Women in Rome Archives - The Partial Historians: Recent Episodes
The Partial Historians
In this special episode we sit down with Dr Emma Southon to discuss her brand new book A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women.
This is the Roman antidote to all those fabulous reimagining of Greek myth by delving into the very real and very fascinating lives of some of the women who lived under the Romans.
Special Episode – A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women with Dr Emma Southon
We discuss the choices Emma made about who to include and who to leave out as well as consider some of the women who stood out for us when reading the book.
If you have a history-minded people to consider at certain upcoming celebrations that may or may not resemble the Saturnalia, this book is worthy of your consideration. Not only is Emma erudite, but she has a great understanding of just how quirky the Romans were.
Things to tune in for The challenges of ancient evidence (a perennial topic on our podcast!) * The amazing life of Turia * ‘Manus’ marriage – an ancient form of Roman marriage which saw a wife come under the direct power of her husband (or his paterfamilias) * The enterprises of Julia Felix * The conquests and political power plays of Zenobia * The very particular approach to Christianity of Melania the Elder
We firmly recommend checking out Dr Southon’s work, which can be found on her website: https://www.emmasouthon.com/
If you’re interested in her latest book, here are links to where to buy online:
- Australia – Booktopia
- UK – Bookshop.org
- US – Please note the US title is A Rome of One’s Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire – Bookshop.org
Emma is the co-host of the History is Sexy podcast and can also be found on Instagram. Emma is a great friend of the show and you’re most welcome to check out our other conversations on Agrippina the Younger and murder in ancient Rome.
Just look at those glorious book covers! Despite the title difference, these are the SAME book. The US release is known as A Rome of One’s Own while the UK version is entitled A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women.
Sound CreditsOur music was composed by Bettina Joy de Guzman.
Automated TranscriptLightly edited for clarity!
Dr Rad 0:12
Welcome to The Partial Historians. We explore all the details of ancient Rome. Everything from political scandals to love affairs, the battles waged and when citizens turn against each other. I’m Dr. Read.
Dr G 0:30
And I’m Dr. G. We consider Rome as the Romans saw it by reading different ancient authors and comparing their accounts.
Dr Rad 0:41
Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city. Welcome to a special episode of The Partial Historians, I am one of your hosts, Dr. Rad.
Dr G 1:08
And I am Dr. G.
Dr Rad 1:10
And this is a special episode because we are talking to someone extremely exciting. Dr. G. Dare I say? scintillating?
Dr G 1:19
I think you should say scintillating. Yeah, we are thrilled to welcome Dr. Emma Southon back to the show. Thank you so much for joining us.
Dr Emma Southon 1:28
Thank you so much for having me back. I just feel extra special when I get invited back like I didn’t do something monstrous last time.
Dr Rad 1:35
Exactly, exactly. So, Dr Emma Southon, for those of you who haven’t caused our previous episodes is one of our favorite guests for three reasons. Number one, she likes RuPaul’s Drag Race and therefore will understand my random references to it unlike Dr. G. Number two, she likes women in history. And number three, she shares our outlook on the ancient Romans, which is that they are unintentionally hilarious and weird. Now to be a bit more specific, Dr. Southon is renowned a smarty pants and here’s why. Aside from the obvious title before her name, she is the co host of the history comedy podcast ‘History is Sexy’, along with our Kiwi cousin, Janina Mathewson. She’s also the author of some of our favorite history books, including ‘Agrippina, Empress, Exile, Hustler Whore’, autobuy autobiography, a biography of the most extraordinary woman in the Roman world, and ‘A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum’. However, we have already had the pleasure of talking to her about these books. And today, we get to talk to her about another exciting volume that has just been released ‘A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women: How Women Transformed the Empire’.
Dr G 2:53
Yay!
Dr Emma Southon 2:56
Impressive.
Dr Rad 2:58
Well, I will say this, you don’t like a short title. I don’t like a short title.
Dr Emma Southon 3:03
And you think I’d learn but that people struggle to remember short titles, but But yeah, I don’t know. They end up being really long. In America, this book is called ‘A Rome of One’s Own’, which is snappier.
Dr Rad 3:18
Ahhh, nice.
Dr G 3:18
I do like that. I saw that on Amazon. And I was like, Oh, that is sweet. I enjoyed the pun.
Dr Emma Southon 3:25
It’s yeah, I have friends who have much better puns than I am. And they come up with these great puns. And I’m like, right, well, that’s my title. Thank you.
Dr Rad 3:34
Now you cover a staggering array of women in this book. And I have to say up front, we’re not going to talk about the Regal period at all, because quite frankly, we can’t talk about it any more. We’ve talked about it so much. The only thing I will say is, I think in a second edition, you’re going to have to amend your chapter on Tanaquil, where you say that there are no popular histories that mentioned Tanaquil.
Dr Emma Southon 4:03
Yes, that’s true, because you have now finally written one.
Dr Rad 4:07
Yeah, we both have we both had.
Dr Emma Southon 4:09
Yeah. But it is. I don’t know. It was just so like, I went through as many as I could find, like all of them for like books of like a history of the Roman Empire. And like that I have kind of lying around in my house and reflect through the ones I could see. And they just skip right over her. They skip over the regnal period, like a lot like the whole, the kings are just kind of coughed over fairly often. But still, I was like, this is such a good story.
I know. I know.
Why would you not want to like go out of your way to include this. So yeah, so second edition paperback edition will have a specific reference to The Partial Historians.
Dr Rad 4:48
Yeah, thank you very much. So we feel okay now, we can calm down and talk about your book.
Dr G 4:53
Okay, the interview can happen now.
Dr Emma Southon 4:55
When I finally – because your book came out just before my end like a couple of months ago, where mine had already gone off like, and I wasn’t allowed to change it anymore. And I was like, no, I could I could have done this with this so much. And I have thoroughly enjoyed it. So everybody should buy it.
Dr G 5:13
Oh, thank you
Dr Rad 5:13
Ahh thank you. Well, we definitely felt that way about your book. And so we’d love to ask you some general questions to start off with about the style of your book. So your last book was about murder in ancient Rome. Why did you decide to, you know, change tack and go for a history of Rome, using the lives of women as your next project?
Dr Emma Southon 5:35
It’s partly spite. So my other thing that I do during my days is I work in a book shop, and you will have noticed, it’s impossible not to have noticed and moment that there is a been in the past two years ish, like a really big spike in interest in Greek goddesses, like retelling Greek myth, specifically, like retellings of female stories and Greek myth, which is great for, you know, ancient history in general, kind of, but also, you, as you will know, when you’re a Roman historian, you think that Romans are the best. Yeah. And it’s constant, like, oh, yeah, I mean, I guess the Greeks are fine. But Romans are better because they’re funnier. It’s so I kind of out of spite, when it’d be like, Yeah, but Roman women exist, too, and that they’re better because they’re real. And they don’t like turn into spiders, or like, they’re not goddesses, they’re bad. So that makes them better. And so, a 50%, out of spite that I wanted people to also be reading about Romans. And to know that Romans are better than Greeks, and 50%, because I just feel like so much of like, popular Roman history is talking about men and like the, the standard narrative of Roman history of the store of the story of Roman history is so much just war and politics, basically, which is the sphere of men, which women are explicitly excluded from, and I thought it would be fun to kind of disrupt that a little bit and be like, one, there is a history of the Roman Empire that doesn’t have any politics in it really, or has a limited amount of politics. And there is a, there is a history, which is more than just politics, it can also be what it is like to live in the Roman Empire at various times as various people. And it’s more interesting to tell that story through women than it is through men and to show that women are always kind of around about and I realized quite early on into writing it that as kind of a historian of my age, I am really only the second generation of historians writing about women in the ancient world, like my supervisor, for my PhD, who is still working was like one of the first generation of people to do her PhD on women. And like, people like Amy Richlin and Suzanne Dixon, who are still around and wrote those first books about women in the Roman Empire are like, they’re still teaching. They’re still they’re still at conferences like this. They’re you know, they’re older. But as we all know, historians never retire. So they’re still around, they’re still alive. Like they. This isn’t like an old discipline women in Rome, or women in the ancient world at all. It’s very, very new. And so, yeah, so it’s time to bring it to their, the popular imagination out of the academy and start talking about it.
Dr G 8:45
I think you’re doing a great service, particularly to readers who have become hooked on ancient Greek myths, because there is so much more to the ancient world than just, you know, having your tongue taken out or turning into a monster or
Dr Emma Southon 9:02
And like it not to be like everybody loves the Greek myths, and they love them for a reason. But a lot of them are victimized women, and there are but there are stories which from a kind of feminist perspective, I have minor issues with like stories of perpetually victimized women and womanhood as being perpetually victimized. So it’s nice to tell stories about ancient women that were not like being turned into spiders or having their tongue taken out or being held into the sea or like or have to be literal goddesses in order to be able to do anything.
Dr Rad 9:36
Yeah, and as as we can definitely testify, we realized once we started focusing on the early republic, that he’d have literally been years of episodes sometimes before we mentioned a woman, we suddenly realized when a woman would come up as you say in your book, like a Vestal Virgin or were like God, it’s been like five years since about women at all.
Dr Emma Southon 9:58
Yeah, yeah. And it’s so easy to fall into that and to be like, oh, all of the important stories are the ones that the Romans thought were important. But the Romans can’t be trusted, because they have bad opinions about a lot of stuff.
Dr G 10:12
So true. So true. And I think this leads nicely into thinking about like, how did you come to the decision about which women to focus on because it seems like you’ve hinted already, in some sense, it’s about availability of evidence. But there must be other criteria as well.
Dr Emma Southon 10:28
So in that early period, a lot of it is availability of evidence up until the later of because the archaeology is so limited, and you are kind of trapped with texts, particularly for like the Regal period, and then the early and middle Republic before their epigraphic habit kicked in. It was about who can I find, basically, and finding stuff for the very earliest period when they basically mythical was easier than I thought it would be like those early bits of Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. So so you’ve got Hersilia and you’ve got Tullia, like, there were more women than I thought. And so I just included all of them, because why not?
Dr Rad 11:15
Yeah, that’s what we were surprised by as well. We started writing about the kings were like, actually, we get it like it’s a it’s a dynastic situation. It’s not a dynastic situation, it’s a family situation. So women have more of an opportunity to get sort of, you know, get a bit of soft power.
Dr Emma Southon 11:34
Yeah, exactly. As soon as you have a situation where one person is in charge, you have wives, and you have children. And when you’ve got children, you’ve got daughters in law, grandchildren, and then you have women who can do things like murder, their husbands marry their brother in law, who’s also their cousin, murder their father running over,
Dr Rad 11:54
as you do as you do,
Dr Emma Southon 11:56
as you do, and can, they can do all of this really fun stuff. So that was fun. The Republican period is harder. And that was tough work, like finding women that you can include. Because they only appear at points of crisis. And very often, they only get a couple of lines to illustrate how terrible crisis is. But once you get into the Empire, like once things really start to kick off evidence wise, so late Republic, going into the Empire, and then coming like the later empire, there’s so many women that it became a part of like, what story do I want to tell, and what women kind of will tell that story. So always wanted it to be not the women who are already included in books. So for women already had a biography about her, I kind of was like, No, and that kind of easily cut out all the emphasis. And I didn’t want it to be a book about politics, and to tell the story that we already know. So I didn’t want it to have you know, Livia and Agrippina. All of the kind of big women that we already know about, I wanted it to be women that you’ve probably not really heard of, or that tell a story that is more about what it is like to live in the empire than to rule the Empire. There are some exceptions, just because I like the stories like Julia Maesa and Julia Mamaea. I include because I just think that Julia Maesa is so cool.
Dr Rad 13:24
Look most people wouldn’t have heard of them?
Dr Emma Southon 13:26
I don’t think yeah, no, yeah, they’re not women that you have heard of very often. And I wanted people from around the Empire. So I wanted to leave Rome at the point when the Empire becomes Imperial, and talk about women from around so that anytime that it was a choice between a woman that was in Rome, or a woman that was outside, I picked somebody who was somewhere else, basically just to because I wanted that empire to feel expansive. And I basically kind of had the time line almost and wanted it to be so we’ve got someone from every century, we’ve got someone pits people from various different parts of the empire, we’ve got different types of evidence. So we’ve got epigraphic evidence, you have archaeological evidence, we have text, different types of texts. And so if I have people that overlapped, I would cut them out. So I had at one point, there’s a woman in Nero’s like court, who is the keeper of his wardrobe. And then when Nero is overthrown, she goes to Egypt and blockades Alexandria, in an attempt to basically force Rome to put Nero back on the throne before he kills himself, which is a cool story, but also one, it’s just the story of Rome. And two, it’s a bit of political story, and it’s would be so I chose instead for that period to tell the story of women living or on the frontier in England, and having birthday parties and writing letters to each other, which is a story that people don’t know, everybody already knows that Nero was overthrown. So basically, when it came down to a choice of like, who in this period, this kind of like, middle of the first entry period is the lesser known, more interesting, more expansive story to tell? So that was like the criteria that I had.
Dr G 15:27
Fantastic. And I think this, I think you’ve also hit upon some of the potential challenges that come up with writing a history like this using women, because you, obviously that selection criteria allows you to sort of embody the expansiveness of Rome in a way that wouldn’t be possible, as you say, if you follow through that sort of imperial line, and imperial women. Are there additional challenges that come along with those sorts of choices, though?
Dr Emma Southon 15:56
Yes. Many, I mean, the writing about women is always a challenge, because you’re so rarely writing about the wear them as they present themselves, like women are so very rarely given this low their text don’t survive, basically. And when you do have texts that they wrote, like, like the like birthday party letters from the, from Vindolanda, which are delightful, but is like, four sentence. It’s, and you’re like that, I mean, that’s I’m so delighted to have these four sentences, but you’re not a lot to work from. And so, or Julia Balbilla, who’s like one of my favorites, who is in the court of Hadrian, and wrote four poems, which survive because she very, very cleverly had engraved on the bottom of an ancient Egyptian statue.
Dr G 16:53
Very clever, very clever.
Dr Emma Southon 16:55
And even better, because she was clearly very smart included her name in every single one of them.
Dr G 17:02
She knew somehow
Dr Emma Southon 17:04
She knew, and I feel like there must have been something where by like, life as a female poet, or like a woman who writes poetry must have already been that annoying thing where people were like, do you know you get that thing? Oh, well, she didn’t really write it, like maybe Propertius wrote it and just pretended to be a woman like, yeah, obviously. That’s it thing that men do. So she yeah, she included like, but you get so little. And so much of it has to be extrapolation. And, like, trying to add context from external things, which is tough work. And it’s why people don’t do it as much. But I think makes for more interesting stories in the end, because as it turns out, like when you start digging into archaeology matches, I find it hilarious to make fun of archaeologists out of like, minor jealousy. You know, there’s so much in archaeology and ethnography that you can illuminate the world that they lived in that is just not available in the in the text like Tacitus can only give you so much. And then when you start to Look at the archaeology, like the archaeology of forts for example, when you start to Look at it, you’re like, oh, wow, like life here was completely different to the way it is presented in the text like it was vibrant and semi luxurious for some people. And like learning that forts were rebuilt every time a different legion turned up to be so that it was specifically fit that legion, like, that’s amazing.
Dr G 18:40
I just need to redecorate this place it’s not speaking to me.
Dr Emma Southon 18:43
Yeah, basically they’d be like, Right Well, the last Legion that was here like had like, you know, eight units of cavalry, but we’ve got 12. So we’re just going to like build on an extra section for that. We’re not going to like feel like a lot like now you’d be like, well, we would just cram them in, like stick them in. But that no, we’re gonna knock down the whole thing and rebuild it. And you can see that in the archaeological record and then you can tell how big the legion was that was there is delightful.
All the mosaics must go.
Yeah, exactly. Like I hate this. This does not speak to me. I need a Medusa.
Dr Rad 19:15
Yeah, exactly. A merman? Who are they kidding?
Dr Emma Southon 19:18
Yeah. Also delightful from the Vindolanda, just like if you sit down and read, they’re just how much bureaucracy was going on in the Roman Empire. This is also delightful. Like, goddamn they love a list. They are just listing everything.
Dr Rad 19:32
Funnily enough, we were just talking about early quaestors and how the Romans wanted them for paperwork.
Dr G 19:40
Somebody needs to do the paperwork and it can’t be me because I’m too big and important.
Dr Emma Southon 19:44
Yeah, exactly. The two things that Romans loved one is beating up other people than the other one is just making lists about it like just paperwork. And it is devastating but we don’t have it.
Dr Rad 19:56
Hilarious. Now segwaying away from just this book, but thinking about your work as a whole, you’re obviously an academic, but you have recently been choosing to write for more of a popular audience. And in order to do that, effectively, you’ve adopted quite a distinctive style as a historian, which is obviously really resonating with readers, I know that I absolutely adore your books. I read them faster than anything else. Can you talk a little bit about your journey as a historian and how you got here?
Dr Emma Southon 20:29
Yeah, well, I realized this is this year has been 10 years since I like left academia. Because I left pretty much straight after my PhD, I did a bit of teaching afterwards. But because my department, I did my PhD and got closed down. And it was also the year that I turned 30. And I thought, at the time, academia in the UK looked really terrible. And it’s worse now. And I thought, do I want to do to eight to 10 years of short term contracts, and working at lots of universities. And my advisor for my PhD, he was Ray Lawrence, who’s now over there with you in Australia. And he once told me that he worked at five universities simultaneously when he graduated his PhD, and like, was teaching and just traveling around the country. I thought, do I want to do that? Or am I 30, and I don’t. And, like and it is, you know, is nine month contracts, it’s not having any job security for longer than that nine months, it’s not having to have three part time jobs on top of it. And honestly, I was not willing to do that as
Dr Rad 21:48
You make it sound so tempting, I don’t understand!
Dr Emma Southon 21:50
I know and also, then you have to be writing constantly, they brought in the REF. That was the year that they brought in the REF as well. We’re here the Research Excellence Framework, where you have to be writing constantly and trying to get points based, like literally trying to get points for your research, which is wild. And so I was like, do – do I want to be writing for points in a culture that is mean? Or do I just want to be not doing that. So I was actually teaching academic writing, is what I went into, and I was teaching mostly people doing vocational things like nurses and engineers, and allied health care professionals like working with them on their writing, which really made me a better writer, because working on people who don’t have any background in writing, or a lot of people coming to writing as late career changes and things like that, who will find writing to be terrifying, and then being like, No, it’s not, it’s fine. It’s okay, we can do this. Made writing more fun for me because it like, broke it down. And then I honestly accidentally became a writer for popular audiences, because I pitched Agrippina the book to a friend of a friend because he had an open pitching session. And he thought it sounded fun. And then I wrote the book that I would want to read. Because by that time, I had been out of academia for like, five years, and I had a job a full time job and a life and do not sit down and read like big chunky history books that are 600 pages long that feel like I have been told like intoned or lectured at, I also wrote a book that I would want to be in bed, or on the train commuting to my job, like, what’s the book that I want to read, I want to read the book that tells me the story in the most entertaining way. And it helps that I find the Romans to be hilariously pompous and deluded about themselves. And to the disconnect between how the Romans see themselves and how they actually are is inherently very funny to me. And so yeah, so basically, my thing is, I love history, and I left because academic history sucks, not because I was fed up with like, the process of academia and I, the thing that I love about history is being what my friend calls a time detective, like you have the evidence, and then you’re like a little poro, like trying to put that evidence together into make it make sense in some way. And you come up with a little hypothesis, and then somebody else goes, Oh, that’s interesting. What if the hypothesis was this and then you kind of have a bit of a chat about it. And so I’ve just been a time detective in a fun way now.
Dr G 24:55
Look, that sounds great. And I feel like that’s a pretty good description of what Dr. Rad and I I do as well. And it’s like, we hold up our little magnifying glasses and we gaze very closely at things. We’re like, you know, what, wouldn’t it be exciting if this was what was based on what we’ve seen here?
Dr Emma Southon 25:10
Yeah.
Dr Rad 25:11
When people ask me, how did you get started in history? I always say Nancy Drew.
Dr Emma Southon 25:15
Yeah. I mean that. Yeah, it’s basically. And I, you know, I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that I also love mystery novels.
Dr Rad 25:24
Absolutely
Dr G 25:24
Like, are you saying there’s a Venn diagram that could be a circle?
Dr Emma Southon 25:30
I think so. Yeah, I think you would find, like, especially people who love like the historiography part of like, the bit where you’re like, oh, cool, like the story of Lucretia. There’s like five different versions, and they’re told at different times. And when you put them all together, you realize that they’re actually like, emphasizing different parts of it. And they’re telling a story that speaks to themselves. And actually, this is just a fairy story that tells us more about the writer than it does about their actual events. And
Dr Rad 26:00
A creepy creepy fairy story.
Dr Emma Southon 26:04
As all fairy stories are like, if you read Grimm stories
Dr Rad 26:07
That’s true. That’s true. Yeah.
Dr Emma Southon 26:09
But yeah, I think that people who like that side and people who like Poirot books, there’s a significant overlap.
Dr Rad 26:17
Absolutely.
Dr G 26:19
All right, well, let us think about the content of the book for a moment, we want to whet the reader’s appetite, because everybody is obviously going to listen to this podcast and then immediately go out and purchase your book. Because of course, we’ve both read it and we love it. We’re giving it five stars. But I’m interested in first of all, like, before we get into like some of the women that we really enjoyed, which of the women that you’ve looked at, were you less familiar with when you started writing? And if it’s not too big enough, do you have a favorite?
Dr Emma Southon 26:54
I am quite a few of them kind of middle ones. So Turia I had only kind of vaguely like I knew of the ‘laudatio Turiae’, but never really read it. So she is the late Republican Woman who is the subject of the biggest, private inscription that we have from the Roman Empire, which is very cool. And Julia Felix, who was also my favorite, I think, I came across, it was Sophie Hay, Dr. Sophie. Hey, who works at Pompeii, who told me about her and she also told Elodie Harper, who wrote ‘The Wolf Den’ trilogy about her so she’s in that trilogy as well. And Sophie Hay is doing God’s work telling the world about Julia Felix, is based in Pompeii, like her complex that she runs. So those were probably the ones like anybody who came from archaeology, because my background is text was somebody that I had a really good time delving into and learning about completely, and being like, Oh, wow, you can Look at all these women all over the place, living their lives, being brilliant.
Dr G 28:04
Look at them go.
Dr Emma Southon 28:05
Yeah.
Dr Rad 28:06
Well, I have to agree that I had heard of, obviously, quite a few of the women that you’ve mentioned before. But like you, Dr. G, and I are very much text based people. We don’t often don’t an Indiana Jones outfit and go out into the wild. So
Dr G 28:22
Although maybe we should
Dr Rad 28:23
Probably but Turia was definitely one of the ones that piqued my interest the most especially coming from a time period that’s actually probably one of the better documented ones in terms of what we’ve got. But yet I had really not heard very much about Turia. So can you tell us a little bit more about her?
Dr Emma Southon 28:41
Yeah, so she is she’s a clearly of like, she is a woman of senatorial rank, definitely of consular rank, her husband is a consul. And she is so we know about her from this huge inscription that was found in five parts. When, during the, like 18th 19th century, Europeans went all over, like, putting together their big corpus of Latin inscriptions, and God bless them for doing but they found the four sections they put together, we don’t actually know that her name was Turia because there’s two bits that are missing. And both of them are the bits with the names. Which feels
Dr G 29:26
Roman history, jesus!
Dr Emma Southon 29:28
Doesn’t it feel like like just emblematic of history? We just, we just lost her name. But this inscription was found and it tells it’s written by her husband because she died before him. And it tells the story of her life, starting from when they get engaged, basically, or at least the bit that we have starts from when she gets engaged. It starts with her family being murdered during the war between Caesar and Pompey and her entire family is murdered on that in the villa. Bye Somebody, and he praises her for single handedly in the middle of a war, identifying and prosecuting the murderers.
Dr Rad 30:08
So she is Miss Marple.
Speaker 3 30:10
She is Miss Marple, and she successfully prosecutes them which is, you know, impressive. And then she is subject to a what is quite fascinating like little insight, somebody tries to claim her as part of their gens so that they can take guardianship of her, because she’s not yet married. And her father is now dead so that they can take control of the state that she has inherited from her murdered family. And she has to go to court and prove basically that she is not part of this gens that she is part of a different and therefore these people have no claim over her, which is fascinating, like thing that must have happened all the time. But it’s not in any text, because obviously that’s not interesting. But basically, her husband says like she just made it so much trouble for them. And she just kept fighting it so much that they gave up and went off to find an easier job. And he is not there to protect her during this time. And they’re not yet married because he has sided with Pompey and it’s off fighting with Pompey. And then when Pompey dies, and the war is over, she both sends him money and sends him resources and sends him enslaved people to help him out lest he ever suffer a moment of discomfort, and also personally talks to Caesar to get him pardoned, basically, so that he can come back to Rome. So she manages to rescue him from his bad decision of picking Pompey. He comes back to Rome and immediately joins the wrong side again, and is on the side of the killers of Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar. And
Dr G 32:01
I don’t know if she’s picked a winner.
Dr Rad 32:02
It’s really her patience that’s the amazing thing.
Dr Emma Southon 32:04
Yeah. So he says she immediately throws in his luck with Brutus and Cassius. And then during the wars between Octavian and Cassius and Brutus, he is fighting with them, and he goes off again, he is then put on the prescriptions list. So when the troit Second Triumvirate comes in, and they are putting together the prescriptions list to kill off lots of people who are considered to be enemies, because Octavian and Antony are significantly less lenient than Caesar ever was a he’s put on that list, which makes him basically prey it means that there is anybody can kill him, and there is a bounty on his head, you get money if you kill him, which opens up a whole way that you can talk about what the proscriptions were like and what that period was like in Rome, where people were literally just being murdered in the street constantly and lots of terrify stories. This is why we think that she may or may not have been called Turia, because there is a story and Appian who has a litany of these stories about a woman who hides her husband in an attic, which is also what the woman in the inscription does. He says she hit me in an attic, her and her sister hit me in an attic and then personally went to Octavian and then went to Lepidus and begged and begged and begged until they got him off the prescriptions list. So she protects him. She keeps him get manages to get him off of the list, manages to save him, manages to make it so that he can continue living his life. During that period, she also they’re living in Milo’s ex-house, the demagogic gang leader. He was exiled and so when Milo’s was exiled for doing a murder, he, his house was sold and they bought it beer so they were very, very rich and moved into it and then Milo’s supporters tried to take it back. So they literally invade her house while her husband is way and so she fights them off with her mother in law, she’s extremely great during all of this period, she saves him multiple times as she protects him from his series of bad decisions and she’s also obviously very you know, they have up to meet sympathies like in every situation they are against the popularity so and she’s and they also talk a lot about mixing their property as a romantic act which is really fascinating because the the story of marriage and women’s rights always says that oh elite women stopped doing ‘manus’ marriage and stopped mixing property and that is how they got more power. But so they talk a lot about how she they mix their property and she handed it all over to him and she didn’t run it herself as like this really romantic act. So they’re obviously like quite conservative couple. And then when things settled down, he continues to tell her story. So you also get the story not only of this woman who is like very politically engaged and politically active, but they can’t have children, it turns out that they try for years and years. And this is a bit where you’re like, oh, wow, you’re really telling the world everything about your wife.
Dr Rad 35:22
Airing it for everyone to read.
Dr Emma Southon 35:23
Yeah, yeah, just putting it on a like two meter high things. say she’s like, she tries everything to have children. And she’s like, but she can’t. And so she comes to him and says, obviously, the point of marriage is to have children and I can’t give them to you. And so what I’m going to do, my plan is I propose that we will get divorced. And I’ll find you a fertile wife. So that you can have as you can have children and continue your family name. And I’ll stick around and we’ll keep our property mixed. So we’ll still be like, kind of married in a way. But you will be able to have children and then I’ll be like, the third person in your relationship, and I’ll raise them like a sister in law, basically.
Dr G 36:06
Is this woman even real? Goodness!
Dr Rad 36:11
‘Stand by Your Man’ was clearly written about her.
Dr Emma Southon 36:15
They do and they are super sweet because they do really seem to love each other. Like the way he writes about her at the end of like, you know, she, like, you know, I can’t I don’t know how I’m going to live without her. Like, shoot, my life is never going to know happiness again, that I’m like, so heartbroken. Everything is I should have died first. This isn’t fair. Like she was so good. And I am so rubbish.
Dr Rad 36:35
He’s right about that, he should have died a number of times!
Dr Emma Southon 36:39
I mean, if it hadn’t been for her, he would have died several times. But he, yeah, but he says, basically, he’s like, Absolutely not like I would never dishonour you that way. I would never make you like a kind of concubine to me like you’re my wife. I married you. I love you. This is no way marriage is more than just having kids, which is, again as a way that you don’t see marriage, Roman marriage, especially elite Roman marriage written about that much like it’s so rarely described as a meeting of hearts or something that is romantic. And so they, yeah, so they stay married for 50 years. They don’t have children. They are aunts and uncles to her. She has a sister who has children and so and then she dies when she’s in her 60s and he is bereft and writes this funeral oration and then inscribes it on two meter high monoliths and puts them on the Via Appia. And there they stay were presumably to his mind forever, so that everybody walking along Via Appia will know how much he loved his wife and how good she was and how she had all of these amazing qualities. And it’s so delightful because it’s such a it’s so emotional, in the way that they love each other, and also in the way that they like they talk about, or he talks about her in this such a beautiful way. But she or doesn’t come across in the way their love women do in a picker feed. Like when you’re reading women’s stories when men are writing about them after they’ve died very often. It’s like she was the most chaste woman and all she did was spend her time weaving wool, and she breastfed her children and she that’s how perfect she was like, okay, so she just had no personality at all she like she just wove wool for you and was chaste. But she has such a personality and this that it’s captivating.
Dr Rad 38:39
It is. So I’m actually exhausted just after I listen to that story. I can’t even imagine what it’d be like to live her life. But I kind of wish that she’d you know, being prepared for his clearly inevitable death. That we had her side of things where she’s like, Oh, my God, you’ll never guess who I married. And what he made me put up with.
Dr Emma Southon 38:59
But the thing is, she really seems to love him.
Dr Rad 39:01
I know. That’s the story that he tells though, right?
Dr Emma Southon 39:04
Yeah. But she does do all this stuff for him.
Dr Rad 39:07
She does.
Dr Emma Southon 39:09
And so I feel like, you know, everybody,
Dr Rad 39:12
She must have she must have.
Dr Emma Southon 39:13
There’s like a point I feel like it’s a bit like, you know, Marge and Homer.
Dr Rad 39:18
It must be because otherwise, it wouldn’t have been that difficult to walk away.
Dr Emma Southon 39:22
She’s like, is he a bit useless? Yes. Do I adore him with all my being? Yes.
Dr G 39:30
Oh, oh, Look, she’s a great character. And it’s just so impressive that we have, like the epigraphy is the is the thing that gives us insight into this – into her life at all. And this is where thinking about different types of evidence becomes really important because obviously like when we’re thinking about written sources, it’s very much that elite male perspective. And the prioritization of subject matter, it really shows. And so this more expansive Look at what Rome could be like and what life was like is becomes really important. And you mentioned Julia Felix before, and she’s one of the figures that I really enjoyed reading about. And obviously Pompeii stands out in people’s imaginations as well as this sort of landmark site and the eruption sort of put to a whole sort of like, how can I say without making it sound terrible?
Dr Rad 40:27
Time capsule?
Dr G 40:29
It kind of creates a time capsule? Yeah.
Dr Emma Southon 40:34
Yeah, it’s a it’s a terrible tragedy, but after 2000 years, suddenly becomes a historians blessing. Their way like, I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, that happened, but also, at least something good came out of it.
Dr Rad 40:45
Yeah, the silver lining. It’s the silver lining.
Dr Emma Southon 40:47
Yeah. Yeah. After two millennia you, you’re like, Okay, everybody’s dead now. I guess. So we can,
Dr Rad 40:54
we can move on.
Dr Emma Southon 40:55
Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, Pompeii is amazing by Julia Felix’s complex is one of the most amazing things. I think the things that people think of when they think of Pompeii, are the theater and then also the like the big houses the villas, which are the story of Rome, that we kind of know like the big impressive houses. And for a while, that’s what people thought Julia Felix’s complex was when they excavated thought was just a kind of a big, weird villa. But outside of it, there is a inscription which was attached to the wall, which said what it actually was, and it says “Julia Felix, daughter Spurius, offers for rent her leisure complex, which contains shops, baths fitted out for the well to do apartments and gardens for a period of five years, Inquire within.” and all of a sudden, archeologists could look at it and go, Oh, it’s a it’s a space where people can go to hang out, it’s not like a private location, because what it is is to was to two houses that have been knocked together. And she moved a road like you can see where a road was redirected, so that she could knock through walls through to expand it, which is amazing. And so it’s got a hot food bar. And in the book, I take you on a we like tour of it so you can see up it’s got a hot food bar outside, which appears to up added on because five years ish prior to the eruption, there was an earthquake in Pompeii, like little warning sign, and that knocked out most of the original leisure district and meant that people coming from the amphitheater, when after games had to go down different roads, and one of them was the road that Julie Felix’s thing was on and so she popped in a hot food bar in order to take advantage of foot traffic, which is brilliant. So it’s got a hot food bar, and it’s got baths, which are very fancy, but very like boutique. So they’re like a little like you can only fit about eight in the toilets, you can fit eight people which is small for a Roman public toilet. And then it has this at the entrance way has a really unusual, almost unique painting – fresco – of not of mythological characters, not of like garden scenes, or of scenes of religious character. But of an every day scene from Pompeii is forum on market day. And has ordinary people doing ordinary things which is so unusual and it’s got like people buying cloth and a person making shoes and horses with inexplicably enormous penises and and like children in school and a person giving a penny to a beggar. And like all of these just like normal activities of like basically the kind of middle classes of Rome. And then inside it has these gardens with little fish ponds and little bridges and a little dining room like a tiny little trick scenario where you can recline and dine. So you have the three couches, and you can do upper class elite dining where you recline on your arm and then people bring you tiny little things of food and it’s got a water feature in the room. And it’s basically a fancy restaurant, for people to go and have a fancy meal out for a fancy occasion and then have a walk around a private garden where there will not be a million other people like in the forum.
Dr G 44:51
I kind of love this where it’s like, I can’t afford my own villa, but what I can afford is I can afford to rent this fancy dining room and we’ll have the lead experience without having to
Dr Rad 45:01
Like a spa day with a lovely meal at the end.
Dr Emma Southon 45:04
Exactly. You know, and it’s like I always imagined it as a kind of thing that you would do for like a special occasion. So like for my birthday, I go to, you know, a Michelin starred restaurant for one meal. And it’s like a big splash out thing where I spend lots of money, but I get like this experience or Yeah, going for a spa day where you do not normally have the leisure time to spend an entire day having, like just basking in steam, but for that one day you can. And that’s basically what seems that Julia Felix’s complex is, it is a space where people can go and have the experience of luxury of time of being served of quiet and privacy, which is something that is so rare in an urban environment, and they can splash out for it, or they can pay for it because it is not something like people like Cicero, and the rich guys are like the Villa of the Silver Wedding or whatever, they can have that all day every day, because privacy and silence and quiet and lush greenery are things that are only available to those who can afford it above you, apparently there was a market for people to be to buy that for one day, or buy that for one evening and to experience it as a luxury, which is and that kind of middle class of Rome of the Roman Empire is so invisible. And it’s so nice to know that that happened and that there were people who would, you know, come in for a birthday or for an anniversary or for, you know, a special little treat and recline and be fed fix instead of having porridge on the street like we normally do.
Dr Rad 46:51
Because you want to eat porridge when you’re on the move, of course, yeah.
Dr Emma Southon 46:55
You know, some you know, sometimes you’re running through the street, you get a big bowl of stew and a bit of wine on a quick go. But sometimes you want to sit down and take your time.
Dr Rad 47:04
She is fascinating, because the very fact that she’s obviously involved in business and her name as well. Julia Felix, it obviously hints at someone who truly is a self made person. And obviously, yeah, obviously does not come from the elite herself.
Dr Emma Southon 47:16
Yeah. And like I said, She’s the daughter of Spurius. So people have suggested that maybe she’s illegitimate, or she doesn’t know who her father is. But she has a citizen. And she, you know, doesn’t mention her husband. And then she has like in the back rooms. There’s her space where she lives through a door. That is a tiny little like villa with an office and where she does her work. And the office walls are covered in paintings of food and money.
My favorite things, yeah.
Which for someone who was apparently making her money serving food, I think it’s great.
Dr G 47:59
Just really embracing everything about how far she’s come and how she’s made it.
Dr Emma Southon 48:02
Yeah exactly. And then she’s got to this point, apparently, in 79, where she’s like, Okay, I’m ready to let someone else run this, and I’m going to rent it out. And you know, I’m still the owner, but I’ll make making my money from rents, and I’m gonna go and maybe she’s gonna go and live a life of luxury somewhere. Or maybe she’s got a new business that she wants to start. But she’s like, at that point. She is she’s ready to let somebody else do the day to day.
Dr G 48:29
I think that’s really cool. It’s like it gives you such an insight into Pompeii, and how Roman life is actually working. And I imagine this is not the only place where this kind of thing is happening at all.
Dr Emma Southon 48:39
Yeah, it’s just the only one we can definitely identify like, because it is the only one that has a sign.
Dr G 48:47
Very clear signage. Very handy.
Dr Emma Southon 48:49
Yeah, put more signs on things, people.
Dr G 48:52
Come on, guys. Come on guys. For history.
Dr Emma Southon 48:54
Yeah, ideally, you must really inscribed them in stone. Because yeah, inscribing stuff in stone is the way to make sure that things last.
Dr G 49:03
We’ll keep that in mind. I want to turn your mind now to like a really later period and sort of getting towards the the edges of the Roman world in a different way. And the figure of Zenobia, who is a figure that maybe people have heard of, but maybe don’t know much of the story about, but she’s also a very intriguing figure in her own right.
Dr Emma Southon 49:24
She is and she’s quite not controversial, but like the interpretation of her is quite contentious, I think. So Zenobia is a woman who is known as a Syrian kind of invader, I think is probably the way that she is often described. If you know any kind of Syrian history. She is a symbol of Syrian identity to a lot of people and she used to be on Syrian banknotes, and the way that she is often described as as a woman who ran an empire in Syria that is somehow outside of the Roman Empire. And the way that I interpret her is as a woman who did the exact same thing as like every general in the third century did which is declare herself and Augustus, and attempted to take over the Roman Empire. Because she, to me is a Roman woman within the Roman Empire, who uses an army to attempt to rule the Roman Empire, which makes her more interesting. So she is the wife of a guy called Odaenathus, who is a kind of weird liminal figure on the edge of the Empire during the third century. So the period when the Empire is fragmented, and there’s about 50 people who claim to be emperor in a 30 year period. And it’s kind of militarily and politically chaotic, whereby nobody knows and prayers don’t really seem to last more than 20 minutes, almost all of them die of being murdered, except for one guy who’s hit by lightning. And it and nobody has the kind of combined military power and personal power to be able to get more than two legions to follow them. And at the time, like basically, a lot of keeping the borders happy. Keeping them secure, is to outsource to people who are big men in their area. And he is one of those guys on the border in Syria with the Persian Empire, the Parthian Empire, and the Parthian Empire at the time is on the rise and is encroaching on Armenia, as it always is. But it’s and this is after Rome is going right the way down into Mesopotamia. So Roman power goes all the way down into Iraq and Iran at this stuff at this time. And so they are charged with basically keeping Mesopotamia as a province and Syria. And he is described in a way that is either means that he is a kind of ko emperor, or it’s just a kind of honorary title. And you can argue about it for the rest of your life. But there’s no real answer to it. But he is running Roman legions, and he is a power down there. And he’s given consular power. And he’s very important, and they have a son together. And then he is murdered by one of his men, because he allegedly he, he takes away this guy’s horse, and this guy is so furious about it, that he murders him.
Dr G 52:41
That’s it. That’s the last straw, you cannot have my horse.
Dr Emma Southon 52:44
Exactly. And so. But what Zenobia does, which is kind of on Roman, but makes sense is, she goes, Okay, and we’re so he had all of these titles and names, and we. And so now my son has all of those titles and names. And so she just kind of gives her son who is like eight, all of the titles that her husband had, and then start ruling as his regent. So she just takes over the role that her husband had running the armies being the face of power in that whole region of Syria and Mesopotamia, she seems to do some military stuff down in Mesopotamia, which we only know because there are some thoughts that are built down there, which have her name on them. So she’s doing something. And then at a certain point, she turns around, declares herself Augusta declares her son to be Augustus, and invades Egypt.
Dr G 53:48
Plot twist.
Dr Emma Southon 53:50
And this is a point where everyone’s like, Oh, hang on, so she destroys a legion in Arabia, then she invades Egypt goes right the way down to Alexandria, and chases out the governor there and sends him on his way, kills a bunch of people, and then settles in and she starts producing coins, and she starts producing lots and lots of bureaucracy. Because where the bureaucracy does survive is in Egypt, because the papyrus survives really well.
Dr Rad 54:18
And the climate.
Dr Emma Southon 54:19
Yeah, yeah. And so what we have is loads and loads of documents, which suddenly start saying, oh, in the year of the reign, like year two of the rain of Iranian and year one of the rain of my son and she basically declares him co emperor of the Roman Empire, which are ralien, who was now emperor and he’s kind of dealing with stuff with the Goths over in the West, he is less keen on this idea, because he’s like, hang on, Who the fuck are you? Who the fuck is that?
Dr G 54:54
Also, what are you doing in the breadbasket of Rome? Get out! Get out, now!
Dr Emma Southon 54:57
Please, you are stressing me out in the breadbasket of Rome! Exactly. And so he pivots very hard away and kind of abandons the situation with the Goths and comes charging into Egypt and fights her. As it turns out, she picked the wrong person to declare herself co Emperor with because if it had been one of the rubbish ones like a Claudius Gothicus or something, he probably would have left it. But Aurelian is the least rubbish and is the person as it turns out, who has the political and military power, and the charm and the ability and the kind of profound balance of being interested in paperwork and being nice to his his soldiers to pull the Emperor back together under one person? So he turns around and blasts into Egypt to fight her she withdraws from Egypt and is like, oh, no, it’s okay. Maybe I’ll just stay.
Dr Rad 55:50
You have it. You have it back.
Dr G 55:52
Byeeeee.
Dr Emma Southon 55:54
But she is still producing coins. And she has, like, we have all these coins from Syria where she’s like, it’s Zenobia on one side, and Juno on the other. And it has her son on one side and Jupiter on the other end, like they’re Roman coins, and they she’s calling them Augustus, and she calls herself an Augusta. And she very clearly is wants to be a part like is a Roman person being a part of the Roman Empire. And they have a bunch of battles. And eventually she is defeated, in in Antioch. And she tries to allegedly, possibly maybe tries to flee on a camel and is caught. But which may be it seems like the kind of story that Romans in Rome would tell about like a woman from the east like, Oh, she just got on a camel, you know what they’re like,
Dr Rad 56:39
She hopped on a magic carpet, and she was out of there.
Dr Emma Southon 56:42
Exactly like but, but it’s a good story. So and she has captured but Aurelian has a bit of Julius Caesar in him. So he lets her live. And he takes her to Rome. And then she lives the rest of her life in Rome, and apparently has more children.
Dr Rad 56:55
Mind blowing, I thought for sure she’d end up dead.
Dr Emma Southon 56:58
Yeah. Yeah. And so she, she is very often presented as someone who tries to invade the Roman Empire. But to me it is very clear that she is someone who wants to rule the Roman Empire and who was like, all these other rubbish guys are doing it. Like she herself puts down another person who tries to declare himself emperor and his children Emperor’s in Syria, and everybody else is doing I don’t see why I can’t get involved.
Dr Rad 57:25
It’s hashtag trending guys.
Dr Emma Southon 57:27
Exactly, like jumping on that bandwagon. And like thinks that she has a real chance. And she you know, she does. She’s the only person who ever invades Egypt, which is impressive, all by itself. And so I think she’s really interesting, both as in the way that we and the way the Romans themselves, but the way that we talk about Romanness, like what about her means that we don’t call her Roman, but also the way that we talked about the Roman Empire and like, at particularly at this period, like when it is all kinds of fragmenting around what gets does still be included in the Roman Empire, and what certainly gets written off from what from thing because this is happening at the same time that the Gallic Empire succeeds. And a guy over in Gaul takes Britain bit of Spain and declares it’s no longer part of the Roman Empire that he is doing his own thing.
Dr G 58:21
We’re independent now. Yeah, it’s been long enough, it’s time to go it alone.
Dr Emma Southon 58:26
It’s like, No, I want my own little empire. And they did. They’re doing their own little kind of situation over there. And but it seems that Zenobia was going to basically keep going, like, be fun to see what she had done had had she had a rubbish Emperor against her rather than gigachad Aurelian.
Dr G 58:51
Yeah, certainly, this seems like the possibility for it to politically work out, actually, yeah, she can hold those regions. And the emperor in Rome is also like, well, I can’t take them back necessarily, let’s make a deal. Then all of a sudden, you’d have something very different going on there in terms of what’s happening with her career and how it pans out for her son as well.
Dr Emma Southon 59:13
Exactly. Because this is the time when the situation with the Goths is really like a problem. And for a good few decades, there emperors have been tied up just desperately trying to keep the gods out, even though all the gods want is to be Roman. And had they been like right, they would have resolved that situation immediately. But they they have been tied up fighting Gods on the Danube and so our ralien is smart enough as a military leader that he takes a tactical loss in order to take Egypt under his own personal control again, but had you had a less tactical one who was like, oh, no, this is the more kind of threatening thing I need to stay here. I can leave the guards and had let her stay in Egypt then you might have a very different – there’s a novel that somebody could write about that counterfactual.
Dr Rad 1:00:04
I love it. Well, so far, the women that we’ve talked about are all what we would loosely describe as pagan because of course, for the vast majority of Rome’s history, the religion that is followed is made up of many gods, etc, etc. However, right at the end a bit of a plot twist of Christianity becoming a major religion, if not the religion of the Roman Empire. And that leads us to the final woman that we thought we quickly discuss, who is Melania the Elder?
Speaker 3 1:00:36
Yeah, who is on this kind of cusp. She lives in a world where Christianity wasn’t legal than it was. And she kind of exemplifies this time when Roman elite women could be Christian out loud, kind of for the first time, but is a woman who does not want to leave behind the benefits of a life as a Roman. And so she is one of the first women who can call herself a Roman Christian, basically. So most of the women before that you have to or most Christians really, before Constantine, you have to choose whether you are a Roman or a Christian. And a lot of you know, the line that that is in all of the trial transcripts and lives that we have for Christian martyrs is that they say no, I am a Christian ‘Christianus sum’ or ‘Christianus sum’, some rather than ‘Romanus sum’. and you cannot be both like and that is why they are persecuted because they won’t sacrifice to the Emperor. Because there seems to be undermining and eventually, they’re, like, constantly in caves. And it’s like fine, we’ve managed to do here is make you stronger. And so she is one of the first people who can say I am a Roman Christian, and she can exist in the Roman world as an elite woman who owns huge amounts of land like she is she actually descends from Marc Anthony’s family line. And she owns as part of her family, enormous swathes of Europe, and is taking income from that. And she she grows up in Spain, and then she moves with her son to Rome after she is widowed. And this being the ancient world, she’s like 23. And she’s widowed, she has already lost two children. And she goes to Rome, where she sets him up as the urban prefect and then spent 10 years living in Rome, preparing her son to be the prefect. And what you have to do is do the games like the big games of the year, and you have to save up for like a decade to do that. So they declare who the prefect is going to be 10 years in advance, so that they have time to save up to the
Dr Rad 1:02:58
Like the Olympics.
Dr Emma Southon 1:02:59
Yeah, exactly. So you have time to prepare. And so she she does actually spent 10 years living in Rome, and then her son comes of age, she becomes a prefect, she does the games. And then she immediately leaves Rome, sells all of her like personal possessions, and then takes huge amount of money and goes to Egypt, because the monastic I was gonna say trend for like, monastic life is kicking off in Egypt at this time, this is a fourth century, kind of mid late fourth century. And she goes off to Egypt to go and visit all of the desert mothers and fathers and ingratiate herself in life in Christian Egypt. And she goes around all of these people and talk to them. And like, these are people who have walled themselves up into their tombs so that they can live there and people who are like, it’s a, it’s a great period of Christian history and history in the Roman Empire, where people were doing deeply odd, like, exercises of stamina and endurance, and of deprivation, like Simon Stylites is, is standing on a, he’s just standing on a pole. And people come and see him and the more people that come see him, the higher his pole gets, but that’s what he does. He just stands on a pole all day, every day, and people are going off into the desert and not masturbating and crying about it a lot. And there’s some great stories about like men, like like thinking about killing themselves, because they’re just constantly tormented by visions of women and young boys and they
Dr Rad 1:04:41
What a life. What a life.
Speaker 3 1:04:43
yeah, but they’re not allows to touch it. And women walling themselves into tombs, or like, you know, these really intense aesthetic practices. And she goes around and visits them all and then kind of decides that she’s not that’s not the life for her because what she enjoys is the life of a patroness. And so she goes to Jerusalem and starts a nunnery. And with her friend, she opens a, they open, open a nunnery, a monastery next to each other where women can come and live monastic lives. And she dedicates herself to a life of very performative asceticism whereby she sort of refuses to wash and then borates people who do, like, rich, she has a huge amount of money, and which she continues to get because her son is now running all of her states, the family estates, and he is sending her money. So she is still benefiting from all of the states that she previously had. And she is pouring all of that money into building up Jerusalem as a Christian space and planting Christianity all over Jerusalem and kind of tamping down the Judaism because they, after Helena, they really want Jerusalem to be the home of Christianity and to shove out the Jews. And she is popular enough there and doing a good enough job that they give her a bit of the True Cross.
Dr G 1:06:13
Sweet.
Dr Rad 1:06:14
This sounds very much like a case of her being able to have her cake and eat it too.
Dr Emma Southon 1:06:18
Yeah, it’s very much a case of a woman who chooses to present as poor while not ever being actually poor. So she, they give her a bit of the True Cross. And then she goes back to visit her family in Rome. One of whom is a quite famous bishop in Italy, where she does a lot of marching around triumphantly, basically. But in the most part, so her family, like go on a visit. And they, they all turn up in like golden carriages wearing purple and red and whatever. And she turns up riding a donkey dressed in rags, holding a bit of the True Cross.
Dr G 1:07:02
Nice work.
Dr Rad 1:07:04
And just like Jesus before her.
Dr Emma Southon 1:07:05
Exactly and you just feel like rolling your eyes so hard, like, like pretending to be poor and so silly. But anyway, she gives a bit this bit of true cross away. And then she gets into a bunch of fights with St. Jerome, who she hates, and he hates her, which is fair, because he’s awful. And she is possibly in Rome, just before the sack of Rome in 410, or she has left. But she inspires her daughter, Melania the Younger, who is potentially the more famous to also become an aesthetic woman, and her and her husband decide that they’re going to sell all of their land free all of their enslaved people, give away everything and become genuinely poor. Which Melania the elder and her son are appalled by and they write to the Emperor.
Dr G 1:08:02
You’ve taken it too far!
Dr Emma Southon 1:08:03
Yeah, exactly. No, no, the thing is, we pretend to be poor, like we’re not actually poor.
Dr Rad 1:08:08
We get to turn it on and off. It’s like a switch.
Dr Emma Southon 1:08:11
Like if I need to have a nice bed, then I need the nice bed like we don’t like and I don’t need to use this money to buy influence and power like I don’t. It’s not what how else, okay, will take me here. Yeah, I need to be purchasing it. Otherwise, because what you have at this time, like, Jerome’s Paula starts her own monastery as well in, in, in Jerusalem, and she is very famous for basically giving over her daughters to Jerome, who He then proceeds to starve to death. But she starts her own monastery and and they’re they have a very specific hierarchy depending on how much money you bring into the monastery with you. So if you want your your social status is outside of the monastery, you there is a hierarchy within the monetary and so the trappings of the world outside Do not leave you when you go and become a nun, you can absolutely go and become a nun and still be a rich, or still be treated as rich and even if you’re pretending that you’re not, but Melania the younger is like no, no, no, I’m gonna give it all away. That’s what Jesus said. And they genuinely try to get the Emperor to stop her, but they can’t. So she sells off everything frees 8000 people, and then goes off to live a genuinely aesthetic. Much to the horror of the rest of her family and then Romans sacked and everything changes. But she she is so fascinating at this point at which Christianity has become legal and so Romans can kind of paste the trappings of a kind of, I suppose, like secular life on to Christianity and can and it’s stops being a thing that you actually have to die for. And you genuinely have to suffer. You can kind of choose to suffer in a way that you can opt out of that.
Dr G 1:10:12
Wait a minute, performative Christianity?
Dr Emma Southon 1:10:15
Yeah. But like they still desperately want to suffer, because that has become part of Christianity. But they don’t. It’s only impressive if you’re choosing to suffer. Like it’s only impressive if you are a rich person who is choosing to wear scratchy rags. If you’re just a poor person who is wearing scratchy rags, you can then that that’s not impressive, like, no, that’s just having a shit life. But being a very rich person who could be wearing silk and who is surrounded by people who are wearing silk, but you’re riding a donkey and wearing scratchy things, that everybody’s like, Oh, my God, what a wonderful.
Dr G 1:10:59
The sacrifice, the sacrifice
Speaker 3 1:11:01
Exactly. And all of a sudden, the fate of Christianity changes and becomes something that people can compete over in a way that you couldn’t really do before. And you’ve the first inklings of what a Christian Roman Empire is going to look like start to appear. And it’s, it’s fascinating.
Dr Rad 1:11:24
I must admit, it’s been a while since I looked at this period, so I was glad to be reminded that the Romans was still unintentionally hilarious. Mostly, yeah, mostly when they were trying to be really serious, even when they became Christian doesn’t make a difference. Doesn’t matter what religion it doesn’t Yeah.
Dr Emma Southon 1:11:41
The more serious the Romans try to be, very often the funnier they are. And there’s this story, like Melania is always surrounded by men who are writing. And so there’s a couple of stories like stories that run about, and there’s this great one about her traveling, she’s moving a new nun from Jerusalem to Egypt, and then traveling across Egypt and cranker, traveling across the desert. So as a little group, and one guy who’s with them, who’s a bishop, they get to their resting place, it’s the desert, they’re in Egypt, it’s hot, and he washes his hands and face and Melania loses her mind, and like, berate him as like, I never wash my face, and I have never laid on anything softer than the hard ground. And even though I’m in my 60s, you will never see me do anything so decadent as to wash my hands, even though doctors say that I might actually be less ill if I did. I still like, Oh, my God, wash woman. But yes, she just loves to be grubby. And just so that she can one up people.
Dr Rad 1:12:47
Well, you know, I actually made her a bit of my own patron saint when I went to school camp and could not wash for several days.
Dr Emma Southon 1:12:57
See, this, incidentally, is why I never became an archaeologist, because I could never deal with the grubby hands.
Dr Rad 1:13:04
Yeah, I get that, I get that. Well, thank you so much for sharing all of those amazing stories, people definitely need to go out and grab your book because it is filled with so many more. So can you please tell us where can people buy the book? And where can people find you.
Dr Emma Southon 1:13:21
So you can you can buy the book hopefully in any good bookshop. You so it’s called ‘A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women’. And it should be hopefully available anyway. You can go to my website, which is emmasouthon.com. Then there are links to places that you can bite there, you can also find me at ‘History is Sexy’, which is historyissexy.com. As long as your adult filters don’t filter out the name, because apparently they sometimes do. But you can find it on all good podcast feeds. And we answer questions that people don’t want to spend two days researching themselves. So and you can ask us questions there. And yeah, I think that’s all the places and you can find me on Instagram at ‘Nuclearteeth’, where I put links to things when I remember. And you can also see many, many, many pictures of my cat.
Dr G 1:14:16
Oh, Look, thank you so much for spending this time with us. We really appreciate it. And reading this book has been a real thrill and pleasure. And we can only imagine that people listening to this episode will feel the energy and the vibrancy of the women coming through in this conversation because the whole book is like this. It’s full of great stuff. As a final question, Would you have any hints about what’s to come in your writing world?
Dr Emma Southon 1:14:45
The next book that I am currently writing is a children’s book with Greg Jenner who used to be the historical consultant for Horrible Histories and now does the ‘You’re Dead to Me’ podcast on the BBC. And we are writing a children’s book about Roman Britain, which is an introduction to historiography for kids.
Dr G 1:15:08
Fantastic. That sounds really, really exciting.
Dr Rad 1:15:11
Sounds like another winner. Well, we as we cannot thank you enough for coming back, back, back back back again – which only you will find funny – and we hope very much to be able to chat to you when that next one comes out.
Dr Emma Southon 1:15:25
Thank you. I’m always here to chat to you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
The post Special Episode – A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women with Dr Emma Southon appeared first on The Partial Historians.
We sat down recently with Zaza, host of the Eurotrash podcast, to discuss the life and times of Julia the Elder. Julia was Augustus’ only biological child and her life offers some keen insights into the Roman world at that time.
Julia is born of the marriage of the youngish Octavian and Scribonia. While Octavian’s marriage to Scribonia did not last, their daughter Julia goes on to play an important role in the growing Augustan household. Historians often refer to her as Julia the Elder to distinguish her from her daughter with Agrippa, Vispania Julia Agrippina (known as Julia the Younger).
Being Julia the ElderJulia is born into a changing Rome. The politics of the republic is breaking down in spectacular fashion. Octavian and Mark Antony are trying to carve out power positions for themselves in the nominal triumvirate that escalates into civil war. Against this backdrop, Julia is often incorporated into her father’s political aspirations.
This bust thought to be of Julia the Elder. This bust has a damaged nose and a very typical early Julio-Claudian hairstyle with a rolled fringe that leads into a plait that runs along the centre part. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
If you already know a little about Julia (even just from reputation), this episode is not to be missed. If you’re interested in coming to grips with one of the most fascinating women in Augustus’s life, then strap yourself in, because Julia lives life to the fullest!
You can catch all the details over at the Eurotrash podcast and (as a real treat) there’s also a YouTube release of the episode as well.
YouTube: The Scandalous Life of Julia the Elder!
Keen to learn more about the Julio-Claudians?Looking to delve deeper into the Julio-Claudians. We have a couple of episodes that may just be the ticket:
- Episode 6 – Augustus, an Introduction – Augustus has A LOT going on. This is very much just the beginning.
- Episode 8 – The Life of Tiberius … Part I – Julia the Elder and Tiberius definitely end up married at some point, but understanding Tiberius may explain a little bit about how that union ended up…
- Episode 10 – The Life of Julia Maior – our first foray MANY years ago into Julia the Elder’s life!
- Episode 81 – Livia Drusilla – Augustus’ most famous wife gets a pretty bad wrap, but did she deserve it?
“Julia, daughter of Augustus, in exile at Ventotene.” by Pavel Svedomsky in the 19th century.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The post Julia the Elder with Eurotrash appeared first on The Partial Historians.
We were thrilled to sit down and talk with Assistant Professor Katharine Huemoeller about her research into the representation of enslaved women during slave revolts in ancient Rome. This conversation reveals plenty of food for thought about the representation of women in the ancient world as well as exploring the way women go on to be represented in later eras.
Special Episode – Enslaved Women during Slave Revolts with Assistant Professor Katharine Huemoeller
The Slaves are RevoltingAnd rightly so. Conditions for enslaved people in ancient Rome could vary widely from difficult manual roles such as mining and agriculture to the challenges of proximity to enslavers in the domestic sphere. Human trafficking also has a significant role to play in understanding gladiators. Assistant Professor Huemoeller takes us through some of the main ways to consider slavery in Rome before turning our attention to three key slave revolts:
- Revolt of Volsinii (265 BCE)
- First Sicilian Slave War (135-132 BCE)
- Third Slave War/ Spartacus Slave War (73-71 BCE)
These examples offer the opportunity to consider enslaved women a little more closely and it’s here that the conversation gets really interesting.
A coloured mosaic depicting two lovers together surrounded by attendants (likely slaves).
One pour liquid from a vessel; one attends beside the bed.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Taken in the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna, Austria)
Things to Listen Out for The role of menstruation during Spartacus’ war against Rome! * The agricultural uprising in Sicily and the ways in which slaves treated free women * The challenges of reading with and against the evidence when it comes to the Volsinii * And no conversation about Spartacus would be complete without a deep dive into the representation of women in Kirk Douglas’ Spartacus (1960) and the more recent Starz series Spartacus: Blood and Sand*
A painting called ‘The Slave Market’ by Gustave Boulanger (1886) which shows a range of enslaved people waiting to be sold. Most wear discs around their neck indicating their enslaved status.
MusicThanks to the glorious Bettina Joy de Guzman for our theme music.
Readings Huemoeller, Katharine P. D. 2021. ‘Sexual Violence in Republican Slave Revolts‘ in Kamen, D., Marshall, C. W. (eds.) Slavery and Sexuality in Classical Antiquity (University of Wisconsin Press), 159-173. * Huemoeller, Katharine P. D. 2020. ‘Freedom in Marriage? Manumission for Marriage in the Roman World‘ The Journal of Roman Studies 110: 123-139. * Huemoeller, Katharine P. D. 2021. ‘Captivity for All? Slave Status and Prisoners of War in the Roman Republic‘ TAPA* 151.1: 101-125.
Automated TranscriptGenerated by Otter AI. Hopes and prayers for the AI learning our Australian accents, Latin terms, and other very niche phrases!
Dr Rad 0:16
Welcome to The Partial Historians,
Dr G 0:19
we explore all the details of ancient Rome.
Dr Rad 0:23
Everything from the political scandals, the love of ours, the battles waged and when citizens turn against each other. I’m Dr. Rad
Dr G 0:34
and I’m Dr. G. We consider Rome as the Romans saw it by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories.
Dr Rad 0:43
Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.
Welcome to a special episode of The Partial Historians, I am one of your hosts Dr. Rad
Dr G 1:07
and I’m Dr. G.
Dr Rad 1:09
We are joined by a very exciting guest who shares some of our interests today, we are joined by Professor Huemoeller. Assistant Professor Huemoeller worked for a nonprofit, the National Women’s Law Centre in Washington, DC for several years before returning to the academic world. She has taught at Princeton University, Middlebury College, and at US correctional facilities through the prison teaching initiatives. She is currently the Assistant Professor of Roman History at the University of British Columbia. And we are very excited to talk to her today, because her special areas of interest include things like slavery and sexual violence, and we’re going to be another word excited about sexual violence. But we’re excited that we’re going to be talking about issues of slavery and gender. That’s probably what I should say. So welcome to the show.
Katharine Huemoeller 1:59
Thank you so much. That always happens to me. I can’t wait to teach this class on slavery. It’ll be interesting that Yeah.
Dr Rad 2:08
All right. So let’s kick off with one of our introductory questions. So you’ve obviously written a lot about incidents of slave results in the Roman Republic, but just to set the scene for our listeners, can you tell us a little bit about the status of slaves in Rome?
Katharine Huemoeller 2:24
Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll talk specifically about slaves in the Republican era, because slavery is quite distinct in different periods of Roman history. And it really sort of takes off in terms of numbers in the Italian peninsula, in the third and second centuries BCE, as Rome expands, more and more people are trafficked into Italy, and sold on the slave market. So there’s a direct link between Roman conquest and the growth of the Roman Empire and the growth of the Roman slave system. But what slavery looked like and how it was experienced was extremely diverse. And some people were were employed on plantation style, agricultural estates, for surplus, you know, production of food, with very, very tough conditions, very harsh conditions, and very little chance of ever being manumitted, much less living a very long life. Other people lived in an urban context, or worked in a domestic context. And the lived conditions were perhaps a bit better than agricultural slavery. But it came with its own horrors, including proximity to owners, maybe increased chance of sexual violence and sexual exploitation, especially for enslaved women, but also for enslaved men. So it looked really different depending on who your owner was, and where you lived, and also, who you were, where you came from. And if you are a man or a woman or a child or an adult.
Dr G 3:58
Yeah, it’s a there’s a lot to take in when it comes to thinking about like the status of slaves in the ancient Roman world, just because there are so many diverse areas that somebody could end up in in terms of like, their place, either like, maybe it will be mining, maybe it will be in the field, maybe it will be in the home. And all of those come with their own risks. And to I don’t think we should ever underestimate the nature of the human workforce that is being utilised in many ancient societies in particularly ancient Rome, just in terms of when you look back to see what was achieved and also the labour that was utilised to achieve those things. So thank you so much for giving us a bit of a taste of the things that are going to be coming out. As we delve further into the questions.
Katharine Huemoeller 4:53
That point about under estimating is an important one too, because the big challenge with ancient slavery is I mean, we can say It looks very diverse, that’s clearly true. But it’s hard to say much else definitively because our record for ancient slavery is is so difficult. And certain types of slavery, certain sleeving strategies appear appear more clearly in the historical record than others. So we have more information, for example, about agricultural slavery in this period, you know, and sort of less idea what’s going on in a domestic context or more information about enslaved men than about enslaved women. So it’s always the question of filling in these very large gaps in our archive.
Dr Rad 5:35
Oh, definitely. Look, we’ve found we’ve been looking at the Roman monarchy a bit because we’ve been working on a book on that period. And as you said, I tend to think of slavery more later in room’s history, you know, during the Republic, when we start to see those big wars that are happening, and lots of people being captured in a conflict and then being made slaves, and then that obviously setting up the possibility of having more slaves because their people are bought into slavery, etc, etc. But the crazy thing was that when we actually stopped and looked at the records, there were references to slaves, and they were everywhere, even in that very early period. And whilst Okay, yeah, some things you know, you might look at them as being maybe troops or something like that. There’s just so many references to think that slavery itself wasn’t a part of Roman society, even all the way back at the beginning.
Katharine Huemoeller 6:27
Yeah, I completely agree. And I think there’s still a lot of work to be done on these earlier forms of slavery. I mean, obviously, it’s in the tall tables, which I know you guys covered. And that’s a great indication that it’s, you know, significant, and it’s a maybe a fairly clear demarcated legal status. But then, of course, it’s also, you know, only one of many different types of dependency in that period, including debt bondage, and, and maybe there was less of a clear line between these types of exploitation. And then the other issue, of course, is that I think in that early period, maybe there are more enslaved people coming from closer to the city of Rome, as opposed to from very far away. And so I expect there, you know, there’s a difference there in terms of the relationship of ethnicity and slavery, but I think there’s a lot more work to be done.
Dr G 7:17
Definitely. Yeah, once you start looking into the little tidbits that we do have access to is like, Yeah, you get the sense that this is a much wider picture. And there’s much more that we can learn as we go along. So thinking about your work and where it has led you in your research, you have focused on three main revolts, slave revolts. So when people are rising up against these conditions that they have found themselves in their lack of agency, and then recapturing that through the process of revolt. And I’m wondering if we can just go through the details of them a little bit. So starting with the revolt of the Volsinii in 265 BCE? What’s going on there?
Katharine Huemoeller 8:00
Yeah, this is one I really didn’t know much about until I started researching this topic. This the Spartacus revolt is very famous, right?
Dr Rad 8:07
I’ve never heard of it.
Katharine Huemoeller 8:14
So um, so this revolt is as definitely more small scale earlier on right in the third century, middle third century. And the sources for it are a bit sketchy, but it is attested in multiple sources. And what seems to happen is that there’s some sort of uprising in this atrocity and city. And it’s a sort of class struggle, and the exact identity of the people rising after it is different in different sources. In some sources, they’re enslaved people. And it’s a serious enough for revolt that the city asks Rome to intervene and assist and, you know, setting the social order back to what it was. So that’s, that’s one of these revolts. And I think it’s an interesting one, because it’s clear that there’s actually a lot of smaller scale revolts happening in the third and second century that we only hear little snippets about, but it seems actually to have been quite frequent. And Amy racialist has done some work on gathering these into a timeline in her slave theatre book. So, just recognising that probably this is happening quite frequently in the Italian peninsula and these two in these two centuries, even though you know, the ones we hear about are these larger scale ones that are called the really the first second and third servile wars essentially. So moving into the second one there, or the first one there, that’s a little less than a century later and the 130s in on the island of Sicily. So, all of these are taking place, you know, I guess I say the Italian peninsula but including Sicily, so in you know, Italy, Southern Italy and Sicily, in regions where agriculture is, you know, predominant. And this first slave revolt is led by a charismatic figure named Yunus As who sort of rises up in one of the major cities in the Catanian plain of Sicily, again, this really important sort of grain producing region, and he manages to, you know, work with other enslaved people in the area to capture the city, and then the revolt spreads to the whole island. And you know, that’s when, of course, Rome takes notice. And then the third one that’s quite that I focus on is the Spartacus slave war, sometimes known as the third slave war, which again, is happening a little less than a century after that. So in the 70s BCE, and in this one, an interesting man, a very enigmatic man named Spartacus, who is maybe Thracian, maybe not, is captured and enslaved in a gladiatorial school in Capua, and manages to break out along with other enslaved Gladiators, and maybe his wife, but we’ll get to that. And once again, you know, similarly to the first slave revolt, the revolt is sort of, at first seen as a minor thing, and not much effort is put to putting it down. And then it sort of grows in size as the rebel army starts to grow as encompasses other people, other enslaved people, but also maybe other free but disenfranchised people in the south of Italy. And it becomes a quite massive revolts that, you know, the Roman army actually takes a few years to suppress.
Dr Rad 11:29
Amazing, thank you so much for that. So obviously, there’s a lot that is interesting about these slave revolts. But I believe the reason that you have focused on these ones in your article was that these revolts involve violence, and particularly, they are revolts that involve sexual violence. And we’ve got records of that. So what did you notice about the way this violence has been represented in the sources?
Katharine Huemoeller 11:57
Yeah, so these these revolts came to my notice, because I am currently working on a book project on the sexual exploitation of enslaved people. And what I noticed in these revolts is that one of the types of violence that the enslaved rebels are said to direct at the free people, and particularly at their enslavers is sexual violence. And so I was interested in looking at sort of what how that manifested itself, not so much to understand what happened during these revolts. But instead to understand from the perspective of these free writers, what did they think enslaved people wanted to rebel against? What kind of violence did they think they wanted to inflict on the Masters, understanding that this is essentially a sort of role reversal, where the enslaved people are said to inflict the types of violence that they themselves have experienced as slaves? So I thought this could tell me something about the conditions of slavery. What I found when I looked at the sources is that there’s actually lots of different types of sexual violence that are inflicted on free people in these revolts. But it’s all directed at free women. And so what we see is that the slave rebels are said to commit acts of rape, and other types of sexual outrage, essentially, it’s very vague, to free matrons and to free virgins, and that these are done in front of their husbands or fathers. And that second part of that second detail clued me in to the fact that these acts are actually sort of intended to injure the free men, using the free women sort of as an instrument. And so that’s, that’s what I became interested in, through studying these is the way in which these enslaved men are sort of claiming the privileges of free masculinity in the revolts.
Dr G 13:56
Yeah, this is a really interesting aspect and insight into Roman sexuality, isn’t it? Because the this ties back into these ideas about the power that is thought to be inherent from a Roman perspective in sexual encounters, where it’s partly to do with the gender of the people involved, but it’s also partly to do with how you place yourself in the patriarchal hierarchy of Roman society who gets to do who to white becomes super important for being able to like know exactly where you sit socially, not just sexually, and the utilisation of women in this not as sort of agents in their own right, but perhaps as vehicles for conveying something about Roman masculinity is not at all surprising, but incredibly infuriating. I feel like
Katharine Huemoeller 14:50
yeah, that Yeah, that’s exactly right. What I’ve what I found is that it wasn’t just that these enslaved men were raping the free women. It was also the If they were, for example, protecting some free women from rape and choosing to rape others, or so this idea that the free masculinity or hegemonic masculinity and Roman society is about not just getting to do what you want to other people, but choosing right, who experiences what and who was allowed to do what. And so that includes not only, you know, sexual violence directed and enslaved people, but also that includes the sort of protection or maybe you could say, I don’t know, supervision, control of free women. So one of the stories that we get in the slave revolts is that the slave rebels choose this one teenage free woman who was very kind to them when they were enslaved, and they escort her to the house of her family members, and explicitly are protecting her sexual virtue. And I think that is as much a privilege of free masculinity, as you know, raping the matrons in front of their husbands.
Dr Rad 16:06
Absolutely. And I mean, obviously, this sexual violence is taking place in a broader context as well. Like, that’s not the only privilege that they’re claiming all of the time. And the one that particularly stood out to me in this regard is the the revolt of Athena, which I never really heard of before reading your article, as you said, it’s the lesser known. So thinking about what the slaves might have been trying to achieve through their actions, you know, more broadly speaking, because I know that during that particular revolt, they take all sorts of crazy actions, you wouldn’t expect slaves to, you know, to be able to take or to even maybe want to take in trying to, you know, set themselves up in a new way of life after their revolt. Yeah,
Katharine Huemoeller 16:49
this is a really interesting one. So supposedly, they, they sort of enact a number of reforms. It’s actually very, it’s very legalistic, rather than, you know, crazy violence, right. So one of the things they do is they become senators, they set up a sort of their own Senate. Another thing they do is they sort of rewrite the rules of inheritance. And it’s a little unclear, either they become the heirs to their former owners, or they write their own wills, it’s not clear which one and then they also rewrite the rule of stupid, which is illicit sex in Roman law. So this is technically happening in an attractive city, but extremely Roman. And always. And so what they say is that a free woman is is not allowed to get married to a free man, until an enslaved man has, has had sex with her first, which is just an extremely strange reform, and is again clearly linked to these ideas about what masculinity is and how to punish free men. And this is the sort of ultimate punishment right to make them marry a woman over whom they’ve had no control over her chastity or sexual virtue.
Dr G 18:05
I think this also tells us something about the nature of what our written sources, perhaps fear most, they’re kind of writing a narrative about, like, what are they most afraid of happening to them? If the slaves succeed? This is not a narrative of how slaves might have pursued their own freedom or how they would have defined it. I don’t know if I was a slave, I’d want to be my first task would be inheritance law, for instance.
Katharine Huemoeller 18:30
Right? Yeah, absolutely. This is like all of these sources are about what free people fear, they, I think have give us almost nothing about what actually happened with these revolts, or what the enslaved people want. But yeah, what’s so notable about about their desires, as represented in these sources is that they just want to be the free men, they want to take over all of their life and their privileges and their wives and their daughters. There is nothing in these accounts, hardly about enslaved women, or children. Right. So the idea here is that these men, when they sort of take control of society, they want to marry the wives of their former owners. That is not like what we see, for example, in Roman comedy, which is from a similar time period, right in which matrons are like gross, no one wants. They’re not. They’re not like objects of desire, right? But in these narratives, they are like, these are the women who are raped or taken as wives by these by these freed slaves. And so what we’re seeing there definitely is intended to show what emasculation looks like, I think in the Roman worlds, that’s what’s feared. And of course, you get that in the military context, right? The slaves are actually winning battles against the Romans. That’s really embarrassing to and emasculating. And now we also see sort of what’s emasculating in the private sphere in the home, or in the domestic sphere. Well, it’s
Dr Rad 19:58
so fascinating that you mentioned this, but because we one of the categories that we use in our show, when we’re ranking, the Romans performance when we’re doing a narrative is where source. So this inherently masculine, you know, like value, I suppose you’d call it or quality. And we try and think of that as obviously the, in a way, it’s like that right to take action, and to do so in a particular way. And it kind of ties into what you’re talking about, I think a little bit here about what the slaves are trying to claim potentially.
Katharine Huemoeller 20:32
Yeah, absolutely. It’s, it’s definitely where to send the Roman the Roman definition of virtue of manliness, the ability to dictate what gets done to other people, all of these other people who are subordinate to the, you know, the free male head of household. And I think that this is really encapsulated in one other event from these revolts that we haven’t talked about, which is a very another very strange one. It is the slave supposedly throw a funeral for a free captive matron, who has committed suicide, because she was raped by these slave rebels. And then to make this inversion even stronger, they force the men to perform the free men who are also captive here to perform gladiatorial combat, in honour of this woman at her funeral, because initially, that’s where gladiatorial combat came from, it was a funeral thing. And so, you know, they’re putting the men obviously in the position that they once were as gladiators. But they’re also forcing them to, you know, to participate in this sort of strange mourning of this woman who they should have been able to protect but failed to.
Dr G 21:49
Yeah, it’s a complicated situation for everybody to be in, I mean, the woman and what she went through that led her to her committing suicide, the situation where the roles have been reversed with the slaves and the Romans, and then the gladiatorial lair of a formal mourning process.
Katharine Huemoeller 22:09
And yeah, yeah, especially an interesting story. That’s so yeah, ripe for analysis. I mean, she’s very much the woman is like, very much like this Lucretia figure, right?
Dr Rad 22:18
Yeah. And so they that particular incident that you’re talking about, I believe, takes place allegedly, in the third serve our war, or the Spartacus revolts, whatever you want to call it. And I believe it comes from a source, a rosiest? Yeah, who’s writing a lot later, who’s actually writing in a Christian context. And I think that this kind of highlights not that this is something that you’re necessarily focusing on. But this sort of highlights, I suppose the issues that you must encounter with the varying kinds of source material that you’re working with for the sorts of incidents?
Katharine Huemoeller 22:50
Oh, yeah, that’s a huge problem. You’re using a Christian source to look at sexual norms in the Roman world. It’s gonna be quite different. Certainly, then, you know, Salas, for example, who’s you know, writing in the Roman Republic, the sources for these revolts, especially, you know, as we’ll go on to talk about for, you know, the presence of enslaved women and these revolts or the participation of women, these revolts there, so fragmentary and problematic, they’ve come down to us by chance, often, and they just kind of feel like they got in there by chance. Like, we weren’t even supposed to know about this. Yeah.
Dr G 23:27
Yeah. Like, I feel like I’ve got a question forming that’s related to the way that women are represented in these in these source materials. I mean, it’s partly the Euros Yes, question, I suppose in that sort of like that Christian framing, although I do love a good a rose. Yes, he does a lot of things that we don’t get to wear. But that sense in which none of these sources seem to really consider a woman’s perspective. They’re always a sort of utilitarian device in these narratives. And I’m wondering how much we can actually get out what it might have been like for these women, either as enslaved peoples, or ones who were free and become part of these enslaved narratives through these sorts of revolts with this role reversal stuff going on? Yeah,
Katharine Huemoeller 24:15
it’s really tough. The women and the stories, both free and enslaved women are very much sort of instruments of male competition, you know, violence. Yeah, just they’re sort of communicate with each other through these women is how I see it. And that’s true of the free women and the enslaved women. So when it comes to trying to understand their experience of revolt, their role and participation in it, we kind of have to work against what our sources are doing frequently. So that’s kind of a project I’m working on now is trying to understand the role of, of women in these revolts. It’s quite clear that there were women present In all of these revolts, enslaved women present in the revolts because they kind of creep into the sources just occasionally. So you just get these sort of casual asides about them, which are very tantalising. And then so I’m trying to sort of use each of these very, you know, casual references, and you focus in on it and try to unpack what it can tell us about women and these revolts. So I could we could go through a few of them if you’d like, because they’re really fascinating.
Dr Rad 25:28
I really hoping that this is the part where you’re going to bring up the women who apparently separated themselves from the Spartacan army because they’re almost exactly my favourite.
Katharine Huemoeller 25:36
They are my favourite example. We have to excitingly we have two references to this one incident, probably the same incident, where these two women are separated from the rest of the Spartacan army. They’re on a hill of sorts. And they’re doing something on that hill. And from the vantage point of the hill, they see the Roman army approaching, trying to stage an ambush, and they sound the alarm and the ambush fails. So what’s so interesting about this, the sources that are this incident is that the two writers who record it, record different reasons for why the women are up there. So Salas, who’s writing in the Republic tells us that the women were Adminster Russell window, which is you a phrase used in other texts, in reference to menstruation. But it basically means like carrying out their monthly things, duties,
Dr Rad 26:30
rituals, women’s business.
Katharine Huemoeller 26:33
Yes, exactly.
Dr G 26:36
Just up on the hill doing what,
Katharine Huemoeller 26:38
we don’t want to get too detailed about it, but there and then Plutarch, writing later, and probably looking at Sallust says that the two women are up there sacrificing or carrying out some sort of religious ritual. These things aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, right? They might be carrying out some sort of monthly ritual.
Dr G 26:56
Look, I feel like in the ancient world, if I was menstruating, I would definitely want to have a ritual associated with that of some kind and be like, Gods what’s going on? Yeah, it’s been days. When does this stop?
Katharine Huemoeller 27:07
Yeah, yeah. But once you do it in the middle of a revolt,
Dr G 27:13
like it’s tough, and it’s like, you know, if you hang out with the revolt, and you’re down on the ground, and it’s happening, and the men are turning to you being like, Are you wounded? And you’re like, I am? I am. That’s definitely what’s happening here. Like the enemies no where here. And there is definitely a situation, I don’t know what to tell you. Like, maybe it would be easier to go up the hill and be like, you know, I just need some respite from this revolt. These guys. I don’t know.
Katharine Huemoeller 27:38
Yeah. And I’m gonna take a friend with me here, the two of us are going off. Yeah, I mean, this. So this is a perfect example of the way these women sort of creep into our sources, because the only reason we even know about the stylist is that tiny fragment was excerpted for grammatical reasons. They liked the reference that women are Gallic, and there’s this weird word for Gallic in it. So they’re accepted by this later group, Marian. And then we have one single manuscript that preserves this reference by the Grimm Aryan. So that is how these women come down to us, like, by so many different elements of chance, and without the stylus, we would really not understand what foods are. So it’s just like, they’ve kind of slipped into the record, I like to think of it that way. And, and so it’s exciting opportunity for us to, to think about, you know, in what other ways they’ve slipped in, but also like, all of the ways that they’re missing, but clearly there. So in this case, you know, my, what I think is so funny about this account is like, this is basically a very embarrassing situation for the Romans, they are already engaged in a war against enslaved people, which is embarrassing, and then they’re, they’re, you know, about to, you know, have this ambush and to women. Foreign enslaved women are the ones that spy
Dr Rad 28:57
on their periods like, yeah, it’s
Katharine Huemoeller 29:00
Just like the worst of the worst for them, right?
Dr G 29:03
Yeah, it’s hitting me, right in my virtus as a Roman man, I don’t know.
Katharine Huemoeller 29:08
Talk about virtus, exactly. Like, of course, to me. Of course, these writers want to explain their presence. In other ways. They don’t want to say, hey, they were up there scouting, and they were successful.
Dr G 29:21
Yeah, these women were actually great at reconnaissance. And that’s why we sent them up there. And their sole job was to like, watch for the Army coming. And boy, did they nail that assignment?
Katharine Huemoeller 29:31
Exactly, exactly. Instead, they’re like, well, they just happened to be up there. And like, you know, they were very lucky that they saw us, you know, and that’s the other thing. It’s like, why would why do we trust Plutarch or stylist to tell us with us? I remember doing I mean, it’s crazy talk about like, you know, who has authority to tell us information? The Roman army would have maybe they would know they had been spied right. But they would have no idea like by who or why I mean, it just doesn’t make sense.
Dr G 29:57
Oh, come on. There’s gotta be somebody from ancient Rome Entertainment Tonight interviewing people afterwards. Like you were there. What did you see? What were you doing?
Katharine Huemoeller 30:06
Yeah, I mean, actually think that the most likely source is a cat a later captive, right? Because we know like Julius Caesar, for example, regularly interrogated captives to ask like what happened to them? And you know so so that’s kind of interesting. But yeah, I just love this this incidence of you know what, to me very clearly is these women you know having a strategic role essentially in the military and instead are explained away for other reasons.
Dr Rad 30:32
He reminds me of one of my favourite scenes from Parks and Recreation, where the whole gang from Parks and Rec are out on a shooting trip, someone gets shot accidentally. And a polis character is trying to cover for how that’s happened by taking responsibility herself because she has a gun licence and the person who did it doesn’t. And so when she’s being interviewed by the Ranger, or the sheriff, or whatever, she’s like, I don’t know, I’m wearing this bra that like open at the front, and it just threw me I want chocolate. I love my period, bitches be crazy.
Katharine Huemoeller 31:05
Every possible
Dr Rad 31:07
everything related to him and every stereotype at it, you’ll it’ll land, it’ll land. And actually, I
Katharine Huemoeller 31:12
should note too, like, it’ll lands not only with an ancient audience, but with a modern one. Because What’s so weird about this source is that there is actually no attestation of menstrual seclusion. As a practice, no, in the West, like, that is not a thing. And yet everybody’s like, Oh, there it is. So we knew it was happening here, too. And you’re like, What is this the source we’re gonna use for this? Really?
Dr G 31:34
You’re one fragment that’s from a single source. Good luck, guys. Yeah.
Dr Rad 31:42
So interesting. And then of course, the other woman that we we can’t neglect to talk about is Spartacus’ wife, very intriguing character.
Katharine Huemoeller 31:51
I was about to say Varinia. But then it was like, wait, no,
Dr Rad 31:53
I was about to say exactly the same thing. Because to me, she is for any issue will always be Varinia, yes. But if we’re going by the ancient source material, the nameless woman that is known as Spartacus is why
Katharine Huemoeller 32:05
exactly, yeah, we have we here plutonic that Spartacus, basically it’s sort of Plutarch introducing Spartacus as a character, a person and he says that he came from Thrace, and that he had a wife with him, who prophesized that he would be, you know, a great force, essentially, by seeing a snake curled up around his head, I think, and this was taking place in, you know, the slave market, and then somehow that they actually wound up together at the gladiatorial school, because he also, Plutarch also says that she was with him when he escaped, or she took part in the escape. So that’s interesting, because it suggests right, that this idea that, you know, they were together for a longer period of time, and that they somehow managed to stay together. Yeah. Yeah. I think that fact especially has attracted a lot of attention and made them like kind of a good opportunity for romance, essentially. Because for a story, right, because it’s so such an interesting, unusual detail.
Dr Rad 33:04
Absolutely. And she’s such a, she’s become so much a part of Spartacus as legend, I suppose in subsequent interpretations as well. She’s been really fully fleshed out. But we have so little about her apart from the fact that she might have been, like some sort of profit tests. And that Yeah, and that she managed to stay by his side, which just seems so unlikely in given what we know about slave auctions and gladiatorial schools, it just seems so rare that they would still be together.
Katharine Huemoeller 33:34
This whole episode is we’re like, no, that didn’t happen. to happen. It didn’t happen. But I was curious Dr. G, what, like, just because the other element of her that’s interesting is right, that she’s this really yeah, she’s his profit figure. And then, you know, these other women that were part of the revolt were maybe, you know, engaged in sacrifice. So there is this sort of like aura of religiosity around these women. I was wondering what your take on that was, as you know, someone who’s looked at?
Dr G 34:01
Yeah, look, I think it’s really fascinating the way that when women crop up in narratives, it’s one of the ways that’s acceptable for them to do so is through the practice of ritual. And what we’re seeing is that this pertains not just to Roman women, but to non Roman women as well, because the in all of these cases, we’re dealing with, presumably enslaved women who have at this stage by the time we’re in the Spartacus war period when we’re talking about foreign slaves, really. And so we get that weird sort of sense. But it also, I feel like this taps back into like, really ancient narratives and stuff, and I feel like the figure that pops out to me at the moment, mostly because I’ve been working on the Roman kings is Tana Quill, and this idea, so she’s the Prophet Hess. She can read the auspices and she ends up being able to prophesize the role of her husband, Lucia Tarquinius, Priscus well, before he get gets into power. And so this kind of sense in which Romans explain unusual rises to power and shifts in power through the divine, and not just through the divine, but through a female interpretation of the acts of gods. And so those women up on the hill, maybe it was the ritual, and Renea, my flesh, rabbit. Maybe it was the ritual, although I don’t know how anyone could possibly explain her being in that gladiatorial school as being like a realistic idea about the narrative. But so I’m really fascinated to understand more about gladiatorial schools to be like, do they always just take the ladies with them to keep them happy? Or something? I don’t know. Do they come as pairs? I’m looking around. And but yeah, this idea of direct line between like Women’s Action, informing men’s action through ritual understanding in the middle, it’s really common. And I think it’s partly because of that patriarchal framing of like, one way to women fit in this society, and it’s not at all clear. And God’s being somewhat unexplainable, like women, God,
Katharine Huemoeller 36:11
both unexplained, mysterious. Yeah, I think that’s definitely that, that that makes a lot of sense to me. And it’s, I think putting that the religious aura of Spartacus, in the context of the slave revolts is important, too, because a number of this sort of leading figures are said to have this some sort of religious significance or prophetic charismatic, fire, breathing, whatever, in whatever way it manifests itself. And so in some ways that actually may have been a really important part of Spartacus is leadership of this revolt. And she’s clearly an important part of that. And yet, her significance to the revolt Overall, though, is still really slim with it. So it’s kind of interesting, because you could think, oh, this made her a really key part of the revolt, because, you know, his charisma is really significant to the revolt success. And yet, you know, it’s she’s only associated with him at the moment of breaking out and then we don’t hear what if she’s involved in the revolt for as it grows larger and larger and more significant, she drops out of the narrative altogether. So it kind of minimises her role by placing her at the very beginning, even though there’s a possibility that that prophecy was actually really significant to the level.
Dr G 37:27
And it also helps, I think, from a Roman perspective, to really explain why things don’t go their way. And having those sorts of prophecies. It really taps into that sense of like, well, we didn’t make a mistake. We’re Romans, the gods were against us.
Dr Rad 37:43
Yes, good point. Well, I mean, it kind of depends as well on what their background is potentially like, if if Spartacus was genuinely Thracian, not fought as a Thracian. Maybe she was also Thracian. And so it’s just there’s so many question marks, though, about whether they actually weren’t any of this. But certainly, in relation to your earlier question, Dr. G, it’s not out of the question, obviously, that there are women who are being used for sexual purposes in a gladiatorial school. Certainly, if you became a highly prized successful gladiator you earned, you know, more privileges in the greater terrorist gladiatorial school where you were staying, you know, you could actually be like, somewhat tolerable, apart from the fact that you had to, you know, fight for your life and that kind of thing. But I don’t know whether a new recruit to a gladiatorial school will have earned any such privilege. And so I guess it just sort of, it must be chance if it actually happened, although I’ve also highly dubious about whether it did, but it must be chance that she also just happened to be what they were looking for in terms of, you know, like pitch and stuff. Or maybe they did want her for sexual purposes. Like, who knows. But yeah, whatever the purpose was, it must have been purely accidental. There is no way they’d be doing Spartacus anything. That’s yeah,
Katharine Huemoeller 39:01
and especially the way it’s represented in Plutarch is that they are captured together, right? They come from the same place, and then they that’s why they’re together and the slave market. And then it’s like, almost like they’re bought in a lot.
Dr Rad 39:13
Exactly. Yeah. That’s very possible. Yeah. But it does seem a little a little weird for a gladiatorial school to be like yeah, man, women. Yeah, whatever. We’ll take them all. Yeah, yeah. Cuz this is before the time when it’s common for women to be fighting in the arena, so she wouldn’t have been bought for that purpose. So yeah, strange. Very strange. Yeah, but ripe for fictionalisation. Right? Yeah. Well, that’s just said I was thinking like, I spend a lot of my academic career being like, where is vernia? Why isn’t she more prominent, speaking to you just and it made me realise that actually, it’s really pretty accurate for her to drop out of the store. But it’s my sister button for modern purposes. I constantly am like, Why isn’t she more fun of the story? Why has history are being downgraded? You know, why isn’t she represented the way that she was originally intentioned by Howard Fassler novelists, you know?
Katharine Huemoeller 40:09
Well, that’s, you know what? Yeah, that’s what’s so interesting, I think about this idea that she was a prophet test because, you know, when she does appearance in fiction, and you can speak more to this, because I can’t now I don’t know exactly the distinction between the script and the way the movie, I only know the movie, the way Spartacus 1960 ends up representing her, but, you know, she is she’s a completely domestic figure, at least in the second part of the movie during the revolt itself, important as you know, a vessel for bearing a child essentially. And so that’s so different actually, from from the, you know, her significance in Plutarch.
Dr Rad 40:46
That is, I mean, I think this is where the TV show by stars plays more with her religious role. You know, it’s a, they go back, because they have more time to play with obviously, they kind of start before the revolt, obviously. And they make Spartacus and auxilary. And they, they give him a whole backstory about why he turns against Rome and all that kind of stuff. And she’s a part of that story. Her death is a part of that story. But her prophecy about how he’s going to achieve like great and glorious things and, and the snake. It’s a theme that goes throughout the whole series, because she is his motivation. And those words are constantly going back to so they make something of that angle in the TV series. But they don’t really talk about that angle very much in the Howard first novel that was used as the basis for the 1960 film. And they don’t really in all of the various versions of the script. The religious side is not really what she’s known for. But she is actually a very significant figure in how it fasts novel, because his novel is told entirely through flashback. So Spartacus is dead by the time you start reading the book, and it’s told through the memories of Varinia, and David, the Jewish guy, who’s also one of Spartacus, his crew. And so it’s really told through her through her reminiscences a lot of the time, and she’s the one that like in the movie ends up surviving goes on to have children and it’s through her and her children that the legend of Spartacus is kept alive. But she’s she’s very significant in terms of being represented as very fierce. So unlike Spartacus, who is born into slavery, and like his life is pretty dreary from the beginning. Varinia has, Varinia is more a person who earlier versions of scripture has been free, and then becomes a slave. And so she fights back like there, there were scenes that were meant to be shown of the slave, the owner of the slave school raping her and her fiercely resisting. And that’s why he gives her to Spartacus, because he couldn’t physically overpower her or at least not to his satisfaction, like it’s, it’s a bit unclear, like they don’t always see obviously, it’s like we see the attack, we see the fight, and then we see her or bruised and stuff. In some versions, I think she’s meant to have been raped in some versions not. So the way it all plays out. It’s really crazy. And then once you get into the actual scripts, they have all these different versions of what she was meant to be in some versions, she was actually meant to be really highly educated. And she teaches Spartacus to read. Yeah, yeah, they. So there’s, there’s all these sorts of things. But certainly in the in the early versions of the script, you see what you see in the Howard first novel, which is that she’s a fighter, she actually there’s actually a line from the Howard fosse novel, which always stands out to me, she says, I can fight like a man can fight. And she’s, she’s definitely portrayed as being at the forefront of these attacks is like this, almost like Valkyrie, like, you know, kind of figure. And when the slaves in the novel erect this big statue to themselves to sort of commemorate who they are, they have representations of all the men from different ethnicities, but then they also have the figure of a woman, and that’s meant to be Varinia. So she’s, she’s definitely like the mother of the slave revolt. But as they get further and further into the script development, her character receives less and less attention, and she does sort of drop out a little bit, and what you’re left with, there are elements of the novel. So her being this figure of fascination for any man that meets her, you know, Batiatus, Spartacus, Crassus, Gracchus, they all fall in love with her. That’s retained, but she’s made much more passive. And it was actually something that the screenwriter, when he first saw the first kind of the film, he rebelled against it. He’s like, what the hell this is not the Varinia that I envisioned and where all the other slave women they just like disappeared, and so they actually did reshoots to add in more families, more slave women more Varinia but I think because of the nature of the ratios, she did end up becoming this What I like to call Stepford Varinia type character?
Katharine Huemoeller 45:03
Yeah, yeah. Cuz the, these, these scenes they interspersed are like, women like doing the laundry in the river, you know, during the revolts, and these, like, very domestic.
Dr Rad 45:14
Yeah. Which I mean, to be fair, again, if I’m, if I’m being fair, obviously, it’s not like, in the Roman world, it’s not like that wouldn’t have been the kinds of things that women would have been doing if they were attached to a slave army. But it is disappointing when you know, how she could have been represented, I suppose, as this, like she only really stops fighting in some of the earlier versions of the script, because she gets pregnant.
Katharine Huemoeller 45:36
Right, right. It’s so interesting to hear that, that there was this distinction made between them, where she was the person who had experienced freedom and therefore was considered to be sort of more, you know, was willing to rebel more, because that’s, that is, you know, sort of that’s kind of a debated topic, like some of the scholarship on the slave revolt says that one of the reasons these happened in this period was because a lot of the people who are being trafficked and you know, into slavery are recently free, and that they like have this sort of memory of freedom, or, you know, impetus for it that other people who are born into slavery might not have, which I don’t think bears out historically. I’ve also recently published an article that argues that, you know, many of the people who are enslaved in Conquest were already enslaved in other contexts, right in other cities, because they’re the people who are most likely to be trafficked to be taken captive and trafficked, a lot of the male, you know, free combatants are killed. And it’s women, both enslaved and free, and enslaved men, elderly people that are the ones who are taken captive. And so I think just because these people are recently sold in, you know, Italy or Sicily, that doesn’t mean that they were free in their lifetime, necessarily, nor does that mean that you would like, be more, you know, willing to revolt necessarily, I think
Dr G 47:02
Some of this must be about like, what are the suitable conditions for a revolt to take place? Like, yeah, like, there’s the moment of becoming enslaved whenever that might happen, whether you’re born into slavery, or whether you’re captured, and you have this understanding of our freedom. But I think it would be very naive to assume that people born into slavery don’t have an idea about freedom. What conditions would permit a moment where you’re like, Okay, this is this is the time to stand up and and take that risk, because it is a risk.
Dr Rad 47:32
Yeah, look, I think it has a little bit to do with a quick of how I’d fast novels, or how I fast I was attracted to write about Spartacus because of the connection with the revolts, or attempted coup that took place in Germany in 1919. And he started looking into Spartacus and he decided that he was going to make Spartacus, someone who was born into slavery as someone who had worked in the mines most of his life. Now, anybody who knows anything about slavery, whilst you might say, whilst we might not know anything about Spartacus, a backstory that we can definitively prove, I think it’s safe to say we all know that slaves in the mines do not live for really long periods of time. So the idea that he would have somehow been a slave working in the mines, like, basically his whole life or something like that. It just, it doesn’t make sense. But it’s something that they played with, I think, in the various versions of the movie in terms of making Spartacus, someone who was born into slavery, they had all sorts of different ideas about how they were going to start the movie, they were always going to start in the minds like they do. But yeah, either way, I think it’s a quirk from Howard fast, which is probably one of his less credible interpretations of the material.
Katharine Huemoeller 48:48
That’s really interesting. Do you think that there was that, you know, he wanted him to be why did he want him to be born into slavery was this idea that he had to be slowly shown another way to live?
Dr Rad 48:59
I think that was part of it in a way. Part of the part of the thing about Spartacus is that he learns from other people like he learns from people like David Perdue, who he comes into contact with, but I think it’s meant to be his nature. His his nature, and the nature of Ernie or the nature of all the slaves is meant to somehow be in stark contrast to the Romans, almost like it’s something genetic, though they are meant to represent the right way of life, which is that men and women come together because they love each other. They have to have children, they take an interest in raising those children. It’s it’s heterosexual. And the Romans, on the other hand, everything’s perverted. So they might not have children at all. If they do. They’re not interested in them. They’re not interested in family life. That’s not their thing. They take part in all sorts of twisted sexual practices. Now I say that in the sense of 1950s contexts which for a 1950s context involved homosexuality, but also incest
Katharine Huemoeller 50:07
And the women choosing which gladiator to watch.
Dr Rad 50:12
That’s that, yeah, that kind of thing. Exactly. So everything about them is meant to be like kind of impure debauch deviant, whereas everything about the slaves is meant to be much more pure. And I think that’s, and it’s also because he’s he’s offering a commentary. I mean, he was a communist. He is he’s offering a commentary on the way that industry and business contributes to this corruption of the soul. So he has actually like some quite lengthy passages where he talks about, I think it’s crisis’s perfume business. Because you do, but yeah, so it’s meant to be about obviously, like, the way that wealth works in each society, and what each society is valuing and how they’re treating workers and the class system. It’s all of these kinds of things, which is why the slaves are meant to be kind of more pure, and the way that they the way that they erected the statue, it’s obviously very, like Soviet Union, in terms of, you know, putting up that kind of imagery of themselves.
Dr G 51:17
We need a monument. Quick, somebody
Dr Rad 51:19
Yeah, exactly.
Katharine Huemoeller 51:21
And that that actually works really well with those scenes from the movie then where there’s these kind of, it’s sort of like this idyllic pastoral existence, like they’re engaged in the middle of a revolt, but they’re, like, you know, taught like singing around a fire and out in the fields. And well, and
Dr Rad 51:37
that’s very much, that’s very much how Howard Fast had envisioned the slave society is being like faily. It is like proto communist, you know, that’s exactly how he envisioned is everything working, even the way that he imagines men and women coming together, women are supposed to be able to choose their sexual partners, they’re not just like claimed by another, Gladiator or another man, just because, well, we’re out of the gladiator school, but you’re still a woman, and I still get to say what you do, he still has this vision of people being able to choose, and that includes women being able to choose who they cohabit with, and who they have sex with, as part of their whole,
Dr G 52:14
As long as it fits the heteronormative status quo…
Dr Rad 52:18
As long as that does that. Yeah.
Katharine Huemoeller 52:21
I mean, it’s so interesting that even though, you know, the reasons that these scenes wound up in the movie contemporary to his era, and very historical, in the end, one thing that the movie does, that I think is more true in some ways, is it does indicate, you know, it represents other people and engage in revolt besides just the, you know, enslaved adult men. And so, I mean, not that I think it accurately represents what their women might be were doing necessarily, or whatever, in the revolt, but it does, it just adds new people to the scene. And so that I think that that then can make you think, as a historian think, Okay, well, is there any truth to that? What were these people doing? And, and this, you know, goes beyond just the experience of enslaved women to just to think about when, you know, these rebel armies are, you know, moving up and down all over Italy? And what is the experience of everyone in in this context of revolt, right, the people who are in the town where the rebels arrive in the rebel army, this is obviously something that’s going to affect everyone in society. But we don’t often consider right, everyone.
Dr Rad 53:35
Well, definitely, as you said, the Spartacus slave revolt does manage to last for a couple of years. And therefore, we know that there are women part as part of this collective that have gathered behind Spartacus and the other slave leaders. It is certainly not out of the question that people are having sex, women are getting pregnant women are giving birth, you know, like, it’s not another question that that is happening,
Katharine Huemoeller 54:01
Or that families joined it to begin with, because, you know, we know that what’s happening on these agricultural estates that, you know, although are the writers tend to talk mostly about enslavement on these estates? You know, historians have done work already to reveal that women were absolutely there. And children were absolutely there. They’re just not the focus of the agricultural treatises. Right. But so, you know, in that case, are they you know, what is their relationship to these revolts as the rebels move through? Are they joining? Are they assisting their owners in hiding them, right? They have to make choices essentially, there’s no way to stay neutral. And I think you know, that that is that does come out of the narrative ancient narratives, right? There’s a story in the Spartan revolt where the slave rebels enter a town and it talks about how many in the town were sympathetic allies to the slaves and basically people had to make a choice whether they were going to reveal where their masters were hiding or you know, help them hide right it it was not On a possibility to remain neutral. Yeah, then we have to think okay, so then what is the experience or revolt like for all these people?
Dr Rad 55:06
Yeah. And that’s that’s something that has was toyed with in there’s actually there were actually two Spartacus movies that were going to be made based on two Spartacus novels that came out around the same time or early 20th century. So we had the one by how fast which becomes the Kirk Douglas movie and then we’ve got the one by Arthur Koestler, which was meant to be made into a Spartacus film called the gladiators, but didn’t end up happening because of character, Douglas’ project. But in there’s an interesting crossover with these, which is some of the stuff that I’ve looked at where the director of Spartacus 1960s to cook Douglas protect Stanley Kubrick became interested in the novel by Arthur Koestler, which was meant to be the basis of the other film. So there’s all sorts of weird crossovers between them. But certainly, in the novels in the various versions of the films, there are scenes that were toyed with about the slave men having conversations about, look, these women and children and old people is slowing us down. Like what are we going to do about this? And so they have toyed with these sorts of questions about how do you actually deal with a revolt? And certainly there, there certainly were going to be scenes and whether other movie, I can’t actually remember which one at the moment, I’m pretty sure it was Spartacus, 1960, where they actually had conflicts between the slave leaders over the question of whether they actually just welcome anybody or whether they only welcome those who can fight.
Dr G 56:28
So thinking about this situation for the slave revolt and their organisation? Isn’t this presumably just as problematic fit any kind of armed force, like logistics in the ancient world depends on the people. And you’ve always got this sort of, presumably entourage that has men and women, in addition to the fighters themselves, in which case, you possibly if you’re on a really significant campaign, there may be births involved there as well. And it’s like an armed forces, not just dudes wandering around with their swords out just waiting to reach the battlefield, I don’t think and so this logistics issue that the slaves are facing is presumably the same kind of logistical issue that the Roman army proper might also be facing conceivably in different points in time,
Dr Rad 57:20
I think. So I think the difference is that obviously, the Roman army is supposed to be helped by the state, you know, they’ve got this additional backup of baby, maybe they’re helping with food supply, depending on where they’re fighting, of course. But logistically, there’s like backup, whereas I suppose for a slave rebel force, they’re constantly having to look out for potential attack people turning on them. And I guess they’re not necessarily going to have like a bunch of trained fighters, whereas the Roman army presumably has a reasonable amount of men who have seen battle or have been trained,
Dr G 57:59
and maybe not supply lines, you know, just kind of a wandering force.
Katharine Huemoeller 58:04
I think you’re right, though. I think you’re right, that that that is an issue, because, you know, there is quite a lot of concern about camp followers called, and, you know, marriage bans, right, like there is a there is there are attempts throughout human history to sort of control outside of the army and like concerns about that slowing them down and messing with discipline as well.
Dr Rad 58:25
Yeah. And I think to be fair, although I’m, I’m really speaking off the cuff here, because it’s been a little while since I’ve looked over my material. But I have a feeling that part of the arguments, and at least one of the things they imagined was actually about, do we accept fighters. So we’re sick of accepting agricultural workers, whether they’re men or women who are coming to join us, because they imagine that there’s, you know, a core group of gladiators who know how to fight. And so I think it was partly about that some of the time or their training then their gender or their age. But they also played with those questions, obviously, of children and the elderly, and women in particular, slowing people down. But yeah, I mean,
Katharine Huemoeller 59:13
that is true to the ancient sources, too. And that the way slavers thought about women was as a way to actually attach men to the estate to reduce the chances of rebellion. Women were thought of as like instruments in that way to you know, have control that men would be less likely to revolt if they have wives if they have children. Right. So the agricultural writers are very attuned to that dynamic. And I think that’s one reason that they don’t conceive of women as participating in the revolt because they’re supposed to be doing the opposite, right?
Dr Rad 59:47
Yeah, exactly.
Dr G 59:49
You were supposed to save us from a vote.
Dr Rad 59:53
Yeah, exactly. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Obviously, this could be an entire episode in itself because Varinia is endlessly fascinating, or the character of Spartacus, his wife is endlessly fascinating. She’s had many, many different names, and many, many iterations where she had no name at all.
Dr G 1:00:13
I suspect it’s probably a good time to wrap up. So we’ve got one final question. So when we were talking about you, in the introduction, we noted that you have a background that’s not just in academia, which is, you know, cool and interesting. You know, some people have a very straight path, and some people don’t. And so, you know, the paths into these sorts of things, I think, are really fascinating. And we’re interested in your work in the nonprofit sector, and also how that might have impacted the direction you took when you came back into academia?
Katharine Huemoeller 1:00:47
Yeah, absolutely. I left university unsure what I wanted to do. But knowing that I was passionate about reproductive justice in particular, and gender equity. And so I worked for a few years in the nonprofit world, working on contemporary issues. And it didn’t end up being what I wanted to do long term. But it definitely informed my interest in the ancient world. So when I decided to go back to graduate school, it took a little while before I could combine these interests, of course, you know, not in Greek lit survey so much. But eventually, when I got to, you know, choose my own research projects, I wanted to do something that touches on these these long issues of gender inequities, and in particular, reproductive injustice. And so I, I became really interested in Roman slavery, and the path and currently I’m most interested in particular in the hereditary nature of Roman slavery, and the fact that it goes through the maternal line. And I’m interested in how that shapes the experiences of enslaved women, what kinds of sexual and reproductive exploitation that leads to. That’s why I’m so fascinated by for example, right? That this idea that in the movie, Spartacus is supposed to be born of an enslaved woman that’s like the opening lines of the 1960 movie, right? Or is that a woman I think it’s something like a woman gave birth to a child, and that increased her masters a state and that child was Spartacus. And, and you know that it’s fascinating to me that that’s in this movie, because that’s actually not really in the scholarship. We don’t we don’t talk that much about the importance of maternal dissent in slavery. So that’s absolutely shaped by my experience in the nonprofit world. And by thinking about how legal systems shape inequities in society, and and also what people do within, you know, the actors within legal systems, how to slavers, choose slaving strategies, knowing that women will bear enslaved children.
Dr G 1:02:50
It’s really interesting, isn’t it? Because just thinking about what you’re saying at the moment about the maternal line, because we know that’s the easiest way to measure a line. And it’s like, you know, a woman grows, and then all of a sudden, it’s like, oh, yeah, and there’s a cord attached for a little while. You’re like, yep, that that one definitely came from me. Exactly. Yeah.
Katharine Huemoeller 1:03:10
In Roman law, it’s the the only the mother is ever truly known.
Dr G 1:03:16
Yeah, exactly. And so it’s like, it’s like, there’s never really any doubt about the mother, and yet Roman society and many, so societies, like from a Western perspective that sort of grown out from that, a very patriarchal, they’re like, No, we’ve always got to know who the dude is. And it’s like, do though, because it’s like, really easy, really easy if we just decided that the
Dr Rad 1:03:36
difficult thing,
Katharine Huemoeller 1:03:37
Yeah, that’s why they’re so anxious about protecting about women’s chastity, right? Because that is the way so for Roman citizens status is transmitted through the line of the Father, and that creates paternal power and, and legitimate air. And so for anyone who’s not a citizen, including enslaved people, but not only enslaved people, which status transmitted through the mother, but that, you know, that is what comparatively looking at slavery over time and space. That’s not the only pattern of transmission. It’s the one that was used during the TransAtlantic slave system, slave trade. And so it’s one that’s very, I think, present in most of our minds, but actually, sometimes status is passed through the parent of highest status, or lowest status, or whatever household they’re in, or there’s lots of possible patterns of status transmission, and they all had rippling effects on the experience of being enslaved. Yeah, definitely.
Dr G 1:04:31
I think it’s really fascinating because it’s kind of like there is always in operation, a two tiered system where there is the perceived status quo of patriarchy as like the right way from for being free and things like this. And then there’s all of the other systems that will fall under that which can be classified within slave strategies, and to see that the maternal line comes out so free Currently there and I was like, Oh, guys, you know, the real answer here is just, you know, patriarchy, maybe you could put that to the side a little bit, and you make it really easy for yourselves. But it obviously goes against something that’s really quite ingrained in Roman society and how they understand themselves, it’s just not possible for them to do something like that.
Katharine Huemoeller 1:05:18
Yeah. And what’s so what’s so interesting about it is that they see transmission to the maternal line as what is natural, that’s part of the you scan to my natural law, that’s what everyone does. But what Roman citizens do, right, the special privilege of Roman citizens is to have status transmitted through the Father. So that is like wrapped up in what it means to be a citizen and what and all these you know, special, this special treatment and special privileges you get with being a citizen, that’s a key one, it’s this transmission through the Father. And that’s kind of like, unnatural, it’s like part of Roman Civil lots, you know?
Dr G 1:05:53
Yeah, yeah. And it is obviously built into the all of the sort of adoption laws that are at play within the elite classes as well, where it’s like, well, we can we can rearrange your male line a little bit to make things a little bit easier here. And that’s sort of on theory legal.
Katharine Huemoeller 1:06:10
Exactly. But I mean, getting back to that, remember that crazy revolt at Volsini right, the idea that the slaves are, you know, wanting to reform the system of inheritance, like, to me that speaks to the significance of status transmission, right, this idea that, like they can decide who their heirs will be. That’s, you know, that is a privilege of, again, we’re two’s to Roman citizen masculinity. That’s, it’s just kind of wrapped in everywhere you look, all of a sudden you see it significance, I think,
Dr Rad 1:06:40
I guess it must be particularly interesting for you to be considering these issues at the moment, given the recent developments, which have been highly publicised all over the world in terms of control over reproductive rights in America.
Katharine Huemoeller 1:06:53
Yeah, absolutely. This, I would say that my present day informs this work in many different ways and informs my work because while I’m been writing this book, I’ve had two children. And so I’ve thought a lot about what it means to be a mother, how we can, you know, think about that over time and space, what reproduction looks like in different political contexts. Now, being in Canada, I’m in a very different political context than how I grew up. In the US. I’m very relieved not to be there right now, with the current climate and the current loss of reproductive autonomy for women there, it’s hard for me to imagine myself being there or putting my children, my two daughters there, right, bringing them there. And so that all of that informed the way I look at the past.
Dr Rad 1:07:45
Definitely, well, we might wrap up on that note, but we hope very much that by the time we talk to you the next time because I’m sure that our research interests will cross paths again, that maybe the situation let’s call it over there has changed so that people have more rights rather than less.
Dr G 1:08:02
Thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with us. We really appreciate it and such a fascinating topic of conversation.
Katharine Huemoeller 1:08:08
Thank you.
Dr Rad 1:08:09
Absolutely. Before we before we sign off, would you like to say anything about publications or where people can find you and your work?
Katharine Huemoeller 1:08:17
The best place to find me would be at my university website. So University of British Columbia, and you can search my name. I have a few recent articles out on these topics, if you’re interested in one that’s I think, particularly accessible is in the Journal of Roman studies. And it follows one woman’s story, one woman who was enslaved and then freed to marry her owner, and then ended up leaving him of sort of form of rebellion and was cursed for it. So it’s a really interesting personal story that I think helps you maybe sort of connect on an emotional level to the past, so that would be the one I would I would recommend.
Dr Rad 1:08:54
Well, I think we’ve got our next podcast collaboration topic. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Katharine Huemoeller 1:08:59
Thank you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
The post Special Episode – Enslaved Women During Slave Revolts with Assistant Professor Katharine Huemoeller appeared first on The Partial Historians.
Medea is powerful, semi-divine, and has an axe to grind with Jason!
Read the postSpecial Episode – Seneca’s Medea with MythTake The post Special Episode – Seneca’s Medea with MythTake appeared first on The Partial Historians.
We were interviewed by Classical Wisdom and the Coffee & Cocktails Podcast! Tune in for Pompeii and Roman sexual practices!
Read the postExciting Things! The post Exciting Things! appeared first on The Partial Historians.
The Women of Early Rome are a fascinating bunch of characters. In this special event, we trace their representation in the ancient sources.
Read the postThe Women of Early Rome – YouTube Special! The post The Women of Early Rome – YouTube Special! appeared first on The Partial Historians.
We are very excited to announce that we have TWO new products available in our Gumroad store. In collaboration with artist Bridget Clarke, we have created printable artwork and teacher resources all about our favourite gal, Agrippina the Younger. In the classroom This project started when we noticed that there are some marked differences in the representation of Agrippina the Younger between the ancient historical accounts and the archaeological sources. We wanted to be able…
Read the postThe Two Sides of Agrippina the Younger The post The Two Sides of Agrippina the Younger appeared first on The Partial Historians.
The story of Verginia is an achingly tragic tale central to understanding the Second Decemvirate. Both Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus go into some detail about what happens and how it unfolds and we'll explore both accounts to compare and contrast them.
Read the postEpisode 114 – The Tale of Verginia The post Episode 114 – The Tale of Verginia appeared first on The Partial Historians.
Cleopatra VII is infamous as the lover of Caesar and Antony, but did you know that she's also famous for her scholarship and leadership?
Read the postSpecial Episode – The Reception of Cleopatra The post Special Episode – The Reception of Cleopatra appeared first on The Partial Historians.
We sit down with Dr Emma Southon to talk all things Agrippina the Younger. Join us for the thrilling and engaging story of Agrippina's life at the centre of Julio-Claudian power.
Read the postSpecial Episode – Agrippina the Younger with Dr Emma Southon The post Special Episode – Agrippina the Younger with Dr Emma Southon appeared first on The Partial Historians.
In this special episode, we’re joined by Liz Smith, who has recently completed her doctoral research of the representation of women’s dress in statuary at Macquarie University. Together we’ll trace the threads of evidence for women’s attire in the Roman world. Liz’s research includes the fashion of women’s dress in ancient representations in order to investigate what we can learn about the representation of women. This means considering how representations of women in statuary were…
Read the postSpecial Episode – The Thread of Women’s Representation The post Special Episode – The Thread of Women’s Representation appeared first on The Partial Historians.
Our jaunt through the history of ancient Rome continues apace! In this episode we cover c. 472-1 BCE. Dr Radness is reading Livy and Dr G is reading Dionysius of Halicarnassus and the comparisons of our sources is quite something! The main stars are the tribunes Volero and Laertorius.
Read the postEpisode 86 – Volero and Laetorius The post Episode 86 – Volero and Laetorius appeared first on The Partial Historians.
Would any Ancient Roman podcast hosted by two women be complete without a very special episode on one of the most famous women in the City's history, Livia Drusilla? Obviously not and here we are :)
Read the postEpisode 81 – Livia Drusilla The post Episode 81 – Livia Drusilla appeared first on The Partial Historians.
The patrician and plebeian conflict explodes over the redistribution of public land. The Vestal Virgin Oppia finds herself the object of public scrutiny.
Read the postEpisode 76 – Plebeian Struggles and the Vestal Oppia The post Episode 76 – Plebeian Struggles and the Vestal Oppia appeared first on The Partial Historians.
Over the last few months, Dr G has been working with TED-Ed to spread the word about Vestal Virgins. Herein are the fruits of that collaboration! I’m super excited to have been part of this project and bringing the world of ancient Rome to others is a real treat 🙂 This TED-Ed lesson explores one aspect of the Vestals’ lives: the possibility of live burial. You can check out all the details here: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/who-were-the-vestal-virgins-and-what-was-their-job-peta-greenfield…
Read the postCollaboration with TED-Ed! The post Collaboration with TED-Ed! appeared first on The Partial Historians.
Can a king really be brought low by the actions of his relatives? The story of Lucretia offers some clues. Join Drs R and G for the second part of the life and times of the final king of Rome, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus.
Read the postEpisode 43 – Lucius Tarquinius Superbus – The Lucretia Chronicle The post Episode 43 – Lucius Tarquinius Superbus – The Lucretia Chronicle appeared first on The Partial Historians.
In this vast topic we focus on women's health. A consideration of menstruation is central to understanding how women's health was conceptualised by ancient Greek and Roman medical writers, while the advent of Christianity influences new considerations of what it means to be 'pure'...
Read the postEpisode 34 – Sex and Health The post Episode 34 – Sex and Health appeared first on The Partial Historians.
Cybele, also known as the Magna Mater (the Great Goddess) is an Eastern deity brought to Rome in the wake of the Punic Wars. In this listener request episode, the Doctors delve into background of this goddess. We consider her divine areas of influence, and follow her progress from the East into Rome.
Read the postEpisode 17 – Cybele The post Episode 17 – Cybele appeared first on The Partial Historians.
Claudius is dead, and who should emerge as the new imperator ... none other than Nero, the son of Agrippina. While we explore the early years of Nero's rule under the guidance of his mother Agrippina the Younger, we also consider the influential roles of Seneca and Burrus.
Read the postEpisode 15 – Nero and Agrippina The post Episode 15 – Nero and Agrippina appeared first on The Partial Historians.
With Messalina dead, Claudius begins the process that any good Roman man would: choosing a new wife. As emperor, Claudius just happens to be the most eligible bachelor in town. He has a pick of the ladies and decides on Agrippina.
This is an unusual match in a number of respects, not least because she is his niece! In this episode, Doctors R and G explore the various intricacies of the relationship between Claudius and Agrippina.
Read the postEpisode 14 – Claudius and Agrippina The post Episode 14 – Claudius and Agrippina appeared first on The Partial Historians.
Valeria Messalina was a cousin of Claudius and there was quite an age difference between them. He was born in 10 BCE, while she was born in c. 20 CE. This thirty year age gap may go some way to explaining the character of the marriage as it developed over time. In this episode, your intrepid Doctors explore the myth, the legend, and the history that is her legacy.
Read the postEpisode 13 – Claudius and Messalina The post Episode 13 – Claudius and Messalina appeared first on The Partial Historians.
We take a detour from the Julio-Claudian emperors to examine one of the women pivotal to Augustus' family and the future of his family line: Julia Maior, Augustus' biological daughter. Who was Julia exactly? And why was she important?
Read the postEpisode 10 – The Life of Julia Maior The post Episode 10 – The Life of Julia Maior appeared first on The Partial Historians.
Sex workers in the ancient world deserve our attention in part because they reveal the differences between our world and the world of ancient past. In this episode, we explore some of the issues on the topic of sex work in ancient Rome. CW: The language and terminology in this episode reflects in part when the episode was recorded and in part the differences in the way this subject is discussed in history rather than cultural studies.
Read the postEpisode 5 – Sex Workers in Ancient Rome The post Episode 5 – Sex Workers in Ancient Rome appeared first on The Partial Historians.
If you are interested in further reading on sex in ancient Rome, the Partial Historians have compiled a list for your reading and thinking pleasure below: Sources: Sex in Ancient Rome Chrystal, P. 2015. In Bed with the Romans (Amberley Publishing Limited) Edwards, C. 1993. The Politics of Immortality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge University Press) Gardner, J. F. 1991. Women in Roman Law and Society (Indiana University Press) MacLachlan, B. 2013. Women in Ancient Rome:…
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Were Roman matronae (wives) having sex? Why would they even want to do it? And what were the consequences when things turned a little bit kinky? It's all here!
Read the postEpisode 4 – Sex and Matronae The post Episode 4 – Sex and Matronae appeared first on The Partial Historians.
Dr Greenfield is a specialist in the Vestal Virgins and in this episode we consider the cult in more depth. The trials and tribulations of the Vestal Virgins and their (possible) sexual escapades serve to create interest around the cult in the popular imagination - but what are some the implications for the priestesses?
Read the postEpisode 3 – The Vestal Virgins Continued The post Episode 3 – The Vestal Virgins Continued appeared first on The Partial Historians.
Dr Greenfield introduces the Vestal Virgins! These priestesses are one of the stand out colleges of women participating in ritual in Ancient Rome. When we understand their place in the greater scheme of Rome we can start to appreciate their connection with the politics of the City.
In this episode we look at: the background of the cult of Vesta; the role that the Vestals played in Roman religious thinking; and, staying on the broader theme of sex in Ancient Rome, we'll consider the reasons why these particular women weren't getting any action.
Read the postEpisode 2 – Entering Virgin Territory The post Episode 2 – Entering Virgin Territory appeared first on The Partial Historians.
What better subject to start an ancient Roman podcast with than sex? In this episode Dr Radford and Dr Greenfield address the most pressing issue in Ancient Roman history! We consider some infamous exploits and some of the major differences in the way the Romans thought about sex from society today. With passion and knowledge, we discuss, laugh, and spar our way through the ancient world.
Read the postEpisode 1 – Launches On An Unsuspecting Public The post Episode 1 – Launches On An Unsuspecting Public appeared first on The Partial Historians.