Conversations: Fulvia, the Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome w/ Dr Jane Draycott
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Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby. And I am your host, as always, Liv, here to share another conversation episode. I'm so thrilled to have these episodes. As you all know, I've had to

pull back a little bit on the scripted episodes just so that I have time to work on this odyssey retelling along with the other book that I've been trying to finish for well over a year now and the collective and you know just countless other things as I try to build out my career outside of um relying on American um advertising dollars. Ha ha ha.

Thankfully, one of the types of episodes that I do not have to pull back on, even in the slightest, are these conversations because...

I absolutely, I mean, I fucking love these conversations. I love having these experts come in and share their knowledge with me, their passion. It is so much fun to record. It's so much easier than writing a 5,000 word script. So I am just so grateful to have access to all of these people and all of the incredible work that they are doing. And today's episode is

Well, I mean, it fits so well. I mean, with everything I just said. But also, this is an expert, an author, a scholar in the field who I have been wanting to get on the show for ages. She wrote a book a few years back called Cleopatra's Daughter, which was about, if you can believe it, Cleopatra's daughter, Cleopatra Selene.

And she'll probably come back on my show to talk about her in the future. But what finally pushed me to say, oh my god, just finally reach out, is that her latest book is on Fulvia, one of the most famous women of ancient Rome. So today I'm speaking with Dr. Jane Dracott. And we talk about Fulvia, this incredible, real historical woman from ancient Rome, and

along with so many things about her that are probably not historical, but instead like misogynist rumors or fan fiction. But we also talk about that more broadly. Women in Rome, the expectations, the...

the things that they were so often accused of doing if they didn't fit into the little Roman patriarchal box that had been ascribed to them, and what that looks like. This episode started about Fulvia, and it is about Fulvia as much as possible, but it is also, it just expanded into this larger question of...

Women in Rome, aristocratic women in Rome, and the ways that their stories, their history, their lives have been manipulated both when they were still living and afterwards to sort of fit together.

with what, you know, was expected of them. Obviously, Jane tells it way better than me, so please sit back and enjoy this fascinating episode about real women of ancient Rome. And don't let me take credit for this episode title. This is just me repeating the book's title because it's great. Conversations...

Fulvia, the woman who broke all the rules in ancient Rome, with Dr. Jane Draycott.

Instead of continuing to ask you questions about your cat, which I could easily do, I will get us into Rome. And so you have this new book on Fulvia. And I, as we've kind of said off mic, I notoriously prefer to have other people come explain Roman things to me. But I do know enough to know that I want to know everything about Fulvia. Yeah.

Not least because just we love a woman in the ancient world, but she would, I feel like I mix up which of the were the maybe the wildest women of the Roman Republic, but was she one of them like what, what kind of, I mean I don't want to just get you to just tell me her life story in this moment but like maybe what you know drew you to writing this book about her specifically.

I think it probably depends on sort of who you are and what your perspective is, because I personally don't think Fulvia was very wild at all. You know, I mean, I, one of the interesting things about sort of researching the book and writing the book is that Fulvia stands out in the ancient sources because the men who are writing those ancient sources want her to stand out there. They are using her as,

as a cautionary tale for other women. They are using her as an attempt to undertake character assassination on Mark Antony. He can't keep his wife in line, so he's all manner of bad things.

And so because they wanted to highlight her in an attempt to highlight many other problems during the late Republican period and many other problematic people like her first husband, probably as floating as a pool chair, and this idea of all the traditional ways of being Roman and doing things were gradually sort of disintegrating in this period. And

One great way of showing that is to show how the women were, you know, wild out of control. And the thing is, is that once you start actually looking at the evidence that we have for this period, and to be fair, a lot of it is Cicero, really. It's Cicero's letters, it's Cicero's speeches, and it's works of historiography that are written much later with a certain amount of hindsight written.

And because they present this view, this rather conservative traditional view of the late Republic and the role of Roman women in it, you get this idea that yes, fulvia is unique and special.

But then when you read through the sources, you don't have a huge amount of references to other women. And when you do find in Cicero's letters, he sort of mentions real women doing real things in passing. And that doesn't always match up with the way that he depicts women in his speeches, because his defense speeches, his prosecution speeches, etc. They're trying to make a point. And so women get used and they get exaggerated in caricature and things like that.

And so once you start looking for these references, everything that Fulvia did is exactly what Roman women were supposed to do.

you know, so they were supposed to get married, which she did. They were supposed to support their husbands, which she did. They were supposed to have loads of babies, which she did, you know, she, she had children with each of her husbands, even better than that, she had boys with each of her husbands. So she gave, um, Poubles, Claudius, Paul, Kerr, and Geis, Gros, and his Curia, her second husband, she gave them their, their first, and as far as we know, only male

male heirs with Anthony. She gave him, well, as far as we know, again, his first male heir and his second one. And so while those husbands were either absent from Rome or when they were dead,

She protected their property and their estates and their children and their political legacies. And, you know, so all the things that a Roman wife was supposed to do and all the things that, you know, later on in the Augustan principle, Augustus is passing moral legislation to make women get married, to make women have babies, you know, all that kind of stuff. She's doing it.

And so why exactly is she being criticized for doing the things that Roman women are expected to do and doing the things that all the other Roman women around her time are doing too? So, you know, you read all these references to women like Cicero's wife, Terentia, who

She's having to manage their joint estates and property while he's exiled and while he's away being, you know, provincial governor, etc. She's having to arrange the marriage or one of the marriages of their daughter, Sevilia, who is the mother of...

Brutus and several other women who were married into the assassins of Julius Caesar, their sort of family affair. She is dealing with a lot of political stuff behind the scenes. And so, for

phobia's not really doing anything that other women aren't doing it's just that we have a lot more evidence for her doing them and that evidence is all very inflammatory and critical because they are using her as this sort of scapegoat in a lot of ways a scapegoat for the for the fall of the republic for the um

bad relations between the members of the Second Triumvirate and as a precursor to Cleopatra as well. She is like the warm-up act to the evil with Cleopatra later on. And there is this agreement, really, as far as the ancient sources are concerned,

in 40 BCE once Fulvia has died and Antony and Octavian are sort of basically on the brink of war there's been a sort of a little bit of a war between Fulvia and Lucius Antonius Antony's brother who was the consul of that year and Octavian while Antony's been away and then that has been sort of put down by Octavian and Fulvia and Lucius have sort of been dealt with

But then there is this possibility of this sort of second war, this kind of worse war, new war between Antony and Octavian at this point. And so they get together at Brindisium and they come to this agreement that actually

That's not the best thing to do. And conveniently, because Fulvia is dead, Antony is now free to marry Octavian's sister, Octavia, whose husband has also died. And so that sort of is a very visible...

presentation of their new sort of partnership and concord and they actually agree and the sources basically say that they decide that it's convenient to blame it all on vulvia because she's dead and she's out of the way and so by blaming it on her

And not really sort of, you know, not really talking out their problems or kind of dealing with their own individual problems. They can just conveniently say, it's all her fault. Let's move on. We're bros now. You know, we kind of, we have this, we're family. We have this new relationship. It's all lovely. And that, of course, just stores up trouble for the next 10 years. I'm obsessed with that answer. I think that it betrays how I've, I mean, how I phrased that, but also just like generally how,

I don't even know quite how to get into it, but it's just purely this... I mean, I think I say wild now because what I mean is essentially what you just laid out of exactly all of that. To me, in the sort of depth of where I've gotten to in researching particularly Greece and Rome, it's just sort of I now...

I now automatically assume that any woman in that kind of realm, like is in some way, like her story is in some way serving a propagandic purpose. And so, you know,

I say while because like I want to hear why all the men were so mad at a woman existing, you know, but of course, yeah, there's all these other implications about what they were doing and what it really said about her. But it reminds me I was having a conversation with a friend recently about and this is going to be where I again, I'm not great at Rome.

But Julia, the daughter of Augustus, who was similarly seen as this like wild, right? Who was like expelled for being too promiscuous or what have you. But, you know, what we were talking about is just this idea of like, well, where is that coming from? Like what propaganda does that serve to call her that? And what does that really maybe imply about her as a real person? And so this Fulvia fits so perfectly into that same idea. And I...

I just, I mean, I'm obsessed with looking at women in the ancient world primarily because of stuff like this where it's like, but I also think like, and I would love to know your thoughts on, you know, how much of up until more recent years was this type of thing taken at face value? Like that she was

you know, because the thing is, you know, it wasn't just the men writing the histories back then, right? It's like all the men up until this point. And the way that so often history has been interpreted in their image and in like the exact image that the sources wanted us to believe, which the sources are also serving this very specific purpose. And, you know, what goes into that? That was a really nonsensical kind of non-question, but yeah,

like was, was she kind of taken at face value more recently? Like what kind of do, what is the broader idea behind her as a character in this kind of propagandic way, if that is a question. There's certainly been, I think a lot more interest in her over the last few decades. You know, we, we have the sort of the,

the feminist movement. And, and that sort of led to not just an interest in women in history, but a recognition that they were there and they were doing things. And there might be reasons why they haven't actually. The bar is low. Sorry. Just to hear it described like that. You're just like, Oh my God, like that should be the bare minimum, but it took so long to get to that point. Well, I think as well. And I, I,

The easiest way to sort of put this is if we look at TV tropes and things, and it's started to kind of be understood that you have certain things like

the the Wendy or the Smurfette or something like that where where you literally have you know one female character with a whole whole group of male characters and it's it's tokenism you know yeah you know stop stop nagging us we've got a woman and in the same way that you know we've got a black person we've got a gay person so so of course we're we're not

we're not racist, we're not homophobic because we included them. Exactly. It's like, what more do you want? And I think that there is this kind of, there is something in this as well, there's this idea, and I encounter this with Cleopatra as well, actually. And you find it in the ancient sources that there's this, this woman is,

is here because she is in some way special and singular. So Fulvia is special and singular. Cleopatra is special and singular. And therefore they have earned their position in this male dominated world of ancient history and historiography. It's,

It makes me quite uncomfortable because it is that sort of thing. As a historian, I was very resistant for a long time. I mean, I was always interested in women and I was interested in the women that

had a presence in my in my history courses and things like that but at the same time I didn't want to do you know the obvious thing which is oh you're a girl you're interested in you know the girl you know you you're interested in in the one female figure from ancient history because of course you know in the same way that that there is this sort of idea that

women are more interested in babies and children and the family and pregnancy and childbirth and gynecology in ancient history and in some cases that might be true because you know we do perhaps look for signs of ourselves or things that we can relate to or possibly it's simply that your life experiences make you curious about life experiences in the past but so with with phobia it's

It frustrates me a little bit that she is held up to be, you know, this sort of this aberration by the men around her when they know full well that's not true because they have wives and mothers and sisters and daughters who are doing all these things.

But, you know, they, they, this is, this is kind of, I could go down a whole rabbit hole about how literally all the ancient sources are lying to us about everything. And we have to sort of bear this in mind that they, they are presenting a very specific slanted view for often for sort of rhetorical kind of purposes and that we have to try and decide what that slant is and how we can kind of get around it. And so this is, this is sort of what I was attempting to do with the book in that,

I could be incredibly pessimistic about it. And some scholars have been. They have written relatively recently articles basically saying that Fulvia is a fiction, that obviously she existed as a historical person, but it is the sources that

made her out to be much more important than she was because they wanted to criticize clodius they wanted to criticize anthony and in actual fact she she was not important she was not significant she was just you know an ordinary roman person in in much the same way that

Claudia Metelli, for example, you can say, well, Cicero's Pro Caglio is all a fiction and Catullus's poetry is all a fiction. It doesn't tell us anything about real women. And, you know, yes, that's one position to hold. It's a very depressing one because it's like, well,

If that's the case, then we can never do anything with ancient women at all because we just dismiss it. And obviously some people do that. No, that's all made up. It's not real. Funny how that doesn't tend to happen so much with ancient male historical figures. I mean, we can accept that there is a certain, the Alexander romance is a fiction, but Alexander the Great is real and historical and everything is true. And the same with Caesar, you know, he's like, oh, he's real. He did all these things.

And so, yeah, that is, that is, that is quite a long way from your original question. No, but that's exactly what I want to know. I want all of this because like, it's what I think about in the mythology all the time, which is why I love having these connections to the historical side, because I mean, you know, so much of what you're laying out is like why I do this podcast and why I started with, with myth, but it was particularly interesting.

wanting to examine the idea that we have been presented with you know up until very recently this like for me on the mythology side it's it's when we have all of these stories of the gods assaulting woman after woman after woman after woman and then we have all of these you know male sources and then historians and mythographers and all of these men um

saying that, well, oh, it wasn't like rape like we think of as rape. It was just, you know, like, oh, it was just like a, you know, I don't even want to get into the arguments, but you know what I mean? Like, but this...

This idea that like it wasn't what we think it is. It was just the way it was back then. Or it wasn't bad because it was the way it was back then. You can cover an awful lot of nasty stuff with the, oh, well, that was just the way that things were. And, you know, that we have different values today. And it's like, do we? Do we really? Exactly.

Exactly. But that's 2000 years of misogyny. It's exactly the same. It is the same with Sylvia because all of the criticisms about her, both as a political spouse to Clodius and Curio and Anthony, and as a politician in her own right, if you choose to see her as that.

These are all things that women today across all political parties have been accused of. So you've got, you know, Cherie Blair, who was the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair's wife on the Labour side. And you've got Kerry Johnson, who was Boris Johnson's wife on the Conservative side.

they both got accused of pretty much exactly the same thing, which was they were using their position to enrich themselves with property and other things. They were using their closeness to the prime minister to get him to enact the legislation that they wanted, even though they weren't elected. And then you've got women themselves who are politicians like Hillary Rodham Clinton or Nicholas

nicholas sturgeon who are being criticized for you know all manner of thing every every single thing you can think of to throw at them you know yes their politics but also their personal lives too it's a really sort of nasty sexual conspiracies and innuendo and things like that and but them being blamed for what their husbands either have done or may have done or have been accused of doing

And so, yeah, it's all 2,000 years and exactly the same things are being said about exactly the same situations. And I find it sort of interesting, but also depressing that this is the case. And one of the things I wanted to do with the book is that you can, I mean, I call it a biography, you know, historical biography. And I call my previous book, Cleopatra's Daughter, a historical biography as well, with the caveat that,

You can't write a historical biography of an ancient person, no matter who they are, not even Cicero, really, despite we have his letters for a certain period of time, but we don't have other stuff earlier in his life. So you can't write a biography of an ancient historical person in the same way that you can write a biography of a person from a later historical period or even today. We just don't have the comprehensive source material of their entire life. And a lot of the time,

we don't actually have their own words either, not their own letters to other people, not their diary, not their speeches. If their speech is recorded by somebody else, how do we know that it's actually true? Because ancient authors make up stuff all the time. And so what I was hoping to do with the book was a sort of qualified reconstruction of this is what we know about her and this provides the framework for her life.

But this is also, this is what people said about her, and it seems very inflammatory. So how to interpret that? On the one hand, oh, it's all true. Every single thing that any ancient author said about her was true, even the things that contradict her.

And, you know, maybe that's true. Maybe she did all the stuff that she was accused of doing, that, you know, she did stab Cicero's head with a hairpin and she did spit on it and she did order someone else to be killed and have his head stuck up outside of her house. Maybe she did that. Maybe she did declare war on Octavian and dress in armor and all the rest of it.

Or maybe she did none of those things. As I said, some people do like to argue that it's all just made up and that she's just a convenient way to sort of flagellate Anthony or whoever. Or maybe the truth is somewhere in between. And

How can we explain these actions? And one of the reasons that I thought she might have been doing what she was doing, well, there were various different reasons. I mean, one reason is that her family, her father's family, her mother's family, these had been very powerful, influential families earlier in the Republic, but by the time of Fulvia's life,

They were still wealthy, but they had lost their political power. So one possible motivation is that she wanted to recapture some of that for herself, for her children. Another motivation is that she loved her husband and she was

very much aligned with them politically. And so she shared their sort of views and was working towards that end. She married three tribunes. So, you know, they all were on the sort of populist side of things.

And she chose to marry them. Potentially her first marriage was arranged by her parents, but her second and third marriages, she is an adult woman who presumably had some choice in it. They were friends. They were her husband's first husband's friend, second husband's friend, etc. And then another reason, and I think this is reasonable to assume that this is a fairly strong motivator, is that she had five children.

And she had, by three different husbands, three different sets of estates and property and wealth and everything else,

And she potentially wanted to secure sort of safety for her children in her first marriage when her first husband Clodius is murdered. There is a suggestion in the sources that Milo, the murderer, wanted to murder her son as well. And he was only stopped because he couldn't find him. And he killed a slave instead. I guess he got confused and thought that the slave was the boy or whatever.

And so if you think that someone has murdered your husband and tried to murder your son, that's going to give you a very specific outlook on how to look after your family. And then later on, when she's married to Anthony, the same thing happens again. Anthony is, is,

declared a public enemy, he's chased out of Rome. She is left in the city with all of her children and all of Antony's enemies descend on her. They are trying to confiscate her property, drain her of her wealth. They're bombarding her with lawsuits and things. They are threatening her children. And so I sort of think there that

assuming that this is stuff that really happened and we do have the documentary evidence for it we have the letters from Cicero about this is actually happening he's very pleased about it because he doesn't like Anthony at this point so if you are a woman in this situation with children in this situation what are you going to try and do you're going to try and seek as much security for yourself through powerful marriages political alliances the acquisition of wealth and property and

That's to me seems that is what she was was doing a lot of the time she she was trying to create a safe space for herself and her children and her her husband's and potentially the people she is connected to that we don't know about.

in a time where people were being murdered in the street and bodies were being thrown in the sewer and in the river. And it was, you know, people were trying to break into other people's houses. We have the Laudato Turia inscription of the woman who is sort of generally referred to as Turia that may or may not have been her name, but that actually records that people, the aforementioned Milo,

So he seemed to be really, really quite evil in this period. Gangs tried to break into her house. Her husband was on the prescription list and he was sort of in hiding and people were trying to break into her house and rob her. And people had murdered her parents earlier in her life and tried to steal her fortune. So this is happening to other women.

Not just Fulvia, because I guess they are, without their men folk, they are seen as easy targets. And of course, big mistake, because Fulvia fights back, Turia fights back, she fends off the attack on her home. So, yeah, the women had a lot going on in this period, and I think it's

If we just even think just a little bit and exercise a little bit of empathy and compassion, we can kind of understand some of what they were thinking and feeling and, you know, was informing their decision making process.

Yeah, well, it feels seems to me like so often that type of thing, the type of actions that women take in situations like that, you know, are more often than not framed in this way that demonizes them, you know, makes them look bad in whatever way.

Whereas, yeah, like the tiniest bit of critical thinking is like, well, that's practical. That is survival. Like the ways that women survived in the ancient world are so often turned against them. You know, it makes me think of Cleopatra. I'm sure you think about her in that realm a lot where people call her Cleopatra.

So many different things. Or you know. It's like either she was so beautiful. Or oh my god no look. She wasn't beautiful at all. What were they thinking? Like there's all of these ideas about her. You know she was a slut. She was getting around. Oh my god I can't believe she was with both of them. All of these things. And it's like that woman knew how to survive. In a world that was trying to kill her. Like that is. It's so simple and to the point.

But it takes a view outside of the patriarchal misogynist structure in which the history has been formed and in which that it grew to the point where it is today. You have to be able to look outside of that structure in order to see this basic level of humanity. It's the same as when we were speaking earlier about people saying...

you know, it's just how it was back then. It was a different time. You know, I'm using a lot of air quotes that people can't see that because it's, it's so, it's so nonsensical. Like that is a basic human level of empathy. Like the, the context I'm thinking about now, just cause I, I talk about Medusa a lot and I recently spoke about her at a

at an event last week. And so she's on my mind and it comes up so often because people love to say that, you know, because Hesiod, which is like the earliest slash, you know, almost the only like early Greek source for her story, because Hesiod doesn't say that it was explicitly sexual assault, that it was non-consensual because he doesn't say it. That means that it was absolutely consensual. And it's like,

No, he just because he did not conceptualize the feelings of women, which like we can read a lot of Hesiod and know that like because he didn't really see them as people like let's be honest, you know, that that doesn't mean that it wasn't viewed as a violent act like and the there's only a very.

specific type of privileged man who can get away with saying like that saying that and not you know having it immediately be like what are you fucking talking about like this is not I'm not being particularly eloquent right now but it's

It's just so interesting to me the way that this is why I love having on historians because I can then connect it to myth and be like, well, this is, you know, it's all of the same stuff was happening with myth and women in just a different way. But yeah, you know, it's the way that these women are doing all of these things or the sources say they are. But the sources often, you know, like the men were doing more terrible things. Yeah, far, far.

far, far worse. I mean, this is in my final sort of towards the end of my book. I'm like, okay, so say she did all of those horrible things. Let's just compare, shall we? She put people's names on the prescription list. So did Anthony and Octavian and Lepidus and, you know, she potentially sort of stabbed Cicero's head with a hairpin. Well, I

Octavian gouged someone's eyes out with his bare hands, you know, and he supposedly sacrificed Italian soldiers on the altar of Julius Caesar. And he did so much nasty stuff during the Triumviral period when, lest we not forget, he was 18 years old to start with. And then he was sort of over the next decade, you know, so he went from being 18 or thereabouts to being around about 30.

when he sort of took sole control.

And so, I mean, I guess we can just, oh, boys. Boys do horrible things. But he spent the next 44 years of his political career trying to just whitewash all of this and wipe the slate clean and blame it on so many other people. And it's like, no, you were horrible. You did some really nasty stuff to lots of different people, many of whom, well, there were

most of whom are dead and so they can't really argue back, but their friends and their family are still around. And so everybody is just, you know, holding their noses and agreeing to let it slide at this point because it seems like the political thing to do. BetterHelp Online Therapy bought this 30-second ad to remind you right now, wherever you are, to unclench your chalk.

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You will not regret trying it, but all of their sauces are good. And the chicken's made for dipping. The new McCrispy strips with a new creamy chili McCrispy strip dip. It's a chicken made for dipping only at McDonald's. But yes, I sort of think the judgment that is sort of exercised against Fulvia

It is very, there is a massive double standard about what it's okay for women to do and what it's okay for men to do and the circumstances under which it's okay for them to do it. So a couple of the other examples I use in the book that when Clodius is murdered on the Appian Way,

Milo's wife is with him when this happens. So there is like a full scale brutal battle going on outside their carriage. And she's just... She's what? She's just sitting in there? She's just...

She's just watching out the window. I mean, she's just ignoring it completely and concentrating on something else. I mean, there is this point where Clodius, injured, goes into an inn to try and take shelter. And Milo orders his goons to go in there, drag him out and murder him in the road. And...

So was he still in the carriage at that point? He just stick his head out the window and Faust is still there. And then she's like, I'm just disassociating from this.

Or because her father was Sulla, you know, is she actually quite used to this sort of thing and doesn't really mind? And Cicero's brother, Quintus, his wife, Pompomia, she apparently, and this is a story that I just uncovered, like reading, researching for this book that I hadn't really...

heard much about her at all. She appears in Cicero's letters because he writes periodically, he's writing to Atticus a lot of the time, who's Pomponia's brother. And he writes, the pair of them write about how Quintus and Pomponia don't seem to have a very happy marriage. They have a lot of arguments. And there's an occasion where Quintus puts the moves on Pomponia and she's like, no, thank you. I am not interested in having sex with you tonight.

And Cicero is flabbergasted because how dare she be so dismissive of her husband when, you know, he has every right to, you know, want to get it on.

Anyway, she apparently, after Cicero has been murdered and Quintus, her husband, and Quintus, their son, they have all been murdered in the proscriptions, she gets hold of their freedmen who betrayed them. And she basically tortures and murders him. And it's just briefly mentioned in, I think, if I remember correctly, it's Plutarch's Life of Cicero or something like that. There's just a throwaway mention of it.

I'm just like, why is this not better known? Why is there not more sort of discussion about this? And is it that it's seen as being, I mean, Pomponia was always an unreasonable, angry, out of control woman. So of course she tortures people. She apparently she carves off bits of his flesh and makes him eat them. Or is this like everybody just agreed-

if someone has murdered your husband and your son even if you didn't like your husband that much but you know you love your son and you're really you know this is how you get your revenge but

Did everybody just agree not to talk about that? Oh, this is nasty. We don't want to kind of delve into how awful women can be or some women can be when we just pretend that they're not. So it's like, well, so for being, you know, poking a dead head with a hairpin, if she even did that,

Versus like there's there's another story and it's from earlier in the Republic that there is a there is a woman who she I think it's if I can remember correctly, I think it's her husband has has been killed in Punic Wars or something like that. And so she has some some some prisoners and she locks them up.

And they think they're tortured and one of them dies. And she just leaves the surviving prisoner in an extremely small space with a decaying corpse of his fellow prisoner.

And this goes on for like some time and she, her sons just kind of go along with this. And then at some point it's, I think one of the household slaves tells somebody or something and it's discovered that she's done this and, oh, this is terrible. How could she? This is terrible behavior from Romans and the way they're treating captives, et cetera, et cetera. And these are sort of, the way these get used in the sources, it's like cautionary tales. Like don't do this. This is really bad.

This is not the proper Roman way to behave. And so I find it interesting that this is especially the case with women. You know, we hear all the time about generals like Caesar and so on. They cut the hands off of deserters and that's fine. You know, they do all sorts of things like that. And then women, you know, do do anything.

And it's not fine. It's not even excusable by this being a time of war or whatever. And then, yes, I do sort of wonder, what are we supposed to make of these stories? Yeah. I think about, I mean, just generally that I like, sorry, no, I can't phrase anything, but I'm just, you know,

I think it's so interesting to think about that question. Again, this is something I think about a lot when it comes to ancient Greece and myth broadly, but just, you know, what the stories are,

the stories that survived, the stories that were recorded, like what they say and don't say, right? Like what, what are they not say about every other woman or, you know, particularly the, the, the crimes of women as compared to men, like you just said in the way that they're not, you know, excused away as being, you know, just part of war. I, I think that that's something I was thinking of before you,

got to that point and just want like the idea that men are allowed to do just about anything in war and it's not seen as you know barbaric and human all of those things but a woman does a fraction of it in some kind of defense or even not in self-defense um but just does a fraction of it and it is

This the most sort of horrifying thing you can imagine. I mean, obviously, the double standard has always been there. But this the the world that was kind of created in that particularly Greece and Rome and the patriarchal structure in which they were all kind of being developed just.

created this world in which you know the the the rules around what women were and were not allowed to do were obviously so different but i also think that the way that they recorded those stories and the women whose stories they did choose to record be they real or mythical were not necessarily you know intentionally selected but inadvertently selected in this way that that does mean that they

you know, are these cautionary tales like you mentioned, or, I mean, I think a lot about the, the women and their stories that just kind of represent male fear of women. They, the way they, they fear the capabilities of women. Right. And so, yeah. And they, and they should, I mean, this is when, when you have a society that is predicated on the fact that significant women

numbers or sections of it are kept down. I mean, there are concerns about enslaved people when periodically an enslaved person's

either actively murders a member of the household or through inaction allows to happen, then there is this sort of, oh well, we must bring the hammer down, like all the enslaved members of that household must be killed because the action of the one. And there is a story in

some, so it gets used in the Roman historiography about this idea that at one point it suggested that enslaved people should wear a certain type of clothing to mark them out as slaves. But then

in the debate around this, it's pointed out that if they do that, they'll realize that there are far more of them than there are of us, you know, the elite men that are sort of in the Senate debating this. And so I think that there's perhaps something similar there with women that you can see in the...

in the literature, the same fears about women appear again and again, and they get used in the sort of rhetorical training, the kind of fictional sort of hypothetical court case scenarios, things like, you know, the idea that the stepmother will either poison her husband's children from his first marriage, or even worse than that, she will convince her husband to kill the children from the first marriage. And, and I mean, this, this,

It's a sort of, I mean, you can understand, I suppose, what that's, at the heart of that is this unease about mixing families, blending families, the family dynamics of sort of stepchildren, step parents, et cetera. But it's seen as this, this is what all women are like. Women couldn't possibly love their stepchildren. They must see them as sort of rivals for their own children that they don't necessarily even have.

And the idea that women are into poison and into witchcraft and spells and stuff. And again, at the heart of that is potentially that women run the house. So women are the ones that oversee all the enslaved people who do the actual sort of cooking and cleaning in elite houses where they have elite.

these large numbers of staff, obviously not so much lower down the social hierarchy, but we don't hear about those people. We hear about the elites and the elite spheres. And, you know, that is, there is something to that, that women are responsible for a huge amount of making men's lives possible. And the idea that a man could

Well, this is this is we see some of this pushback when Augustus is trying to pass moral legislation to encourage everybody to be married pretty much all the time. And we hear in the sources that the rejections of this, you know, for some men don't like women. They don't want wives. They're perfectly happy with with their own bachelor life because, of course, they have households full of enslaved people who are running their life for them.

But there is this recognition for, or at least it's not voiced, it's sort of hinted at in the subtext that there is this recognition that women are actually quite important and quite fundamental to both the running of your household and the survival of your family. Because if you want your family to survive, you have to have heirs. And where do you get those from? Well, you have to have a wife who's going to provide you with legitimate children.

and the state more broadly, because of course you always need more Romans and where are they going to come from? Some of them will come from abroad, of course, but for the senatorial order and the equestrian order, the sort of the wealthy elite people who like to think of themselves as so much better than everybody else, there is this problem of, well, you can't do without the women. You need the wives and you need the children.

And also in the late Republic as well, women don't go abroad with their husbands. When their husbands go off to campaign or to run provinces, women have to stay at home. And so while the men are out of sight and doing whatever they're doing in the province, the women are the ones who are responsible for running provinces.

their household and they're looking after all of their sort of finances and everything else with sort of legal oversight and guidance, but they're the ones who are on the spot making the day-to-day decisions. And that is, you know, I think a lot of, a lot of men in the ancient sources, they have perhaps they have anxiety basically about what are the women going to get up to while I'm away? It's like, well,

perhaps if you were nice to them and you trusted them you wouldn't have this anxiety but perhaps because you've not been so nice to them and you don't trust them and you clearly think that they're going to take an opportunity to sort of try and get one over on you why would they do that if if you had treated them nicely and loved them and you know everything else so it is perhaps that fear of

I have treated literally everybody that's not me very badly. And one day it's going to come back to get me. It's so interesting seeing that historical side of the very same thing that I look at every day in myth because it's

I mean, looking at the sources from Greece are so interesting as compared to Rome, you know, for so many reasons, but so much of what, you know, so much of what we know obviously does come from myth in that way of it being sort of translated into reality the way it was in Greece, which, you know, didn't

necessarily like apply in the same way in Rome. I'll just say about that though something I find very interesting is that we don't have the same amount of Roman myth as Greek myth. Yeah. We have a little bit you know you know of it and some stuff like that but and you sort of see it in the contemporary sort of enthusiasm for Greek mythological retellings from a feminist perspective

where are the Roman ones? Because we have, you know, Le Guin's Lavinia, for example, drawing on the Aeneid. But where are the rest of them? Because we don't seem to see Roman myth in that way. And it's like, because we were like, oh, well, the Greeks have got myths and the Romans have got history. It's like, well, the Greeks have got history too. And the Romans have also got myths. But

You know, you sort of perhaps there's this tendency to just dismiss them as having taken the Greek myths and they're just rewriting. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, Ovid made that really difficult. Like Ovid is the main problem, I would say, for that narrative. Yeah.

Kind of going back to what you were talking about earlier, the way that the sources as they survive, you know, say so much about kind of what's going on there, but also what we don't know and what is not being told to us either intentionally or otherwise. I've mentioned this on the show a handful of times now because I just can't get over the way that I've just keep...

And seeing these men try to like they think that they're telling like a strong woman story, but in the process, they are lessening the importance of a very real woman. And so but to me, it's really important to connect it with Socrates as we were talking about those sources earlier and the things we know and don't know, because I think.

We are so often, and obviously this is really different when you're in the depths of study and things, but for a more broader audience, we are so kind of expected to believe everything that the ancient male sources wrote to the point where

There are these, these arguments I keep seeing about, about Socrates and Aspasia where people will say, Oh, you know, this woman, you didn't, you didn't hear about it in the history books, but a woman was Socrates's teacher. And they say this with such, with such strength and surety that like, look, I am, you know, I'm bestowing this honor upon this woman that you've been, you've been ignored. People have been ignoring her in history because a woman taught Socrates and, and,

I'm an ally. Exactly. And in doing so, they also, they try to say that, oh, she's been demonized because of the patriarchy. So they say she was just a prostitute. And it's like, actually her role as this, this sex worker, this like high end Hatera sex worker is like why she was able to ever speak with Socrates. And you ignoring that while sounding like an ally, because you don't want to say that she, you know, was a sex worker, like is, is,

is taking away the very real history of this woman who did really interesting things and was able to do so because she also was a Hatera, you know? And it's like, it just reminds me of what you were saying with Fulvey at the beginning and, and the things we believe of the male sources that they give us in relation to women. And then also the ways that like they, those then, um,

phrasing this so poorly, but the way that then we can like, we see the other side of then the people who try to like make up for it, but in doing so again, erase the lived realities. Like we don't need to see women as perfect emblems of morality in order to

be acknowledging and appreciating these very real women. It's actually far more interesting, impactful, powerful feminist to examine them as real complicated humans in the exact same way that the men were real complicated humans. It's funny because it's still, in some ways, it's anti-feminist in that

it's still, it's giving someone value because of their connection to a man.

So, you know, it's like, well, you know, a woman taught Socrates, therefore a woman, this particular woman has something she's worth paying attention to because she's associated with somebody that we value. Yes. And Socrates or any other ancient Greek or Roman man is surrounded by women, many of whom will never get mentioned. Or they're just Hatera.

Just sex workers. Yes, exactly. It is frustrating that people, women, they get their entrance to the stage via their connection to a man. And this is something that

it's inevitable really with ancient history because it's a patriarchal society and it is the men who are promoted as being worth examining and then the women connected to them are worth examining because they're connected to these men not because they are independent people of their own and I just

it makes me frustrated, I suppose, the limitations of the sources. But it's funny when people do talk about feminism or ancient feminists and the idea that we can say that anybody in antiquity was a feminist in any way, shape or form. I mean,

They absolutely were not. What ancient woman was actively working to make life better for the other women and the non-binary people of her acquaintance?

even when we do see some examples of female solidarity, it is very class-based. So Hortensia, for example, marching to the forum and speaking to the Second Triumvirate and demanding that they not tax the 1,400 richest women in Rome. And that's a very famous... Yeah, it's a very famous example of collective female action. Yeah. Yeah.

But it's not feminist at all. They're trying to tax dodge. It's very contradictory in some ways. It seems to be one of those areas where it's like, let's identify women who are ahead of their time. And it's like, were they ahead of their time? I mean, I don't think Forbia was ahead of her time. I mean, you could say perhaps she was ahead of her time by maybe a decade in that, you know, had she been the wife of,

Augustus when he was the emperor or had she been the wife of Antony, had he become the emperor. She was ahead of her time in that sense in that she was anticipating a period where women empresses had a huge amount of personal power but

it's not like they use that power for the betterment of all the other women or anybody else really. It was very sort of selfish use of power to promote themselves and their agendas. And it's one of the things I try, as I was trying to contextualize Forbier and try and look at her with a certain amount of empathy and compassion and reconstruct her behavior,

Ultimately, I was still trying to remain aware of the fact that there's only so far I can do that as a 21st century person. You know, there is only so far that any...

ancient Roman woman would be someone that you could potentially bear to be in the same room with. Could you find any common ground with them at all? And I mean, I think the same is probably true of mythological women. I mean, we don't obviously get sort of three-dimensional depiction of them in the ancient sources. They tend to be quite archetypal or, you know, let's tell a story so you can learn a lesson, you know,

But it's sort of a lot of it is, well, I didn't care about any of this until it happened to me. And then it was the worst thing ever. You know, and I victimized all of these people. But then I got victimized. And I don't know. That's terrible. Yeah. No. Well, and it's I think that it's just all of it is this reminder also of just the way that

it's just so hard because of, of, I mean, the patriarchal structure and then also where we're at now. But, you know, even all of these mentalities, this idea that of finding women who were, you know, ahead of their time or what have you, like also all of that is still so tied in with patriarchal values that it sort of gets lost. You know, it, it reminds me of the, all the horrible, um,

nonsense um going on right now with this very certain type of woman who has gained a status in the patriarchy to the point where she wants to keep every other woman out of that status exactly it's the well it's you know it's the women who

who demonize... It's the cis women who demonize trans women because they have reached this point. Because women have been, you know...

to the degree that we have for this long. You know, there is this very specific type of woman who has achieved the next tier down from the men. You know, it differs in varied places. You know, it's white women in North America, like a very specific type of white woman. It's the Trump voter white woman in the States. We have them overhead.

They're the ones who are celebrating the recent Supreme Court ruling on trans people. Oh, exactly. Yeah, I can't stop thinking about that. Well, it's the strangest thing because it seems to have sprung up in the last five years or so.

I'm not entirely sure where that has come from. And it's probably too simplistic to say that it's come from a very specific person with their enormous platform and their enormous wallet. But they're not there. If you have to pick one person, if you had to. But I do think it's important, particularly right now with the Supreme Court decision that happened in the UK last week. Yeah.

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Well, I will bring this back to Fulvia, actually, because a lot of the criticism of Fulvia, she is not acting like a woman. Or, you know, the ancient authors say about her, the only thing feminine about her is her body. And what's sort of connected to that is the fact that, you know, she's, you know, as far as we know, a sort of...

a cishet woman who is married to Dumean who's having babies so there's quite a bit about her body that is feminine including her ability to have children but

but the idea that she doesn't behave like a woman because she wants things that women aren't supposed to want. And one of the things I think is quite interesting about her is that there is a fairly standard stereotype in ancient Roman literature that basically all women care about is cosmetics and jewellery and clothing and your wife is going to spend all of your money on all of these things. And

One of the interesting things about Fulvia is that there is never any suggestion that she wants money to buy, you know, pretty things. She wants money so that she can buy property and she wants political influence and she wants to sort of

Act as a patron to many different clients, including like client kings and queens and and the consul and other people like that. And so so this idea that they are attempting, it's like the Lady Macbeth unsex me now sort of thing is that the very way that she's acting is.

renders her you know un-female, un-feminine, un-woman but of course she can't be a man you know that's ridiculous and and it's interesting in in ancient myths about um sort of um sex change or gender reassignment or whatever term you might want to use for sort of the the ancient hermaphrodite stories men don't turn into women women turn into men

And the idea being that they were always men all along, but they're just revealing their true self, but it doesn't work the other way because who wants to be a woman in antiquity? This idea that it's perfectly natural for a woman to transition and become a man. How on earth would a man transition to being a woman? The recognition that, of course, in a patriarchal society, being a woman really sucks.

And so it's with Fulvio, it's this idea of she's she is really pushing her way into the male sphere and making it. And I kind of come back to the fact that in some ways, I guess if you put it in a different way, she is.

But realistically, she's not doing anything that lots of other Roman women weren't doing. Yeah. And were they all? Was Seville trying to be a man? Was she being unfeminine? Was Terentia being unfeminine? Was Clodia being unfeminine? And I suppose if you have a very narrow definition of what feminine is, and it's the sort of ancient Roman equivalent of the modern trad wife, you know, that is, I suppose, true. But...

Yeah, she's so interesting in so many ways for what the Romans think about her, but also what later writers drawing on the Romans think about her and all the way into the present with how women...

The idea that they have to wear sort of trousers and the whole pantsuit thing to be taken seriously. They have to lower their voices to be taken seriously. And you hear people like Margaret Thatcher doing that. But the actress Natalie Portman had to do that. She had to have sort of elocution lessons to speak in a lower pitch because her natural voice was deemed too high pitched, made her sound too young, made her sound...

I guess, you know, not intelligent. The idea being that if you're, if you have that kind of greedy voice, like high pitched voice, that you're a silly little girl and an intelligent woman who went to Harvard, I think. Well, I think it all, it's so interesting the way all of this does connect so well. And I think it all just, you know, comes back to this idea of the fear of,

what the men couldn't control, you know, Fulvia was a man because she was threatening their masculinity. What they saw as masculinity and that is control. Right. And it's interesting, isn't it? That what, what man who is secure in his masculinity was,

is threatened or feels that someone else, whether it's a woman or another man, can threaten his masculinity. And it's clearly there are some insecurities present. And for Roman men, I suppose, it's because your reputation is everything.

And you need to be on pretty much all the time. You need to constantly be acting in a way that is deemed to be manly and virtuous and sort of you have your dignity and your authority.

and all the equivalent Latin words for those. Yeah. That they don't necessarily translate exactly to the words I've used. But, you know, there's that sense of these are all, you know, your...

your good name once lost is lost forever, that whole sort of situation. And so the worst thing that someone can do is cast aspersions on you, can call you effeminate. And so if that's the worst thing you could ever be is womanly, I mean, it's just too depressing to really...

think about how misogynistic the actual world is. It's baked in, you know? Well, I think that's a good way of phrasing it and kind of bringing everything full circle because I think it's a good reminder that the

the gender binary generally harms all of us. And the- Yes, trying to force yourself into a very specific box. It's not made to fit. By the very definition, it's not for everyone. It's barely for anyone. Exactly. But we're all sort of cutting off bits of ourselves to fit into it. It's like how toxic masculinity, you know, men being exposed

to everything you said about the Roman man, right? Those expectations...

Create toxic masculinity because it gets ingrained that they cannot be anything else. And then that toxic masculinity hurts men as much as it hurts women and other people, because it is, again, enforcing this gender binary. And I think it goes back again to to the very specific type of women who are afraid of of of trans people, to those cis women who are afraid of of.

trans women and the way that that all comes down to to control and power I saw a trans person I wish I remembered it was on a TikTok video and I and so I don't remember who who said it but it was a trans person talking about somebody had asked a question um

Of like, you know, they were like, honest question, you know, why do you think that people are so afraid of trans people? And the answer, I think, will stick with me forever. And it's this idea that trans people exist outside of the patriarchal structure, because the patriarchal structure is that binary structure, and it has put women into a place where

and that place is where the men want them and trans people don't fit into either of those places they exist outside of that binary and therefore they cannot be controlled by the patriarchal structure and it's why that you know these women particularly that one with all the money you know she is one of the worst patriarchal

agents, I would say, to ever or to exist now, certainly. She is the least feminist person I can imagine because she is

enforcing this binary that was created by the men to control us. Like I don't, and it's so hard to understand that alternative. Once you recognize that, like that, that structure, that idea of what does and does not constitute a woman, be it from ancient Rome and or Greece to now that structure of what does and does not define a woman is what is there to control us. It is the thing that is meant to keep us in check and, and,

adhering to it is just another way of enforcing the patriarchal structure and

It is interesting though, as I mean, as we were talking a little bit earlier about the fact that we remember in our lifetime, you know, people feeling confident about being themselves, their authentic self and doing whatever they wanted to do with their hair and their makeup and their clothing and just their way of living their life. And I mean, that's, that's the thing, isn't it? It's like all of those, those,

the idea that you could perhaps see someone else and they could inspire you and you could say i mean this is a very sort of simplistic example but but you know if if a woman wanted to cut her hair short and she'd had long hair her entire life because she thought oh that's the appropriate woman we're going to do but then she saw you know trans people or um

you know, any, anybody on the LGBTQ spectrum doing whatever it was they wanted, you know, combining, you know, a shaved head with a dress or whatever else. And she thought to herself, oh my God, you know, I can,

I don't have to dress this way or whatever. I'm going to do that too. And it's almost like this is, this is part of the problem is, is that the, because these, these barriers started to become very permeable and break down and it's like, no, no, no, we've got to shore them up. We've got, we've got to quick get in there and put everybody back where they're meant to be again. And it's, it's,

It's just really depressing. It is. What business is it of yours? How does someone else choose? I mean, I think this is about the sort of the...

supposed sort of pro-life uh arguments as well it's like if you don't want to have an abortion and you don't believe in abortion don't have an abortion don't have one don't don't have one easy you don't have to no one's gonna make you whereas at the you know at the same time if someone else does want to or they may not want to but they need to or whatever other situation

doesn't affect you at all you don't even know about it if they don't tell you and if they if they happen to know what your thoughts are they probably won't you know yeah

Yeah. Trans people using bathrooms. It's the same thing. You don't need to know. If you know what somebody has in their pants in a specific bathroom, like that's a problem. And it probably means that they're not a trans person. They're an actual threat. Like people love to use this idea of like, well, men going into women's bathrooms. So that's why. And it's like, well, that's a problem with men. That's a man doing something. Yes.

Periodically in the UK, I mean, maybe it's the same in other countries, we do periodically get news stories about men who have attacked women in supermarket bathrooms or department store bathrooms. Because men are scary.

And that's the issue. Yeah. And it's like they weren't dressed as women or anything else. They just went in. They just went through the door, you know. And we have signposts up in our public toilets which say, you know, the person assigned to clean this bathroom is male today, you know, to make you aware. So there are men in bathrooms because they're employed to be there. I mean, that's okay. That's fine.

Well, it's also like you making a law about a trans person and where they can and cannot go actually doesn't stop a man from going somewhere and hurting someone. Like it literally doesn't. It doesn't stop a man from doing that. And every time they try to make this argument, it's like, well, but a man has done this. And I'm like, well, then you're talking about a man. You're not talking about a trans person now, are you? You're talking about a man. This is really the sort of the crux of the issue and the...

The depressing thing about it, when you were saying earlier about how patriarchy hurts everybody, toxic masculinity hurts everybody. And with the sort of, you'd think with the onset of like the body positivity movement and everything else, that things would get a bit better for everybody. And, you know, that women would be allowed to not wear makeup or do whatever with their hair or their clothing.

That's not happened. What's happened is that young boys and men are now being body shamed about, you know, this, that and the other and they're feeling like they need to have, you know, they need to take steroids and they're becoming really unhappy with the way they look. It's like, no, that,

how has it gone in that direction rather than the other direction? If the other direction, you know, we could have had women being held to less high standards of being allowed to be more what they were doing, that would have helped men too. But no, instead keeping these standards getting ever higher is actually hurting young boys and men as well. Like when it comes to the really superficial stuff that historically it's been women that cared about makeup and clothes and hair, but now men are caring about it or being forced to care

about it too and everybody's increasingly unhappy. It's like, what is the end game here that we are literally all utterly miserable all of the time? We hate ourselves. We hate our lives. And wow, I mean, if we look back through history at periods where this has occurred, it doesn't end well for anybody. No. Yeah. It's...

Oh, it's so terrible you have to laugh, like I just did. With that kind of, that sort of shrill kind of verging on hysterical, and there's a word that, you know, that kind of laugh. It's not a genuine ha-ha chuckle. No, it's that awkward, ah! Like it's... It's a laugh that could become a scream if it goes on too long. Yeah. No, it's, yeah, it's so wild. But it is, I mean, this...

It's a conversation transformed. I should know. Like every time I'm going to talk about an ancient woman, it's going to become me just ranting about the patriarchy, but I do think it's so interesting. It is. And you can't avoid it really because no, I think because we know that we're so close to it. Yeah. Because there is so much continuity and so much of the classical world has been deliberately changed.

our contemporary world has been designed deliberately looking to that as a sort of a role model in our political systems and a lot of our religious systems and social systems they are drawing on all of that and so we took quite a lot of the bad stuff and brought it into our sort of contemporary world and now we're just having to sort of muddle through and try and sort of

pointed out when we see it and argue with it. But we have platforms to do that. I do love that I can have women like yourself on to talk about ancient women because, I mean, I'll, I'll have, I'll let men do it too, but they have to do it right. But, you know, I, I,

I just think at the very least we can be examining these past figures, you know, and looking at, you know, even if, you know, you've talked a lot about, about not being able to, you know, have any kind of comprehensive biography on, on people from that world. And that's absolutely so true. And also it's so nice to be able to,

look at what we do know, but also question why we know it and what might have influenced that. Right. And I think that is at least something that has come out of the field in the last couple of decades, but that at least that ability to question what we know and why we know it, you know, because that is part of the thing that's quite depressing, because if you think about it, there are certain ancient sources that

we can recognize that they survived because the people at the time thought that they were important. But then how do we, there are other ones, we have to sort of reckon with the sort of transmission of these sources and how it happened. And a lot of the time, and this is

impressed me when I thought about it, when I first read about it, that a lot of the sources that we have survived because they were used for teaching children. And so we have the sort of equivalent of what we have in the UK, we call the national curriculum. And it's what certain people have decided, this is the canon, this is what young people need to know. And therefore they get copied and copied and copied.

And then you get the sort of, I don't know, the outliers there. There's just the completely wacky, random stuff that survives in one manuscript in one place. Accidental survivals, yeah. Yeah, and that's the sort of interesting thing that if you sort of, you somehow travel through time and grabbed an ancient person off the street and you said to them, what do you think are the most important things

texts that we need to preserve. It might give us very different answers because we're sort of judging, I mean, I guess we can accept that Iliad and the Odyssey are seen as very important and were always seen as very important by the nature of just how many people engaged with them in their own work and how many copies of them survive out of the way places in Egypt and things like that. So we can accept that people thought that the Homeric texts were foundational.

what about the other, you know, all the others that we have? And why do we have the play, the tragedies that we have when there are other ones that won, you know, the festival competition that we don't have? And, you know, Sappho was thought to be brilliant and the ninth muse. Is it the ninth muse? No, the tenth muse. Yeah.

How many years? 10th years? 10th years, yeah. Oh, God. But yeah, so we don't have her work complete. We have fragments. Survived by accident. So clearly it's not about quality.

of sort of writing in the same way I suppose that the modern bestsellers are not on the bestseller list because they're good literature including the ones written by a certain individual people readily acknowledge that they're not actually that good now even if you're judging them as children's literature yeah yeah

But because everybody's had them in their house at one point or another and they're in all the shops and you would be forgiven for thinking they, you know, that is the same. But yes, I always wonder why we have the sources we do. And in the case of Fulvia, we have...

We're missing some really significant sources. We're missing the books of Livy that deal with that period. Really? And that period in detail. Even though he was alive at that time, he lived through it, he was writing about it. We don't have the work of Quintus Delius, for example, one of Antony's

So yeah, we don't have Quintus Delius, but we do have Cassius Dio, who used Quintus Delius. So some of the more sort of pro-Antony information, and Plutarch potentially used Quintus Delius as well. So

some of that is there, but it's like, what else was there? And so, and when we, we tend to sort of think of ancient sources as being a sort of flat morass of information, but they were written at staggered intervals. Cassius Dio is writing sort of 200 years after the events that he's describing. And so one thing that I always try and point out to students when, when I'm talking about this kind of thing is that they were writing with the benefit of hindsight and

about stuff that was ancient history to them. If we think about what was happening 200 years ago, for us it was the Victorian period. And so you know exactly who turns out to be important because at the time they didn't know. It could have been any number of people, but then somebody dies and they're off the table or somebody loses a battle and so they're off the table and so on and so forth. And so at the time, people appeared to be important

And so they are taking up quite a lot of the sort of historical bandwidth of the people that are living through that time with them and that people are writing about them thinking they're important, but then they die. And so they immediately cease to be important as far as the historians writing later are concerned. They know that Augustus's adopted grandsons, his grandsons who he adopted as his sons, Gaius and Lucius, they know that they die before they can really even do anything important.

And so they are, you know, historically insignificant. They probably have a paragraph each in any given ancient encyclopedia, like the Oxford Classical Dictionary or something.

But at the time, that was not, you know, there were so many prophecies about how great they were going to be. They were being groomed to be the future emperors. They were being given all of these honors. There was this huge expectation. You see a little bit of that in Virgil's Aeneid with Marcellus, for example, Augustus' nephew. He was going to be potentially the heir. He was married to Augustus' daughter, Julia, and it was anticipated that they would have children, the next generation of the Julia Corbyn family.

He died very young. And so she was then married off to Agrippa. And then they had their children. But of course, those children died young. The male children died young. And so we reading 2,000 years later are reading sources that were already dealing with a several hundred years of hindsight. And so they're sort of the established narratives about what mattered and what didn't and who was important and who wasn't.

And I find this was something that I found quite interesting thinking about Fulvia was that she died in 40. We've already sort of discussed that she died and immediately she was used as a scapegoat for Anthony and Octavian. But one of the things that I was thinking about when I was writing the book and as I sort of came to conclude it, I was like, well, what if she hadn't died? And this is one of the ways I think you can potentially tell who was historically significant. If they had lived, would things have been different?

slightly different, significantly different. And with Fulvia, I think things would have been significantly different for Antony and not just Antony. So the way that I think about it is that if Fulvia hadn't died in 40, maybe he would have divorced her over the Perusian War. Maybe he still would have married Octavia and so on.

But Fulvia would have been alive and she would have been in Rome and she would have retained their children and her existing children. And she would have been in a position to defend Anthony's interests in Rome, even if she'd been extremely angry with him for divorcing her, very ungrateful for her going to war to defend his interests. She would still have been the mother of his children and sort of seeking to advance their cause, right?

And she would have been able to protect Anthony's interests in that way, not out of altruism, but out of the desire to continue to wield influence through the next generation. She had four sons. One of them was a member of the Claudii. One of them was a...

they were from these very influential Roman families they would have been could have the potential to be the sort of political leaders of the next generation and had that happened Octavian wouldn't have had the influence that he had in Rome and in Italy and

if Antony had retained his influence in Rome, then the outcome of the Battle of Actium might have been different. And the outcome of this sort of situation with Antony and Cleopatra and Octavian might have been different. And so you'd see Antony having a considerable amount of influence in the Near East with Cleopatra

and her children occupying the kingdoms that he allocated to them and the donations of Alexandria. His daughter from his earlier marriage to his cousin, she was married into a Near Eastern family

elite family that would eventually go on to be a client kingdom royal dynasty and then his sons and his step-sons in Rome taking care of the rest of the empire and so I find that really interesting that the possibility that if Forbia had lived she would have it would have been

quite a different political scenario. Whether Antony married Octavia and had the two children with her that then created the Julio-Columbian dynasty or not, the Roman political situation would have been quite different during the 30s and then potentially after that as well. And so I think that's something to bear in mind when we think about history, thinking about

not just well this was always going to happen it's like no it wasn't necessary one one difference you know you can think counterfactually about a lot of things what if caesar had not been assassinated well octavian would have not been important necessarily because caesar would have continued to do what he was going to do and octavian would have just had to have been his minion um anthony would have been his minion too everyone would have been his minions so yeah

I could go on about that for a long time. I mean, I think about that in relation to what we don't have so often too. I was thinking back to what you said earlier about just how we can't really say that any

woman from that time was ahead of her time or or or the ways in which, you know, we don't have evidence that anyone was objectively against the the concept of slavery and all of those things. And it's you know, I think it's it's so true to think about it in that way of of

what if things had been slightly different? What if one person had lived when he, they might not have, or what have you, but also to think about just what didn't get written down, you know, what. The Antikythera mechanism, for example, like we have the Antikythera mechanism, but we have no ancient literature that says anything about anything remotely close to it. What is it? Exactly. Well, and I think that we have so many women who,

But we have them through these male lenses of, like you said, too, often hindsight and knowing their eventual importance and all of that. And so it's, you know, the question of what we don't know, of course, is something that will haunt all of us, I think, forever. But it's also really interesting to just think about those questions and understand.

The question of what we do and don't have or what might have been happening and we don't know about it. We have references to hundreds of female authors, but we don't have their work. We have fragments of about 100 ancient female authors when we know there were more than that. But we just don't have anything that they actually wrote.

That's clearly not about quality because there are plenty of ancient male authors whose works we don't have either. Plenty of plays written by, you know, the tragedians and the comedians and the historians who are acknowledged to be brilliant, but not so brilliant that every single thing they ever wrote was preserved. And

yeah it's like what what what might we find if if you know we we did look at all the papyri fragments in in uh that were uncovered in egypt or we did find more uh tablets of any number of different materials and things like that yeah i mean it's endless and

I could say a lot about the handful of plays of biorepidies that survived by accident because I think they say a lot of really interesting things because they were not selected to teach children or be preserved. But that would keep us going far too long. But it's a great... I love to think about that and just what may or may not have been there. But knowing what we do know about these women, I do... I mean, I like hearing that...

you know, was maybe just this very realistic person who maybe did some terrible things and some good things. And her history was written by men. And here we are. Who is entirely virtuous and who is entirely not virtuous. I mean, we all, you know, horrible people can do the occasional nice thing and nice people can do the occasional horrible thing. And depending on... Things are complex. Yeah. I mean, this is something I think that does get lost in this desire to...

try and you focus on an ancient person a lot of the time you you find them interesting and you find them in some respects admirable because you're trying to sort of you reach reach them trying and and so this this i guess it you can there can be this this inclination to try and explain away everything bad they did or you know focus on the good things that they did and

And realistically, it's probably a mixture of both of those things. This is with Fulvia, I think. I tried to explain why I thought she might have done things, you know, for better or for worse. And I certainly...

I find her interesting and in a way that it's hard to find a lot of other ancient women interesting simply because we don't have the information about them. We don't have enough, you know, they get mentioned for one thing, like, oh, they had a very nice, you know, emerald necklace or something. It's like, well, that's great and good for them. Yeah.

doesn't tell me anything about them as a person beyond the fact that they liked large jewelry. Some people do, some people don't. Some large jewelry is incredibly tacky, some large jewelry is actually very luxe. Yeah. But I think that's so...

It's just, I love that we've had this conversation. I'm so glad I finally did reach out to you because I think even just the way you opened it was exactly what I want to hear about an ancient woman, which is that I want to hear how they were a woman, a human. We didn't necessarily talk about phobia very much. I mean, I know. Which is great because it does mean that, you know, when I do have a podcast and I stick much more family to the book, this is not just a repeatable of that.

Well, that's what I like to get out though. You know, I, I like to make it this conversation, but also I just want to hear about women. And so the fact that we were just able to turn it into this conversation about

roman women more broadly i think is so great because so often i think we have to use characters like fulvia as as an emblem almost as all the others because like you say we don't have anything and so being able to also use that to openly translate to the fact that we don't have much about these other women and so what can we think about other women via fulvia um or and and some of the others that you reference because i also do like that you've just been able to like

share all these little facts about all these other Roman women who did these things or maybe they didn't and it was to make them look bad what have you but I I just I I want to look at ancient women and mythological women even at as complex people um you were capable of lots of different things because I think that that is far more interesting and realistic and so yeah I

All to say, this is very delightful. I'm sorry we didn't stick too much to full VR in the book, but I've had a delightful time. Well, I suppose it means that for potential listeners, they're not spoiled. They don't think, oh, well, I don't need to read the book now. It's like, you do need to read the book. You need to read it. Because there's so much. Also, the cover is great, just as I've been meaning to say that. I love the cover. I think that's a great...

painting they've chosen or I don't know if you did but yeah well that's not going to be the American cover but it's also really gorgeous it's on my Instagram for anyone who cares to see it but the American version I think is coming out in June so not too far away

Perfect timing. Well, then that was going to be the, how I wrapped it up of also asking, you know, more about that. I also, I was just in the UK for the first time and I saw your book in a number of places. It was exciting to the lead up to chatting with you. But yeah, so, okay. So it's out in the UK. Clearly it has a great cover. I'm going to go check what the North American cover is going to look like as well. We'll figure out those dates for the,

release of this episode, but is there anything more you want to share with my listeners other than they should read Sylvia and maybe Cleopatra's daughter, which I imagine is also really, well, I mean, this is, this is possibly more for you than the listeners, but maybe we could do a Cleopatra or a Cleopatra Cellini, um, episode. Um,

because there's so much that we could say about Cleopatra. Please, again, you've been on my list since that book. I just end up, I get there's too many things to do and it ends up, and emails stress me out. So then people sit on my little to-do list for ages until I send them a slightly manic DM. But no, I would love to talk about Cleopatra, Celine. Absolutely. Well, let's do that then. No, I mean, I hope your listeners have enjoyed our meandering conversation

slightly ranty at times discussion because I have and you have and I hope that they are intrigued enough to go and look my book. I mean, buy it. Yes, that would be great, but you can also get it from a library. I mean, it's however, just however you consume it, just try and consume it, please. Heck yeah. No, we love a library. Oh, nerds, as always, thank you so much for listening. I'm just...

perpetually thrilled that I have these conversation episodes, that I get to record these kinds of conversations, that I get to talk to these kinds of people. I mean, it's truly one of the best things to come out of this podcast and this job. So the fact that you all want to hear these nitty gritty details, these obscure, or in the case of Fulvia, not necessarily obscure, but just...

Much maligned, much... You know, there's just... There's so much to stories like these and I'm just so grateful that there are so many experts who have this kind of knowledge and passion and who just want to come on and talk about... I mean, people like Fulvia, but I mean this about so much of the ancient world because it's just...

It's just the absolute best. And I'm so grateful for this. Huge thanks to Jane for this episode. We had so much fun. It's probably one of the few that I've had a little more trouble editing in recent months because it is just we were able to go so deep into these wider issues around women and patriarchy and history. And oh, my God.

But it was truly so delightful. So I do hope to have Jane back soon to talk about Cleopatra's daughter as well. Because you, I mean, you name an ancient woman or a woman from the ancient world and fuck knows I want to hear about her. So.

I mean, and on that note, if anyone has recommendations for either topics like that or experts that I might have or might maybe should talk to for the show, you can always feel free to share those with me either via email, MissBaby at gmail.com or via the ongoing form for Q&A.

or for questions for Q&A episodes, that's mythsbaby.com slash questions. And speaking of that, I could use some more of those. So if there is something, some topic, some person, some burning question that you have and you want to share with me or you want to hear more from me about it, please submit those. Again, that's mythsbaby.com slash questions.

Let's Talk With Miss Baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Pangoish is the Hermes to my Olympians, my incredible producer. Select Music is by Luke Chaos. The podcast is part of the Memory Collective, a group of creators and educators dedicated to sharing knowledge that is accessible, contextualized, socially conscious, and inclusive.

to find more from the Memory Collective, visit collectivemem.com. By the time of this episode's release, that website may or may not be the newly created thing that we are currently working on. If not, there's so much more coming soon. If it is, great. Check out the new website. But for now, just to keep up with what's going on, you can check collectivemem.com. You can also sign up for the Myths Baby newsletter, which one of these days will exist. Again, just...

Gotta find some of that elusive spare time. Sign up for that at mythsbaby.com slash newsletter. Thank you all so damn much. I just love my goddamn job so much. And even while everything in the world seems to be like a little bit on fire, I'm just so grateful that I have you.

This work that I can do, the history that I can share with you all, and just these ways that we can kind of find, like, resilience and inspiration from the ancient world. It means a lot. So it means even more that you all continue to want to hear me talk about it. I am Liv, and I love this shit.

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