Cleopatra was released in 1963 and has gone on to herald the end of the golden age of the historical epic in Hollywood. Known as one of the most expensive films to ever be made, its troubled production and the on screen connection between Taylor and Burton have both cemented its place in cinematic history.

We have a look at some of the issues that led to production delays and there were a lot! From tricky weather conditions, Taylor’s health troubles, to issues with the script, there wasn’t an issue that this film didn’t face in the journey to release. Dr Rad delves into the details of the factors that influenced the production including:

The historical pedigree of Cleopatra is based on a few different sources including credit given to Plutarch, Appian, and Suetonius! The impetus for the film was also based on the book published in 1957, The Life and Times of Cleopatra by Carlo Maria Franzero. There’s a depth of references throughout the film that have support in the ancient sources. Dr G considers:

Keen to delve more into Cleopatra? Check out our conversation with Yentl Love about the reception of Cleopatra over time.

Our music is by Bettina Joy de Guzman.

Lightly edited for our wonderful Australian accents 🙂

Dr Rad 0:15
Welcome to the Partial Historians.

Dr G 0:19
We explore all the details of ancient Rome,

Dr Rad 0:23
everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battles waged and when citizens turn against each other, I’m Dr Rad

Dr G 0:33
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 0:44
Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.

Dr Rad 0:58
Hello and welcome to a special episode of the Partial Historians. And this one has been a long time coming. Dr G.

Dr G 1:07
it has I’m very excited to be talking about the epic, grand, magnificent, over budgeted 1963 version of Cleopatra.

Dr Rad 1:21
Absolutely we couldn’t believe it. We realized that we’ve talked about this a lot on other podcasts, and then we kind of forgot that we’d never done it for ourselves.

Dr G 1:32
We’ll go into even more nerdy depths of what is happening in this film and why, and I’m very excited to learn from you. Dr Rad, because I know history on film is your jam, and I’m excited to see what I learned from this whole process.

Dr Rad 1:48
I have some film detail for you, Dr G. In fact, I’d like to start with a quote, If I might, from the writer slash director of the film, Joseph Mankiewicz. He said that “Cleopatra was the toughest three pictures I ever made. It was conceived in a state of emergency, shot in confusion and wound up in a blind panic.”

Dr G 2:12
Well, and that gives us a taste of things to come, doesn’t it?

Dr Rad 2:15
It really does a bit of a background detail, if I might. Dr G about this film, setting it setting it all up. So 1963 when Cleopatra was released, we are getting towards the end of the golden era of Hollywood, that time when epics were everywhere. Cleopatra is sometimes blamed the end of the public’s fascination with epics, but I’m not so sure that that is the case. We’ll have to get into a bit of debate about that.

Dr G 2:45
I think it’s certainly pretty opulent. I’m happy to watch it again and again, not too frequently, though, because it is very long.

Dr Rad 2:53
It is very long, and we will get into why that is in a second. But there’s certainly been a lot of attention on this film since its release, and that’s partly because there was a lot of publicity, obviously, around the film’s production, but also since the film’s release, people who were involved with the film have published books and memoirs about this movie. So we’ve got things like my life with Cleopatra by Walter Wanger, who was the producer. We’ve got the Cleopatra Papers, which was written by some of the publicity men who were involved from the side of 20th Century Fox, Weiss and Brodsky. And so there’s just so much material about this film, which I think feeds into the legend itself.

Dr G 3:37
Oh, excellent. I’m so glad there’s good source material on this film as well, because I have planned for our conversation by thinking only about the historic, historical events and what has happened in the course of the film, and how that matches up to our ancient source material. So I think the combination of your perspective on the film production and me chiming in with little details being like, what about this might lead us down some interesting paths.

Dr Rad 4:05
Well, we should perhaps tell our listeners, Dr G that this movie was originally meant to be two epic films, one about Caesar and Cleopatra and one about Cleopatra and Mark Antony. Following in that grand tradition, we think this is going to be a multi-parter special episode for us as well.

Dr G 4:26
Which I think makes perfect sense, because when you do look at the film, the first two hours is Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, and then it’s set up with the intermission, and you’re like, alrighty, then take a short break, and when you come back, it is all Mark Antony and Cleopatra. So you can see how they might have wanted to have two separate films, but for some reason, they ended up sticking them together instead.

Dr Rad 4:53
Absolutely. Now let’s just go through the basic cast, just for people who may not have seen the film. As Cleopatra,we of course, have the gorgeous Elizabeth Taylor, the most beautiful woman in the world. We have Rex Harrison, veteran actor as Caesar. But Dr, G, did you know that he wasn’t meant to play Caesar in this movie?

Dr G 5:13
Really? He does a very good job, I think.

Dr Rad 5:15
He does do a very good job. But, and this is part of the endless production troubles that plagued this film. The original actor who was slated to play Julius Caesar was Peter Finch, illustrious English-Australian actor best known for his role in Network where he’s as mad as hell, Dr G, and he’s not gonna take it anymore.

Dr G 5:40
Oh, another classic. Okay, but he drops out and we end up with Rex Harrison instead?

Dr Rad 5:46
We do, and it’s purely because of the timing, yes. He had actually been, Peter Finch, was actually hand selected by Elizabeth Taylor to play Caesar. They had starred in a movie called Elephant Walk together, and she liked him, but because of all the delays, he had to move on to another project. Similar thing for our Mark Antony, of course, infamously played in the end by Richard Burton, but originally was meant to be played by Stephen Boyd, whose name you might recall, because he plays the bad guy in Ben Hur and he also stars in Fall of the Roman Empire.

Dr G 6:21
Okay, so this man has been around epic films, and he’s looking for his next turn. Is it a timing issue for him as well?

Dr Rad 6:29
It absolutely is.

Dr G 6:30
Well, I think it’s really lucky that we have Richard Burton to be honest, because this is one of the things that sort of goes down in film history, is watching these two on screen together.

Dr Rad 6:43
Absolutely. Now, as the producer, we have another veteran, Walter Wanger. Walter Wanger was involved in so many movies in his career, the ones that perhaps stand out, I think that people might have seen these days would be Queen Christina, Foreign Correspondent, Joan of Arc – the one with Ingrid Bergman – I Want to Live, and the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He also had two turns as the president of the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences in then, well, basically in the late 1930s and the early 1940s. His last film, however, would be Cleopatra.

Dr G 7:23
The end of the Wanger is near.

Dr Rad 7:27
And then, of course, finally, we have as director a couple of people. We had Robert, sorry, Ruben Mamulian, who was the initial director, but he was replaced with Joseph L Mankiewicz, who was an esteemed writer slash director. I adore Joseph Mankiewicz. He was involved in some of my absolute most favorite classic movies. He was the writer director of All About Eve and also A Letter to Three Wives, which I really, really recommend. If you haven’t seen that one.

Dr G 8:00
I haven’t I’ll put that on my list classic films.

Dr Rad 8:04
Yeah. And finally, as composer, I couldn’t help but mention Dr G, that Alex North is the composer for Cleopatra, because he was also the composer on Spartacus.

Dr G 8:15
Ah, all right, another Golden Era film veteran in the wings.

Dr Rad 8:23
Absolutely. He also worked on Prizzi’s Honor, The Agony and the Ecstasy, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Misfits, The Children’s Hour, I’ll Cry Tomorrow, Viva Zapata! and A Streetcar Named Desire.

Dr G 8:34
Impressive resume.

Dr Rad 8:39
Yeah. So we have said, the point of all this, Dr G, is that we’ve got a huge amount of talent on this movie, and that’s just obviously the tip of the iceberg. There’ll be other notable names that come up as we go through this detail. But with all these people on board, you would think that we are going to get a priceless example of cinema.

Dr G 9:00
I mean, I think we do, don’t we? I mean, at the very least it looks so opulent, you can almost see the money dripping off the screen. It’s incredible.

Dr Rad 9:10
Absolutely. Let’s talk a little bit about the money, shall we?

Dr G 9:14
Please, let’s.

Dr Rad 9:14
So to give you a bit of an idea. Few years before Cleopatra came out, there was, of course, the gigantic success that was Ben Hur. Ben Hur cost around $15 million to make, which was pretty pricey for, you know, 1950s movies, but of course, it was a smash hit, lots of Oscars, so money well spent. Cleopatra was not meant to cost anywhere near as much as that. It had a $2 million budget and a 64 day shoot assigned to it, both of which it would blow out of the water, eventually costing $44 million in 1960s money. It’s very hard, of course, to adjust for inflation, etc, etc, but it is estimated that in today’s money, we’d be talking something in the neighborhood of $400 million.

Dr G 10:11
Well, I mean, they’re only $42 million over budget.

Dr Rad 10:16
A drop in the pan.

Dr G 10:17
Yeah, I’m surprised nobody pulled the plug on this film before it got well out of hand, because to spend that much money, somebody at the at the studio has to keep saying, yes, I’ll give you another extension on finances for this project. And I am assuming that the film itself, in terms of, like the production days the film, you said it was 64 day shoot? I as a as a lay person who doesn’t study film very often, even my understanding is that it took way longer to shoot this film than the 64 days.

Dr Rad 10:51
It definitely did. And I think, look, this is why I particularly gravitate towards this movie. Because, as you know, you might have heard, I wrote a little bit on Spartacus in my time, and one of the things that I like about Spartacus is that it’s a piece of history that was pieced together by multiple people. It wasn’t something that was conceived of and executed by one author. And so I think it’s really interesting to consider as a historian, when you’ve got multiple people who are contributing to the construction of something, particularly when they’re doing it, seemingly in a rather haphazard manner, a lot of the time, because it really obviously affects the version that you get on the screen. And I think Cleopatra 1963 is another classic example of how this movie came together in such a haphazard way that the history as well, I think, has been affected, and that’s why it’s such an interesting example for people who were interested in the ancient world on film to consider it was actually originally conceived of in 1958, I believe. It was meant to actually starred Joan Collins at first, but eventually Elizabeth Taylor was the woman who was inextricably tied to this project, and it was Walter Wanger’s baby from the get go, the producer, Wanger, who I mentioned before. But it encountered production issue after production issue, and it had such a troubled time, and a lot of it was, to be honest, was also out of their control. So in the very early days, it was weather that was often causing the most issues.

Dr G 12:32
Okay, well, that’s not anybody’s fault. Can’t do much about the weather.

Dr Rad 12:36
Yeah. Well, basically they start the art director. So you mentioned the opulence of this movie. The art director, John DeCuir, I’m presuming his name is, had started constructing sets in places like Pinewood in England, and the weather did serious damage to these sets. Elizabeth Taylor herself was plagued by illness in the early days of this project. I think a lot of people probably know that she actually almost died during these illnesses. She had to have an emergency tracheotomy, and then she had to have plastic surgery to try and remove the tracheotomy scar. And all this kind of stuff is somewhat out of the control of the people who are working on the production.

Dr Rad 12:36
Yeah definitely, these are things that you can’t anticipate and you can’t plan for and you just have to work around them if you want to bring the whole project to life. So, yeah, if you’ve got sets that have been destroyed by bad weather, obviously you have to think about where you’re going to rebuild or how, and if your lead is, you know, suffering from illness and then recovering from surgery, what are you gonna do? We can’t film Cleopatra until we have Cleopatra on set. You know what I’m saying?

Dr Rad 12:40
It’s funny how it works like that. You know, having your lead actress around, how it assists with the production.

Dr G 12:40
And she’s basically in every single scene. There are very few scenes which she does not appear in so the load for her, in terms of, like the workhorse nature of her having to be on screen so much throughout this film, means that she’s, if she’s not in top shape, you’re gonna have delays.

Dr Rad 12:40
Absolutely. And it’s also, I think, partly, and this is where 20th Century Fox has to take some responsibility. There also seems to have been multiple decisions being made about where exactly this production was going to end up being filmed. They kept on debating, you know, are we going to proceed filming in London? Are we going to film in Rome? Are we going to film in Hollywood? Like, what is going to happen with this production? So there were a lot of delays, I think, caused by that, although they were probably responding to the problems. But basically what that means is that we’re a few months into the shoot of this film. They’ve already spent a fortune on the movie, and they only have about 10 minutes worth of workable film.

Dr G 14:57
Oh, oh no. I. Yeah, this is gonna be bad guys. I think we need to double down and spend more money.

Dr Rad 15:06
Well see, and again, this is exactly it. Right? You raise a very valid point of, why would they proceed with this movie when they’ve already spent so much and they have very little to show for it? Why not just, you know, claim as much insurance money as they can. I don’t think they could even get as much as they spent. I think by the time, I think by the time we’re about almost six months in, they’d spent, you know, between six and $7 million and they could only get about 2 million back in insurance costs. So why wouldn’t they just pull up stumps and, you know, take it as a loss and just forget about the whole thing. And I think that part of the reason is actually Elizabeth Taylor herself, Dr G,

Dr G 15:47
Is she living to play Cleopatra on screen? Is that what’s going on here?

Dr Rad 15:51
She is keen to play her but I think it’s more the fact that they believe in her bankability, because, and this is where we get into some of the scandal behind this particular film, Elizabeth Taylor had something of a reputation by the time she was filming Cleopatra, she’d already had multiple husbands by the time she was cast to pay Cleopatra, and her most recent husband was a guy called Eddie Fisher. Eddie Fisher had been married to American sweetheart of the screen, Debbie Reynolds. Now, if this is sounding a little familiar to some of you, yes, these are the parents of Carrie Fisher or Princess Leia of the Star Wars movies. So essentially, Elizabeth Taylor had been kind of demonized because she had supposedly stolen away Eddie Fisher from Debbie Reynolds. And so she was very much seen as a home wrecker. She was like the evil seductress type, or as Debbie Reynolds was the the good wife, the good mother, the really cute baby faced, you know, sweet as pie actress. That was her image at the time. And this is how these two women were represented when Elizabeth Taylor went off to make Cleopatra. However, the fact that she had then become so gravely ill and then managed to recover, I think, meant that people were ready to forgive her, perhaps for those perceived transgressions, and she was awarded an Oscar, her very first for a movie called Butterfield 8. And so it seemed like this would be the moment to be on the Elizabeth Taylor train. You know, part of her her come back, in a way, not that she was doing badly or anything. She’s obviously still making lots of movies, attracting a lot of attention, but it seems like this would be a moment to be part of her – I don’t know what’s the right word, to be part of her, um…

Dr G 17:51
Her rising star. This is a moment to be capitalized upon, potentially. If she is, as you say, recent Oscar winner, then there’s obviously that sort of sheen to her as well, where it’s like, you’re going to get to see a great actress who has a reputation that sometimes leads into the seductress, and she’s going to be playing Cleopatra, who, in popular imagination, is known for seducing Roman men.

Dr Rad 18:19
Absolutely. And it’s always funny how the women who are chosen to play Cleopatra, whether it’s real or imagined, they do often have these connotations in their personal life. Sometimes it’s entirely manufactured, and it might not be a fair way of looking at them, but I think it’s really interesting that they often bring that to the role you think about. Even the Cleopatra set were mooted, but never have been. I mean, Angelina Jolie was supposed to play Cleopatra at one point in time, and that was back when, you know, her personal life was a bit more scandalous than it is these days. There is often that connection with the Cleopatra players.

Dr G 19:02
Yeah, let’s get a artist whose personal life seems to be mirroring the artistry we’d like to see on screen.

Dr Rad 19:09
Yeah. And of course, her personal life during the filming of Cleopatra would then take on a life of its own, but we’ll get into that in our next episode. I think, um, now they also, I think, 20th Century Fox, really wanted to cash in on the epic, the, you know, the the genre itself. They knew that the Ten Commandments and Ben Hur, King of Kings, Spartacus, had done really well at the box office, and they were looking for something that would also bring in huge profits to 20th Century Fox. There were internal issues in the company at the time. So a Greek, American guy called Spyro Skouras was the president of Fox at the time, but there were people within Fox who were trying to get him out. That there were factions within the company and that, I think. Also affected the way that decisions were often made with this movie, skuas was definitely on board to try and, you know, wipe out the memories of box office failures that had been in recent years, to restore himself to glory with the huge success of something like Cleopatra. He also, I think, contributed a bit to the indecision about where they were going to film, etc, etc. But Elizabeth Taylor’s production company was involved in the Cleopatra filming, and her production company being involved meant it had to be a European filming, which basically meant that they, instead of using Fox’s own studio lots they were going to end up filming eventually in Cinecittà the very famous film studios in Italy. Now you would think that that would mean that they might therefore enjoy good weather, because usually in autumn and Rome, it’s quite a nice time to be there. But as luck would have it, there was unusually stormy weather in Rome in the autumn where they were meant to start filming, and there was amazing weather in LA, so in some ways, they perhaps should have just been filming in LA. But of course, as we said, you cannot always predict the weather.

Dr G 21:16
Yeah, that’s unfortunate. And I guess the complexities of having Elizabeth Taylor production company needing to lean in a particular direction, where, obviously it would have been cheaper for 20th Century Fox to do it in their own studios. It’s just adding complexity to what is already something that’s quite complex already.

Dr Rad 21:34
It absolutely is. And also filming in Rome was also going to be good for Elizabeth Taylor’s health, the issues that she had had were very much focused on her lungs. London weather wasn’t fantastic for that. So moving to a warmer climate was also going to hopefully mean that she wasn’t going to become too ill to work again.

Dr G 21:59
Very interesting. Oh, very interesting. Now,

Dr Rad 22:02
I know we wanted to get into the history. Dr, G, so one of the things that I really like about this movie is that if you look it up on IMDb, whilst you will see a number of screenwriters credited amongst them, you will also find Suetonius, Appian and Plutarch.

Dr G 22:18
I’m so glad to hear that, because it is very clear, from what we see in the way that the story unfolds, that somebody, at the very least, was reading their ancient sources. And I think this is really ideal, because as I was watching, re-watching, because I have seen this film many times before, I was going through and just making notes about the things that were happening, and just putting asterisks next to things where I was like, things where I was like, I’d like to check if that’s a proper historical detail. That’s an interesting thing for somebody to have said, or that’s an interesting thing for something to have happened. Who are these people? Can I find a reference to them? And by and large, you can. So there’s many interesting figures. For instance, Ptolemy, the brother of Cleopatra, is positioned in the opening of the film as having three key advisors, and one of them’s the Chief Eunuch, Pothinus. One of them is his tutor Theodotus. And then there is the general who’s in charge of his armed forces, a guy called Achillas. And each of these three are attested in the historical record with these names. And I think, you know, this was a great start for me. I was like, Oh, look, Ptolemy surrounded by his henchmen. And while there are some nuance of difference, so for instance, we get the story that when Pompey the great is fleeing from Greece in the wake of the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 he ends up fleeing to Egypt. It is Achillas, the general of Ptolemy and some other Romans who had been previously stationed in Egypt and had stayed that managed to bundle Pompey up and execute him. And one of the early key differences that we see in this film is that when Julius Caesar arrives in Alexandria and he meets all of these advisors of Ptolemy, Achillas is there basically as a foil to the other two advisors, and he seems to be a bit more pragmatic. And it seems that he’s aware that Julius Caesar would not have been happy with the execution of Pompey, whereas in the historical record, he was definitely a key player in making sure that that had happened. But yet, what we see is that Achillas’ position there’s maybe slightly more nuanced in his understanding and appreciation of Roman politics than the other two advisors of Ptolemy. So we see like little differences, coming through, but the fact that they have the same names that we see in the ancient sources, and the fact that they’re there at all on screen doing this kind of stuff, which is giving us this richness to what Ptolemies court looked like, I think, is impressive. Like, that’s a choice that they have made in the production to be like, let’s try and follow the source material for some of this stuff.

Dr Rad 25:21
Absolutely and I think that this is perhaps a good moment to perhaps quickly summarize exactly what this movie covers. I mean, to be honest, it’s a bit hard to know exactly what they intended to cover all of the time, because so much of this movie ends up on the cutting room floor, because they end up taking the two epics that were meant to be and forging it into one. And we’ll talk about why that happened again, probably in a future episode on this. We are essentially focusing on the part of Cleopatra’s life where Caesar enters so where Caesar winds up in Alexandria as he’s pursuing Pompey as part of the Roman Civil War, and then ends up getting embroiled in the civil war that’s going on in Egypt between Cleopatra and her siblings. And we follow Cleopatra all the way through her relationship with Julius Caesar into her next relationship with Mark Antony, and the film ends with her death. Spoilers, everybody. That’s where we’re going to end up. And it is interesting, I suppose, in some sense, that you could look at this film and I suppose be critical of the fact that it’s therefore focusing on the part of Cleopatra’s life, which involves Roman men and love affairs. That’s definitely what this movie focuses on. And it was actually based on a popular Italian novel at the time by C M Franzero, and there’s a little preface from that book that I thought I might read to you, Dr G. says, “women are the most interesting creatures on earth. Men can only be judged in light of their attitudes to women. The love may prompt some men to accomplish great deeds, but in a woman, love is the only motive of life.”

Dr G 27:02
That’s it, that’s, what?

Dr Rad 27:03
That’s, that’s a little thought I’d like to read for you.

Dr G 27:05
No, okay, all right, so I think one of the ways in which this film suffers is that it does seem to be trying to do two things at once, and, maybe because of the cutting room situation, it’s doing neither particularly well. Because we have this sense that Cleopatra is a political animal – that does come through in the film, but it’s not done ultimately, in a very nuanced way. And we also see this leaning in on like the seductress element, and this idea of Cleopatra, sort of bringing men into her orbit and then having her way with them. And in some respects, that doesn’t go so well either. But what we see in this opening of the film – so to give just a quick sort of like plot summary, here we have Julius Caesar is basically turning up in Alexandria. He is met by Ptolemy the 13th and the advisors, and that’s where this whole thing kicks off. And it’s not until we get a little bit further into the film that Cleopatra turns up in her rolled up carpet being brought in by her loyal servant, Apollodorus.

Dr Rad 28:33
Classic

Dr G 28:35
Classic moment in cinema. There is a moment where Apollodorus is holding the carpet and you’re like, I know there’s not a body in there right now. It’s not body shaped. It’s just not and then there’s then there’s a cut, and we switch to the part where he rolls it out, and it’s like, oh, there she is.

Dr Rad 28:50
Surprise. She’s been dieting so that she could fit into that carpet for weeks.

Dr G 28:54
Ah, like she was practically invisible. And then there she was. And all of this allows us to bear witness to this idea that Cleopatra is a little bit more savvy than your average Ptolemy. So you know, she immediately does things like point out that his maps are wrong, and these sort of little gestures are a hint towards this idea that she is political, she is strategic, and it’s a shame that that I think doesn’t get a little bit more play time as well, but we quickly sort of deviate into this storyline where Julius Caesar is kind of forcibly, sort of seduced her to some extent, and she says, You’re not going to like me this way. And I think that’s a really interesting moment in this film early on, but other things that are happening. So once Julius Caesar has met Cleopatra, she’s come out of the carpet, he’s very excited about that, and they start working together. She makes the proposition that she should be in charge more so than the brother. And there’s fighting in the streets. So Ptolemy’s forces have ended up embroiled with the Roman soldiers in various ways, and the fighting that has broken out starts, it seems, on the Nile, but then progresses onto the shorelines, and we have this infamous burning of the Alexandrian library.

Dr Rad 30:28
Not the books, Dr. G, anything, but the books.

Dr G 30:31
Nooooo. And for anybody who watches this film who loves books, you will obviously be on Cleopatra’s side. She is outraged by the burning of the library. She lays into Julius Caesar. She blames him for this, and I think that’s an important moment, because it gets you on side with her. But it is also something where we’re not quite entirely sure that that is something that historically happened. So people talk about the burning of the Library of Alexandria, and we actually don’t know and really what is happening here. So there are some suggestions that the location of the library would have been inside the palatial complex. That’s as far as we can sort of take where it might have been, because originally it was established by the early Ptolemies as a way of generating their own power and knowledge. So it should have been pretty well protected. And we don’t get a sense that the palace is at any stage under threat, not in the film, not historically. And then, having said that, we’ve got differences in our ancient source material as well. So we’ve got later sources who are suggesting that the library is fine, even into the third century CE, the library is there. It is functioning. If it was burnt. It wasn’t burnt to such a degree that everybody’s like, we can’t rebuild it.

Dr Rad 32:01
It’s just a light singe-ing.

Dr G 32:03
It’s just over, now it’s gone. So if it had burnt, it is revived, or alternatively, it wasn’t burnt at all. And we’re really just not sure about what is happening here, but touching on it does allow Cleopatra’s character to have this sort of moment in the sun with the audience, where it’s like, if you like books, you’re going to be on her side.

Dr Rad 32:25
I think it’s also meant to be, as you say, a nod to her being intellectual, that she values this knowledge, and also that she values the heritage of her own dynasty, the Ptolemies. And perhaps also, maybe more broadly, Egypt. But I think you do get a sense of her connection with her ancestors.

Dr G 32:48
You definitely do, and that, I think, comes through pretty clearly in this. And the other thing that historically is quite interesting in this early part of the film is the idea that Julius Caesar is visiting the tomb of Alexander the Great.

Dr Rad 33:05
I love this scene. I’m so glad you’re talking about it.

Dr G 33:09
I will come to the beautiful translucency of that sarcophagus.

Dr Rad 33:12
Absolutely, Alexander, glistening like a little chocolate.

Dr G 33:17
Hmm beautiful. I was like – the money they spent on this! Alexander the Great dies in the east. That’s pretty well established. It’s sudden. There’s controversy about that, and the ancient source material gets really weird, really quickly about this. The idea seems to be that his body was taken quite quickly back to Macedonia, Greece, back into the area of where he came from, and was embalmed there, which I think should be our first question. And then the first Ptolemy took that body, now preserved, to Memphis in Egypt, which is nowhere near Alexandria, just for the record, and then hundreds of years after that, the body somehow gets moved to Alexandria and ends up about 1000 kilometers from where Alexander the Great died. So we have this sort of tricky story that happens over centuries where Alexander dies in one place, is embalmed in another place, is then moved a couple of times, ends up in Alexandria. We don’t know too much about the tomb itself. Details are pretty thin on the ground. Strabo describes it, but he’s also there in the late Republic. So to what extent that carries through into other periods. It might tie in nicely to the Cleopatra moment he’s there in the sort of the 10 years after the Battle of Actium. And it seems that the whole complex is also inside the palace, and that the Tomb of Alexander the Great is particularly recessed amongst what might be other tombs of Ptolemies. And that would make sense. The Ptolemies see themselves as very much connected to Alexander the Great and the inheritors of his world. So they would obviously position themselves as being close to his body if they could. It seems that they do that. But if you wanted to see Alexander the Great, there were a couple of caveats. He was brought out to you, not you went to him.

Dr Rad 35:30
Well, naturally.

Dr Rad 35:33
You wait

Dr Rad 35:34
And it’s marm in like harm, not man like spam.

Dr G 35:38
And so how long he spends in his sarcophagus is anybody’s guess, because presumably he’s not removed that often. But you know, they wheel him out and they wheel him back. And part of the controversy for that is, why is that even going on? But also, further to that, Alexander the Great had potentially stipulated, and we don’t know why that he wanted to actually be buried in the Oasis at Siwa. Now pay attention, everybody. This is a reference to Assassins Creed Origins. So Siwa is where your main character starts in that video game. Great news, Siwa, lovely little oasis place. What would Alexander the Great want to do with that? It is not clear at all.

Dr Rad 36:28
Doesn’t seem grand enough for Alexander.

Dr G 36:30
No, what’s going on? So the other source that we have for this, because I was like, do we have any historical evidence that Julius Caesar actually visited the tomb of Alexander the Great? This is hard to track down. Everybody says that he does, but they don’t usually provide their source reference, which is frustrating. But Lucan, in his epic poem of the Civil War, does talk about this in a way that is directly critical of Julius Caesar.

Dr Rad 37:02
Yeah, Lucans not a fan, from memory.

Dr G 37:04
Lucan is not a fan. He sees the whole thing as a disgrace, really. He sees Alexander as a “chance marauder whose sudden death solaced the world”.

Dr Rad 37:18
Wow.

Dr G 37:20
So the idea that anybody is going to visit this particular individual in death does not rate highly on Lucan’s radar, and Julius Caesar gets roundly criticized for having done it. So I’m interested in, like, the sarcophagus itself, as it’s depicted in the film. What are your thoughts?

Dr Rad 37:44
Look to be fair, I have never looked into what Alexander’s sarcophagus might have actually looked like, because as far as I’m aware, we have no idea where Alexander the Great’s body is, nor do we know where Cleopatra’s body is. I’m presuming they’re all underwater, like most of ancient Alexandria, but I don’t think it would quite look like that. It looks almost like a Swarovski crystal, or something along those lines. What are your thoughts?

Dr G 38:14
Look, because we don’t know, and every so often, a new news story comes out where they’re like, we found it: it’s the tomb of Alexander the Great! And it’s a bit like the news stories that were coming through a few years ago. Of like we found Pliny the Elder. I’m like, did you?

Dr Rad 38:31
Oh, yeah, and the news stories are constantly coming through about finding Cleopatra.

Dr G 38:35
So yes, both Alexander the Great and Cleopatra sit in this realm of we would love to have their bodies, because I can only imagine the kind of cheap and horrifying restorations of their faces that people would do if they thought they had that skull. Cleopatra, turns out she had a big nose. Ah, but with reconstruction…

Dr Rad 38:59
But how could you tell? The nose is the part that goes first, Dr, G!

Dr G 39:04
No, but, I mean, you got to look at the coinage. I think the worst that I’ve seen is the one that was like, clearly Britney Spears. They’re like, this is Cleopatra reconstructed. Wait a minute.

Dr Rad 39:16
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

Dr G 39:18
So we have this idea of we don’t know where the bodies are, historically, we don’t know where the sarcophagi are. And this film has a lot of sort of sarcophagi type scenes, because we’ve got this tomb of Alexander the Great we also then end up with what appears to be a funeral temple to the deified Caesar later on, and then we also have Cleopatra’s own area for her end. But maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Dr Rad 39:53
I would like to zoom in on what actually happens whilst they are visiting Alexander the Great because I think that this is actually the perfect scene to kind of understand the way that Cleopatra was meant to be in this film, and the vision for her, and the way that it didn’t quite manage to be executed. So when they see Alexander’s tomb together, Julius Caesar tells Cleopatra that he cried the first time that he came to visit because he had accomplished so little. And that’s the part that you’re referring to that everybody repeats about Julius Caesar’s visit to Alexander’s tomb. Cleopatra then urges him to carry on Alexander’s dream, which she classifies as one world, one peace, one nation. Now this, oh, and of course, she wants Alexandria to be the capital.

Dr G 40:51
Obviously

Dr Rad 40:52
Naturally, naturally, she sees that as being the capital. But she’s like, You know what? It doesn’t even really matter, because we can just all be one people. And it’s this moment where she reveals her pregnancy with Julius Caesar’s child, which what is an intriguing possibility. Of course, we kind of write off Caesarian, the child that Caesar and Cleopatra actually did have together in real life, because he gets murdered by Octavian in the aftermath of Cleopatra and Antony losing Actium, etc, etc, as you would expect, he’s perceived as a rival. However, what a fascinating possibility to have this child out there who does unite Caesar and Cleopatra’s families together. I mean, the mind boggles when I consider how the world might have been different if that boy had lived beyond his teen years. But I’m getting distracted. The main thing, I think, is that they really did want Cleopatra to come across as a political, intellectual figure, whilst the love story obviously was important and the sexy stuff was important, because a Cleopatra movie that does allow you to do those things, you know, King of Kings and those sorts of biblical epics like Ben Hur it’s a little bit harder to be, you know, so sexy when it’s getting on with Jesus, doesn’t seem respectful, you know, but Cleopatra always opens the door for a certain level of sexiness and love and passion. But they did also want to have this, and that’s also, I think, because, I think that’s also why they brought on board Joseph Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz was well known for preferring to write and direct powerful movies about women. So that’s why I particularly highlighted his involvement in movies, like A Letter to Three Wives, and, of course, the absolutely phenomenal All About Eve. So he was really interested in women. He got along really well with Elizabeth Taylor. He kind of knew how to work with her. She was obviously huge star by the time she came on board Cleopatra. And one of the reasons, I think, that they also pushed ahead with making this film, when it seemed like all the signs were Stop, stop this immediately, just walk away, was partly because Mankiewicz was brought on board. The first director doesn’t seem to have particularly impressed anyone. I don’t know that he was handling everything as well as he perhaps could, and apparently he was a bit of a perfectionist. But Mankiewicz was someone who they thought was going to come in with a fresh vision, and they really did want this to be a vision that was centered around a fusion of sort of Elizabeth Taylor and Cleopatra, because obviously it’s meant to be about her. And I think he wanted her to be a bit of an Eleanor Roosevelt JFK esque kind of figure. Because lest we forget, this is during JFK presidency that they are writing and conceiving of this movie. And so I think it was meant to somewhat embody, as well, a bit of the the freshness, the hope, I think, that was coming around in that early 1960s era for many Americans. And Joseph Mankiewicz, when he came on board and looked at the script, he thought, Oh, my God, this is an absolute disaster. He didn’t like what he saw the one of the guys who’d been working on the early script had never even met Elizabeth Taylor. He was just judging her based on what he’d seen of her on film. And so the biggest issue that Mankiewicz face was the script, and so he desperately wanted time before he started work on actually filming the movie to write an entirely new script, but unfortunately, they wouldn’t give him the time that he needed because they’d already started production, which means that people like Elizabeth Taylor were already getting paid to stay on this project. So she was getting about $50,000 per week plus $3,000 for expenses.

Dr G 45:03
Oh, hello

Dr Rad 45:04
Yeah, and that’s just for Elizabeth Taylor. Apparently the expenses to keep the production running, even whilst it was technically shut down, was around $45,000 in terms of their overheads. The insurance company weren’t going to cover their losses, and so they only gave him a really small amount of time to try and work on the script before he had to start filming again. So he did his best. There were a few other people he was working with, guy called Lawrence Durrell and Sidney Buchman, who was actually a blacklisted writer who’d moved to London to escape that HUAC era, and they sort of hold themselves up in a hotel for a while and tried to pump out the best scripts that they could. Mankiewicz wasn’t thrilled with everything that he was getting from the other writers. They weren’t the people I don’t think that he had wanted to work with. But nonetheless, they also got a guy called Ronald McDougall who also worked on the script. So as you can see, we’ve already got, you know, many people coming together working on this script. It is a total mess. And what ends up happening is that they have to go into filming without a finished script. And this is a very similar situation to what happened on Spartacus, like they have a basic idea of where it’s heading, obviously, and they have got multiple drafts and scenes and that sort of thing, which have been pumped out by these various writers, but they do not have one script that they know that they’re going to be working from. And what that means is that Mankiewicz is signing up to not only direct the film and shoot all day, but he’s then committing to writing the script at night, so in the very first period of filming. So filming resumes in September in Rome, where they kick off with the filming. He is producing and directing by day and writing at night, six days a week, and then on Sunday, that’s his entirely writing day.

Dr G 47:12
That sounds exhausting, and I’m not even trying to do it.

Dr Rad 47:15
It is. And essentially what ended up happening was they had to make a few adjustments, as you can imagine, during the shooting, I think eventually they switched to sort of starting at around midday with the actual filming. But certainly, what Mankiewicz was doing, he ended up being propped up entirely by drugs. Basically, he was being given drugs to help him to stay awake and complete his work, and then he had to be given drugs in order to be able to sleep at night.

Dr G 47:44
This is the classic tragic Hollywood studio story from this period.

Dr Rad 47:49
It absolutely is, and Mankiewicz said of the strain of this film on him, I’m not biting my fingernails. I’m biting my knuckles. I finished the fingernails months ago.

Dr G 48:02
Buddy. Nothing’s worth this.

Dr Rad 48:06
But yeah, it is. It is absolutely crazy. And this, I say this, I say all of this because I feel like it is relevant in terms of, just like with Spartacus, you don’t really end up with a clear version, perhaps, of who Spartacus was, and what his rebellion was meant to be about, and all of that kind of stuff. I feel like that’s why we get a slightly mixed portrayal of Cleopatra in this film, because the script was always such, you know, such a such a mess. Basically, it was always being worked on, and it was way too long, and this is one of the reasons why. Again, it sort of blew out in terms of in terms of the way that not all scenes are brilliant. I mean, even though I think Mankiewicz was a fantastic writer, definitely his writing was not always up to scratch. Rex Harrison even asked him to rewrite some of his scenes as Julius Caesar, because he wasn’t really happy with them, and that’s really because Mankiewicz was working under such time pressures that he would just write to get something down and didn’t have time to edit them, a feeling I know well from our own projects.

Dr G 49:17
I think it is pretty clear from what we see on screen, that there are ideas about how Cleopatra will be, and they’re executed variably. And there’s also a sense in which you, at times, are watching these performances, and you feel like the actors are being sort of pushed in a particular direction as well. There are times where all of a sudden, characters are shouting at each other. It doesn’t necessarily seem like there’s been an appropriate build up to that, and part of that can be put down to like filmic style of the period, but some of it also feels, feels like maybe there’s some confusion about what is required in a scene. There’s maybe conflicts between actors and director about what should happen, and for the actors themselves trying to maintain a sense of the continuity of the character when they’re being presented with such varied material, it shows a little bit on screen at times, and not to a positive end.

Dr Rad 50:27
Absolutely and certainly there was sometimes a bit of tension on the set because of those sorts of issues. Apparently, Elizabeth Taylor would often turn up late on the set, even when the starting time was noon, when they switched to what are apparently called French hours in November of 1961 so that’s about, I guess, they were filming for about, what, two to three months before they switched to those different hours, and Rex Harrison kind of resented the fact that she was just turning up late and didn’t really make apologies or get into any trouble for it. She also had all these special conditions as a part of her contract, like she didn’t have to work for the first two days per menstrual cycle, which Rex Harrison kind of resented that she got this slightly diva-ish, I suppose, treatment.

Dr G 51:14
Uh hello, has he ever had a menstrual cycle? Does he know what the first two days are like?

Dr Rad 51:19
No, that’s what I mean. Like as someone who is, you know, at this particular stage of my life, I’m like, well, yeah,

Dr G 51:26
Like, don’t ask me to be in front of a camera.

Dr Rad 51:29
But just to give you an idea of Mankiewicz schedule during like these, these periods, although it did dig a little bit better with time. So after those first few months of real horror. Taylor Burton and Harrison all agreed to take salary cuts in order to try and shorten the working working week for Mankiewicz because he was just so exhausted, but he would basically be working at about 5:30 to 6am – he would take something called Dexedrine. He would then have a shot after his lunch to keep him going through the afternoon and another shot after dinner to keep him writing until around 2am and then at 2am he would be given a shot so that he could get about three to four hours sleep.

Dr G 52:10
It’s just dehumanizing.

Dr Rad 52:13
I know it’s crazy. It’s amazing, actually, in a way, that they finished this movie, I can’t understand how Mankiewicz managed to get through it. I mean, I think the thing is, for this particular movie, it is the end in the road for a lot of the people involved. Skouras will be replaced as the president of 20th Century Fox. Walter Wanger will also not make another movie after this. And Mankiewicz also will be kind of done in the film industry after this movie.

Dr G 52:41
Yeah, everybody’s going to be burnt out, that’s for sure.

Dr Rad 52:43
Well, some of them, they were forcibly removed. But yeah, sure, let’s go with burnout. That’s nice. Let’s say burnt out. Yeah. It basically wasn’t until the end of May in 1962 I believe that Mankiewicz had finished enough of the screenplay that he wasn’t writing at night after filming all day. So, but that’s, if you think about it, September to May. That’s still quite a long time that he was having to work like this.

Dr G 53:11
That is intense.

Dr Rad 53:12
It is.

Dr G 53:14
Oh boy, oh boy. All right, so some historical details. So there is a mention early on in the film that Caesar doesn’t have enough legions in Alexandria to deal effectively with Ptolemy’s forces. And we’re reminded that Caesar only has two legions in Alexandria, and everybody’s pretty sure that that’s not going to be enough to deal with Ptolemy’s army, particularly if Ptolemy takes a turn, which he does. And this whole situation is alleviated at a certain point by the arrival of the forces of Mithridates. And this is an exciting moment, and I immediately put an asterisk next to it, and I was like, Mithridates, what’s he doing over here? This is not where he belongs usually, what is going on historically? And this is where we start to get into the broader politics of like, what is the Roman Empire at this point in time? Because they have a lot of influence throughout the whole Mediterranean. And this guy was a real figure, and he did turn up in Alexandria and support Caesar in this moment. So all of this is lining up very nicely with our historical material, this particular Mithridates, because we need to emphasize that there were many of these people with this name. He was the illegitimate son of Mithridates, the fifth Euergetes, the king of Pontus, and he grew up in the Royal Court of Pontus, not only that, but his career is bumped along throughout his life by Caesar’s support. So these two know each other, and he secures a whole bunch of privileges. He’s in Rome from Caesar in the 50s BCE, so before Caesar goes on his like, really long jaunt to Gaul, Caesar is playing the political field and helping this guy out with furthering his career. So when Caesar needs some help in Alexandria. Mithridates comes along and plays at the table. He is able to bring a certain amount of armed forces with him, and that helps against Ptolemy the 13th. So he gets rewarded for his support. He ends up being given some additional territory around Pontus, which he goes back to, and all of this works out very nicely for him. So this sort of stray reference in the film to this figure from the east and Caesar, playing it up as like, you all told me, two legions wasn’t gonna be enough. I had a plan. Mithridates. I talked to him before I got here, everyone’s like, ohhh. And we get a sense that Caesar is politically savvy. Has anticipated everything that’s going to happen and already had a plan in place that he wasn’t revealing to people, because that’s the way he does business, and that’s how he gets to be in charge of stuff. We also have the moment where Caesar acknowledges Caesarion as his son.

Dr Rad 56:24
Absolutely.

Dr G 56:25
This is not something that we necessarily feel like we’re on a firm footing on in terms of the historical sources. Definitely, Cleopatra claims that this is Caesar’s child, and the dates do line up in the sense that he is in Egypt in 47 and when he leaves later that year, he’s there in 48-47 when he leaves to go back to Rome, Cleopatra does bear a child, and it would make sense that it would be his.

Dr Rad 57:04
Oh, I have no doubt that it is his child. It’s more that I don’t think he ever publicly acknowledged him as such.

Dr G 57:10
And we have this whole scene in this film where he does this public acknowledgement, which I think is fascinating, because then we get to cut almost immediately to a scene of the senators in Rome talking about Caesar and what’s happening in Egypt, because bad news travels fast. And I think what’s really interesting about that moment is that Octavian is already positioned as being a senator in Rome. He’s there, he’s in the crowd. He’s making his grumpy faces that will become so classic in this film, but we see sort of a compression of Octavian’s career to the point where he is already a powerful figure in Rome.

Dr Rad 57:56
Which doesn’t really add up with what we know.

Dr G 57:58
Yeah, in this very early 40s period where that is not possible. He won’t be old enough.

Dr Rad 58:06
Yeah

Dr G 58:07
Just not old enough. The maths is not mathing right now, but he’s there, and it works from a filmic perspective. So I can see why they’ve done that. But this whole situation also compresses what is some pretty intense movement around the Mediterranean for Julius Caesar, which the film doesn’t capture. The film kind of gives us a version of Julius Caesar’s movement as he leaves Greece after the Battle of Pharsalus, goes to Alexandria, stays there for ages, has a baby with Cleopatra, gets the word that he should take up the dictatorship in Rome, and at that point, goes back to Rome. And it’s a little bit more complicated than that, because he does a whole extra few trips in there. So after the Battle of Pharsalus, yes, he goes to Alexandria. By the time we get to mid-47 he sets off for Rome, and it’s later that month where Cleopatra has the son. So he’s not there when Caesarian is born. But he doesn’t go directly back to Rome. He goes via Asia Minor. So he confronts a guy known as Pharnaces the Second at a place called Zela. And it’s a shame to skip over this moment in the film, because this is Caesar’s fastest victory, and is the one that prompts the phrase that we get in Plutarch, “veni, vidi, vici”, I came, I saw, I conquered.

Dr Rad 59:38
Nice.

Dr G 59:40
That’s when he does it, and then he gets to Rome. Ultimately, in October of 47 doesn’t stay there for very long. Things are not great for Caesar in Rome. I mean, he’s in the middle of a civil war, which he’s a major player in. So he leaves in December, and he heads back to. Africa, not Egypt. So he’s heading south, basically, and that is where he’s recruiting new men. And in then, in early 46 of that year, he wins a victory at Thapus, which is in Carthaginian territory. And a little bit after that, Cato the Younger, one of his opponents commits suicide in Utica, also in Carthaginian territory. So it’s all of this activity which then leads Caesar back to Alexandria, and then because of his role in defeating some of his Roman opponents in North Africa, that’s when the dictatorship stuff starts to happen. So there’s discussions of that. And so we’ve got this real complexity of what’s going on for Julius Caesar at this point in time, which is really smoothed over by this film. As far as we can tell from the film, he’s hanging out with Cleopatra, having a great time defeating Ptolemy, being at her coronation, both crowning her and then kneeling, which I think is a great move on his part. But yeah, so there’s some things going on here that we don’t get to see in the film, and also some things that a little bit anachronistic, but I can see why they’ve done them.

Dr Rad 1:01:15
I completely agree with you in the sense that obviously there has been a gigantic compression. However, I guess this is where, if I was arguing from the film side of me, that is that you have to compress events often to make them fit into a film. And if we consider this to be the movie that it is Cleopatra, it’s about her, not about him. And so whilst, yes, it’s complicated, because obviously in trying to set her up in a particular way in the movie, they are obviously going against historical fact, and they are misrepresenting Caesar to a certain extent. I’m kind of like, what would you do? I mean, this film is already so long. How could you deal with all of this stuff that Caesar is up to and still be addressing what the film is meant to be about, which is Cleopatra’s life and relationships.

Dr G 1:02:08
Yeah, exactly. And we get a sense from our source material as well that what Julius Caesar really wanted to happen in Egypt is for the co-rule to go ahead as it was supposed to. He wasn’t really supposed to be taking sides, and didn’t really seem to want to until he had to. So the fact that he hesitates on the whole Ptolemy situation historically is not useful for this story at all, and positioning his immediate interest in Cleopatra at the forefront of what is going on here is an important device to give her the leverage, initially, that she needs in order to push herself into power as sole ruler. I mean, obviously, Cleopatra has many siblings, as you noted earlier. It’s not just Ptolemy the 13th. There are others who are also trying to find their way into sole rule, and those complexities are also glossed over. So there would be a way, I think, to create a Cleopatra film that really does focus intensely on the familial politics that she’s dealing with and how Julius Caesar becomes an instrument within that. But that’s not how this film navigates any of this situation.

Dr Rad 1:03:27
No and that’s where you come back to sort of what I was saying earlier in that this film was obviously chosen to essentially kick off with Caesar entering her life and Anthony exiting it with her. And so it is very much focused on what is Cleopatra up to whilst the Roman men are in the picture a lot of the time. However, I do understand that at the time that this movie was created, I feel like they would have been less comfortable about making a movie that started before that, because, let’s face it, even these days, even taking into account the wider range of source material that we have where, finally, you know, a lot of the Arabic sources about Cleopatra in translation and all of that kind of stuff. At the same time, we don’t know a huge amount about Cleopatra’s early life. A lot of what we can piece together about her early life we’re piecing together from the movements of her family members. What’s her dad doing? And what does that mean for Cleopatra? What are her brothers and sisters up to as they scheme to take the throne from their father? And so we we do know a few things, but there’s not a ton of insight into her life in this time period. So I can kind of understand filmmakers in that era before second wave feminism, or all of that kind of stuff, not perhaps feeling comfortable to do that, but it does obviously craft her in a particular way. However, I think the reason why I like the Cleopatra and Caesar part of the movie more is that I like the interplay between Rex Harrison’s Caesar and Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra. Obviously, it’s not perfect, but I do think they have kind of a fun dynamic. I mean, it’s not sexy at all, but then again, should it be? This is the thing, right? Caesar was an awful lot older, you know, several decades older than the teenaged Cleopatra when they first met. Most academics believe that whatever union these two had was largely political in nature. Sure, they might have got along. Okay, she was smart, he was smart. She’s a good politician. He’s a good politician. But at the end of the day, the reason that they are together is for political reasons. So I can kind of forgive the lack of sexual tension between Taylor and Harrison in this part of the movie.

Dr G 1:05:52
Yeah, it does make sense, and I think we start to see a shift in the way that they are operating in political alliance with each other. When this film shifts to Cleopatra in Rome, this sort of sets up a new dynamic for them, because up until this point, it’s been Julius Caesar in Alexandria, so he’s had to be sort of stepping his way carefully through the local politics, as well as dealing with whatever is being thrown at him from the Romans from afar. But now we see a whole reversal of this situation, with Julius Caesar in the place where he’s supposed to be, even though maybe it’s more tense than we would imagine, and Cleopatra is entering into a different political sphere. I love the arrival scene of Cleopatra in Rome. I think it’s one of the greatest, the greatest cinematic scenes of all time.

Dr Rad 1:06:58
And, not surprisingly, a nightmare to shoot by all testimony.

Dr G 1:07:03
Of course. I mean, it looks like it was done outdoors, so I can only imagine the weather. But also, Ceasarion is much older than he’s supposed to be. Realistically, he should have only just been born, but he’s a small child. Now, don’t worry about that. He’s five or six. Now, some time has passed, and we have this grand entrance where Cleopatra is gradually, slowly approaching the Roman Senate.

Dr Rad 1:07:33
She’s getting closer, hope she doesn’t fall.

Dr G 1:07:38
Is that a sphinx you brought with you? I really enjoy this whole moment, because there, there is an element of historicity about this. We do know that she goes to Rome to negotiate an alliance, becoming one of the “allied kings and friends of Rome”, so that’s essentially why she’s there. And it’s also the case that Caesar is now in a position where he’s effectively won his Civil War, and he’s able to conduct his great triumph. And we see a lot of white horses just putting it out there.

Dr Rad 1:08:20
Hmm controversial.

Dr G 1:08:21
Is it okay? That’s a reference for listeners to our narrative side of the show.

Dr Rad 1:08:28
That’s what I was going to say, to understand why we’re flagging that, see episodes on Camillus.

Dr G 1:08:33
Yes, see the Camillus episodes for why that might be a problem. Caesar is now in this position where he’s quite powerful in Rome, he has won this civil war. Cleopatra turning up is acceptable because there needs to be an alliance negotiated. She’s now the top dog in Egypt, so she’s got to get the paperwork sorted out for that. And we also know historically that this is when Caesar is starting to spend a lot of money on building programs, which includes a statue to Cleopatra. So it’s all sort of happening in the right kind of way. It’s not strictly historically accurate.

Dr Rad 1:09:10
Yeah, historically, we know that Caesar did set up a statue of Cleopatra in the Temple of Venus Genetrix, I believe.

Dr G 1:09:19
Correct. He did, and she’s placed her statue is slightly smaller than the goddess’s statue, but they’re next to each other, cute.

Dr Rad 1:09:29
Symbolism. I think this is perhaps a good point for us to perhaps start wrapping up. I think definitely the part this part of the movie, the Caesar and Cleopatra part, is the one that intrigues me most, in terms of the way that Cleopatra’s identity is conceived. I’m going to ignore slightly Julius Caesar’s just because, as I say, I feel like the main point of this movie is to make a movie about Cleopatra. And first of all, I think it is interesting that there actually is a nod to the fact that she is a blend of things, that she is not just one thing, because historically, Cleopatra is often conceived of in terms of her race and gender first and foremost, and those aspects of her identity and gender often reflect the context in which they are made and the anxieties of the time in which the film is made. And so we often do see quite orientalized versions of Cleopatra in very early conceptions of her, even going beyond film looking at artwork and that sort of thing her race is, is definitely something that shifts with the discourse around race at the time that something is made. And I think similar things go for the way that her gender is represented. You know, is she hyper feminine? Is she hyper sexualized? All of those kinds of things. I think what is interesting about this movie is that the whilst obviously the the way that she’s dressed, the makeup, and the way that she refers to herself often does play up the typical aspects, which is the highly Egyptianized version of her playing into this idea of her as a foreigner, which I might add, Dr, G, thanks to Augustus, he was the first one to really lay up her foreignness, because it was convenient to do so when they became enemies and in the propaganda war that he ended up fighting with, Mark Antony but I’m not going to get dragged into that.

Dr G 1:11:35
Save that for the next episode.

Dr Rad 1:11:38
Yeah. So we have her talking to Caesar about herself being, as, you know, as fertile as the Nile, that she will bear him many sons and and certainly with the this idea of her being, being Egypt, you know, and we definitely see lots of references to her being particularly tied up with the cult of Isis, and the goddess Isis, which, again, I actually don’t have a major problem with, because we know that that was also the case, and Isis is a deity who has particular connections, obviously, to Aphrodite. By this point in time, Aphrodite obviously having connections to Venus. It’s all coming together with Caesar’s connections with Venus as well. So all of that kind of stuff. I actually can appreciate why they’re doing it. But there are also these references to her Greekness, to the fact that she is part of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Caesar himself, when she is berating him for being a barbarian in her eyes, which, I think, again, is really interesting to see Cleopatra actually spinning that racial narrative back on Caesar. He starts talking about her being, you know, the product of, you know, inbred, incestuous generations. And so he’s talking about her family’s practices. He’s talking about her in connection with her relatives and her ancestry, which absolutely, very important to Cleopatra. We can’t conceive of her without the Ptolemaic dynasty. She’s absolutely drawing on what previous Cleopatras, previous Arsinoes, previous Berenices, have done in the hundreds of years that the Ptolemies have been ruling over Egypt. And we do also see these references to her Greekness, the fact that she is from this Macedonian background, which is really interesting, because you don’t generally get any reference to that being made in a film whatsoever. And whilst you do also get the sensualness of Cleopatra in these representations, and you obviously the way that she interacts with Caesar, you know, the whole rug thing when he comes to visit her, bath the way that she carefully stages it. You do also get to see Cleopatra as a mother, which is generally not something that is incorporated in many versions of Cleopatra, and I think that’s because as a society, we tend to conceive of motherhood as being inherently unsexy, that once you have had a kid, that’s it, that part of your life is over. The sexy part was meant to just lead you into motherhood, and now that you’re there, that’s it. It’s all about nappies and, you know, and bedtimes, nursery stories, and you don’t get to have both, whereas Cleopatra’s motherhood in this particular instance, it’s obviously conceived of as being very political and and you definitely see only a strengthening of that bond with her and Caesar through this child, particularly because we’re explicitly told that Calpurnia is barren and that Caesar doesn’t have any children through her. So I actually think it’s really interesting, the way it comes around, and even the fact that Cleopatra is very self conscious in the way that she stages that bath scene when Caesar comes to visit her, so that she’s having just, you know, like a regular kind of little, you know, spa day or whatever. And then when she hears Caesar is coming, she’s like, let’s put on a show. Romans will have certain expectations, and I can’t disappoint them. And so she’s deliberately playing up to that idea, which, in a way, I think is kind of making fun of us a little bit in the audience, in a kind of wink wink, nudge nudge sort of way, because let’s face it, we also have ideas about what we want to see from a Cleopatra movie, and often the makeup, the hairstyles, the costumes, all of that kind of stuff is is geared to meet our expectations, even though the filmmakers might know it’s not necessarily the most accurate version, they know that they need to deliver something that the audience is going to accept as this is Egypt on screen. This is what Cleopatra on screen looks like. And so they know they have to hit those classic moments. Of these are in Cleopatra meeting with the rug, Cleopatra’s baths.

Dr G 1:15:44
Is she bathing in milk? Check.

Dr Rad 1:15:49
Yeah. And in the next film, there also be those classic moments, like Cleopatra’s barge coming in to meet Antony. There are those classic moments that have to be hit because they have become the real standout moments of Cleopatra and so, yeah, I kind of think it’s fascinating the way that this film, actually, I feel, is playing a little bit more with her gender identity than is often given credit for.

Dr G 1:16:09
Hmm, yeah, we definitely get to see her opting in to building part of the myth, if you like. I think the bath scene that you’ve mentioned is a really good one, because she has been spying on Julius Caesar, so she has overheard the sorts of things that he’s been saying about her when she’s not around, so she knows exactly what he’s expecting to see in the same way that when he in another conversation that they have slightly earlier on, I think she does mention to Caesar that she knows that he went to the tomb of Alexander the Great. This is prior to them going together. And he was like, oh. It’s in that moment where he realizes that she has a spy network, and she has ways of finding out information, and she’s across far more than he may have previously given her credit for, and it’s in that sort of exchange where you seem like, oh, maybe she is a savvy political player. Maybe I should be paying attention to this side of things. And he kind of suspects that he would be spied on, but he’s not expecting the extent to which she has the information. And I think that’s interesting as well, because it does put her in the powerful position in that relationship, like, you’re on my territory. There’s nothing that happens around here that I don’t know about.

Dr Rad 1:17:35
Absolutely. And I think that the way that they position it, I kind of can appreciate because it is natural that Caesar has sometimes more insight into certain political phenomena because he is so much older he’s been around the block many, many times. And Cleopatra is meant to be a young woman at this point in time, sure, a young woman who’s managed to survive the Ptolemaic court, so let’s not underestimate her political savvy either. She’s already seen her father lose his throne because of her sister’s actions, and then her father take it back and execute her older sister. So I’m not trying to downplay the fact that Cleopatra obviously has grown up in perhaps even a more troubled environment than Julius Caesar has, but certainly I don’t mind him being the older statesman in in this particular movie, it’s done in a way that doesn’t ick me, like it does in the Vivien Leigh version of Cleopatra and Caesar, where it is, it is disgusting, the relationship between them at times, and it’s so patronizing, whereas in this case, I think you do get a Cleopatra who is very politically savvy. I mean, like the fact that she knows when there’s, like, an attempted assassination against her, you know, she’s actually sitting around being quite casual. She notices that her taster hasn’t properly taken care of something, and she just very calmly, is like, drink it, drink it again, and the woman dies, you know, because it was an assassination attempt. She does have that savvy, and she does give Caesar, you know, she does talk back to Caesar. She’s bold, and she shows her intelligence, but there are those moments sometimes when Caesar, obviously, can also bring in some, you know, some insight into a situation. So I do kind of like the dynamic, the fact that, you know, it is tit for tat. It’s playful, but in a way that isn’t disgusting, like in the Vivien Leigh version.

Dr G 1:19:26
And we also see, particularly when they’re in Rome, there’s a scene where Julius Caesar is in council with some of the other senators, and it seems like a fairly private moment, but Cleopatra is also present, and he starts to express what he really wants, and that is to be in charge of everything. And obviously this is a little bit dramatic, and not in keeping with what we know from the historical sources, but the fact that Cleopatra is present, and the fact that towards the end of that scene, Mark Antony accuses her of being the product of this change in Julius Caesar is an interesting sort of moment, because it does lean into this idea of, can a woman sort of prompt a man in his ambitions in a particular way, which is a very stereotypical kind of seductress vision. It’s a very Lady Macbeth kind of thing. But we’ve also just witnessed Julius Caesar off his own bat say these things, and nobody has prompted him, nobody has prompted him to say those things. He’s just gotten himself worked up, and he’s revealed something about his own truth that has made everybody in that room uncomfortable. She just happened to be there. Well, I think that’s interesting as well.

Dr Rad 1:19:26
Yeah, exactly No. I completely agree. It’s like, this is what the men are seeing, but they’re not really appreciating the whole picture, because it’s easy to blame the woman, which is absolutely what happened. Cleopatra cops a lot of the blame. I think actually, she’s kind of perfectly summed up in one of Julius Caesar’s lines to her back in that scene in front of Alexander’s sarcophagus, Caesar says to her, “you have a way of mixing politics and passion, but where does one start and the other end?” I think that is kind of how Cleopatra is operating. I mean, it is often seen as a, I suppose, a bit of an unfeminist thing to say that Cleopatra might have used sex in a political way, but maybe we can also say, well, these are also used sex in a political way, in this particular sense. And the advantage of being a woman, and I’m citing Dr Kara Cooney’s work on this, the advantage of being a woman is that you can solidify your relationship through sex. And a child, obviously, you could absolutely solidify any relationship through sex, no matter the gender of the participants, but in this day and age, biologically, it’s only possible to actually fuse that together in a child if you’re a man and woman. So in a way, that is potentially an advantage that Cleopatra has in dealing with these men. And it’s really nice to see a movie that actually allows that part to be included in the story, because, I say so often the focus is just on the sect, the romance, the passion, and they forget about the motherhood that is a key part of Cleopatra’s identity, particularly because Caesarion ends up being someone that Cleopatra promotes herself, as far as we can see with, like the Temple of Dendra and that sort of thing, as a kind of co-ruler. She’s obviously setting him up to take over the dynasty in the future, I would say. But one thing I would like to quickly highlight before we completely leave, and what reminded me about the bath scene. Elizabeth Taylor’s body attracts a lot of attention and commentary, both at the time and subsequently, because Elizabeth Taylor did notoriously fluctuate a lot in her weight during the filming of Cleopatra, and that’s partly because, as we’ve said, the filming goes on a lot longer than was intended. And look, she wasn’t well. She was going through a lot, which we’ll probably get into a little bit more later on, but certainly, her fluctuating weight has attracted a lot of attention, and that has also been, I think, subsumed into this idea of the excesses of Cleopatra in a way that is obviously not enjoyable, but it is also connected to the conditions that Elizabeth Taylor herself had on this particular film, which were record breaking at the time, particularly for a woman in Hollywood. Now, it’s not unusual for studios at the time to want to promote a movie by combining a little bit of the character with their actress, you know, having them become sort of one and the same. So it’s no wonder that Elizabeth Taylor has become so connected with this particular character that she played. And this is not the first time that this had happened to her. At the time that she was involved with Eddie Fisher and getting involved in, I was gonna say breaking up the marriage, but obviously it takes many people to break up a marriage at the time that she was involved in that triangle, let’s say, and I should perhaps say, that she was friends with Debbie Reynolds, by the way, by the time she was involved in this triangle with Eddie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds, and she was recovering from the very tragic death of the love of her life, Mike Todd, who had died in a plane crash very unexpectedly. And she apparently actually sort of saw Caesar in this movie as being like Mike Todd. So, yeah, Mike Todd, being her, her Caesar, basically. She had been in a movie called Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which is about a woman of loose morals, to put it in the time, the vocabulary of time seducing somebody else’s husband. So Elizabeth Taylor has has known this sort of treatment from Hollywood studios before, but her body the film itself, they all become sort of emblematic of the excesses of Hollywood, and that connects really well, obviously, with this idea that Cleopatra was supposed to be excessive. We have stories of her extravagance that are preserved to us, like the famous one from Pliny the Elder of her dissolving this amazing pearl in a glass of vinegar so that she can drink it and say she has drunk something insanely expensive that doesn’t seem to be possible physically. But those stories are very popular. If you look at portraiture of Cleopatra, often, pearls are a big symbol of hers, and so Elizabeth Taylor showing off her body in this particular bath scene has definitely attracted commentary because of the way that people have had no problems talking about her weight losses and gains throughout this movie, and the way that she sometimes has, you know, abundant cleavage showing, or she often has abundant cleavage showing in all of her costumes, which were tailor made for her by Irene Sharaff, one of the big designers in Hollywood. And I’m going to finish up by telling you a bit about her salary. Dr James,

Dr G 1:26:02
dr, because just a minute, I mean, her, her costumes are incredible. There are some. There are some. In particular, I’m just like, Oh, I wish I had a body that would look that good in a costume. That’s so, you know, the costume designer did an amazing job, I think. Oh, and she look,

Dr Rad 1:26:19
she look. She complained a little bit about the fact that she had to keep altering them, because Taylor’s weight did fluctuate, but she had 60 costumes. Elizabeth Taylor made it very clear that she planned to steal them all because she thought that they would. She actually could see that they were going to start a trend like the Taylor Cleopatra trend. In terms of the fashion. Apparently, Elizabeth Taylor also was allowed to sometimes do her own makeup. So some of those makeup looks might have actually been Elizabeth Taylor’s own kind of invention, which seems interesting, but she attracted a million dollar fee for this, and this was the first time that any actress had received such a salary from a studio. The way that this was broken down, it was meant to be about $125,000 a week in salary, as well as other expenses, such as $3,000 a week in living expenses. Plus her food was paid for, plus where she was staying was paid for, plus she received first class round trip airline tickets for any movie location shoots for herself, three other adults and her three children that she had at the time, she needed two Penthouse Suites at the Dorchester in London, a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud limousine at her disposal at all times. And also, as we’ve talked about, her production company was involved in the production of this film, so she was also benefiting from that, which meant that the movie had to be shot in Europe, not the USA, for tax reasons, she also made sure that the movie was going to be shot in Todd ao. Now, Todd-AO was something that she had inherited from her husband Mike Todd when he died, who had pioneered this particular widescreen technique. Now this was important because 20th Century Fox had their own widescreen technique called CinemaScope that was particularly famous, which means that she got royalties from the use of Todd-AO, and they couldn’t use CinemaScope, and it meant that the sets had to be built in a certain way, because that’s the way that widescreen works. You have to make sure that’s going to look a certain way on the screen. So she would end up making around $7 million from this particular movie. So even though she later bad mouthed it and said that she didn’t like her own performance, she certainly made a mint from it. And let’s face it, she wasn’t doing too badly when she entered she was already famous for being wealthy, for having had multiple marriages and love affairs and that sort of thing. So the fusion of her own identity with that of Cleopatra, the excesses of Hollywood and the studio system at the time, and the fact that those excesses seemingly lead to a downfall,

Dr G 1:29:06
like a little bit of life mirroring art. And you know, these things are all going together. I mean, the perfect casting for Cleopatra.

Dr Rad 1:29:15
I would think absolutely so. That perhaps seems like a good moment for us to wrap up. Dr G, as I predicted, this episode has become as bloated as the movie itself.

Dr G 1:29:28
It is time, dear listeners, for an intermission.

Dr Rad 1:29:34
We will be back to talk all about Cleopatra, 1963 and the second half of the movie with a focus on Richard Burton slash Mark Anthony, next time.

Dr G 1:29:49
Thank you for listening to this episode of the partial historians. You can find our sources sound credits and transcript in our show notes over partialhistorians.com. We offer a huge thank you to you, if you’re one of our illustrious Patreon supporters, if you enjoy the show, we’d love your support in a way that works for you. Leaving a nice review really makes our day. We are on Ko-Fi for one or ongoing donations or Patreon, of course, our latest book, Your Cheeky Guide to the Roman Empire, is published through Ulysses Press. It is full of stories that the Romans probably don’t want you to know about them. This book is packed with some of our favorite tales of the colorful history of ancient Rome. Treat yourself or an open minded friend to Rome’s glories, embarrassments and most salacious claims. With Your Cheeky Guide To the Roman Empire.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The post Special Episode – Cleopatra 1963 – Cleopatra and Caesar appeared first on The Partial Historians - Ancient Roman History with smart ladies.

In our latest special episode, we were positively tickled to be able to chat to Dr Jane Draycott about her latest historical biography Fulvia: The Woman who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome (published with Atlantic Books).

For the uninitiated, Fulvia is one of the more notorious characters from the Late Roman Republic. If you’ve heard of her, it is probably as the wife of Mark Antony – the one he first cheated on with Cleopatra. What an honour.

However, in this episode, you will get to hear why Dr Draycott thinks she is so much more than that. Join us to hear all about Fulvia’s other husbands, her many children and the rhetoric that destroyed her reputation.

Dr Jane Draycott is a historian and archaeologist and is currently Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests are extensive and include: displays of extraordinary bodies in the ancient world; the depiction of the ancient world in computer games; and domestic medical practice in ancient Rome. 

In 2023, Dr Draycott published Prosthetics and Assistive Technology in Ancient Greece and Rome with Cambridge University Press. 

2022 was a huge year for Dr Draycott in terms of publications! 

We know that you will be running out to get yourself a copy of Fulvia once you have heard the fascinating details shared in this episode.

And for keen listeners, rest assured that Dr Rad was keeping a tally throughout the interview of all of Augustus’ hideous crimes 🙂

Our music is provided by the wonderful Bettina Joy de Guzman.

Dr Rad 0:00
Welcome to a special episode of the partial historians today. We are joined by Dr Jane Draycott, who is a historian and archeologist and currently Lecturer in ancient history at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests are extensive and include displays of extraordinary bodies in the ancient world, the depiction of the ancient world in computer games and domestic medical practice in ancient Rome. In 2023 Dr Draycott published Prosthetics and Assistive Technology in Ancient Greece and Rome with Cambridge University Press. Now 2022 was a huge year for Dr Draycott in terms of publications. First, there was a co edited collection, Bodies of Evidence, Ancient anatomical Votives, Past, Present and Future with Routledge Then, there was a co edited volume, Women in Classical Video Games with Bloomsbury. Third, there was an edited volume, Women in Historical and Archeological Video Games with De Gruyter and fourth (and we’re already tired thinking about this much coming out all in one year) the biography Cleopatra’s Daughter, Egyptian princess, Roman Princess, African Queen Bloomsbury, which was all about Cleopatra Selene. So we are completely thrilled to be sitting down with Jane today to discuss her latest historical biography, Fulvia, the Woman who Broke all the Rules in Ancient Rome, which has been published with Atlantic books, Fulvia is one of the most fascinating women of the late Roman republic, very deserving of having a full length treatment. So we’re excited to get into the details, because she is rudely often overlooked for those. Julio Claudian hussies.

Dr G 2:00
hello and welcome to a brand new special episode of the partial historians. I am Dr G

Dr Rad 2:08
and I am Dr rad,

Dr G 2:10
and we are thrilled today to be sitting down with Jane Draycott to discuss her latest historical biography, fauvia, the woman who broke all the rules in ancient Rome. So Fulvia is one of the most fascinating women of the late Roman republic, so very deserving of having a full length treatment such as this one. And so we are very excited to get into all of the details. Welcome, Jane. Well,

Jane Draycott 2:42
hello. Thank you for having me. It

Dr G 2:45
is an absolute pleasure. It is a bit of a fan girl moment for me, because I love your work. And before we get too far into the nitty gritty details of Fulvia’s life, I’m wondering if you can tell us a little bit about what drew you to the study of Fulvia and what inspired you to write a biography about her different

Jane Draycott 3:07
ways I could try and answer this question, and I think all of them would be true in sort of some small measure. I mean, the first is that I suppose, as someone who has studied the Roman Republic and the early Roman imperial period for probably what, how do I do this about aging myself? And I’ve been teaching it for a long time as well. I’m a, sort of been broadly aware period, broadly aware of the historical characters in it. And to be honest, it’s never really been that interesting to me, because I’m more of a social historian. I’m not a political historian. I also really don’t find men that interesting. Sorry, male listeners, also

Dr G 3:53
ancient Rome,

Jane Draycott 3:55
yeah. So, so people, people like Cicero and Caesar. I’m just like and politics the same. I don’t really care about, you know, senatorial debates and that kind of stuff. I’m much more at the sort of from below sort of situation, you know, like, yes, okay, you’ve got the great men in Senate who are making all decisions. But what does that actually mean in day to day life for everybody else? And so I’ve never really paid a huge amount of attention to that sort of history. But when I wrote my first popular history book, Cleopatra’s daughter, and I focused on Cleopatra Selene And as part of that, I looked at Cleopatra and Antony and their relationship, and how Cleopatra Selene came to be, literally, I became sort of aware that there was a lot of other interesting stuff happening at that time. I mean, I teach a course on Cleopatra. I never really wanted to be someone who worked on or someone who people thought worked on Cleopatra, because it just seemed to be so obvious. You know, you’re sort of like, oh. You’re a woman, you’re a historian. Of course, you’re interested in Cleopatra because she’s, like, literally, the only you know, ancient woman who ever did anything interesting. And so you sort of, yeah, that’s exactly, that’s the reason. That is the that’s the reason why. But for me, because I worked on Greco Roman Egypt. That was my PhD, was on, you can’t really avoid Cleopatra. You can’t really avoid the sort of the end of Ptolemaic Egypt and the start of Rome in Egypt and everything that goes along with that. And if you work on sort of the late Republic, the Augustan Principate, you also can’t really ignore Antony and Octavian and the Second Triumvirate and that sort of thing. And so I guess I was looking for ways that I could approach this period from a different angle, an angle that I found personally interesting. Because I don’t, as I said, I don’t find men interesting. I certainly don’t find like male rivalry, you know, toxic masculinity, particularly interesting, either. And so cleopatraini was a way in, because she sort of breached Egypt and Rome and North Africa in the end. And there was a sort of a brief period where I touched on Fulvia, because, of course, Antony was married to Fulvia at the time that he met Cleopatra, and it did play into the perusing war and the sort of the the way that the the initial enmity between Antony and Octavian changed into this kind of rather fake, you know, bromance with with the Pact of Brundusium and the marriage of of Antony to Octavius sister’ Octavia. And so when I was looking for something to do for my next topic. And I did want to work on something female related, simply because I find, I find women interesting. I think that there, there is not so much about women, really, Roman women. I mean, if you go into the sort of the bookshop and you look at the shelves of the ancient history section, there is a lot of stuff about politicians like Caesar, military campaigns, about various different wars, and for women, you know, there are some things about the the judicallian empresses and stuff like that. But, and there’s loads about Cleopatra, inevitably, there’s a whole shelf of, there’s Tutankhamun and Cleopatra, that is the the Egypt section.

Dr G 7:25
That’s all you get people that’s all of Egypt,

Unknown Speaker 7:29
3000 years apart. But sure, whatever, you know. And so basically, I was sort of thinking about, Okay, well, what, what would be the logical thing to do here? And my agent and my editor, they actually said, Well, you know, what about this phobia character? She sounds quite interesting. And so I sort of thought right then, and I started, I started looking a little bit more because I came into it from, you know, she was married to Anthony, and she was the victim of a lot of sort of hostile invective. But when I read more about her, I was like, Oh, she actually, Anthony is the very end of her very interesting life. You know, he is her last husband. He is, he’s one small part of a much longer and more interesting life. Because that’s, that’s the other thing as well. It’s that ancient history is one of those funny things where people sort of pop up and suddenly, you know they’re 30 years old, or 40 years old, or whatever else, but you’ve never heard of them before because the ancient historiography just didn’t think they were interesting. That ancient writers don’t care about children. They don’t care about people’s early lives. They they only really care about once. Once they’re sort of adults and they are doing military or whatever sorts of things. And so I found that she was actually very interesting. She was very active. She there was a lot that could potentially be said about her, and it was also what she represents, as well as someone who is very literally on the point where the Republic dies and the Empire was born, and she’s right there. And she is, as I argue in the book towards the end, she is actually, I think we could see her as one of those individuals in history where there really is this kind of point where things could have gone very different ways. And she was right there, and she was involved in that, if she, if she hadn’t died, when she had died, and and things might have turned out quite differently. And obviously various people, I guess you could say all people are important, and all people have, you know, an effect, a ripple effect, what we do. But some people are a bit more important and a bit more ripple creating than others. And I think Fulvia was one of those people, and because she is a woman in this time, she’s not had as much attention as if she had been a man in the same situation. So think about Antony, for example, and how much attention he has got. I mean, even he has fallen victim to. Of being Caesar’s sidekick, you know, and Octavians, sort of, you know, the loser of the of the battle between them, and Cleopatra sidekick, too. Whereas thing Antony and his own right is very interesting. There is a lot that could be said, and it hasn’t been said because it’s been sort of covered over by other looking at other people or other events. And so I think we’ll, we can talk a little bit later, I suppose, about why Fulvia isn’t more widely known. I mean, people who study ancient history know about her because she’s, she’s one of the women of the late Republic. You know, along with Servilia and Caesar’s daughter, Julia and Cicero’s wife and daughter, that they we know who they were, and we know that they were important to these people in this period, but she hasn’t had that, that sort of very lavish popular history, TV, film, etc, treatment at all. So I think a lot of people don’t necessarily know her, but they know the period, and so doing a book about her allows them to approach the period in a different way, and see it from a different perspective, someone who’s not a consul or a general or a senator, but who is on the periphery of all of those things.

Dr Rad 11:11
I know it is crazy that there hasn’t been a movie about Fulvia when you actually think about how action packed her life seems to

Jane Draycott 11:20
be. It is. It is interesting. I mean, when you, when you think about the way that this period tends to show up on film, it’s pretty much always about Caesar. It’s, it’s, it’s following Caesar through his career and then to his assassination. And if it goes beyond that, the it then pivots to Cleopatra, when you, when you when you think of it like that, and the way that TV shows and films are sort of created primarily in a sort of by by by male creatives, the big the big budget ones that are seen as sort of epic. It’s primarily male directors, male writers, and it’s about men, male, male actors playing these male characters. And they don’t really have a lot of women in them, you know, if they have women, it is as the sort of the the love interest. And so if you’ve got, you’ve already got Cleopatra and she, she is sort of, literally every single sort of a woman you could possibly want rolled into one that you can put on film. And then as a foil, you’ve got Octavia, who is you the good girl, the lovely, kind, gentle, caring, Roman wife, Roman mother. And there’s no room for Fulvia there, because you’ve already got, you know, the ball buster and and the sort of the the vamp and the sort of the the kind of aggressive, power hungry, money hungry, whatever, woman in the form of Cleopatra. And so you can’t, you know, have two of those. I mean, this is why I think if there was a story of Mark Antony’s life and you, you would have to include Fulvia. And I think you could sufficient, if you want, if you cared to, you could differentiate full beer and Cleopatra very much. But in, in in TV and films, it’s like, well, another woman, another female character, you know, too confusing. Too many women here already. They’re just

Dr G 13:17
taking up too much space. Well,

Dr Rad 13:20
let’s think a little bit about this, because obviously one of the issues for a woman in ancient Rome, as opposed to someone like Cleopatra in ancient Egypt, in that they couldn’t really hold anything officially, in terms of political office. So I’m going to really embarrass you and quote you to yourself, a woman could not hold any sort of political or military office herself, yet she might exert influence upon those who could. So let’s talk a little bit about a different husband of Fulvia. How do we see this particular idea upheld when it comes to thinking about Fulvia’s first marriage to Clodius Pulcher, a person who probably also deserves his own movie because of the controversy he excited in his lifetime. And yet, where is it Hollywood? Where is it? You

Jane Draycott 14:07
know, it’s funny. Where you said you were going to quote my words back to me. I have the brain of a bird, so as soon as I finish something, I feel about

Dr Rad 14:16
it. I’m glad I’m not alone in that. So I was like,

Jane Draycott 14:19
it doesn’t embarrass me, because I’m like, Oh yeah, that’s good. Those are good words. Yes, I find I thank Clodius quite interesting, and for much the same reasons, actually, as several other people at this period, in that we do not we do not know what he looked like. We have no portrait of him. We do not have any thing from his perspective or anything else. Everything about him is is mediated through primarily Cicero, who obviously hated his guts and and sort of other people as well, who who found him rather problematic because of his his sort of when it comes to Fulvia’s marriage to him. I mean, the thing. We don’t really know very much about that at all. We know that happened because she is obviously involved in the sort of events surrounding Clodius’ death and the funeral and the riot and the trial of Milo. So that is where we hear about Fulvia for the very first time. So we don’t know when she was born, and we don’t know really much about her, her childhood. We can, we can sort of venture to reconstruct based on knowledge of who her parents were and what their situation was. And you know that she had two children with with Clodius, so she’s, you know, a relatively, relatively young as Roman girls women were when they first married to marry him, and she has this marriage, and these children, and what we what we know about their marriage is based on what Cicero tells us when he’s trying to blacken Clodius’ reputation, he tries to argue, in the ultimate act of victim blaming the man that got, you know, brutally murdered in the street and then run over by their horses and carriages and things like that. But it was all his own fault, because he actually, he was planning to murder Milo himself, but he severely, you know, underestimated how large Milo’s entourage was and how many, you know, gladiators with with lethal weapons would happen to be in it at that point in time. And so the thing that Cicero tried, that the smoking gun for Cicero is, is that clearly close was up to no good, because usually Fulvia went everywhere with him, and on that particular day she was not there. And why was she not there? This is suspicious. And so the interesting thing about that is, is like, Well, I mean, you could say a lot about Cicero’s attitude to women, including his own wives, but the idea that it’s weird for a Roman man to want to spend time with his wife.

Dr Rad 14:20
Gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.

Dr G 16:58
What is Roman masculinity?

Jane Draycott 17:00
is, I think this is interesting for us to think about from from Fulvia’s introduction to politics. I mean, we know that her own father was not really a political animal. He had a speech impairment, and so that might have been part of it. He just didn’t. He was just rich and that, well, that was fine, not everybody. I mean, this is the other thing about the Roman Republic. We get this sense, everybody’s constantly trying to be the Consul General. And actually, a lot of guys were just like, You know what? I’m going to enjoy traveling around the ancient Mediterranean. Enjoy my villas. I’m going to enjoy, you know, my my my philosophical works, etc. But her stepfather, her mother, her parents divorced, and her mother remarried someone who became a consul, and was was at this very point in the in the sort of late 60s. So she certainly had sort of access to politics, you know, with her, with her stepfather, the Consul, and it was through him, it’s, it’s thought that her marriage to Clodius was arranged because the pair of them were connected. And so I think that there’s something there that we can think about, that she, her marriage gives her sort of portray in into Roman politics and Roman populist politics. I mean, she, her three husbands, are all we could say populist politicians. They all hold the office of Tribune, so they all have a specific political position we, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it ideology, but, you know, they have certain ways of doing things, and so she is given, I would say I would see it as a introduction to this world, and this, this way of of potentially attempting to connect with the plebs, the the generally ordinary people, the extent to which any of The Roman populist politicians genuinely cared about the plebs. I cared about the plebs. I mean, we can, we can debate that. I think till the cows come home. It is actually

Dr Rad 18:48
probably something we should unpack for our audience, so our listeners would be very familiar with the idea that the tribune of the plebs is a troublesome person who is out there to make politics difficult for everybody. However, it’s a little different, because we’re in the 390s BCE, and this is much, much later. This is hundreds of years later. Perhaps we can quickly unpack the landscape of late Republican politics and this idea of the big clash that’s happening between those who are trying to rule through more populist measures and those who disdain such politics.

Jane Draycott 19:26
Disclaimer, I did say earlier, though I’m not, I’m not really one for the for the political history, but I do think it’s something that happens in this period. So what we see in the first century BCE is this this increasing dominance by individuals and they, they are obstructing political business for their own benefits. So we have Sulla, we have Marius. We have the first triumvirate of Caesar and Pompey, and Crassus ,Antony. We have Octavian, and they are all stepping outside of the system the way that it was designed. So they they are not holding power for the short periods of time that they are supposed to. They they extend and extend and extend their Imperium, and they make sure that their armies are loyal only to them, rather than to the state as a whole. And I mean, I sort of again, I think that I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s exactly the same as what’s happening today, but you can see why people would become, shall we say, dissatisfied and discontented with the political system that it is dominated by a handful of extremely wealthy individuals who do not really care about anything except themselves and sort of limited circle of other people, and are using all the they have their disposal. And these powers are considerable, not to make other people’s lives better, but to just enrich themselves, give themselves the the best assignments and things like that. So one of the things I find quite interesting about Caesar’s assassination is that there was this period where, when Caesar came back from Egypt from the civil wars, that there are apparently all these ideas that he had. And we hear about some of them in Suetonius and Plutarch, but he was going to alter the course of the Tiber, for example. And he’s going to do this because the Campus Martius, and then the part of Rome where the Tiber bends around, was prone to flooding horribly boggy and stagnant and unhealthy. And by changing the course of Tiber could actually be an improvement for people’s like the ordinary people’s lives in the city of Rome and other other initiatives like that. And so on the one hand, the the ancient historians are like, oh, you know, he thinks he’s a god. Make these big, enormous, sweeping changes to the way that things have always been, and we don’t like that. And for ordinary people, like, Well, my house isn’t going to flood anymore, and I’m not going to die of malaria. I think that’s pretty good. Yeah.

Dr G 21:52
I mean the time, it does have this terrible reputation,

Jane Draycott 21:55
when the when the so called liberators, Brutus and Cassius and all their cronies. They assassinated Caesar, and they just assumed that everybody would be as happy about it as they were, and the entire city just sort of looks at them, and they’re like, What did you do? Why did you do that? And we’re going to kill you. Run up to the capital, and they’re like, hide themselves in the temple. Because they’re just like, Oh, whoops. We didn’t have Canberra afterwards. We just thought everyone would be as happy about it as we are, because our senatorial dignity has been tarnished by, you know, Caesar clemency. And it’s like, yeah, that’s exactly what everyone else cared about. You know, you cared about your senatorial dignity, and not you know how they were going to eat and you know how they were going to sort of support their families and everything else?

Dr G 22:44
No, no. But I think it’s really interesting, because what it does is it sets up the idea that the politics of this period is really at a knife’s edge, like people are holding the extremities of their positions, whether they are coming from that tribunate position of I’m supposed to be upholding the will of the people in particular ways, or they’re coming from that more senatorial position of the consulship and those more rigorous prestige positions on the cursus honorum, everybody is heading towards great and greater extremity. And I think this actually flows in nicely into thinking about Fulvia’s reputation, because everybody is so on edge that everybody is willing to take the nth degree in the way that they pursue their opinions about topics and people. And she has an incredible reputation in the ancient sources. So I’m keen to know a little bit more about what are some of the big accusations that are leveled against her. So you’ve sort of foreshadowed Cicero a little bit, but I’m sure he’s not going to be the only one who comes up here.

Jane Draycott 23:54
So I think Cicero starts it to be perfectly honest. I mean, he it’s interesting the way that when he talks about Fulvia in relation to Clodius, he mentions her a couple of times in a very sort of detached way. He’s he’s talking more about Clodius than he is about her. And I think it’s interesting that 10 years or so later, when he’s talking about her in relation to Antony, he talks about her in a very different way, and how much of that is about phobia herself, and the way that her, her behavior has changed. That’s probably part of it is that, you know, back back in the day, when she was a sort of young, you know, early 20 something widow, there was only so much you could really say about her in public. And then towards the end, when, when she’s a mature woman, mother of five, and very much involved in in political and military business, he can say different things about her. And of course, the standard way that you go about directing sort of negative. Of invective, oratory, etcetera, towards your enemies as you is you criticize things like their masculinity. I mean, in some respects, nothing really much has changed. You know, you attack people based on certain characteristics. And one of those characteristics, this is where Antony gets attacked, first, over Fulvia, later, over Cleopatra. So Cicero in his Philippics, really. And so in some of his letters, I mean, they weren’t, they weren’t necessarily widely disseminated at the time. You know, you get from his his letters, this is what he does, actually think what he’s talking to his friends about, and he is criticizing the amount that Fulvia is involved in the business of running Rome, because Antony, he is away. He is He is off doing military things, first in the sort of the triangle period, when when there was the sort of the civil war against the the liberators, and then subsequently, when he is off in the east, sorting out the mess that the civil war left behind that so he’s not there. And so who is running things in his absence? Well, the person who always runs everything in the absence of the patio familias, and this is, this is not something new, really. When, when Cicero was in exile after his his consulship, who was running things for him, his wife Terentia, was running things she she was running her her estates, his estates. She was trying to deal with the consequences of his exile. She was trying to arrange marriage for their daughter, etc. And so Fulvia is is basically no different to any other Roman senatorial wife, because in this period, wives did not go on campaigns with their husbands. They did not go with them to their their provinces. When they were being a provincial governor, they stayed at home. And so while they were at home, they were running things in their husband’s absence. They were the ones that were seeing, you know, the the clients, and acting as patron and sort of doing that kind of thing. And so this is what Fulvia’s doing. She is She is basically acting in Antony’s place while Antony is away. And Cicero is not happy about this. I mean, he’s not happy about what Antony is doing, but he’s also not happy about the fact that Fulvia is is the means by which he’s doing it. Yeah. So, so the reason, then, that we we get such negative accounts of Fulvia is is partnered with what Cicero was writing at the time, and Cicero’s perspective, and also octavians perspective as well, with the poetry he wrote and the propaganda surrounding the perusing war. But also later than that, in 40 BCE, when Antony, and Octavian. Fulvia has died, conveniently, it must be said for both of them, and they form the Pact of Brundisium and Anthony marries Octavia. There is this agreement that the convenient and expedient thing to do, basically blame everything on Fulvia so that the two guys can wipe the slate clean, and they can make their alliance, and they can make the marriage, and they can enter a new era as as sort of brothers, not just brothers in arms, but actual brothers, because they’re linked now by marriage. And so that’s the second stage of it. Is this agreement that will blame everything on Fulvia. And then later than that, once Octavian is the last man standing, and he becomes Augustus. He spends the next, sort of 40 years of his life, and brain attempting to whitewash everything that he did earlier. And so in the in the progress of the process of him doing that, there are people that he ends up using to sort of hang all the bad stuff on. So, you know, the prescriptions, that’s not his fault. He was young, he was innocent, he was he was overruled by Anthony and Lepidus. And also Fulvia because, you know, she was adding, adding names to the prescriptions as well, and and so this is, I suppose it sort of crystallizes in the Augustan principled and then all of our latest sources who were drawing on this period as the history being written by the victors, that sort of thing. They are using those official stories. And so as time goes on, Fulvia becomes more and more and more of a villain, until we get to Cassius Dio who is the one with the really sort of lurid account of how she abused Cicero’s head. And Dio, he has, he has lots of he loves a little bit of color. I mean, his his descriptions of Cleopatra lying on her couch and attempting to seduce Octavian by showing him Caesar’s love letters and things that the weirdest seduction strategy you can imagine. You want

Dr Rad 29:33
to hear what got your great uncle going.

Jane Draycott 29:35
I know, like father, like son, you know, yeah.

Dr Rad 29:40
But the Romans, I mean, let’s face it, they do like that kind of stuff, right? They do like following in the footsteps of their fathers, not

Jane Draycott 29:47
as much as the Ptolemies, I think. Yeah.

Dr Rad 30:20
The interesting thing, I suppose, about this late Republican period is that there are quite a few women running around, seemingly violating these traditional standards of behavior, particularly those for women. And so you’ve got Julia the Elder, for example, Augustus, only biological child, who infamously ends up in exile because of her bad behavior. And of course, you also have to go back to the Clodii, Clodia Metelli. What is it that makes her different from them, like, How is her behavior and the way that she breaks the rules different to those sorts of women in some ways,

Jane Draycott 30:55
I don’t think it really is. It’s, it’s that she’s, she’s unlucky in that she is the one who is held up as as the sort of, the paragon of bad behavior, and through, through her links to, to Antony. So this is one of the interesting things about her, because, on the one hand, a lot of what she was doing, I don’t think was particularly different. And yes, I mean, potentially, she she was, she was breaking rules, in the sense of, you know, that whole thing about the the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, but she wasn’t doing anything that lots of other women weren’t also doing in this period, but the prominence that she comes to because of who it is that she happens to be married to, and The the fact that he is drawing so much criticism from from the person who I mean, if we if we didn’t have Cicero’s letters and his speeches, I think our view of the late Republic and the fall of the Republic would be quite different. And it is interesting that we have two separate accounts of the Capitol area and conspiracy and but from people who were there at the time, and the Cicero’s tells us one thing, and Salus tells us something different, or puts quite a different spin on it. And so, you know, it’s something that I think should be born in mind that the sources are hostile towards her, but the the source is hostile towards her, that the two, the two people who, the person who writes about this period is, is hostile towards her and her husband and her previous husband as well. Um, it’s also one of the reasons I think I don’t really have a problem with with Fulvia, supposedly, like enjoying the fact that that Cicero was was murdered because he’d been a thorn in her side for years. He had defended the man who had murdered her first husband and who had apparently planned to murder her son, the man who drove Antony out of out of Rome, and meant that she was being targeted and her other children were being targeted, and who were making very inflammatory speeches and writing about her. I mean, really, is it a bad thing that she was pleased that he was there? So, you know, thinking, oh

Dr Rad 33:07
yeah, Sister sounds like a jerk from her point of view, from her, from her perspective. And also remember

Jane Draycott 33:11
that Claudia had been her sister in law, and had probably been someone that she because she was older, she she was probably someone who she admired and, and, and thought was, was, yes, this is the kind of, the kind of life I want to lead, to be this sort of rich and influential woman with this great life, I kind of, I want some of that for myself. And so, you know, Cicero wrote the pro killio and destroyed, you know, Claudia’s reputation. So, so he had done a lot of wrong to her and the people that she loved, and even if she didn’t necessarily love them that much, they were still her family. They were still people that were associated with her. And so I don’t think it’s unreasonable for phobia to be very anti Cicero. And I think it’s more unreasonable for Cicero to be anti phobia, to be perfectly honest, because how much of it was his, his own personal sort of opinion of her, and how much of it was him using her as a way to get to other people. And that’s, you know, she’s collateral damage in his campaign against against Anthony. Yeah, that’s

Dr G 34:17
that’s not fair, definitely. And there’s this moment where, in the wake of the murder of Clodius, she is sometimes attributed as giving a public speech, which seems to be quite moving to the people of Rome. And I wonder if that’s where it started for Cicero, because Cicero has the task of defending the murderer, and all of a sudden, things are being swayed by somebody who ultimately is outside of the rhetorical tradition, or ought to be. She may have had theoretical training, but she’s not supposed to be good. At it, and she’s not supposed to be standing up and saying stuff like this in public, and effectively maybe showing him up. And so I wonder if that’s where Cicero started. He’s

Jane Draycott 35:13
chewing for some reason he finds plastic bags incredibly tasty, and obviously it’s not really something he should be hunting. But back to the question. I mean, this is, this is another example, actually, of Fulvia doing something that is not actually a bad thing for her to have done. So women were responsible for the funeral, or a lot of the sort of funerary rights. They were the ones who were supposed to, sort of, you know, prepare the deceased, and they were the ones who were supposed to mourn and, you know, wail and tear their hair, tear their skin, rend their clothes, etc. And so she’s not doing something that, or at least see the thing that she’s doing, the very basic kind of fundamental core of it is what she’s meant to be doing as a Roman woman who has who has been bereaved. It’s then how she is developing that, or how she is potentially steering that in the direction that she wants it to go. And yes, the direction that obviously other people like Cicero and Milo don’t want it to go. They don’t they don’t want people to feel bad for Clodius, you know, the husband and the father. They want people to think, oh yes, that that rabble rouser, he’s gone. That’s brilliant. And so I think this is something that we sort of see with her again and again, is that the things that she does are very sort of standard, traditional Roman Republican Woman things to do, but the way that she perhaps does them, the way that she expands them, the way that other people see them as as inconvenient. This is what draws the ire and that it’s possible to put this negative slant on it. Because perhaps, you know, she’s very high profile, she’s she’s very visible, she’s first. She’s She’s Clodius’ wife, and if she’s with him all the time, then people can see her. And then she’s Antony’s wife. And if she’s with him, or she’s with him when he’s when he’s around, and if she’s acting in his stead when he’s not, again, she’s very visible. She’s making herself visible because she needs to remind people of Antony. I mean, this is because, partly the the the one of the motivations for the Perusine war is that Antony is not around, and Octavian is attempting to woo the soldiers and the Veterans away from Antony by giving them like land that that has been promised to them and making him their patron. And so Fulvia, along with Antony’s Brother, don’t forget, and his brother, Lucius, who is Consul at that time. The pair of them are like, no, no, hang on. You know, Antony deserves to be involved in this. He deserves the credit for this. You you can’t do this. And cut him out of it completely. And so Fulvia is there to represent Antony. She’s got his sons, their sons with her, to represent the next generation. And this is the other thing I think that that is important to remember, is that she’s got five children. You know, she she is pretty much the ideal Roman wife, because she has produced children for all three of her husbands. She’s given all three of them a son. In Antony’s case, she gave

Dr G 38:19
them two. I mean, that’s incredible, good work. You know that is, that is peak Roman woman, right there.

Jane Draycott 38:26
I mean, she, she is married to her second husband, cheerio, for, like, literally a matter of months before he goes off to Africa and he leaves her with, you know, his his son. He’s his only son. So, you know she, she is she, she did better than Livia. She did better than Octavia. You know, Octavia had, like one, one boy out of about five children. Livia had had two sons with her first husband, but didn’t have any, any children at all with with Octavian. So she is actually the kind of woman that that Roman women in this period should be aspiring to be, because she is. She’s ticking all the boxes. I mean, this is what makes it so funny, really, that she and so sad, that she gets the criticism that she gets. Because realistically, she is doing that is expected of a Roman matron, and yet, because she’s doing it for the wrong people, it becomes something that that she, she loses all of the positives, and she, you know, the negatives are amplified.

Dr G 39:26
It sounds like some people might be jealous and are trying to ruin her reputation, but I think you’ve touched on the children, and this is a nice lead into thinking about them. What is fulvius legacy in terms of her children. Do we know anything about what happened to them?

Jane Draycott 39:44
Tha patchy nature of ancient Roman history is that we don’t know very much about people that we really should know about. And so one of the things that we don’t tend to know about is what children were doing, what happened to children. And and what you end up having to do is, if they don’t make it into the sort of literary, uh, sources of the period, you end up having to do sort of prospography with inscriptions and things like that to try and find out what happened to people. And so Fulvia has five children. She has a son and a daughter with with Clodius. And we know about the son because he is mentioned in the course of the sort of the trial of Milo, because there is this suggestion that Milo, after murdering Clodius, was going to go to the villa and murder the young the young boy, the young Claudius. Then we hear about him in a letter that Antony sends to Cicero some years later, when Anthony was married to Fulvia, and he is he’s close young Clodius or Claudius, and he seems to go by Claudius, his he’s a stepfather, and he’s sort of, essentially, he’s trying to get Cicero to just let it go with his sort of enmity with with Clodius, and sort of agree to kind of focus on the next generation. And at this time, Cicero is sort of sucking up to ants. He’s like, Yes, all right, then and then after that, what we hear about just just briefly in a later source, is that however much promise he had as a young man, he basically goes off the rails and sort of eats himself to death and falls into a life of dissipation. We have his funerary urn with with his sort of epitaph on it, and that allows us to sort of reconstruct his political career. So he has the standard cursus honorum political career, but because he’s having it under the Augustan principle, where everybody’s focused on the imperial family, we just don’t really hear anything about it. So he has what seems to be a sort of a normal senatorial life in this period. And that’s that’s basically it. Her daughter Claudia, after she’s divorced by Octavian we don’t hear anything about her again. And so possibly, possibly she died, possibly She remarried, and just had, you know, again, the standard Roman life of marriage, children, etc, with the three younger boys. That’s where things I think are really sad. And this is, this is one of the things that doesn’t get so much attention. So Young Curio, he goes to Egypt with Antony and Antony’s and Fulvia’s oldest son, Antyllus. So clearly, Antony has has been this boy’s father. He’s been married to Fulvia since, since he was a baby. He was Curio’s, one of curious closest friends. So I think it’s quite nice that Antony sort of stepped in and married Fulvia and sort of took on her three prior children. But this is, this is very bad for this young man, because he’s he is around 18 when the invasion of Egypt happens, and Octavian murders him. He comes to a sticky end because of who his his stepfather and his mother are. The same thing happens to Antyllus. Antyllus is murdered, and he is even younger. He’s 16 or so when, when he’s murdered in Egypt. So that’s two of Fulvia’ssons gone around about the same time. Antyllus gets more attention because he’s included in the Plutarch Life of Antony, which is where we get most of our details of this at the end of this period in Egypt from. And then Curio is just mentioned briefly in a different source. And then the one that everybody, I think knows the most about is Ulus, the youngest, and he is raised by Octavia. So he he is only a bottler, perhaps when Fulvia dies in 40 and so he ends up going into Octavius household during her marriage to Antony. And so he probably didn’t have any memories of his father, or very, very few memories of his father, because Antony spent most of his his, you know, the next sort of 10 years between, between the marriage to Octavia and his death, off in Egypt or off in the east or trying to campaign against papius. So, so Iullus doesn’t really have any memories of his mother or his father. He’s been raised by Octavia, and he again, like his oldest brother, probably as Clodius Pulcher. He he goes off the cursus honorum. He reaches the point of consul. He’s never allowed to command an army or govern a province. He’s kept very close to to Augustus in Rome. And then he gets tangled up with Julia and her intrigues and her adulteries. And he, he is forced to fall on his sword over that. And so, except for, well, we don’t know what happened to Claudia, the daughter, but the four boys all come to quite sad, pathetic ends in one way or another, and three of them die by violence at the hands or or sort of indirectly, at the hands of Octavian or Augustus, and so I don’t know how much of that we can attribute to his feelings about Fulvia. He doesn’t seem to have liked her very much. His poetry on the subject and the way that he campaigns against her in the in the Perusine War, that seems to imply that he’s quite anti Fulvia, possibly because she represents all the things about women that he really doesn’t like, but that it’s probably part of it that he wants to make sure that there is literally nothing left of Fulvia or Antony in Rome that can be a problem for him during his his reign.

Dr Rad 45:17
It is wild, though, how those families keep intertwining. I mean, the fact that Fulvia could have been octavians mother in law. I mean, was who she

Jane Draycott 45:26
was, yes, yeah. And Claudia had been a little bit older, and if she had had a child with Octavian, you know, again, it’s these things. Of things might have been quite different, because Octavian only has Julia with with his his second wife, scribonia, and she, she becomes very important for the Julio-Claudian dynasty, because she is, she’s literally the, the only sort of direct line of descent from from Octavian, as opposed to Octavia.

Dr Rad 45:56
absolutely crazy. And then for one of their children to be so enmeshed in Julia, he’s one biological child’s downfall. It is crazy. So Fulvia obviously lived at a time that we very much see now looking back as a crossroads for Rome, that tipping point from Republic to Empire, and given that the Romans were a big fan of the exemplar when they were writing their histories. So these examples of how to live your life or how not to live your life, can you perhaps explain what Fulvia’s potential legacy would have been for people living under Octavian slash, Augustus and then into the Julio Claudian dynasty? This

Jane Draycott 46:37
is a really interesting thing to think about, because there is this question of how long were people’s memories. And one of the things that Tacitus actually he when he opens the the Annals, he opens it with the death of Augustus in in 14. And one of the things he talks about is how, basically, because Augustus had lived so long, you know, he was, he was 74 or so when he died. And so he had been in control of the the the Empire, really, for 44 years, and had plenty of time to sort of rewrite history to his liking. And so he talks about the fact that one of the reasons that Augustus is able to do this is because literally, everybody else was dead, and nobody, nobody alive, remembered what it was like. Or very few people remembered what it was like to live under, well, a functioning Republic. I mean, some of them did remember what it was like to live in in sort of times of horrific Civil War where people were being murdered in the streets, and their bodies threw in the Tiber and prescribed and all the rest of it. And so he’s sort of like they were seduced by the promise of peace. And like, Oh yeah, Tacitus, that’s terrible. You know this idea that you might actually be able to live your life and grow to old age and see your children grow up and not be in danger of assassination or or street gangs or conscription or whatever else. Yeah, so bad

Dr Rad 48:05
to not have their father brutally murdered in the street and have to start a riot,

Jane Draycott 48:09
exactly. And so with the question of Fulvia, the the interesting thing is, is that how, how long did people remember her for bearing in mind? She was sort of replaced by Octavia. She was replaced by Cleopatra, and there were attempts made to present Roman women in a different way. So part of octavians strategy was to highlight Octavia, to highlight Livia, and to present them as these paragons of Roman womanhood, and to give them the same sort of legal and sort of religious protection that the best virgins and the Caribbeans had to make it make them sacrosanct, so that they couldn’t be used against him the way that he had used Fulvia and Cleopatra against Antony. And so there is this. This is a concerted attempt through this period to sort of rebrand Roman women, I suppose. I mean we have, we have the Augustan or the sort of moral legislation, the attempts to get both women and men married and having babies for the Roman state, and the attempts to keep the senatorial and equestrian orders separate from the lower orders and stop people marrying foreigners and non citizens and things like that. So there is this attempt being made to tell Roman women that you you should be like this. You should behave like this. In the material record, we see things like the araparius and all of the the coins and the cameos that present this image of, you know, woman, babies, etc. And I mean, we know with the times that we’re living through that it’s not that easy that you the state, can tell people all day long that you should get married, you should have children, you should behave like this, and plenty of people can say no, thank you. You know, get get your your nose out of my private life. Get out of my bedroom. I’m going to do what I want to do. Do. And we know that he wasn’t so successful because he kept having to reintroduce more moral legislation to try and get people behaving the way he wanted them to. So Fulvia is also she is mentioned in the histories as as time goes on. She’s always being mentioned alongside Antony and Cleopatra and everything else. So clearly people remembered her, and they they had a certain amount of information about her. And the thing that I think is is really thought provoking, is the way that the women of the imperial family behave in in the sort of the next few decades. So you have Octavia and Livia, for example, who are trying very hard to be as public as they can be, but in very sort of specific ways. You know, they’re presenting themselves as wives and mothers, and they’re quite successful at that. They it’s the where it starts to fall down is this sort of subsequent generation. So you see Julia the Elder and Julia the Younger being really quite stupid

Speaker 1 51:05
with their adulteries and their conspiracies. It’s like, really very risky you’re doing this so, you know, okay,

Jane Draycott 51:13
and then you have Agrippina the elder and Agrippina the younger and Messalina as well. And there are elements of the things that they do. They the accusations made against them, the allegations about their behavior. These are quite similar to Fulvia you have this so Agrippina and Messalina are both accused of having people killed so that they can seize their property. So this, this seems to be this, this sort of standard accusation against women. Women are greedy and they covet things that they’ve got no business coveting. And good men find themselves coming to bad ends because these women want their villas and want their gardens I mean, it’s funny, really, because one of the one of the things I think is quite amusing about Fulvia is that she’s never accused of wanting, you know, jewelry and pretty dresses and all the stuff that women are supposed to want. She she’s accused of wanting money and property and power and and diplomatic, you know, advantage and things, which I think is great,

Dr Rad 52:12
which is similar to Agrippina, isn’t it? Because when Nero tries to bribe her with dresses, she’s like, nooo, thank you!

Dr G 52:19
Not my flavor, actually. And

Jane Draycott 52:21
I mean that that in itself, gives us a perspective on Roman women, that that, you know, that that we all of the sort of the sum tree legislation and things like that, and the the all the writing about the cosmetics and the perfume and the the silk and the things that that women are spending their husband’s money on. It’s like, well, yeah, some women, maybe not all women. You know, some women were like, I’ve got my own jewelry and my own silk man, because my thanks. I want some other stuff. I want the stuff that actually matters. But, but, yeah, so. And we see with acropony The elder the the her involvement in Germanicus is military campaigns, the fact that she goes with him, the fact that she she uses their marriage and their children in the camp, and is able to transfer some of the troops loyalty from Germanicus to her and to her children, particularly Caligula, who would, of course, grow up to sort of try and take advantage of that. And so it is this all, is this all coincidental? Are these women just doing this stuff with no knowledge of Fulvia, or no interest in Fulvia, or was there a sort of a slightly more calculated approach to it, that just as as I said earlier, she she was actually a pretty good Roman wife and mother. She was doing the things that Roman wives and mothers are expected to do, and so were women looking to her and thinking, Oh, yes, I will do some of that. But then they too, found that there is clearly a very fine, almost invisible line as to what it’s okay to do and what it’s not okay to do, and especially for high profile women who are very visible to to members of the public, like the imperial family, they they seem to have have difficulty. I mean, Livia has difficulty. It’s one thing. During the the reign of Augustus, she seems to get away with literally everything that she wants to do. But when it comes to the reign of Tiberius, he is like no mother go away. You know, I’m a 50 year old man. I’m not having you tell me what to be involved in my reign. And he, he does very much try and put the brakes on everything that Augustus had apparently been happy enough with her doing. And so, yeah, when women can go so far, but when they, when they reach that invisible fine

Dr G 54:42
line, well, it seems like the fine, the fine line might just be being on the more powerful side, essentially, because what Agrippina the elder is doing is actually very similar to what Fulvia is doing. As you say, and you. For both of them, it works out quite differently, because one is in the imperial family at that stage, and obviously they’re holding all of the cards. And Fulvia is not furious.

Jane Draycott 55:11
Is not happy about Agrippa and the elder either. I mean, he is very angry about her behavior, and is treats her very brutally after the death of Germanicus. So she she is sort of, she manages, for a little while, while Germanicus is alive, she manages to sort of thread this needle. But once he’s gone and she’s lost her male protector, then it is a different matter. She is much more vulnerable. He refuses to allow her to remarry, because he he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to face any more influential men or any more Imperial babies. And this is, this is something that Fulvia, I mean, she, she had experienced the death of two husbands that left her vulnerable, but she always had another husband that she she could then turn to to protect her and and the same thing with with Livia, for example, she she is protected during the life of her husband, but then once her husband is gone, she she has lost her plausible deniability. As long as your husband is letting you do things, it’s fine. And then as soon as he’s He’s gone, he’s not doing it. Other people have got things they want to say about it, even your son, or your horrible son,

Dr G 56:20
really interesting to think about, isn’t it, this whole period is just such a fascinating moment in Rome’s history, and we’re so lucky to have so many sources. I think this is part of how we get to that sense of it being interesting, because I’m sure every period of history has the capacity to be as interesting. And it’s just we’re lacking source material, but

Jane Draycott 56:41
we’re not looking in that. We’re not looking at the right direction either. We’re not looking at the right people. I mean, one of the things that, and I sort of, I didn’t think this initially, when I was researching formula and I was writing the book, by the end of it, I came to realize that one of, one of the sort of the really interesting things about her is how important she was in the sense of what happened when she was no longer around. You know, it’s, it’s like, you you don’t necessarily realize that someone is the linchpin of your social group until they’re not there anymore, and then suddenly no one, no one’s getting together. No, no. You know nothing’s happening. And you’re like, I didn’t realize that that person was the heart of the group, but they clearly are, because without them, we’re terrible. But with Fulvia, I think the really interesting thing to think about is, if she hadn’t died in 40 when she did, I think Roman history would have been quite different.

Dr Rad 57:32
It is so frustrating that she died at that moment. It’s

Jane Draycott 57:35
not that she I mean, she was one of these sort of quite dynamic, mover and shaker type people, but it was as much where she was situated and all of her connections that that was part of that. And so, so if she hadn’t died in 40 she, let’s assume that she had stayed married to Antony. And even if she hadn’t stayed married to Antony, she was still the mother of his children and the the mother of his political heirs in Rome. And so while he was away in the 30s in Parthia or attempting to take water Parthia and in Egypt and everything else, he didn’t have anyone protecting him in Rome anymore. His brother Lucius had gone to Spain and seems to have just died because he didn’t. He’s not really featured again after the Peruvian war. And so Fulvia was not in Rome on the spot to protect him. And so Octavian is able to completely demolish his reputation and do things like the will that may or may not have been fake that he opens and says, Oh, Antony wants to be you know, he wants to move Rome to Egypt. He wants to be buried with Cleopatra. He wants to leave all of his money, etc, to his Egyptian children, and so on so forth. If Fulvia had been around, that would not have happened like Antony’s will. Would have been different if that even was Anthony’s will. She had four young boys growing up to be Roman politicians, all of whom were part of very influential Roman families. So she had her oldest son, Publius Clodius Pulcher she had her second son, Gaius Scribonius Curio, and then she had her two sons of Antony. And so those four boys, growing up would have been able to basically take control of the Senate and have have a lot to say in Antony’s defense. In Rome, they would have been able to run things to Antony’s advantage, and then at the same time with if Antony had been able to put all of his his Eastern children into the positions that he and Cleopatra had planned for them, he already had. He had his his eldest child, Antonia, was already married into an Eastern royal family, and the four, those four children sort of ruling different parts of Near East, with Fulvia’s four sons ruling the Roman West. I mean, that’s the thing that I think is really interesting, what the world would have looked like, and when, when people would try and speculate on what would have happened if, if Antony and Cleopatra had won the Battle of Actium, how would his people look different things? Never think about that. They think more in the sense of Oh, Antony’s in Egypt, and the Roman Empire moves its focus to the east and and things like. It’s like, yes, but think about what’s going on, what would be going on in Rome at that point. And Antony would dominate Rome as well in the traditional Roman way. It wouldn’t have been Oh. Rome would become Egyptian and go Eastern. There would have been highly placed Romans in the Roman political system making sure that Rome sort of ticked over as well. And, and that is something that, because I hadn’t really thought about that until I came to the end of a writing book, and I was like, oh my god, this is, this is really, potentially this fascinating sort of counterfactual history element of it. And of course, the Julio Claudian dynasty as we know it, would not have existed, because Octavius daughters, Antonia Major and Minor, would never have been born. And therefore, the only thing Augustus really had going to him without his Julia and her, her children with with Marcellus or Agrippa and well, the three boys die young, and the girls have have troubles with their own. So he Julio-Claudian dynasty would would be, would have been very different as well, assuming it had even, you know, come to be. So Fulvia is the sort of at the center of this very interesting, sort of complex network of cause and effect. And if you take her away, or you put her back in, you know, she, she, it really is. These are, these are turning points for world

Speaker 2 1:01:28
history. Absolutely. Octavia obviously has completely conflicted loyalties between Antony and Octavian. In that decade, she’s hardly going to do the same sort of job that Fulvia would have done if she had lived and remained his wife. And

Jane Draycott 1:01:45
she does, she does try. And then she she does, apparently, voice, you know that it’s very hard to be the wife of one imperator and the sister of another imperator, it’s like, oh yeah, cry me a river, Octavia. But, I mean, she starts to try. She tries to support Anthony as much as she can,

Dr Rad 1:02:01
totally but that’s exactly it. It’s still not the same, because Fulvia just doesn’t have that, you know, that obligation to Octavian at all in spite of their brief familial relationship,

Jane Draycott 1:02:15
he might have been quite keen to remarry her daughter. Then Julia wouldn’t have been born, and potentially he’d have had other so. So yes, it’s for people who dismiss Roman women as not being important because they don’t hold the political or military offices. And why do we need women’s history? Oh, it’s just work, nonsense, etc. Well, individual women can actually be quite significant, whether it’s because of the things that they say and do, or whether it’s simply because of the person that they are in the position that they’re in, they can have quite far reaching effects on on things and then. So that’s that’s another, another reason, I suppose, why I wanted to sort of write this book and write books like this that sort of put the women back in, because women are 50% or slightly more of the population, and they, I mean this all of our important family period. I mean, I went once sitting down and trying to work out Roman prospography In this period. It, oh, my God, it brings on a migraine. Once you start doing that, you realize marriage was really important. And we hear about the men because it’s the men that have the public facing life and the literary and material and documentary evidence for them, but they are marrying women from other families, and they are creating links. And when you think about it, if you once you’ve traced all the family trees, you realize that the fall of the Republic was basically an extended family squabble. It

Dr Rad 1:03:53
does increasingly feel that way, especially when you consider that. As you pointed out, Antony’s children with Octavia become key players and makers of the Julio Claudian dynasty, Antonia Maior and Minor, without them, you don’t have the members of the Julio Claudian family.

Jane Draycott 1:04:12
But even even beyond that, outside of our specific sort of Fulvia, Anthony, Octavia, Octavian sort of situation, Fulvia was related to Caesar through marriage. You have, you have families like the she was, well, she was related to the Clodii by marriage. And they were related all the they were all married to the girls. Were all married to important members of individual families and things so, so really, what we’re seeing in the Roman Republic, because the Roman senatorial class is so basically incestuous. I mean, they’re all marrying each other cousins are marrying second cousins and so on so forth. So they are fighting amongst themselves and their own families and their own extended families. And it’s sort of, it’s almost like, you know, someone. Those situations where, at the reading of the Will all of the descendants start fighting over who gets the biggest share of it? And that is basically what the fall of the Republic is. It’s all these, all these related people, related by blood, related by marriage, fighting over who gets to have the biggest share. And they’re not. They’re not very good at sharing. It’s a zero sum game – one Person has to come out on top, and that means everybody else has to lose. And that’s why we find ourselves in this situation.

Dr G 1:05:30
Roman history summed up so well,

Dr Rad 1:05:33
the Romans not very good at sharing,

Dr G 1:05:36
not very good at sharing and ruining everything in the process,

Jane Draycott 1:05:40
just like any elite, really, if we, if we think about it, any any modern country, you know, they’re sucking up all of the money and all of the resources, and they’re wondering why all of the sort of people beneath them are getting progressively more annoyed about sex.

Dr G 1:05:57
Well, thank you, Jane, so much for coming on the show. It has been excellent to have a good old chat about Fulvia, the late Republic, how all of these pieces might be fitting together with what’s going on with women. Where are they? What are they up to, and and how is this influencing the very nature of history itself. And I love your consideration of the counterfactual history here as well, and Fulvia’s central positioning as this kind of linchpin person that is really holding different types of potential rooms together within herself, so the way she decides to act is pivotal, not just for her, but for everything that it influences the moment of her death is obviously pivotal, as well, as you’ve noted. And I would encourage anybody who is interested to seek out your book and to delve into the details even further. So thank you so much for your time. Thank you for having me, and

Speaker 2 1:07:03
clearly we’re sending out the message to Hollywood that it’s a mystery that Fulvia has been so overlooked in popular culture given her importance, as demonstrated by this chat. Yes, because,

Jane Draycott 1:07:14
because what Hollywood is doing currently is is green lighting, lots of stories about complex women and overlooked minorities.

Dr Rad 1:07:33
Thank you for listening to this special episode of the partial historians. You can find our sources sound credits and an automated transcript in our show notes at http://www.partialhistorians.com Our music is by Bettina Joy De Guzman. You too can support our show and help us to produce more fascinating content about the ancient world by becoming a Patreon. In return, you receive exclusive early access to our special episodes, just like this one. However, if you lost all your money betting on a chariot race, please just tell someone about the show or give us a five star review. Until next time we are yours in ancient Rome.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The post Special Episode – Fulvia with Dr Jane Draycott appeared first on The Partial Historians - Ancient Roman History with smart ladies.

Welcome to another cheeky preview from our new book, Your Cheeky Guide to the Roman Empire.

This chapter is a bit of a contrast to our first one on Spartacus. We turn from a rebel from the lowest ranks of society to one from the elite. We are journeying from the Roman Republic to the mid-Empire. Aaaaand we are travelling from Italy to the provinces.

For our next instalment, we tell you the tale of Queen Zenobia of Palmyra. Cleopatra reborn!

With a Rebel Yell – Zenobia’s Winning Strategy

Queen Zenobia addressing her soldiers by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

We hope that you enjoy it and would love to hear your thoughts.

If you haven’t pre-ordered a copy yet and you like the sound of it,  the details for the book can be found on our website.

Music by Bettina Joy de Guzman.

The post Another Cheeky Preview – With a Rebel Yell – Zenobia’s Winning Strategy appeared first on The Partial Historians - Ancient Roman History with smart ladies.

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.

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:

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.

Our music was composed by Bettina Joy de Guzman.

Lightly 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 - Ancient Roman History with smart ladies.

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

And 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:

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)

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.

Thanks to the glorious Bettina Joy de Guzman for our theme music.

Generated 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. Huemoeller wishes to make a correction to what she said during the recording: people of all genders, not only women, are being stripped of reproductive autonomy in the US.]

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 - Ancient Roman History with smart ladies.

Medea is one of the most memorable characters in Greek mythology. She is powerful, has associations with magic, and capable of taking drastic action. Most people are familiar with the version of Medea crafted by the Athenian playwright Euripides, but today we turn to a lesser known interpretation.

Special Episode – Seneca’s Medea with MythTake

A quick synopsis may be handy before diving into the episode!

Medea is a semi-divine princess of Colchis (a land on the shores of the Black Sea). As a young woman, Medea fell in love with Jason while he is on his quest for the Golden Fleece. Medea used her gifts to aid Jason in completing the impossible tasks set by her father, King Aeëtes. Medea helped Jason to yoke the fiery bulls, win a competition with the giants, and slay the dragon that guarded the Fleece. In her love for Jason, she defied her father and decides to run away with him to Greece. To escape unnoticed from Cholcis, Medea kills her brother to distract her father. From there Jason and Medea travelled together to meet Pelias, king of Iolcus, who had agreed to give Jason his throne if he returned with the Fleece. But when Pelias saw the Fleece he refused to fulfil the agreement. Jason and Medea then worked together to bring about the downfall of Pelias, but needed to flee Iolcus after suspicion falls upon them. They finally settled in Corinth and have two sons.

So Jason and Medea are bound together, not only by their children and their marriage, but by acts of violence which were often planned together but executed by Medea with her semi-divine skills and pharmaka (knowledge of herbs and drugs). A healthy relationship, this is not!

Jump ahead a few years and, in order to climb the political ladder, Jason decides to leave his marriage with Medea to marry Creusa the daughter of King Kreon of Thebes. The play opens with Medea cursing both Creusa and Kreon and seeking time to prepare for her exile. Kreon grants Medea one day before she is exiled which she immediately uses to plan her revenge on Jason for leaving her after everything they’ve been through together.

She laces a stunning robe with poison and sends it to Creusa as a gift for her wedding with Jason. The Chorus describe Medea’s rage and frustration in great detail and pray to the gods that Jason is spared from her vengeance. But Medea’s pharmaka is extensive and the robe kills Creusa by catching on fire when she puts it on. Kreon tries to save his daughter but he catches on fire too when he touches the robe. But in the wake of their deaths, Medea does not feel any better; her need for vengeance remains. Medea resolves to sacrifice their children in a final act to help Jason understand the depth of pain he has caused by leaving her. This blood sacrifice seems to transform her and to reveal her divine form, as Medea escapes in a dragon chariot while she throws the bodies of the boys down to Jason. Jason observes that there are no gods because otherwise such acts would be impossible.

Seneca the Younger was a Stoic philosopher who witnessed a lot of the ups and downs of the Julio-Claudian emperors during his lifetime. After a couple of trips into exile, Seneca ended up rising to a position of immense influence. He was appointed tutor of Nero, the son of Agrippina the Younger and adopted heir of her husband, the emperor Claudius. When Nero succeeded Claudius, Seneca experienced a career high in the early years of his reign. However, stability was not a feature of Nero’s rule, and Seneca was eventually forced to commit suicide by his former pupil. As we consider Seneca’s Medea, it’s worth considering how his context influenced his work. Certainly he has plenty of strong women to draw upon from his own experience and the recent politics of ancient Rome!

If there’s two things that we love, it’s women in the ancient world and the Julio-Claudian period in Rome. So understandably, we jumped at the chance to talk to Alison Innes and Darrin Sunstrum from the MythTake podcast about Seneca the Younger’s interpretation of Medea. 

What did this man make of Medea’s story? Tune in to find out!

Thanks as always to our Patreon and Ko-fi supporters.

Thanks to the lovely Bettina Joy de Guzman for our theme music.

Frederick Sandys between 1866 and 1868. Medea
Medea has a connection with pharmaka and this idea sets up her early interaction with Jason and has numerous consequences.

John Downman 1750-1824 An Episode from the Story of Jason and Medea.
Medea ascends to a higher plane after her suffering and Jason is left to bear the consequences of his choices.

John William Waterhouse 1907. Jason and Medea
Jason watches on as Medea utilises her skills in pharmaka in order to aide his quest to obtain the golden fleece.

Generated by Otter AI with some light editing! We know the Greek and Latin can be tough for automated transcripts, so apologies in advance for inadvertent mistakes (hopefully they’ll make you giggle!).

Dr Rad 0:15
Welcome to a special episode of The Partial Historians. Today we sit down with the hosts of the amazing podcast MythTake to discuss all aspects of Seneca the Younger’s Medea. We hope that you enjoy

Alison Innes 0:40
Good morning.

Darrin Sunstrum 0:41
Good afternoon.

Alison Innes 0:42
Good evening,

Darrin Sunstrum 0:43
and good night.

Alison Innes 0:45
Welcome to a another episode of MythTake,

Darrin Sunstrum 0:48
A fresh take on ancient myths.

Alison Innes 0:50
We still got it, Darren.

Darrin Sunstrum 0:53
It’s been a while. I forgot.

Alison Innes 0:54
It has been it has been a little while since we have done an episode. But I am really excited about tonight’s episode. We have two special guests from halfway around the world joining us by the virtue of or by the miracle of technology. We have Dr. Fiona Radford and Dr. Peta Greenfield from The Partial Historians podcast. They are experts in ancient Rome, which we are very much not experts. They look at various aspects of Roman life and reception in their own podcast Partial Historians. So we’re very pleased to have you. Hello.

Dr Rad 1:31
Hey, thank you so much for having us.

Dr G 1:34
That was Dr Rad!

Dr Rad 1:36
To distinguish my voice.

Dr G 1:38
We’ll just set that up straight. Yeah.

Dr Rad 1:40
Any stupid thing said by this voice are the property of Dr. Radford.

Dr G 1:45
And I’m Dr. G, thank you so much for having us.

Alison Innes 1:48
Well, we are very pleased to be connecting with you and I’m glad that we could work out the timezone difference. We’re recording from Canada, as usual, in Ontario, and you’re all the way around in Australia. So I we’re very glad to be connecting with you.

Dr Rad 2:01
It’s a it’s a Commonwealth podcast.

Alison Innes 2:04
Yes. Yes, that truly international.

Dr Rad 2:06
Exactly.

Alison Innes 2:07
And I’m also excited to have you because we are going to talk about Medea, which everybody who listens to this probably knows by now is one of my favourite characters, but we’re going to do it a little bit differently and have a look at Seneca’s, Medea, and Darren and I are not as strong. Well, Darren, Darren knows knows this play better than I do. I have never formally taught or really studied this play. So I’m kind of, I’m the real student here. But we are really excited to have some Roman experts on board for this conversation.

Dr Rad 2:38
Excellent. Let’s get into it.

Dr G 2:40
Yeah, so I think we should start with just a consideration briefly of who is Medea. Let’s locate Seneca within the context of the subject matter.

Dr Rad 2:50
Yeah, true.

Alison Innes 2:51
All right. Well, Medea goes back a very long ways. Darren, do you want to give us a quick rundown on on her mythology?

Darrin Sunstrum 2:58
Well, in Medea, yeah. Like you said, she’s one of those sort of older characters that that, you know, been probably kicking around since the Archaic period, more than likely. We, we encounter her at least on the Greek side of things in Euripides work about 431 BC. There were other playwrights like Nephron, for example, that wrote about Medea as a figure from this woman from Colchis from the Black Sea region, who is a foreigner, barbarian and mysterious sort of “Other” type character with associations and magic. And then her relationship with Jason and the Argonauts, which is a very old myth. Right, is picked up and, you know, use time and time again. So we see Medea, you know, in different iterations and tragedy, and lyric poetry, you know, here in our discussion with Seneca all the way into the Imperial Roman period, which I don’t live in very much, but so it’s a long stretch of time to have, you know, one sort of character called Medea. And you know what she is, and I think everyone knows what she’s probably most responsible for, or her infamy or her fame. So, you know, she’s a non-Greek character, but a very compelling and powerful female heroine in a catalogue of heroes that are primarily male.

Dr Rad 4:26
Yeah, the Romans seem to really be attracted to the story of Medea. I mean, obviously, when I say attracted, I don’t necessarily mean in a hugely positive way. Because as you say, she is quite infamous. But yeah, they definitely seem to enjoy going back and back to the story of Medea.

Dr G 4:43
And I think there’s something very compelling about Medea’s story as well because bound up with it is the whole spectrum of human feeling. From everything from intense attraction and affection and love to like the bitterest of human sorrow possible. And she captures this within the arc of her life. And so there are so many elements of her story, I think, that people can hook into and repurpose. And when we talk about attraction, I think it’s that compulsion. It’s almost like things become so devastating in her life and in her mythic tales, that it’s hard to look away.

Alison Innes 5:24
Yeah. And there’s there are some key events that all of the different authors who we have, and presumably, from what I’ve read, there were a lot more plays and tales about Medea in the ancient world than survive that then have come down to us. But the broad outline, of course, is that Jason shows up with his Argonauts and he needs to get the Golden Fleece. Medea betrays her father and helps them out and in their flight from Chlocis back to Greece with Jason. She marries him and kills her brother. And then we are of course, located in Corinth, where Jason is now married the princess, but depending on which author you have, there’s different nuances and different interpretations and different details for each of those. So it’s a really flexible story that gets retold in a lot of different ways.

Dr G 6:22
Yeah, and I think we see this coming through with Seneca’s Medea, it’s a very formal kind of play. Very Roman, I would say in its structure. If we’re, inevitably people will make comparisons with Seneca’s work with the very famous Euripides play. And they’re very different in structure, even though some of the messaging is similar. They get to the conclusion in very different ways. And one of the things that I think that tells us about Medea is just how she can be reinterpreted consistently over time for different audiences, while keeping some core features of the story. But while also shifting a lot of the contextual details around how that story unfolds,

Darrin Sunstrum 7:08
I like that because like, like, like any good myth, it’s true. It’s sort of adapts its dynamic, and it sort of serves its shape sort of fills the vessel in. And by that, I mean, it serves the audience at the time, or at least the narrator’s agenda, whatever that might be. So I think the Medea characters are really plastic in that way.

Dr G 7:26
Yeah. So I think it’s probably a good place to think about just the basic plot of Seneca’s play. And we sort of we start off with a conversation happening outside between Medea she’s alone on stage, actually, I should say, it’s not a conversation just yet. But she’s sort of like locating herself through this kind of soliloquy.

Dr Rad 7:52
She does like to have conversations with herself,

Dr G 7:54
She does like to have conversations, there’s, it’s a very, it’s a very ancient play thing to do. Popular all the way through for centuries, really discussing sort of positioning the audience to understand history in a particular way, and help everybody come to grips with where we’re at where we’re up to in her life. And she’s in Corinth. And this is a very typical place for plays about Medea to start as well. But from there, we sort of get into a whole sequence of events. And Seneca seems to like a sort of a really particular structure to his plays. And some editors of the Latin collections do like to divide it up like that, as well. So it feels like that we have distinct scenes, even though we’re not really sure what any of the stage directions might have been. And so one of the really important character devices in Seneca’s Medea is the role of the Chorus and the way that they tend to set up how you might interpret a particular set of action. And they also tend to be a marker point for a change of scene as well, either towards the end or towards the beginning. So the chorus has a lot to do with this. And we see this sort of like ebb and flow between Medea expressing herself having a conversation with Kreon, the king of Corinth about needing time before her exile takes place, having a conversation with Jason, where he’s kind of like, you gotta get out of here. And she’s like, I need more time to get organised. Where am I gonna go how I’m gonna live my life? And it’s like, it’s really important that you leave. And she’s like, you know, You dumped me, right? I don’t know that I should necessarily be bearing the brunt of your poor decision making because the reason why she has been asked to leave is she’s now the third wheel, essentially, in her own life.

Dr Rad 9:48
Yeah, Jason no longer needs her. I mean, he’s he’s got a new wife and you shiny wife,

Dr G 9:51
Jason’s about to marry a woman. He hasn’t really told Medea about that. She’s found out because she’s about to be exiled. Like you need to leave and she’s like, Excuse me?

Dr Rad 10:00
if only all breakups could go this way.

Alison Innes 10:04
Medea is really front and centre in this play too. Not only does she start off with the with the opening, but I have cannot put my finger on the exact statistic at the moment, but she has the vast majority of speaking lines in this play. So it’s very much her driving the story.

Dr Rad 10:22
Oh, massively, it’s definitely the Medea show. It definitely puts her more forward than you Euripides did, even though obviously, she’s a huge part of Euripides as well.

Dr G 10:32
But we do get some sense from the sort of secondary characters that there are some concerns about how she’s coping with the situation that she finds herself in. Rightly so as it turns out, so there’s some good foreshadowing presented through the character of the Nurse, and discussions that happen that relate to the tutor of the children, they’ve got some concerns about what’s happening. And fair enough. She’s not taking things well. And she makes that abundantly clear through her spoken time on stage as well. But she does manage to negotiate with Kreon to have a day to get herself organised. And she makes it pretty clear early on that she’s going to use this for vengeance. This is a pretty standard moment for Medea in terms of her representation in literature, first of all, buying the time, and then being like, Alright, now for the plan. And she does the grand reveal of well, the plan is this, it’s going to be bad. And I’m looking forward to it, you know, I’m going to find a way to poison that new wife. And then I’m going to take things to the next level because you know, who’s really responsible here, Jason? Jason is the real issue.

Dr Rad 11:44
I kind of disagree with her in someways.

Dr G 11:46
In that sense. It’s a very modern kind of representation as well. She refuses to take a sort of a victim blaming position. I mean, she does take vengeance against the second wife. Yeah, that is all part of her plan to take down Jason. It inevitably, it goes well, in the sense that it all happens.

Dr Rad 12:07
Yeah, the plan works!

Dr G 12:08
The plan works. That might be the worst part of all, perhaps.

Dr Rad 12:12
And bonus points. She takes out Kreon when she takes out the new wife. Oh, yeah, they go down together. Yeah.

Dr G 12:21
Father steps into try to save the daughter: doesn’t go well. This is all described vividly by people who come into the play to like deliver messages. And we end up at this final set piece, which is the moment where she executes the children that she and Jason have produced together. One of them directly in front of Jason.

Dr Rad 12:44
Which again, is in contrast to what happens in Euripides’ play as far as we can tell where the murder of the children would happen offstage.

Dr G 12:53
Yeah. So there is a transition of the violence to the stage.

Alison Innes 12:58
Yeah, and Jason’s Jason’s a very different character as well in Seneca as I know, we’re trying not to compare but it’s really really it’s very difficult not to but he’s been his circumstances different he’s not marrying the princess so much out of love or desire to step up in the world. But he can only get safety for them if from Kreon if he is marrying Kreon’s daughter. So there’s, there’s a different there’s a different motivation behind the marriage, correct?

Darrin Sunstrum 13:29
Yeah, there’s something like that going on self preservation, the mood is very different, right, the function that fibre framework is very different from an Attic drama, like Medea is in your face, like right at the very beginning, and she doesn’t leave your face, till you know, she’s stepping in the chariot. So like, you know, you get a little Jason and you get a little Kreon and you get some Chorus thrown in, but, you know, she’s right your eyes for the whole play. And it’s not like Euripides where, you know, some of there’s some circular motion lines and characters are coming and going slightly. And there’s negotiation with chorus. But But here in Seneca’, it’s Medea from from beginning to end. And it’s extremely compelling. But like I said, there’s a very different type of Jason that’s being presented here. A lot of people like to throw a lot of dirt on Jason and Euripides. I’m not a big fan of that. But here in Seneca he’s a pretty sympathetic character, at least from my reading of it, you know, he’s he can’t do much of anything but but suffer. Right? But you know, that in the face of such overwhelming hatred and violence, what can what can one man do you know, even if he is the hero of the Argo, right? Who Medea lays out quite plainly in Seneca that not only does Jason, owe his success as a hero, but so does every single Argonaut on that expedition also, you know, all their success to her, you know that that’s pretty hard to overlook.

Alison Innes 15:02
And so many of them have come to unfortunate ends.

Darrin Sunstrum 15:04
And they have. Medea in the Seneca play too. There’s something strange and about it in the sense that you can get overwhelmed with lots of the magic and the details and the artefacts and so on in the terrible ferocity of that character. That sort of when I use the word terrible I don’t mean in a in a moralistic way I mean awe inspiring power. And she has a number of moments of that are transformative within the play itself. Euripides’ Medea is much more of a slow reveal. I think Seneca is is has those but there’s blinding flashes where she’s no longer herself in the play become something much more terrible. I use that word again. So yeah, I just like I like the contrasting element of and I really did enjoy revisiting Seneca’s Medea again.

Alison Innes 15:54
Well, his Medea is much more emotional and passionate right from the beginning, I would say and, and I wonder, does this have to do with Senecas own philosophical leanings?

Dr Rad 16:07
Yeah, I think I think this is probably a good time to talk a little bit about who Seneca actually was, and maybe give him a bit of historical context, because that could possibly help us to decode his interpretation of Medea a little bit. So as I think you guys mentioned earlier, Seneca is writing much later than Euripides. He was born as far as we can tell, towards the end part of Augustus’ life, and therefore he got to see a little bit of Augustus, but he was probably, obviously a child, then he certainly would have experienced the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, and then most famously, Claudius and Nero. Now, it’s probably worth mentioning that there has been a bit of dispute about whether Seneca actually authored a lot of these plays that are ascribed to him, but we weren’t worried going into that.

Dr G 16:56
Let’s not create too much touble for ourselves!

Dr Rad 16:58
We’re not gonna go into that. But presuming that he did write this particular play that we’re looking at. It’s very possibly something that he wrote, whilst he was in exile during the first half of the Emperor Claudius’ reign.

He had gotten himself into a little bit of trouble.

Alison Innes 17:17
Yes, adultery was-

Dr Rad 17:20
Yeah, he fell afoul of both Caligula and Claudius, for very different reasons. As at least, that’s what the sources tell us. There is something I think to be said for the fact that he might be exploring certain themes relating to his own experiences under the Julio-Claudians, which we can come back to in a sec. But he’s also most famous, obviously, and this is probably what you were getting at Alison, for his very stoic philosophy, is that what you were referring to in terms of his own beliefs?

Dr G 17:48
Yeah, and, and so like that stoicism that is coming, that sort of underpins a lot of his writing, I think we can see the effects of this in terms of the way that he structures his plays, and also the kinds of messages he might be trying to have the audience take away. The one of the key ideas that really drives the Stoic framework is like how you think about the way that you feel really shapes everything about your world. And that becomes like, a piece of advice as a stepping stone for like, well, how can I think about the world and my feelings in a way that might be reasonable and useful to me. And what we see in Medea is a character, and indeed, a whole cast of characters very much bound up in their emotions and trying to figure out how to respond to them. And while Medea is obviously the central figure in all of this, she is by no means the only character who is trying to figure out how to respond to their feelings about the world. She eventually places Jason in that position. And he also details moments of his own struggle with reaching the decision to take another woman as a wife. And we also see Kreon and his concerns about you know, wanting to have a stable situation, which is only possible if Medea is no longer there physically in the city.

Dr Rad 19:19
How interesting that she was being exiled while Seneca was himself in exile…

Dr G 19:26
Could there be a parallel?

Alison Innes 19:29
And Seneca had an interesting life in the course of his kind of rise to prominence and exile and return because he’s he was originally from Spain, was he not? And he spent time in Egypt as well. So presumably, he would have been exposed to various versions of this story from various sources from different places.

Dr G 19:52
Yeah, so he, I mean, he ends up in Rome as a child and is educated there. But as you say, he is born in Hispania. And so there is a sense in which this is a period in Roman history where there’s a lot of shifting from the periphery into the centre. And we get a sense that one of the ways that you could read this play is also through that idea of the outsider versus the insider. And Seneca, for all of his education, to what extent does he consider himself absolutely a Roman? is a good question to ask. And he becomes very involved in the imperial family and the legacy. And this might play into things as well. So like being close to power, how you self identify could produce interesting resonances for how he thinks about Medea. And to what extent he might empathise with her situation, on a certain level.

Dr Rad 20:52
We’re especially dealing with Kreon as well, I believe there might be some messages there as well about how a ruler conducts themselves, which as I said, probably might have might have had something to do with his personal situation because he does seem to fall afoul of Caligula, perhaps because he’s a little too good with the words.

Dr G 21:10
Hello!

Dr Rad 21:11
Yeah. And then And then, of course, he seems to be caught up in some sort of sexual scandal or at least suspected sexual scandal with Claudius’ nieces and Caligula sisters aren’t really-

Dr G 21:24
You always have to be careful of those sorts of notions. And yeah, political invective, often takes the form of this kind of sexual innuendo. Yeah, and sort of salacious accusations. So it’s hard to know.

Dr Rad 21:38
I think it’s fair to say, though, based on his other writings, because he did obviously take a lot of this time, eight years to write, he definitely wasn’t happy about being exiled. And funnily enough, you know, he might have been channelling a bit of Ovid, who also read extensively about Medea and was exiled.

Dr G 21:56
And if there’s anything that we know about Seneca is that he is a very literary man,

Dr Rad 22:01
Definitely.

Dr G 22:01
And he structures a lot of his writings, Stoic and otherwise it seems, around a conscious engagement with literary tradition. So I think it’s a real shame, actually, that we don’t have Ovid’s Medea as a point of comparison. Ovid is a very engaging and nuanced writer. And to be able to compare those two plays from a Roman perspective would be amazing, I think, for all of the things that are very interesting about Seneca’s play, if you asked me. If I wanted to go to the theatre to watch Seneca’s production of Medea I would probably say no.

Darrin Sunstrum 22:39
For what reason?

Dr G 22:41
I don’t find her a psychologically compelling version of Medea in this play. And it’s weird because it’s not like the plot is necessarily different. Yeah, in all of its sort of overarching points from say Euripides, but reading Euripides, together with Seneca, I would go and see Euripides’ Medea, in an instant, it feels like there is a real psychological insight and development of character of Medea onstage in Euripides. And I feel like what we get in Seneca, for me as a as a modern person in the 21st century, it doesn’t feel psychologically compelling. It feels very literary. And it feels very Imperial Roman, and I can appreciate it on those levels. But it doesn’t feel powerful in that way.

Dr Rad 23:30
That does raise the question as well about how much Seneca actually ever envisioned this play being performed, per se as a play? And how much was it meant to be recited or read? If you know what I mean.

Alison Innes 23:44
I was just about to ask. I was just about to ask him about that. And you beat me to it. Yeah. So it seems that it was a bit of a trend as well that at some point, literary men would dabble in writing, writing a tragedy, but it wasn’t necessarily intended for performance and sometimes intended for reading, which is would be a slightly different approach.

Dr G 24:09
Yeah. And I think we can see that almost instantly in the depth of like intertextual and mythological referencing that’s going on in Seneca’s piece. Like, it’s not an easy read. I went into this preparation, thinking, Ah, you know, I’ll sit down with Euripides, I’ll sit down with Seneca and then I was like, oh, no, oh, no, I got to Seneca and I was like, I need a critical edition of this work. Like there is it is very dense in the sort of information that it’s offering line by line, in some cases, in whole speeches where you’re like, Okay, if I can’t piece together this whole mythological web that is being offered to me, I’m going to have a very difficult time understanding the nuance of what Seneca is trying to get at here. And that makes it a play that is not for people who are just going to the theatre for a good time, or people who are not really quite across all of this mythological depth that Seneca is bringing to the table here.

Alison Innes 25:14
Yeah, it’s like he’s showing off a little bit about his own depth and breadth of knowledge of the myth. And you mentioned Ovid earlier. And we unfortunately don’t have his Medea. That’s what that that’s one of those plays that, you know, if you could save one thing from the ancient world, right, but he does deal with the myth as well, in the Metamorphosis, and in Heroides as well. And I know Darren is pretty familiar with those sources.

Darrin Sunstrum 25:42
Well, yeah, a little bit. I reread Heroides 12. You know, we’re not talking about it exclusively today. But like in that, in that sort of, era, you know, in that area, as far as a Roman author who’s concerned dealing with this topic, it’s not a play, obviously, it’s the letters, you know, the between Jason and Medea, in this case, it’s Medea writing to Jason. That’s a very different one and very different to, to speak about, because it’s, there’s not a lot of agreement on whether or not it’s of even a tragic tone. Some people think that it’s that it’s a more satirical or comic but you know, there’s, there’s definitely no love lost between the two, that’s for sure, in that letter.

Dr G 26:28
Yeah, this is true. And and I think the thing to me that’s really interesting about the way that Ovid is navigating Medea in that letter is that it does feel like she’s attempting to come to grips with everything about her life in a way that that does encompass some of the anger. But letter writing itself allows for moments of reflection, which when we think about what happens with a play, a play is more like, well, we’ve got to jump from the thought to the action quite quickly. Having people write letters, for instance, or have a journal doesn’t really work so much on stage. And so the letter is able to accomplish something that I’d be interested to. Yeah, now I need Ovid’s Medea: the play.

Alison Innes 27:20
Maybe somebody will be unwrapping a mummy somewhere and they will find, will find it!

Darrin Sunstrum 27:26
You know, what struck me as I read, the sequence that we read them sometimes affects your perception of them. So I had read Heroides 12 in preparation, and then a couple of days passed, and then I read over the course of two nights, Seneca’s play, and that one two punch there was very striking in the sense that one I have Euripides, of course, in my mind. But when I read Heroides 12, when I read Ovid, Medea, in that one is leaving the door open very often for a return to this sort of idealised husband and wife situation to she wants Jason to come back to her on a number of occasions. And I was kind of struck by that. And then when I went into Seneca, you know, you don’t really get it, there’s like a line, there’s like one line, after you know, Kreon comes and Medea talks to him. And Jason comes back and she says something like, “Castus is coming. One King is against us, there’s another. Come with me. And, you know, the two of us together will will will flee, right?” And I went whoa, really? Even after all that magic and hatred and passion and, and everything else. She still she still says to Jason like one line. Let’s let’s leave together. Jason says, No, obviously. But her her response to him there I thought was like wild because everything else is all snakes and fire. And then in one line she’s like, but you might want to come in it’ll, it’ll preserve you right now preserve you.

Dr G 29:07
And I think that’s the thing about Medea that that makes her such a compelling character, to be honest, because that what she has always longed for, is to be with Jason. And that has shaped the way that she behaves in response to everybody around her. And so there’s this sort of compulsive codependency for her, which she she finds it impossible to break and despite her anger and her frustration and the remorse that seems to be quite genuine at times that she feels for the acts that she has committed in pursuit of this relationship. She still ultimately it doesn’t mean anything for her if he doesn’t stay and in a way that that gives her I mean, that’s part of the tragedy of it. But it also gives us a really keen insight into into her state of mind. She has to double down and when she can’t, and that that’s taken away from her as well. It sort of pushes her beyond the sort of thresholds of morality as we tend to see them.

Dr Rad 30:21
But that’s why I agree. I actually do agree with you, Dr. G. I have I when I read I read both Euripides’ Medea and I read Seneca’s Medea in preparation for this episode. And I have to agree with you that even though there are some interesting elements to Seneca, I agree with you that I don’t find Medea as psychologically compelling, because she just comes out all guns blazing from the get go. She is so strong, and she is less sympathetic. I think, for me, looking back, I know Euripides is very complicated and the way that he handles her status both as you know, as a potential barbarian as this person who’s not exactly like what you you know, like a mortal woman or anything, like there’s obviously a lot of complexity there, which I just think is lacking in Seneca to a certain extent and I think feel

Dr G 30:42
Because you don’t get that character build

Dr Rad 31:16
No and you don’t get that arc of her actions, you know, of what path is she actually going to take. But I see much more coming through Seneca’s Medea, him dealing with that classic Stoic idea of the need to moderate emotion to, to learn how to deal with an emotion as powerful as anger, and the disaster that can result if people don’t learn to, to handle that in a in a productive way or, or a way of handling your emotions, in a sense of what point is that in getting so worked up over situations that you yourself, have no control over? You cannot control? What you know what the king is doing. You can’t control what Jason is doing here? Why are you getting yourself so worked up about this, look at what happens when you allow emotions like love and rage to run rampant?

Alison Innes 32:13
Yeah. And I think he’s definitely showing us the danger of passionate love that it’s a very, it’s it and this violent anger are two sides of the same coin. And that in some ways, her anger shows how deeply she loves, as you say, she’s she’s unable to step back from that and to, to detach herself that she’s, she, when one source I read described it as she’s opened a hole in in in the wall of herself. And that both lets Jason in, but it also means that it makes her weaker for that. And that. So she turns to these to this passionate anger, when that love doesn’t work out how she wants it to.

Darrin Sunstrum 32:58
Well, you know, there’s something about that Medea and Seneca that I think we’re either overlooking or attributing to something else. And, you know, I think simply might be, you know, it’s uniquely Roman in the sense that especially a connected Roman, like Seneca, who’s used to being in the presence of powerful figures, like an emperor like Nero, you know, like, you got to know how to walk around these guys, you got to know how to talk, you got to know how to keep them, you know, at bay, but because they they’re extremely powerful, like with a whim, like Medea, they could destroy you. And we’ve seen We’ve seen what’s happened there, their hair triggers, they’re like the opposite at times of what it means to be Stoic. So like if a character like Medea in this play is someone who’s like bottled lightning, you know, they’re a lot like a Roman imperial figure themselves. And the character of Jason and Kreon and all the rest of them are just the people that are in the orbit of someone with incredible imperial power. You know, you, they Medea goes through a transformation at the beginning, she asked herself, who am I? And then about, I don’t know, like Act Four, I guess she says, I am Medea. And that means something completely different. When we look at that concept, there’s that heroic concept or theological concept called Art to Kea, right. And that means, like a complete sort of release of freedom, a shedding of the bonds, where you become something that is, you know, that requires no support, you know, like, like, what does an emperor need? Nothing, because they have everything. Right. So that’s a transformative moment. That’s something that struck me when when I read Seneca along with all the witchcraft and the crazy stuff that was in there, too, but

Dr G 34:49
I think this is a fantastic sort of perspective to to adopt this idea of Medea as like the Imperial figure,

Dr Rad 34:57
and how intriguing that she that Seneca might have used a track like Medea to try and teach nearer to, you know, reign it in, reign it in.

Dr G 35:05
but also as a warning to like because this allows you then to read Jason, as the guy that bumbles through the Imperial Court, and is the Senecan figure who gets himself exiled.

Darrin Sunstrum 35:20
feel like, well correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Ovid sort of do the same sort of thing, when like in his Metamorphosis as an overarching theme, is it not really sort of like a treatment in some ways about: Be careful who you upset because, you know, if they transform you like the gods themselves, right, these encounters with these powerful beings, sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re bad, but they’re always met them. They’re always changing. They’re always about metamorphosis, right? Like, that could also apply if we use that as a, as a model for Seneca in some regards as a somewhat of that era. Maybe

Dr G 35:58
Definitely. And Medea herself is, is going through her own transformation all the time. And this is something that Seneca has definitely leveraged from Euripides and surely has been popular from Euripides onwards, this idea that Medea is not simply a mortal woman, that she that the divine streak in her is significant, and it will have really particular effects. And it means that she goes beyond in many respects, what anybody thinks that she could be capable of.

Dr Rad 36:34
I think that’s one thing that did strike me more front and centre in Seneca is that emphasis on on the witchcraft and the connections to like Hecate and that kind of thing. Whilst Euripides doesn’t obviously neglect to mention those aspects to Medea, I feel like she comes across as much more of a quote unquote, “normal woman” in the situation that she’s in, up into the point up to the point where she flies away.

Alison Innes 36:59
Yeah, it’s interesting. There’s, there’s almost a continuum from Euripides’ Medea Medea through to Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica. And then to this play, like building on that, on that witchcraft. In Apollonius, he pulls out a lot more of that magic aspect of her. Now granted, it’s not this episode that he’s dealing with but with with the other episodes he deals with, he he pulls out that magic, but it’s almost an innocent mass. And like almost as though she’s a young girl who doesn’t quite know what she’s doing. Whereas here in Seneca’s Medea, we have a mature Medea, who knows exactly what she’s exactly what she’s doing. And, and the magic, the way it’s described feels much more nefarious to me and then than it did in the Argonautica.

Dr Rad 37:55
I think it’s so interesting that Seneca is emphasising that angle. I mean, it’d be completely anachronistic, obviously to say anything about Agrippina the Younger here, because of course, it’s before she potentially murders Claudius using those sorts of elements. But certainly, what Seneca might have witnessed in Imperial Rome, I mean, this is the age of Lucasta, the poisoner, you know, it’s not like these methods of particularly women, eliminating people that wouldn’t be unknown to him, I would say.

Dr G 38:26
Yeah, there are definitely rumours about this kind of thing. And there are definitely you there are street corners, where you can find these people selling their skill set, as it were. But I do like this consideration of the fact that Medea in Seneca’s play and also in Euripides, because well, we’re seeing her at that edge in both of these plays, is that she is in the mature phase of her life, you know, she has become a mother herself. She’s married, you know, she’s lived a good deal of her adult life. Whereas the thing that is the landmark for her in terms of how her life unfolds, is potentially a mistake of a young woman, potentially on the cusp of adulthood, taking a risk for a boy that she liked. And it being the mistake that sets off in consequence, the rest of her life in a tragic fashion. And because the mistakes start to build,

Dr Rad 39:30
oh, don’t look, I mean, it’s I’m being completely anachronistic, but I can’t help but look at it through the eyes of, you know, a modern person and it does it does sound like that old story of that girl that got mixed up with that guy started doing things that she didn’t really want to, you know, didn’t not knows maybe not and didn’t want to do but start doing things that she might not have done if not for him. And Medea does seem to she does dwell on those things that she did, obviously, as you said earlier, she does keep thinking about, “But I did these things for you; I did these things for us. And And now where are we?”

Dr G 40:03
Yeah, so she gets trapped in like a sort of a young woman psychology where she hasn’t come into her full sense of herself. And she does make a choice, which, initially, I mean, it doesn’t seem so bad. You know, she’s helping a boy out that the monsters are involved. And it’s like, you know, there’s no, there’s no big risks there. I mean, the monsters are risky, but like in terms of like, the moral question, yeah, like, you can overlook that and be like, well, you know, somebody had to deal with the dragon. But that sort of slides into like, Okay, well, how are we going to get out of here? We now need to leave.

Dr Rad 40:38
Yeah.

Dr G 40:38
And that leads to a really pivotal moment,

Dr Rad 40:42
Which totally haunts her definitely.

Dr G 40:44
Yeah. And she’s, she does seem to be haunted by the treatment of her brother and how she has navigated that. And that’s the thing that really cements that situation between Jason and Medea, I think far more so than the acquisition of the Fleece itself.

Alison Innes 41:00
And it’s interesting that her story with Jason begins with subduing the monster, the monster serpent guarding the and then she becomes a monster herself in the way that Seneca presents it. She is monstrous, and she goes off, she she calls on serpents again. And this this serpent angle, I think is really interesting. But she calls on serpents again, and the winged chariot and all of that, and she becomes something monstrous herself.

Dr G 41:34
Yeah, there’s this lovely motif of serpents that is running through Seneca’s Medea and which is obviously supposed to remind the audience of that initial moment between her and Jason and and what she has done there. And then we start to see that sort of visualisation of Medea in the serpent chariot, which is coming through in vaseware from like, even like, sort of like, at the same time as we’re getting Euripides play in Greece, we’re seeing red figure ware from Southern Italy, which has the same kind of imagery on it. So it’s just astounding, the way that that serpent motif continues to develop and evolve.

Darrin Sunstrum 42:16
Yeah, it was all sorts of monsters and scaled horrors, and different types of poisons, and different sort of iterations of the power of fire, that struck me as interesting. You know, about how, you know, venom and fire and poison in flame, were all sort of part of the same sort of kind of complex of like, magic that was able to destroy Medea’s as enemies, whether it be a building or a person, or whatever it was she, you know, she had it all down, like, the way that the magic worked. Like you were drawing lines between what she said and almost every hero that you could come across. She had an artefact that linked it to Herakles, all sorts of different monsters, the Chimaera, everything was all in there the Charybdis and Scylla. You know, they all had she all had a fang or a scale, or the ash, or something that was just filled with this, this powerful force that that only she could channel and use to destroy her enemies. And I thought it was just like, overwhelming in it’s detail.

Dr G 43:30
Yeah, Seneca is amazing for the detail.

Alison Innes 43:35
And he uses those serpents as a as a motif or a representation of sexual passion in particular, but also calling on these ancient connotations going right back to Typhaon and Python and the Hydra like those ancient stories of of serpents.

Darrin Sunstrum 43:57
You know, the other thing too, was, I don’t know how much the Romans were into ghosts. But I read a lot about ghosts more about ghosts in the Roman context than I did in the Greek context. So my, my instinct is that they’re, you know, they’re fascinated by them. The Greeks probably were too but in the idea here, I don’t know, like you said, like, if you’re reading it or watching it performed, but that scene, where Medea is confronting or confronted by a ghost that she doesn’t recognise. And then she said, then she sees that it’s absurd as her brother, and then the play just sort of just goes into, like, overdrive at that particular moment. When she realises now what she has to do. I kept thinking about Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but that’s at the beginning. It’s not like three quarters of the way through. You don’t like it, but still, I’ve never had like Euripides doesn’t have ghosts in it for crying out loud, like, but this one does, right? Everything else is there so why not throw a ghost Do right.

Alison Innes 45:01
And the theories are there as well.

Dr G 45:04
The Romans have a lot of interest in ghosts. This is true, they, they spend a lot of time thinking about the dead. And what is happening at that intersection where you can get in contact with Hecate. And there are festivals set up specifically to deal with placating the dead spirits at times of the year where the barriers between the planes of the world are quite thin. And so for Medea to see a ghost would not be out of keeping it all from a Roman perspective.

Dr Rad 45:38
And the Romans are just so obsessed with their ancestors as well. You know, they, they have obviously they keep those funeral masks and they come out, you know, for certain occasions like that they are so connected to the people that come before.

Dr G 45:49
Always having to walk past the imagos of the past

Dr Rad 45:52
So yeah, Medea being fixated on her brother in particular

Dr G 45:57
It does make sense from a Roman perspective for sure.

Alison Innes 45:59
Does that make her crime of killing Jason’s father that much worse to a Roman?

Dr G 46:07
Not necessarily, because Medea is not herself from the region. So in the sense that like, it would be a problem for Jason definitely, for Jason finds ways to not be the one who’s actually absolutely involved. So the stain is really on Jason rather than her. Certainly she carries a lot of blood guilt related to her own family, which would be looked upon terribly. And I mean, she’s not going to come out of it well, from a Roman perspective, anyway.

Dr Rad 46:41
No all the murder, still not good.

Dr G 46:46
Even if we’re reading it through that Roman reading it through a Greek lens, then she’s sort of behaved in ways that don’t represent piety in any way. And she’s been driven by ambition. And all of this is rendered more monstrous from a Roman perspective, because she is a woman.

Dr Rad 47:06
Yeah, I mean, like, to be honest, I’m totally speaking off the top of my head here. I haven’t I hadn’t really thought about this until it came up in conversation. But, of course, by this stage in Rome, as well, women had, most women would have had those kinds of marriages, where they still had very strong connections to their family of birth than their husband’s family. Whilst Of course, they become more and more tied to their husband’s family, you know, when they have children and that kind of thing. And they obviously want their children to succeed. And that’s their main goal in life, etc, etc. At the same time, they do maintain extremely strong ties to their family of birth. And they’re own pater familias. So I think I think Medea having that that strong loyalty to her own family would make sense in the Roman context, more than what happened with Jason’s family.

Darrin Sunstrum 47:56
Yeah, like always a daughter and always a sister like having a brother, right? Like, that’s a pretty important relationship and a Roman woman’s life is the relationship that she has with of course her father, but also with her brothers. Right?

Dr Rad 48:10
Yes.

Darrin Sunstrum 48:11
And even during marriage right there, like I’ve heard, it said that they’re always a daughter. You know what I mean, right

Dr Rad 48:18
I think that’s true. And he would have actually, he would have, he would have heard about that firsthand, of course, because in spite of the fact that, you know, for hazy reasons, but maybe something is serious is trying to overthrow him. He saw Caligula who he knew, exile his two sisters, and, and then constantly threatened to kill them. And then in spite of all of that, he would have heard about them or seeing them coming back to Rome. And one of the first things they did was make sure that Caligula’s body or remains, I should say, was properly buried and had and had the Honours due to it. So you know, they were sisters. Yeah. To the end. Yeah.

Alison Innes 48:57
And I think that that difference is something worth teasing out a little bit because for the Romans, again, like Medea’s and Jason’s marriage is gonna stand out because of the passion element. Whereas in ancient marriage, generally and maybe I’m over-generalising here the marriage is not love match, necessarily, right?

Dr G 49:20
That’s right. Yeah. And this is one of the fundamental problems, I think, for Medea and Jason is that everything about the way their relationship begins, means that from a moralistic perspective, for the Greeks and the Romans, this can’t succeed. If this relationship was a success, it would break the moral fabric that has been set up in terms of how marriage should operate, who should control it, and all of those patriarchal structures are undermined.

Alison Innes 49:49
As the meme goes, I I saw a meme circulating on Twitter about marriages is is an agreement between two men for a Roman woman, but she’s not necessarily involved. It’s her father and her groom, possibly. And certainly the groom’s father as well who are making that agreement. And here, you have a couple who made that decision for themselves in in this passion.

Dr Rad 50:16
Oh, yeah. And with Medea choosing Jason as well, it seems like she really makes that choice.

Alison Innes 50:21
Yeah. And then further complicating it, too, is that the women like we have a tendency in our modern society, or Western society at any rate, to think of, of children as belonging to their mothers, sometimes even more so than to the fathers. But legally, for the Romans, children belonged to the father, so they’re not even really her children.

Dr G 50:48
Oh, yeah. And Jason kind of makes that clear as well. That, you know, these, these are children that are going to, ideally, it’d be better if the children stayed with him, because then he can incorporate them into the new family.

Dr Rad 51:01
And that definitely seems to be something that Medea is striking against, I think really, in Euripides, as well, but certainly in Seneca about she’s striking at the house of Jason, you know, she’s she’s striking it. I don’t know how you

Dr G 51:13
That legacy. Patriarchical structure itself, which is which flows from father to son.

Dr Rad 51:18
Yeah, it’s not about you never, even though Jason is a very different character, as you highlighted in Euripides, to Seneca, there’s never, I think a scene where you see really strong emotional connections between Jason and his children. That’s, that’s not really a focus, it does seem to be much more about that, that legacy aspect

Darrin Sunstrum 51:38
is definitely not given a lot of time to discuss how that works. Yeah, considering into the play, it’s, it’s a few lines here or there. And then, you know, your, your into the terrible stuff, you know, it’s been said to in the Greek context that a marriage is, of course, a marriage ritual, that it’s just as much a community affair as it is between two individuals. And that is successful marriage, at least from the religious side of things, as far as Greek religion is concerned, if it goes off without a hitch, then everything’s okay. Because the bride and the bridegroom have transitioned from what they were into what they will become. And that’s good for them. But it’s also good for the community. So if we consider this from a point of view of Medea and Jason, here’s a marriage, you know, that was begun outside of the Greek world. And in that is, you know, steeped in I don’t know what blood murder, right. And less than convenient circumstances, that was never really allowed to transition into the Greek world, and it’s out of context and out of sync with was just about everything that we would come to understand about what we might call a proper Greek marriage. So not only not only do they suffer, but the whole community suffers as a result of the being in close proximity to these characters that are much in flux, specifically, Medea in particular.

Dr Rad 53:08
Yeah, and I think even if you look at it in, in the Roman context at Seneca is, is dealing with now that you’ve got this imperial system, I mean, the imperial system is very much set up, like it’s almost like a larger version of that familial unit structure, you know, the, the way that people like Augustus get the title, you know, “father of the country”, and that becomes a very sought after way of looking at him. And he’s almost like this giant pater familias for the Empire. And the family is such a key unit, even before the empire that the family is always such a key building block in the Roman state, and the way that their society has to function. And, and it’s very much that idea of when a woman is acting out, if she doesn’t have a strong man to control her, if she doesn’t have a strong man to control her. If she doesn’t have a strong pater familias, chaos will ensue. Women can’t be entrusted to have that kind of independence. And as you say, it is it is bad for society if you don’t have the structures in place like you’re supposed to.

Darrin Sunstrum 54:09
Right, right. Yeah.

Alison Innes 54:11
And that is similar to, to looking at Euripides’ version in the Greek model is that this is this is what can happen if if a woman doesn’t have her curios if she doesn’t have somebody overseeing her a male somebody overseeing her.

Dr G 54:25
Yeah. And I think as for Medea, and the way that she operates in society, it is perhaps convenient in terms of the theatre, but also fascinating in terms of the psychology that she is still able to find allegiances with other men in times of trouble

Dr Rad 54:45
and she escapes

Dr G 54:46
Yes she does Yeah, gets out of there

Dr Rad 54:47
She gets away.

Dr G 54:49
But being able to wrangle her way to securing some alliances and some promises of aid from other powerful men, despite the fact that she clearly, in some senses, is being set up as a symbolic “No Go Zone” like – this is how you don’t do womanhood – is itself really interesting because within the terms of the play itself, she’s, she’s always pushing back against it and sometimes it’s working out.

Dr Rad 55:20
Absolutely.

Darrin Sunstrum 55:20
Yeah.

Alison Innes 55:21
It’s interesting that the king of Athens doesn’t put in an appearance in Seneca’s version. What what do you make of that difference?

Dr G 55:31
In a way, it’s kind of like skipping to the chase, isn’t it? Because we’ve started at that really like that fever pitch of anger, which is a quality that the Romans tend to deplore anyway, and she’s running with that throughout most of this play. Like, it’s almost like her transformation is pushed forward as a result, it’s like the anger is building and building and building. And all of a sudden, it’s not a surprise that she’s there in a chariot. Yeah, it’s like, it’s kind of like it’s reached such a point, that she doesn’t need that external point of safety anymore. She’s discovered it within herself. And that was probably going to happen in Euripides anyway. And we see that unfold in a slightly different way. But yeah, she’s kind of self contained.

Dr Rad 56:25
It does seem like more of a play on it to have Madea in Euripides, you know, going oh, but but how will I get out of this? Like, what’s my escape plan to have to have the character dealing with those sorts of issues does seem like more what you’d expect in something that’s going to be performed, I suppose, as the audience is like, oh, what she’s going to do? What has a plan going to unfold? It adds to the tension, I suppose.

Dr G 56:46
Yeah. Whereas by the time we get to Seneca, maybe the audience doesn’t need that. And they’re like, You know what, let’s just go for gold, go for the big stuff.

Alison Innes 56:54
Well, and it leaves her at the end of of Seneca’s play with nowhere to go, she can’t go back. Anywhere that she’s been, or to any family that she’s had. And she doesn’t really have a place to go forward to either she just kind of goes into the heavens.

Darrin Sunstrum 57:12
Yeah just into the into the heavens. And then Jason says there are no gods.

Alison Innes 57:16
Yeah. So there’s not even really a place there.

Darrin Sunstrum 57:18
And then you’re at your knees. But yeah, I don’t know. I thought that part was quite compelling. Actually. It’s not just a change of address part.

Alison Innes 57:27
Yeah, I’m not saying it’s not it’s it’s not compelling. But it leaves her in a different – I don’t know. It’s just it has a very different feeling compared to like, when we finish with Euripides’ Medea, we know that yes, she’s taking off in anger. But this is the next step in her plan. We see her taking off in anger. And that’s it. You know, there’s there’s not, there’s not a hint or a clue or any idea of where she belongs, like she may have found herself. But has she found where she belongs?

Darrin Sunstrum 58:02
Yeah, she is all she has her own place.

Dr G 58:05
And I think in a way that makes sense for Seneca if we’re thinking about like the Stoic sort of positioning as well, is that for Jason to be like, there are no gods. I think that’s him trying to just deal with the trauma that he’s just just taken on in witnessing the murder of one of his children, because she’s clearly leaving. And she’s clearly in a chariot and there are clearly serpents involved. So good luck to her buddy. I mean, she’s, she’s off and away. But for this whole thing to be just a crescendo level of anger, I think that speaks a lot to what Seneca is driving at,

Dr Rad 58:47
Definitely.

Dr G 58:48
What does it mean to hold that kind of rage? And how can it ever be dissipated? And it seems like the answer that Seneca comes to is that that it can’t – that level of rage belongs beyond the human experience.

Dr Rad 59:06
And what kind of life are you are you leading? You know, where’s where is it leading you? Even though Medea is much more set on revenge throughout Seneca, she still does have those moments where she’s kind of like, Wow, am I really doing this? Am I really going to murder my own children? She still has those moments.

Dr G 59:23
Yeah, where she has to buck herself up being like, I can do this.

Dr Rad 59:26
Yeah.

Darrin Sunstrum 59:26
I have a couple thoughts she vacillates between the decision making process or not, and that’s something that they share that Seneca and Euripides share, at least in that moment of psychology and Medea. It’s not very long. But one of the things that I was I found missing. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but what I found missing about Seneca, of course, it’s very relentless. We’ve talked about that. But the idea is that there’s almost no sort of rhetorical repartee. And by that I mean, Medea doesn’t use her gift of rhetoric to convince or manipulate like she does in Euripides. Right? Nor does there seem to be any sympathy with – which Euripides often does in other plays – But even in the Medea, Euripides’ Medea any sympathetic portrayal of anyone on the outside, whether it be other women or slaves or children themselves, or you know, marginalised characters, right, Nor is there any sort of, you know, you portray the gods as less than powerful, right or questioned their power, right, and their effect. So Seneca doesn’t get anywhere near those particular things, because rhetoric is not what it was or in, you know, fifth century Athens. Right. There’s something else that’s important to him, I imagine here, Medea is not about to trying to change anybody’s mind that I can see.

Dr G 1:00:52
I think I think I would accept that up to a point. I think it’s probably dangerous to say that the Romans aren’t interested in rhetoric. It’s just that their style is very different. And the way that Seneca is showcasing Medea through long set speeches, without giving other characters a real entry point is, in a way very much in keeping with trying to focus in on a particular feeling and rhetoric for the Romans as well, and to a certain extent for the Greek, centres around speechifying rather than conversation. So you might look at I spent a lot of time at the moment reading Dionysius of Halicarnassus. So bear with me, but he is always even at that point, writing in Greek, always trying to put together set speeches for rhetorical effect. And so they’re persuasive, not just in terms of their length, but for the arguments contained within that length. And this might be an argument for saying that Seneca isn’t writing so much a play as he’s writing some sort of document for circulation. He’s not trying to build that conversational oratory into it at all. Medea does convince Kreon which is a necessary element for the forwarding of the plot. So that does happen early on in Seneca. But it’s not the style I think, I think there’s something to be said about the differences in the way that Greeks in Euripides’ time are pursuing rhetoric and the way that Romans in the first century of the empire are pursuing rhetoric.

Dr Rad 1:02:40
I agree with you, Darrin, about the lacking of Medea’s persuasiveness, until almost like in Euripides her persuasiveness is one of her fearful powers because she, yeah, she is able to snake her way through situations and again, I think it does add to the dramatic element of of the play in Euripides. It is the way that the way that she works her magic,

Alison Innes 1:03:02
Yeah her danger there is not just her magic, and maybe not even primarily her magic, but her ability to use her words and to use what is a manly skill in rhetoric. Whereas in Seneca’s Medea her magic is her most, well her magic and her anger coupled together are the most fearsome aspect rather than her words. There’s there’s not the agon “the contest” of words that we see in a Greek play.

Dr G 1:03:12
Which is interesting as well because incantation in conjunction with pharmaka is usually very important. So it is striking and it’s not there.

Darrin Sunstrum 1:03:50
They even reference that in the play, she talks about the power of her word, right, but it’s used in reference to the incantation process, the magic itself. I remember that. I made a little note, but I can’t remember where it is. But wow, again, there’s the power of words, right. But then it was just about magic talk. Right, like speech.

Dr G 1:04:14
Mm. So I guess we could say that Seneca is then making a real differentiation between speech and the potential of rhetoric, and incantation as just very different modes of speaking.

Alison Innes 1:04:26
So were there any other angles that we wanted to explore?

Dr Rad 1:04:30
Yeah, no, I feel like I’ve felt like I’ve said,

Alison Innes 1:04:34
I feel like we’ve kind of come to a natural point and natural conclusion. All right. So thank you very much for joining us. This has been a really interesting conversation.

Dr G 1:04:43
Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

Darrin Sunstrum 1:04:45
Thank you very much, guys.

Dr Rad 1:04:50
Thank you for listening to this special episode of The Partial Historians co hosted with MythTake and until next time, we are yours in ancient Rome.

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CW: The accounts of Verginia include paedophilic desire, violence against women

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.

Episode 114 – The Tale of Verginia

Dr Rad takes us through the complexities of thinking about Livy’s context and how that might influence his presentation of the material. Dr G explores the connection between the Latin term virgo (virgin) and her name Verginia. There’s plenty of parallels that will emerge between Verginia’s story and the story of Lucretia, whose fate seals the demise of the Roman monarchy.

Verginia is the daughter of a well-known centurion who is fighting on one of Rome’s frontiers. But conflict emerges when Appius Claudius decides that he wants her for himself. He seems heedless to reason or morality when it comes to Verginia and this leads him to engage in a set of behaviours that are appalling.

Verginia’s story is one that involves a number of strange and dangerous concepts:

• Claiming people from the street as slaves
• Convoluted plans to remove a young woman from her family
• Legal arguments around the claim that someone is a slave
• Arguments for how to protect women’s virginity
• What does it mean to be a citizen?
• Official summons and strategies to foil summons
• Groups of women akin to a tragic chorus
• A butcher stand and the connection of Venus with the Cloaca Maxima

• Appius Claudius. Ap. f. M. n. Crassus Inregillensis Sabinus Pat – Cos. 471, 451
• Spurius Oppius Cornicen
• Quintus Fabius M. f. M. n. Vibulanus Pat – Cos. 467, 465, 459
• Quintus Poetelius Libo Visolus
• Manius Rabuleius
• Marcus Cornelius – f. Ser. n. Maluginenesis Pat
• Lucius Minucius P. f. M. n. Esquilinus Augurinus Pat – Cos. 458
• Marcus? Sergius Esquilinus Pat
• Titus Antonius Merenda
• Caeso Duillius Longus?

• Marcus Claudius

• Verginia
• Verginius – father of Verginia
• Numitoria – mother of Verginia
• Publius Numitorius – Verginia’s maternal uncle
• Lucius(?) Icilius – former tribune of the plebs and Verginia’s betrothed

• Dr Rad reads Livy 3.44-48
• Dr G reads Dionysius of Halicarnassus Rom. Ant. 11.28-37
• Joshel, S. 2002. ‘The Body Female and the Body Politic: Livy’s Lucretia and Verginia.’ In Sexuality and gender in the classical world: readings and sources, edited by Sandra R. Joshel & Laura K. McClure, 163-190. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Keegan, P. 2021. Livy’s Women. New York: Oxon.

Additional music and sound in this episode includes an original composition for our podcast by the fabulous Bettina Joy de Guzman

Heinrich Friedrich Fuger – The Death of Virginia.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user Jbribeiro1

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Cleopatra looms large in the imagination, but her legacy is often overshadowed by the western cultural tradition. It turns out that there are many ways to understand the last Pharaoh of Egypt.

Special Episode – The Reception of Cleopatra with Yentl Love

We were thrilled to sit down with Yentl Love to discuss the Islamic reception of Cleopatra. Love is known for her work in making ancient history and classics accessible through her blog the The Queer Classicist. Love has been studying Ancient History and Classics for a number of years and is now bringing the ancient world to life for readers across the globe.

Egypt’s last pharaoh has a rather negative reputation in the western tradition. A classic example is the characterisation of her as a poisoner.
Alexander Cabanel, Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners, between circa 1845 and circa 1887. Wikimedia Commons

Cleopatra VII was the last Pharaoh to rule Egypt. She was part of the Ptolemaic dynasty, descendants of one of Alexander the Great’s generals. She experienced her fair share of family drama. One of her sisters was executed for seizing the throne from their father! It may not have been a relaxing childhood, but it did prepare her for a political career when she became pharaoh at just eighteen, alongside her younger brother, Ptolemy XIII.

In this episode, we discuss Cleopatra’s journey and her encounters with some of the most famous Romans in history, including Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavian (later Augustus!), and how these relationships would impact the way she was represented in the surviving sources.

There are many Greco-Roman sources that refer to Cleopatra, and these include histories, biographies, poems and letters. One factor that they have in common is the negative portrayal of the Egyptian Pharaoh. This is in contrast to the archaeological record, such as coins, statues and buildings.

One of the most arresting portraits is by Artemisia Gentileschi, Death of Cleopatra, 1613 or 1621-1622. Here we see a woman in middle age, stripped bare of all the insignia of power in her final moment of defiance.

We explore some of the reasons behind the differing portraits that have survived of Cleopatra, before delving into the Islamic source tradition. Produced much later than the Greco-Roman sources or the archaeological material, the Islamic sources provide a distinct portrayal of Egypt’s last queen; one that is not bound up in her relationships with men or her appearance.

Cleopatra the scholar? Elizabeth Taylor in the title role of the 1963 film with writing implement in hand!
Image courtesy of http://www.mediafactory.com.au

Join us for this episode about the historiography of Egypt’s last pharaoh; a woman whose fame deserves to include more than just her Roman lovers.

Ashton, S. Cleopatra and Egypt. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008.

El-Daly, O. Egyptology: The Missing Millenium: Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings. London & New York: Routledge, 2016.

Gillett, M. “Goddess, Whore, Queen and Scholar.” Teaching History 51, no. 1 (March 2017): 19-23.

Hughes-Hallet, L. Cleopatra: histories, dreams and distortions. London: Pimlico, 1997.

Welch, K. “Cleopatra as Pharaoh?” Teaching History 53, no. 1 (March 2019): 10-15.

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As far as incredible women in history go, it’s hard to top Agrippina the Younger. Political, ambitious, and a savvy operator are all ways we might interpret the evidence that remains for her life. But its fair to say that our ancient sources are a little less than kind.

Special Episode – Agrippina the Younger with Dr Emma Southon

As the Julio-Claudian family developed into a fully formed imperial dynasty, Agrippina the Younger emerged as an important figure in the rule of three emperors: her brother Caligula, her uncle (and later husband) Claudius, and her son Nero.

She could trace her connections back to Augustus through her mother’s line. She was also the daughter of the wildly popular Germanicus, who died too soon and under circumstances palled with suspicion. Her family connections through her father were Claudian and ultimately this meant she embodied the Julio-Claudians.

After the demise of her siblings, we can think of Agrippina as the distilled essence of the family.

But having an illustrious ancestry is not necessarily indicative of how one’s life will turn out, and in this special episode, we have the great pleasure of sitting down with Dr Emma Southon, who has written an accessible academic history of Agrippina the Younger to delve further into the life of this amazing woman.

A recent reconstruction of Agrippina the Younger as potentially the lead singer of an 80s band…
Source: Royalty_Now on pinterest

Dr Emma Southon’s book Agrippina: Empress, Exile, Hustler, Whore was published by Unbound in 2018. This biography of Agrippina the Younger combines historical detail, engagement with the ancient sources and a colloquial tone to make for a roaring read.

We consider the path to publication for this biography and how academics are finding ways to bring detailed critical history to a broader readership.

Looking to delve further in the life and times of Agrippina?

Here’s some sources to get you started:

• Tacitus Annals, esp Books 12-14; Agrippina the Elder’s tears as read in Agrippina the Younger’s memoirs by Tacitus Annals 4.53
• Pliny the Elder Nat. 7.6 – Agrippina’s breech birth
• Dio Cassius Roman History Books 59-62
• Suetonius’ Life of Gaius, Life of Claudius, and Life of Nero

• Barrett, A. A. 1999. Agrippina: Sex, Power, and Politics in the Early Empire (Routledge)
• Barrett, A, A. 2002. Agrippina: Mother of Nero (Routledge)
• Ginsburg, J. 2005. Representing Agrippina: Constructions of Female Power in the Early Roman Empire (OUP)
• Southon, E. 2018. Agrippina: Empress, Exile, Hustler, Whore (Unbound)

One of the most famous depictions of Agrippina on coinage is her representation with her sisters on the reverse of one of Gaius ‘Caligula’ Augustus’ issues. c. 37-41 CE.
The depiction of living women on coinage was rare and Agrippina’s appearance here is an exceptional moment in Julio-Claudian iconography.

Before things went wrong…
Nero and his mother, Agrippina the Younger depicted together on the obverse side. c. 54 CE. Source: Wikimedia Commons and Classical Numismatic Group, Inc.

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In this special

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 often mediated by a male perspective and asking what this might reveal about women’s lived experience.

A consideration of material evidence, especially when combined with inscriptions offers an alternative to the literary sources for thinking about women and daily life in the ancient world. Our evidence in this episode dates from the third century CE, which means we’re thinking about a Rome embroiled in empire and imperial rule.

In this episode

• drapery in statues and reliefs
• the colour of statuary
• the stola
• the palla
• dress as status

Epiktesis outlives her family. We consider the monument she dedicates to her husband, her children, and herself. Liz takes us through the pose adopted by Epiktesis – the Large Herculaneum Woman Type – and its implications.

Grave stele dedicated by Epiktesis to her family, from Prilep, Macedonia. Skopje Archaeological Museum, inv. AMM 41. Photography © Skopje – Archaeological Museum of Macedonia. Photograph: Ortolf Harl 2017 November.

The husband remains

With Epiktesis

Liz explains how

We consider the

Social status is a

Sarcophagus dedicated by Aurelia Eutychia to herself and her husband Marcus Aurelius Marino. Originally in Voghiera, then moved to Ferrara, Palazzo dei Diamanti, Italy. Front panel. Ferrara, Palazzo dei Diamanti, Italy. No inventory number. DAIR Inst. Neg. Rom. 64.2022

Liz explores the

Here’s the inscription found on the sarcophagus:

Aurelia Eutychia built this sarcophagus while alive for herself and her husband Marcus Aurelius Marino a veteran of Syrian lineage at the behest of the patron and her most dutiful husband with whom she lived for forty-three years by order of the patron out of his own funds. If someone after the death of the both opens it they will deposit a thousand sesterces to the tax authorities.

Join us for a lively

Addendum: In exciting news, in the time between our chat with Liz and the release of this episode, we can confirm that Liz has passed her doctoral examination and joins us as a full academic. Congratulations Dr Liz Smith!

Edit: Since conducting this interview, further analysis of the sarcophagus dedicated by Aurelia has revealed the insight that Aurelia would have been Marcus Aurelius Marino’s enslaved property, before he freed and married her. As his freedwoman, Aurelia would have been bound by custom and law to respect Marcus and give him services (operae), even after her manumission. Accordingly, it is all the more interesting that Aurelia represented herself as an equal partner to her husband through the statuesque elements we see on the front and lateral sides.

For further reading:

Peter Stewart 2003. Statues in Roman Society

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