Daisy Dunn

They weren’t all scheming poisoners: the maligned women of imperial Rome

Joan Smith criticises the distortions of Robert Graves in particular, whose villainisation of the empress Livia had no historical basis whatever

Statue of Livia, the wife of the Emperor Augustus. [Getty Images]
  • Comments

  • Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women

    Joan Smith

    William Collins, pp. 272, £25

Already a subscriber? Log in

This article is for subscribers only

Subscribe today and get a £30 Amazon gift card if you correctly predict the next US president.

Offer ends in ${days} days ${hours} hrs ${minutes} mins ${seconds} secs
  • The weekly edition delivered, via the Spectator app
  • Unlimited access to spectator.co.uk
  • Spectator newsletters and exclusive events
  • The chance to win a case of Pol Roger Champagne

Read next

Trending

Matthew Lynn

The true cost of Labour’s Budget is impossible to calculate

Matthew Lynn
No sombre music accompanied Rachel Reeves’s Budget, nor was there a reading from Corinthians. Yet, those details aside, one point is surely clear: Labour’s first Budget in 14 years was a requiem for entrepreneurial Britain. The four decades from the Thatcher reforms of the early 1980s, that turned the UK into one of the best

Because you read about adultery

Also by Daisy Dunn

Latest

Comments

Join the debate today

Guess the new US president when you subscribe, and get a £30 Amazon gift card.

Already a subscriber? Log in