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 !