Review : Embers Of The Hands

This next review takes me into the happy intersection of history and myth. Eleanor Barraclough's Embers Of The Hands is a wonderful look at the Viking Age through a series of objects. Not exactly archaeology, not really a tour of "Must See In Scandinavian Museums", but a sort of union of both with a healthy smattering of literary context thrown in for good measure.

I have to say I never used to go for books like this. I preferred clear narratives, moments in history where at least the major events and characters could be known in detail with some degree of confidence. But I've come to realise that this approach can illuminate the mindset of ancient peoples, however dimly, and indeed if you don't know what their objects, their clothing, their environment was like, you're lacking a huge part of their lives. 

It's not a sociological history, exactly. It's more like Neil Price's efforts* to explore the mindscape of the past, and for me that's the most interesting aspect of all. What did they believe ? How did they think the world worked ? How did that influence what they did ? What did it feel like to be a Viking ?

* Immediately after this one I read Neil Price's latest popular work, The Sea-King and the Sorceress, so I'll be deferring some parts to the next post on areas where Price goes into more detail than Barraclough.

The Review Bit

The book doesn't exactly start well. The introduction is a rather drawn-out outline that feels decidedly dry and academic. Normally this would be a good place to set out the proper context for everything that follows, especially the motivations and bias of the author. One or two pages describing exactly how you'll proceed is quite enough; twenty-one pages of this is a strange choice.

Thankfully, it gets better fast. By the end I had no doubt at all I'd be deliberately seeking out more books by the same author.

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The one permanent oddity is her insistence on saying "enslaved" or "enslaved people" when "slave" would do perfectly well. Emily Southon also does this, as does Price, but Barraclough takes this to another level. I really don't get it. We all know slaves are people just as we all know that all doctors and lorry drivers and prisoners are also people. Do we need to insist on saying "imprisoned people" ? Of course not. That's just weird.

And why now ? Slavery in its industrialised form is long dead and will not return. Changing our terminology now is far less effective than shutting the door after the horse has bolted, because the horse has not only bolted, it's gone off to start a family, lived to see its grandchildren grow up, grown old, and died. Are we supposed to feel more sympathetic for these long-dead people ? Do we we need to be constantly reminded extra hard that they were people and not objects ? Why ? Anyone who doesn't know that slaves were people is simply too stupid to be affected by any change of terminology.

Damn weird, if you ask me. It's like suddenly insisting that Roman glass-makers were really, really good at their job, and if we don't all call them "Roman expert glass-workers" every single time, we're doing them a disservice. I find it very, very odd.

But enough of that.

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Yes, I know that's not how HTML tags work. Shut up.

Other criticisms are much more minor. Barraclough can turn her pen to the amusing and the rhetorical as necessary, reminding me at times of Thomas Williams. The worst I can find to say here is that sometimes the rhetoric is laid on a bit thick, which is hardly a scathing piece of criticism.

I think I'm going to give this one a solid 8/10. It's great stuff, and my biggest problem was that I wanted the book to be longer.

The Vikings Revisited

But not rehabilitated. The Price is right when he says that nobody should admire the Vikings, even if he does labour the point a bit much (more on that next time). Slavery terminology aside, Barraclough doesn't get obsessed with moral messaging or telling the reader how to feel. She lets that come through naturally, so what we get is a "warts an all" view of Nordic life. And the subtitle "Hidden Histories of the Viking Age" is important : this is about all aspects of life in medieval Scandinavia, not just the big burly axe-wielding maniacs who wreaked havoc across the north.

Fear not, gentle reader : nobody sane would try and remove the image of the barbaric axe-wielding lunatic leaping off a longship to spread fire and death among the Christians. Everyone loves the Viking berserkers. As David Mitchell rightly says, they're fun, and anyone pretending that they aren't fun is kidding themselves. Horrible ? Absolutely ! But that's exactly why the Horrible Histories franchise has been such a success. Nobody still feels personally affronted by the ravages of the northmen; the Vikings today are essentially a fantasy. And pretty much everyone finds fantasy violence fun.

No, what we've got here is an attempt to make the Viking world not less brutal, but more complete. Just because they could sometimes be savage didn't mean they couldn't also be sympathetic. And sexy. And stupid, and other words beginning with s. So let's begin my short summary of sightseeing seafarers and scary sorcerors.

Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside

Let's start with... seamen. Yes, the actual kind, you shut your filthy mouth. In fact I want to start exactly where Barraclough starts precisely to get a minor academic dispute out of the way. She mentions the spectacular find of a ship in Estonia with no less than thirty four bodies aboard, plus animals and parts of animals, not to mention heaps of objects of all kinds. This puts to bed any ideas of the Viking's having any sort of typical funerary style : as far as I can tell, singular burials aboard ships might have happened, but it would be much more common to have many bodies per boat. A higher body per boat ratio was more economical if nothing else.

Barraclough also completely agrees with Price that this burial, from c.750 AD, means that the Viking Age likely began a few decades before the more common 793 AD date of the Lindisfarne raid, and that raids to the east deserve more attention. The dispute between them comes in the interpretation of the grave(s). Price attributes the amount of weaponry as clear evidence that this was a military expedition. Barraclough highlights that the weapons were awfully ornate if they were intended for practical use, and the amount of gaming boards seems a bit much for even the most enthusiastic gamer-Vikings. She suggests that instead this was an armed diplomatic mission. Rather than heading out looking for plunder, this particular group may have been trying to make a sale or sign a treaty, only to find that their voyage went disastrously wrong.

Sex

Ok, the boatful of bodies is certainly nightmare fuel, though the academic disagreement rather tempers that. But any remaining scholastic style goes completely out of the window when it comes to, err, romance. But to ease us in here – you do your own joke – we also have some surprisingly fun stuff on hygiene and personal grooming. The Arab commentators on Viking fashion and hairstyle choices become much more interesting when compared to how the English perceived their Nordic neighbours. The Arabian perspective :

They are the filthiest of God's creatures. They do not clean themselves after urinating or defecating, nor do they wash after having sex... they wash their faces and their heads with the dirtiest and filthiest water there could be.

He goes on to describe them spitting and blowing their nose in this same communal bowl and continuing to wash in it. Which is almost so implausible it might suggest a bias, since that level of dirt surely ought to result in infections and a quick death or at least debilitating illness. 

But the English took a disturbingly different view :

They brought many hardships to the people of the land, for they combed their hair every day and bathed every Saturday. They also changed their clothes often and groomed their bodies with many such frivolities. Hence, they assailed the chastity even of married women, and persuaded the daughters of nobles to become their lovers.

Well ! For the English, bathing once a week and combining their hair was enough to make their Nordic invaders irresistibly sexy heartthrobs, whereas for the Arabs, the same people were beyond disgusting. What the hell does that say about the English ?

Mind you, the Norse were a diverse group. One other Arabic commentator didn't mention their appalling hygiene, but did remark on their musical "talents" :

There is no uglier song than the groans that come out of their throats. It is like the braying of hounds, only worse.

We also have words directly from the Norse themselves. Some remarkable personal messages have survived on rune-sticks which seem almost exactly like modern text messages. My personal favourite :

Gyda says that you should go home.

We'll never know the full context, but the possibilities are wonderful. And there are messages about wanting to go to the pub more often, fart jokes, and how the penis should buy the lovely vagina a drink. Some of them are extremely crude, others seem like the writer had acute embarrassment. One short poem lamenting the writer's lack of sleep turns out to be a coded message for a woman's name that would have flummoxed most modern cryptic crossword enthusiasts. 

There are messages professing extreme enthusiasm for sex and those which are highly derogatory, including words meaning "a woman/man who runs away from a penis/vagina". There are messages of fucking up the arse, of being friend-zoned, and "fluffy sentiments" of romantic devotion. And then there's my second favourite* message :

May a demon sort out B's cunt.

* My third favourite is different again : it's a label on the back of a hammer which simply says, "this is a hammer". It's tough to find a more perfect message to help future archaeologists decipher what they're looking at. 

Chill-axing

All of this philandering inevitably led to the next generation of Viklings. They may have done essential work much sooner than modern children, but they certainly found time for play as well. My favourite example by far comes from the very extreme end of the Viking world : the stick-drawings on Onfim, a 13th-century Russian boy believed to be about six or seven. They're terrible. They're every bit as bad as every other six year old who ever lived. Onfirm seems to have been doing his schoolwork but got carried away and draws himself on horseback, breathing fire, holding a sword, and accompanying what's probably his father. He even writes "I am a wild beast".

Onfim, dude, your drawings absolutely suck and they're the most adorable thing I've ever seen in a history book and I love them.

Children also seem to have learned to skate and ski from a young age, with these activities apparently being especially associated with youth. As they got older* they turned to more competitive sports which could turn violent. At least according to the sagas, these could often become the source of family feuds, though Barraclough notes how much this reflects reality isn't clear.

* Not much older though. Price points out that the typical lifespan after having survived young childhood was about 40. People could and did live into their 80s, but these were exceptions, and 60 was already doing well. It makes a difference when you realise that most of the legendary figures weren't the kind of grizzled 40–50 somethings they generally seem to be in the TV shows and movies, but barely old enough to drink had they been born in modern America.

What does seem to fit the stereotypical Viking image of machismo is the popularity of strength contests. Less in keeping with our modern image are the popularity of board games and poetry. Yes, they might endure the freezing ocean only to plunder churches and murder priests, yes they carried out human sacrifice, and yes a major source of their economy came from slave raids. But when they got home, they were quite likely to put their feet up in front of a warm fire, play some board games, and teach their kids to draw. Oh, and get involved in endless petty legal disputes. Human psychology really is fascinating.

I'm A Slave For You

Despite the weird terminology choice, I was pleasant surprised by the chapter "Unfreedom". Barraclough presents the nastier side of Viking life without being nearly as moralising as I feared : just present me with how things were and I'll judge for myself, thanks. And this is what she does. 

Some parts of slavery were every bit as bad as you'd expect. Captives would be shackled and treated literally as cargo, abused for sexual pleasure or sacrificed to aid their masters into the next world. Laws protecting pregnant slaves existed only to protect the slave owner, not the slave or her unborn child. They might even have been branded by filing grooves into their teeth. Conditions for some were unbearable.

But not for all. Society in general had a strongly hierarchical structure : strongly, but not strictly. The boundaries between demographics were not always clear, and someone deemed to be free was by no means without social obligations to their friends, family, neighbours. They could opt out of those obligations only to an extent, and defying social expectations (such as a woman wearing trousers, a man practising magic, or homosexuality) could come with extreme consequences. 

People did all of these things anyway, of course. Likewise, a few slaves could run estates or act as tutors rather than being human beasts of burden, and not all slave owners treated their property like animals. Some freed them, some appear to have loved them. But the stigma of "former slave" remained. As in ancient Rome, being freed was not seen as the same as being born free. It would be a mistake to see all slavery as equal, because it certainly was not, but saying "it wasn't always as bad as being routinely sexually abused" hardly amounts to concluding that "actually they had a lovely time of it". 

The Road To Hel

Saving the best to last, my favourite bit was the stuff on Viking religious beliefs. Or rather, perhaps "spiritual world view" would be a better description, since there was no single presiding dogma, no foundational text, and whether these beliefs encompassed moral directions is contentious at best.

Some of this is amusing. There's a skull with runes engraved which appear to be an amulet to protect its owner from headaches caused by dwarves. Did they literally believe an invisible dwarf was attacking them with a little hammer and that this would somehow deter them ? Did they think the dwarves operated in some other metaphysical realm and attacked them with magic ? And why did they think the dwarfs were out to get them – why only with headaches, why not by causing them memory loss or their hair to fall out ? So many questions. And we won't know the answer, because as Barraclough says :

They weren't sitting around thinking "how fascinating to be here at the emergence of Scandinavian proto-urbanism, sowing the seeds of what will one day be known as the Viking Age". More likely they were thinking, "my head hurts, how do I get rid of those bloody dwarves".

And probably there were multiple answers to these questions. There were certainly multiple types of funerary practise. One widespread idea seems to have been that Hel – the Viking afterlife for those not eligible to Valhalla, and apparently neutral rather than a place of torment – was somewhere to the north and down. There are hints of special "Hel shoes" to allow people to make the journey, and even crampons for horses to deal with the ice and snow. But not every grave points north, and how were you supposed to get there if you were buried on a ship ? Why did they believe in the afterlife as being apparently a pretty crappy place for the majority, and since you were expected to do considerable walking to reach it, what would happen if you decided not to go ? 

The most spectacular part of the book comes in Iceland. Amidst the landscape of fire and ice, endless days in summer and permanent darkness in winter, lies a cave. Three hundred metres inside, in the pitch darkness, is a huge drystone wall, ten metres across and nearly five metres high when it was complete. This could only have been seen by torchlight. Yet while it blocks the passage, beyond it are seven piles of animal bones, each up to three of four metres wide, spread out over another hundred metres or so. Ship-shaped stone structures lie scattered in multi-coloured glass beads.

The work to construct these features must have been extraordinary given the conditions, but what was it for ? It seems related to Sutr, the fire giant who will end the world at Ragnarok, but would a drystone wall – even a big one – serve as a defence ? We'll never know exactly what was going through the minds of those who visited and sealed the cave. The ending is curiously touching :

Four lead weights, one in the shape of a cross, little more than a centimetre long, put there twenty or thirty years after Iceland's official conversion to Christianity in around 1000 AD. And then, nothing. A farewell to the fire giant, left alone to smoulder in the darkness.

Bloody hell, that's atmospheric. And the conversion process was, as here, clearly non-linear. No smashing of the pagan idols in this case, no ridiculing the beliefs of their ancestors. Here the beliefs in Thor and Freya and Sutr and all the rest appear to have been very real, very literal, and not so easily dismissed by a sandal-wearing hippy from the Middle East. Quite possibly, the respectful gesture from the Christians who abandoned the site was tinged with just a little bit of fear for what might still be down there.

Conclusions

Barraclough mingles the hard, tangible objects with the blurred boundaries of mental realities. As Christianity took hold, people didn't abandon the old gods entirely or immediately. In one fascinating case, a rune-stick calls on Odin to help recover stolen property but labels him as a fiend, a bit like summoning Satan because you've lost your shoes. 

The Viking world could be horrific. Its economy was derived in no small part from slavery, and multiple, independent sources attest to human sacrifice that rivals the Aztec rituals for brutality. Trees hung with corpses, women forcibly taken and murdered at funerals, deliberately bloody methods of sacrifice... there's plenty to satisfy any horror writer. But for every act of horror was something more human : a reverence for the dead, poetry filled with sorrow, graffiti about cunts and arse-fucking, a child's absolutely bloody useless stick-drawings. Notions of whether we should see them as good or bad are far too simplistic; as with nearly all human societies, they were good and bad, with neither cancelling out the other.

The end of the Viking Age is similarly ephemerous. Price sticks broadly to the conventional date of c.1066, or perhaps a little later. Barraclough argues that it could be pushed considerably later. The Norse declined as a dominant power from the middle of the 11th century onwards, but the core of what they were faded more slowly. They didn't stop believing in their pagan gods just because they officially converted to Christianity. Raiding didn't entirely stop just because nation-state militaries began to rise in prominence. 1066 AD mattered an awful lot in England but made bugger all difference to the inhabitants of Iceland or Greenland. She suggests the true end might be reckoned as late as 1400.

Personally I'm not sure. Perhaps we can say that the Viking diaspora kept going long after the Age itself ceased to be. There were in fact a few large-scale Norse expeditions after 1066, though nothing as successful as the earlier ventures. The Age was over, but the Vikings themselves were not. And for a people as diverse and complex as these, not being able to precisely define when they ended is curiously satisfying.

Review : 21 Roman Women

Time for another book review. This time, I veer away from mythology and back into proper history.

Today it's the turn of Emma Southon's A History Of The Roman Empire In 21 Women. The best description I can think of for this is "militant feminism with a human face". Southon is professional comedian-level funny, righteously and rightfully angry at the the historical injustices of the treatment of half the human species by the other, but rarely grumpy or preachy. Unashamedly revisionist and provocative, the hilarious and often NSFW jokes – this is really, really not a book for children – don't obscure the deep thought that's clearly gone into this. I found it very insightful and I enjoyed it enormously. 9/10 for me !

The Importance Of Being A Mornament (it's like an ornament, but... more)

There are two main points from the whole book that stuck with me. First, that Romans viewed women as more important than later historians have traditionally allowed. They didn't view them as useless ornaments who existed solely for making babies or prostitution... at least not always. But the second, related point is that this doesn't mean they treated them very fairly. Southon never tries to depict the Romans as in any way progressive, because they could be a right bunch of misogynistic weirdos. They might not have excluded women, but they believed pretty darn strongly in a highly gendered society. 

The earliest references have some of the clearest examples of this. Rome was founded by freed slaves and escaped convicts, all male, but the idea that they might go and liberate women to sustain the fledgling city seems – in their own description – to have been thought of as ridiculous. Far better, apparently, to just go and ask their neighbours if they had any they'd like to donate (quite literally treating them as a commodity) and when that slick piece of diplomacy astonishingly failed, they decided to just abduct them instead. Lovely.

And yet even in the early centuries, women appear as both villains and heroines. There was Tarpeia, the traitor who opened the gates to the enemy, but also Hersilia, who forced a truce by having the Romans and the Sabines acknowledge each other as family thanks to the, err, forced marriage*. Regardless of whether woman either existed, the Romans themselves thought they did. It wasn't they who left them out of their histories, that was the fault of much later writers. 

* Oddly, Southon doesn't think the Rape of the Sabine women should be interpreted in the modern sense. So... these bunch of desperate freed slaves and escaped convicts go and abduct a bunch of women, and then the women decide of their own free will that these dudes are, like, totally hot or something ? Hmmm.

And it wasn't just grand politics where women appeared as active protagonists. Southon describes one especially bizarre episode :

Ocrisia was doing something with the semi-sacred fire in the royal house in the presence of Tanaquil whereupon, to everyone's great surprise, a giant willy rose up out of the ashes. This floating ash willy proceeded to impregnate poor Ocrisia, because Tanaquil, who was once again able to recognise a come on from the gods, ordered her to sit down on the fire and fuck it, and Ocrisia obeyed.

Sexy. But while Southon clearly has a point in that the divination skills of Tanaquil were unfairly written out of history, I have a hard time seeing that one as due to misogyny as she claims. Rewriting this WTAF moment into one that doesn't involve fucking a giant ash willy feels like Tanaquil's divinatory skill is lost more out of collateral damage than anything else : the version in which Orcrisia got pregnant by Tanauqil's husband may be a cliché, but good grief it's more believable.

Influenced And Influential

Women were also affected by the political changes that they themselves influenced. One of Southon's skills is presenting this as full history of Rome itself as well as its women, albeit with the major political events now reduced (rather pleasingly) to scenery*. As Roman government reformed, she notes that while inequality was a deliberate design feature of the earlier monarchy, it was very much a bug in the new system of the Republic. Not that this helped with female empowerment very much, mind you.

Greater equality was the order of the day, though in this case, it doesn't really seem to have done much for female empowerment at all.

* I have to disagree that Roman military history is boring, even if Southon's descriptions of the protracted civil wars as "extremely slow-burn class warfare in which all the protagonists are grumpy billionaires" is pretty damned apt.

One example of this limited change makes this clear. A disturbing feature of Roman life was that aristocratic women could rarely own their own property or run their own affairs, being required to be under a male guardian : initially their parents, then later their husband. In essence, a husband had the same level of authority over his wife as parents did over their kids. Which is distinctly creepy.

But Republican reforms meant that the woman could keep her original family as her guardian instead. This gave them a degree of choice. Rather than now being wholly (materially) bound to their husband, thus making it pretty essential to obey him in everything, they had options. They could certainly choose to support him against their original family; if he was rich enough, there was little financial risk in doing do. Or they could opt to quite literally say "you're not the boss of me !" and bugger off. It hardly meant that they were free (but then, everything was a hierarchy for men as well), but at least now they had a choice of employer, as it were. 

Even clearer examples of feminine feedback come in the form of the the Vestal Virgins, where politics and religion collide head-on. Southon's description of the Roman idea of divine justice is brilliant :

Romans appear to have viewed their gods as capricious, grasping psychopaths who would crush every mortal in an instant but who could also be bribed with a bit of burnt food and some perfume. Romans gave them a little drop of wine, some banging statues, and the odd glorious temple, and in return, the gods helped them win wars and didn't send massive swarms of bees to chase them around the streets.

This sort of political-religious attitude will be important later on. For now, the Vestal Virgins were given extreme privileges for their virginity, which the Romans viewed both as an immense sacrifice and literally necessary for the city's survival. They were given an escort and essentially free access wherever they needed to go, and could even pardon criminals with a look. Those who tried to cross their paths without waiting for them could even be executed. 

But this was a case of the kind of power which is only given provided it's not abused (with later laws restricting their pardoning powers in a classic case of "but we never meant that you should pardon that guy"), and the punishments for misbehaving Vestals were severe : for having sex or even just wearing trousers, they might face being bricked up alive with a candle and some food so that technically it wasn't counted as an execution.

Other concerns feel much more modern. Worries about excessive luxury still abound, but for some especially strict Republicans, these included "tables with one pedestal" and, perhaps even more inexplicably, rugs. For women specifically, the dilemma over whether sex work counts as empowerment or objectification resonates very strongly. For some it was indeed grim slavery, but for others, it was a choice and they did it freely. Choice, surely, is the whole issue here. Someone who doesn't want to do it is in an awful state, but that doesn't automatically mean that other people aren't genuinely enthusiastic about it. Later on, notes Southon, monks were viewed as always tempted by the pleasures of the flesh, whereas the idea that women might actually enjoy sex was never even considered.

And the major caveat to women requiring guardians was that this doesn't appear to have applied to the lower orders, with a nice case of a woman running a huge spa-villa in Pompey as her own boss. Southon's descriptions of this are honestly lovely, and had it not been for the volcano, it sounds like she would have had a wholly successful career. I somehow always find it rewarding to read descriptions of people who just had a nice time.

There was true love to be found here as well. By chance, I happened to hear Mary Beard's podcast about the woman usually known as Turia recently, who has a massive gravestone describing much of her life story. Most of this seemed like the act of a dedicated and loving husband, but Mary Beard being a thoroughly odd duck, she described it as partly selfish for reasons that entirely escape me. Southon, however, is pretty clear that this is an act of great romantic feeling, not some weird humblebragging nonsense. Which directly contradicts Philip Matyszak's dubious claim that romance was a medieval invention. Again, sometimes things in the past could just be nice.

Unfortunately, of course they could also be horrible. But even then, women could still take control.

Power and Prudes

Segueing nicely to combine sex and politics, Southon prevents the rather spectacular antics of Julia Caesar, or more accurately Julia Caesari Filia, daughter of Augustus. Augustus was undeniably a political genius, but Southon shows him to be a horrible dick in his personal life. I mean, he divorced her mother on the day she gave birth to Julia, which is more than enough to denote "horrible dick" by itself, but it gets worse. He mainly divorced her so he could shag other women, but then the politics and sex collide head-on and here's where he gets really dickish.

Augustus, as the first emperor proper, had won. The Republic lived in name only and there was no longer any regular route to the top of the tree. You couldn't be promoted to being Emperor as you could consul, and the best you could hope for was to be adopted as heir. So how to deal with all those squabbling aristocratic senators who came from a long line of politicians where the struggle for advancement was all about political promotion ? Augustus' brilliant idea, says Southon, was to try to redirect their competitive streak into solid Roman virtues : family values, domestic harmony, chastity, that sort of thing*. Families would no longer be quite such a private sphere, but the way that the aristocracy competed for status.

* And weirder ones, like encouraging people to have as many babies as possible. Or even stranger, banning people from bribing people not to marry. Quite why people were bribing others to not get married is anyone's guess. "If there is anyone here who knows why these two may not be lawfully joined...." – "YEAH I'VE GOT FIFTY QUID, STOP THE CEREMONY !"

Unfortunately even a genius can misread the room from time to time, and Augustus didn't seem to understand that other people were awfully fond of adultery as well. This included not just a lot of senators, but Julia as well. In Southon's words :

She fucked in the Forum. She fucked on the rosta. She fucked by the statue... she fucked his great rival's son... Julia Augusti Filia loved to fuck.

Gosh.

Some of this was performative. Julia had never been one to hold back, but she always did as she was told and married who her father told her to marry. But after he took her son away to raise as his heir and her husband died, then had her marry someone she hated, and she snapped and went on a complete fuck-fest, making a very public mockery of his extremely prudish laws. Appeals from other aristocrats, who didn't regard Julia's behaviour as anything especially bad, fell on deaf ears. Augustus executed her main boyfriend, banned her from drinking wine or having male visitors or attendants unless they were ugly, and had her exiled. She only found out about the death of her daughters third-hand. The only thing Augustus did for her was to provide an income and comfortable surroundings, but on his death, Julia's son was murdered by Augustus' new heir. 

Fast-forward a couple of centuries and we get someone who absolutely did not love to fuck, Perpetua. Here we see politics and religion having whole new difficulties. For the mostly still-pagan Romans, the need to placate the gods was extremely real. For the Christians this was obviously nonsense. The pagans, in Southon's telling, weren't intolerant towards Christianity because of their religious beliefs per se. They were intolerant because the Christian's beliefs prevented from partaking in the religious rites that they genuinely saw as necessary for survival. Christians, in effect, were the equivalent of those "sovereign citizen" dickbags that plague parts of the modern world.

And Christianity changed the world view of its followers in highly pragmatic ways. For the pagans, having a social network, followers, status, all that really mattered. For Christians it was nowhere near as important as entering heaven. So when Perpetua refused to sacrifice to the deified Emperors, to her father this was a kick in the teeth : refusing her basic social obligations as a citizen, besmirching his good name, and potentially risking divine wrath (presumably via swarms of giant bees) all at once.

Pepetua's tale is not a nice one and I'm going to skip over it. But Southon makes some important corrections to early historian's narratives. Some of them portray Perpetua as a cold unfeeling zealot, a God-botherer who cared for nothing but Christ. No, says Southon. Her choices hurt her. She was distraught at the social injury done to her father, moved by her own crying baby, and suffered the physical torment of prison greatly. Perpetua in her own writings may have a belief it's hard for most of us to relate to, but she comes across as every bit as human as the sex-crazed Julia Filia.

To The Bitter End

Martyrdom and spirituality gave women a new avenue for agency, albeit not a very nice one. Even if you were a theologian, as evidenced by Melania the Elder*. Living in c. 370 AD, life in Rome was not so very different to how it had been in the late Republic : there was a senate, gladiatorial games, chariot racing, and all that familiar stuff. But Christianity had changed the character of social life, and rather than being a power through her husband, Melania sought power through spiritual prominence. 

* Not to be confused with Melania the Plastic, who is a modern blemish.

And it was, ultimately, all about power. Melania chose the now fashionable ascetism for this, suffering financially (but not really, never being in any real financial danger), physically (very definitely really, but stupidly) but not at all socially. She managed her family finances carefully and ensured her family rose to prominence, her virtue signally being amply rewarded. After all, "Ascetism is meaningless if it isn't a choice... it didn't offer power to the powerless, it merely reframed the power of the powerful." Being poor when you can't help it sucks. But being deliberately poor, in the right circumstances, can give you tremendous theological and social clout.

Christianity had by now evolved, allowing marriage and family relations even as ascetism became popular. It certainly didn't seem to have made anyone especially nice though. Poor old Perpetua had suffered from the pagans, but now the Christians threw those abuses back at everyone else. Melania herself was manipulative and power-hungry, but at least she never encouraged people to fast themselves to death to get off on it, unlike "Saint" Jerome, who did. Her granddaughter, on the other hand, may have freed eight thousand slaves, but she forced her own attendants to become ascetics and only let them eat every other day. I guess the bit about feeding the five thousand passed her by.

If the Melanias had sought religious power, other late Roman women went for the old-fashioned approach to power through politics. The truly remarkable Julia Maesa, annoyed at having been relegated back into obscurity at the death of her emperor-husband, instigated one coup and survived a reactionary counter-coup unscathed. The first put her monstrous loony of a son (Elagabalus) on the throne, a puny teenager rising from religious obsession to ruler of the world because his mum knew how to persuade Roman legions how to do her bidding. Unfortunately the brat was so awful that his own bodyguard murdered him, but Maesa survived even as many of his favourites were also put to the sword, despite being the most prominent female figure in the reign. And then it just gets better : she now ushered in another coup, persuading these grizzled military assassins to put her grandson on the throne instead. She lived long enough to fully dismantle the remaining infrastructure of Elagabalus's administration and then died. Her daughter, Julia Mamea, went on to be a successful empress-mother.

And then it was over. Southon makes a compelling argument that the title of Last of the Romans could well go to Galla Placidia (died 450 AD), the last normal Roman aristocratic woman, doing normal Roman things behind the scenes like getting married, influencing her husband, summoning St Augustine, advocating for the city of Rome's supremacy in its own empire, that sort of thing :

No emperor or empress after her was as vocally and visibly dedicated to the cause of the city of Rome. None ever voluntarily lived there again, none supported its primacy, none was crowned there and none ever died there peacefully again. In some of her coins, Placidia shows herself crowned with the hand of God reaching from above to bless her with divine sanction. On the reverse, however, stands Victoria, holding a cross but representing, as she always had, the unending triumph of the eternal city of Rome.

Conclusions

What I particularly like is that Southon never tries to make the case that women were automatically better rulers than men. She notes that women were bizarrely and unfairly viewed as susceptible to enacting a peculiar, emotional sort of cruelty when given power, but never pretends that they had innately better judgement than men. They most certainly did not and do not. This book is a plea for recognition and equal treatment, not unfettered approval. 

What comes through clearly is just how much women have been overlooked. Despite the undeniable patriarchical nature of Roman society, they still managed to be kingmakers, heroines, businesswomen, whores (both literal and pejorative), traitors, murderers, theologians, wives, mothers, criminals, leaders... all of human life is here. They were far more in control of their destiny than often shown, even if their treatment by the men could be abominable.

Not that I think Southon is perfect. One particularly weird claim she makes is that focusing on women makes the men less important and derives them of agency. Surely this must be intended as irony ?  But if not, I think the opposite. Focusing on women doesn't change what men did, but it does reframe their actions. It makes them seem less mechanistic and more human, reacting to fellow human beings – doing things because their hateful/abusive/loving/bizarre spouse wanted them to, not just behaving in accordance with Roman social obligations. Both genders benefit from respecting the other; neither is deprived of anything through a more level playing field.

She also has a tendency to replace "slaves" with "enslaved people", which is apparently the done thing in history books lately. I find it distractingly odd : just what do you think "slave" means ? More on that in a forthcoming review. And she definitely has a strong love-hate relationship with her subject, though she does manage to turn that conflict into a glorious display of laugh-out-loud humour. 

Then again, decrying people's "nostalgia" for ancient Rome, and explicitly declaring scare quotes around "Western civilisation", are definitely into stranger territory. Western civilisation is a thing. I think, in many ways, it's a good thing. Rome too could be horrific and brutal, but it contributed art, literature, philosophy, law, engineering, and a scale of political thinking not seen in Europe for centuries afterwards. Being nostalgic for gladiatorial combat or war elephants would indeed be a cause for concern, but I look more sympathetically on those romanticising some aspects of the past – as Southon does for the villa owner in Pompeii – and I certainly don't think Western civilisation deserves any kind of quotation marks. For better or worse, the Romans played their part in shaping it, and the role of women in the process has been unfairly dismissed. More like this, please !