childbirths in Rome anyway, but for these girls it was much higher. So, for example, the first wife of the emperor Caligula, Gaius, who we know as Caligula, his first wife, died in childbirth, and she was so insignificant to the dynasty because she died that we don't even know exactly when she died or how old she was. And he went on to have three more wives. But the Greek historian Cassius Dio actually remarks as a throwaway remark in his history of the period that there was a shortage of women to marry in Augustan Rome. And he doesn't explore that, but it's actually due to the very high mortality rate among marriageable girls in ancient Rome.

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[Eleanor Evans]

This gives a very different picture of Roman elite women in this period sort of giving as good as they got. You know, it repositions them as children with very little agency, who then move through the world with. With a lot of challenges. So if that's the case as we know it, where does this idea that they were sort of all giving as good as they got come from?

[Joan Smith]

It's extraordinary because I've heard that phrase so many times. You know, when I was writing the book, people would say, what are you writing? And I'd say, I'm writing about the women of the Julio Claudian dynasty. And people generally, men actually, would say in a rather superior way, oh, I think you'll find those women gave as good as they got. Well, they didn't, you know, they were divorced, and they weren't just divorced. So. So obviously, if you were the emperor, you could divorce your wife and you could send her to live on a very distant farm or village, and you could surround her with soldiers, and there's not much she could do about it. What's really striking about it is just how personal the malice towards these women were. So when Augustus exiles his daughter Julia, he sends her to an island which was called Pandateria, then it's now called Ventotene. It's in the Pontine Islands. It's 50 kilometers from the west coast of Italy. She would have been arrested at night, probably chained, taken all that way in a litter, put in boat and taken across this island. And I went there when I was writing the book. It's 300 meters by 800 meters. It's absolutely tiny. The only crop that grows there to this day is lentils. But he also forbade her to drink wine, to have nice food. Her mother, Scribonia, who I've mentioned earlier, she was absolutely Heroic and volunteered to go with her, even though she was coming up to 70 at the time. They were there for five years before Julia was allowed to come ashore and live in a town in the south of Italy near the Straits of Messina. But she was never allowed to go back to Rome. And the point is that when she was exiled, she had five children, aged, I think, from memory, they were aged about 12 to 20. She never saw her children again. Her daughter, Agrippina, the elder Agrippina, was murdered there. She was exiled there and murdered by Tiberius, the second emperor. And he hated her so much that he ordered her to be beaten up by a centurion. And she lost an eye. And, you know, how can you imagine what it's like to be a woman in the first century who's beaten that badly on this tiny island, not even access to the limited knowledge that Roman doctors. She survived another couple of years. She tried to starve herself to death, and he had her force fed. I mean, the stories of what happened to these women, it just. It was extraordinary writing the book because I knew what happened to them, and I was being told all the time that, oh, you know, they lived in palaces, they had a lovely time, and they stood up to the men. And it's actually, I think of the 23 women I chose to write about, I think five died of natural causes.

[Eleanor Evans]

They are horrific fates for so many of these women. And I'm interested in what your senses of why these women being so far away in history, seems to make these horrors that they suffered a bit less tangible, a bit less real, and, you know, more of a punchline, like Julia, like you say, she suffered so much on that island, and yet she can be dismissed with this nymphomaniac tagline. What do you make of that?

[Joan Smith]

I think that's a really interesting and important point because I think that when people think about this period, they kind of get confused between real and mythic people. And, you know, there are all these Greek legends about nymphs being turned into trees and, you know, all this kind of nonsense and mythic heroes and what happened to them, many of whom were inventive. And it's as if these women belong in that category that they're not really actual women, that whatever happened to them, it's part of a good story. And you don't want to spoil the story by pointing out that these were women, they felt pain, they felt grief, they felt a huge amount of grief. And one of the things that astonishes me about it is how often the Women lost contact with their children and how little that's ever been considered in histories of the period. I mean, it's obvious that, you know, the women were used to provide heirs. So Julia had five surviving children. Her daughter Agrippina, the elder Agrippina had nine pregnancies and six surviving children. And I think only one of them died of natural causes. You know, these are terrible fates that happened to these women.

[Eleanor Evans]

They really are terrible fates. And they certainly do illustrate just how terrible a lot of these rulers were as well. Alongside the horrors, there are also nuances of language in translation that really have done a lot to solidify these women's reputations. And I wanted to pick up on Augustus's second wife, Scribonia, who, I think I've got this right, is described as nagging. And I'm interested in what you found in your translation and how you would characterise how she's described.

[Joan Smith]

Well, before I went back to the actual Latin text, I thought I'd read Robert Graves translation of his Life of Augustus. And when I got to Scribonia. So Suetonius was Hadrian's private secretary and that meant he had fantastic sources. He had access to the Emperor's private papers, including Augustus own account of his reign. So in the Penguin Classics current translation, he says has Augustus saying, I had to divorce Gribonia because I couldn't stand her nagging me. And I thought, this is a very modern word. I mean, I don't think there's even a Latin verb to nag. I'm not aware of it. So let's go back and look at the original Latin. And this, this is actually what Augustus wrote himself. He wrote, potisus morum ejus perversitatem. Patisis does mean disgusted, angry, you know, fed up. But the word perversitas actually means, it's our English word, perversity. It has the idea of standing up to somebody, you know, defiance in it. It's nothing to do with nagging. And Mark Antony in a letter actually explains why she was fed up with Augustus and standing up to him. It's because she was pregnant with his child, with Julia, as it happens, and she knew that he was flagrantly having affairs with other, including probably Livia, who wouldn't have had much choice in the matter. So that nagging is a modern kind of imposition by a 20th century writer who didn't like these women very much or any women very much, as far as I can see. And the effect it's had is catastrophic. So Alan Massey, who's a very highly regarded Scottish writer, he wrote a novel based on the life of Augustus where he's speaking in Augustus's voice and he says Scribonia was a gap toothed, big breasted scold. Now there are no images of Scribonia. We have absolutely no idea what her teeth looked like. She had large or small breasts or whatever she was. And so this is simply picking up on a modern mistranslation of the Latin text. And it's actually had a catastrophic effect because Scribonia is one of the heroines of my book. She's one of the few women who actually survives. And after her daughter Julia is murdered on Tiberius orders, starved to death in a town in Reggio Calabria in southern Italy, Scribonia, who having gone through this terrible thing, goes back to Rome and lives for another two years and gets to, I think about 86. So she is an absolutely heroic figure, you know, who shows great solidarity with her daughter, is her only consolation. Leaves her own grandchildren behind in Rome to be with her daughter, and yet she's dismissed as this nagging, shrewish wife. And it's like all those stories you see in modern newspapers saying man kills nagging wife. When you look at it more closely, you can see what actually happens. And it's just so shocking to me that she's been traduced in this way.

[Eleanor Evans]

There are some saddening parallels there. I'm interested in what you would say to people who might say that's just how it was for women back then and we perhaps can't or shouldn't see it through the lens of how acceptable it is now. What's your take there?

[Joan Smith]

Well, interestingly, nobody says that about slavery. Nobody says, yeah, well, slavery, you know, they understood, you know, human beings worth in a different way. And it's imposing a 21st century view to say that slavery was a terrible thing. No, there are basic principles about human beings should be treated and what human rights are. And there is no way on earth you can say these women as anything but victims of what I call in the book a femicide. They were killed because they were women. And it's true that Roman emperors killed a lot of men as well. But it's different because the men that they killed tended to be rivals. The Julio Claudian emperors never felt secure. They knew they could be overthrown by the time you get to the third one, Caligula, he's assassinated. His successor, Claudius, who was his uncle, lives in terror of being assassinated. So all the time they're looking over their shoulder is somebody plotting to overthrow my regime and make themselves emperor, all of that. So they're nervous about these men. Also they're greedy. I mean, Caligula went through a huge fortune when he became emperor and then needed other people's money. So you have a pattern of men being targeted, you know, accused of treason or whatever, but it's actually because they've got a beautiful house in Rome that the emperor fancies or somebody fancies and so on. So in a way that's not personal, in the same way, what the emperors are doing to their female relatives is they are using them to produce heirs, casting them to one side, but instead of treating them decently, they're treating them with absolutely huge malice. And that's the disregarded story that's come down to us. I mean, I'm in an extraordinary position because as well as being a classicist, I have spent a lot of my life as a journalist writing about violence against women and girls and also working with the Mayor of London. I was an advisor to the Mayor of London for eight years on drawing up the strategy to reduce violence against women and girls. So I am familiar with domestic abuse in a way that most modern writers aren't. And I know that there are patterns of escalation, there are warning signs, there are red flags. If certain, certain things happen to women, you can more or less say that they're very likely that they will end up being murdered. If we look at Nero's first wife, Octavia, who is actually the daughter of the Emperor Claudius, he wants rid of her, he doesn't like her. He's got a mistress he likes much more, but he's afraid to divorce her because she's Claudius's daughter. And there's a great deal of affection for her in Rome. And there's an extraordinary sentence in Suetonius's Life of Nero where it says in Latin, it says that he tried to, to strangle his wife on several occasions but failed. Now Nero was bigger, stronger, he was a man. If he'd wanted to strangle Octavia and kill her, he could have done. What this is an example of is non fatal strangulation, which is an incredibly common form of domestic abuse. Sometimes it's done to prove that the man can dominate his wife physically. Sometimes there's an erotic thrill from it. And of course, what we know from modern examples and studies of domestic violence is that a woman whose partner does this to her is seven times more likely to be murdered. And that's exactly what he did to Octavia. He divorced her. He sent her to Pandataria, the island where Julia and all these other women had ended up. And a few days later, he sends a centurion who tells her she has to kill herself. This girl is only 21, and when she doesn't want to, they slit her wrists and they put her in a pot bath to hurry up her death. They cut her head off and send it back to Nero. And I was really shocked when I was thinking about the book to go to the British Museum Nero exhibition, which is one of their huge blockbuster exhibitions. And it had captions for school children because, you know, it's a very popular exhibition with school children. And one of them said, critics said that Nero killed his mother and two of his wives. He said that they betrayed him. Who would you believe? And this is just jaw dropping. And I said at the time, I posted that on Twitter and said this is actually classic victim blaming. These women had virtually no power at all. And Nero killed two of his wives, his sister in law, his mother and his aunt. You know, he's a very similar successful and unpunished serial killer is what he actually is. I was really shocked that the British Museum would actually ask such a careless question. And you could only ask that question if you don't understand the history and the stages of domestic violence.

[Eleanor Evans]

These ideas then, like the one you just said of it being sort of a retribution killing or the idea that somehow these men were perhaps goaded towards violence and things like that. Why do you think these ideas have so endured so much that even modern historians today are sort of turning to those kind of stories in their own way work?

[Joan Smith]

Because I think there's a kind of appetite for sensational stories without thinking that they involve real people. The Romans were, I'm afraid, very, very misogynist. And for all the kinds of reasons that we know of. You know, men worrying about the paternity of their children and worrying about women being unfaithful as all those kind of things. But it's also about control. The emperors tried to exert an extraordinary degree of control over their wives, their mothers, their daughters. And the least bit of resistance to that, they interpret as treason, as literal treason. I mean, Tacitus actually says this, that Augustus had a terrible habit of actually behaving as though an insult to him was equivalent to treason. And it's an offense against the state. So what they're doing is they're mixing up public and private roles and saying that, you know, if a wife defies her husband in any way that that's an affront to the state. And to this day, it's all about control. And you can see this now that, you know men who kill their wives, they will always say, she drove me to it. It. And that's what the emperors were saying, and it carries on to this day.

[Eleanor Evans]

And is it fair to say that this notion of control, when it sort of pertains to Julia, accused of being nymphomaniac, Messalina as well, this sort of insatiability legend that is attached to them both, there's also a fantasy element to it. Where do you think that comes from?

[Joan Smith]

Oh, people like pornography. I've described Seneca's account of supposedly what Julia did, prostituting herself in Rome, as a pornographic fantasy. And again, you have the same thing with the satirist writing a complete pornographic fantasy about Messalina, the Empress Messalina, one of Claudius wives, and saying that she was a nymphomaniac and that she was so mad for sex that every night she crept out of the palace. And by now they've developed the fantasy into supposedly actually worked in a brothel, how she was supposed to get past the praetorian guard every single night, sneak out, go down to the brothel, do a night shift there, coming back. Juvenal actually describes it in terms of, you know, smelling of smoke and sex, and that she managed to creep past the praetorian guard, get back into the palace, get back into bed, and nobody noticed. It's the most extraordinary pornographic fantasy. And the word nymphomaniac, which is applied to both Julia and to Messalina, was invented in the 18th century by a French doctor who thought that women suffered from something called furor uterinus, which is a storm in the womb. And that when women got this storm in the womb, they couldn't control themselves and that they just had to have as much sex as possible. It comes back to the idea of control. So it's the idea that these women, because they've resisted and not gone along with what their men folk wanted them to do, that that turns into a kind of complete inability to control themselves as well.

[Eleanor Evans]

And there's the language you say, the sense that they are being characterized as willful or rebellious, it's very sort of, I think you use the word infantilizing, that they can't be controlled as willful children that they are. A final point I wanted to ask about is the trend of. Of saying that certain women loved luxury, that they loved sort of excess. And this idea is Used to slander or attack as well, isn't it?

[Joan Smith]

Yes, but one of the reasons for that is that some of these women were obviously not unfaithful all the time and not crazy for sex, and particularly the Empress Agrippina. So you have to think of another way of attacking her. So she's greedy. And, you know, Tacitus actually says that he's rather disappointed by the fact that she's incredibly austere, both in her public and private, but that she really wants gold and a lot of what she does is motivated by greed. So it's just another way of attacking women. And of course, the Romans, in some ways, sort of Roman culture was both very sophisticated and very keen on luxury. But at the same time, they'd have these periodic bouts where they denounced luxury and said, you know, women are spending too much and all of this kind of thing. And Augustus made a kind of spectacle of that. So he insisted that Julia was brought up to weave clothes for him and things like that, you know, so it was all part of the idea that the women liked nice clothes or jewelry or whatever, whatever. It's part of the not being a proper Roman matron, because proper Roman matron would stay at home quietly spinning and making her husband's clothes or her father's clothes.

[Eleanor Evans]

You've given us a sense, then, of the dangerous strictures in which these elite women were operating. We're treated as pawns. We're living their lives in this intense danger. Going forwards for our listeners, what sort of attitudes would you hope that people can hold when they're looking at translations or going to exhibitions or perhaps even at the sources directly? When thinking about women in ancient Rome in the first century, I just like.

[Joan Smith]

Them to be skeptical. And, you know, it's probably asking quite a lot of people if they're just visiting an exhibition or a museum. But when they're told something that maybe doesn't ring true, I wish people were more ready to ask questions. And really what I wanted to do was express my own frustration about this period, because ancient Rome has always been a huge part of my life. It's always been, in some ways, a joy to me. You know, this is a civilization very, very sophisticated in terms of art, literature, architecture. There's lots about ancient Rome that I absolutely love. Particularly I love the poets Catullus and people like that. But to me, there is a huge, glaring contradiction, which is that they were so horrible to women, and that's actually, in a way, not unusual. And one of the things I point out at the End of the book is that these were women who had almost no rights in law. And, you know, a woman was in the power of her father until she married. He could then retain the power and make decisions about her life and her fortune, or he could give that power to her husband. But most women did not have autonomy. They could be raped, they could be murdered. There wouldn't be any comeback. And one of the things I point out is that you look at that, look at the condition of women now, and you think in terms of legal protections, we're in a much better situation because things like rape are illegal, domestic violence is legal, and so on, and yet those laws are not enforced. So one of the things I've been trying to say with the book is that when you think about what happens to women in the 20s, which is often horrible, I mean, two or three women in this country are killed every week by a current or former partner. We need to understand that this actually emerges from thousands of years of treating women like this. And also, very importantly, not believing women and actually believing the excuses of the men who kill them. So, in a way, I mean, I know it's a big ask for one book. I just. I want people to be more skeptical, to actually understand that these women were. Some of them were very brave and they did try and stand up for themselves, particularly the younger Agrippina, Julia's granddaughter, who was actually eventually murdered by her own son on the orders of her own son, Nero. But they were brave and they tried very hard with a very bad hand that they'd been dealt. But that, it also tells us a great deal about the society we're living in now.

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That was Joan Smith, journalist and author of the book. Unfortunately, she was a nymphomaniac. She was speaking to Eleanor Evans. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Cramer.

[Joan Smith]

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[Joan Smith]

H T C A L Com Talk.