Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac must be one of the most eye-catching book titles of the year. I assumed it was just a riff on John Ford’s 17th-century tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, but apparently it came directly from the mouth of a modern tour guide in a museum in Rome. The man was describing Julia, the daughter of the first Roman emperor Augustus, when Joan Smith stepped in. ‘Julia,’ she corrected him, ‘was not a nymphomaniac.’
The rattled guide, who conceded that he was merely following the (biased) ancient sources, may be relieved to learn that he has not been singled out. Smith, the author of the barnstorming Misogynies, takes many others to task for insensitivity in her new history of 23 women of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Tom Holland, Guy de la Bédoyère and even Mary Beard are among the writers of popular ancient history in her firing line.
Smith approaches the women of the early empire from a very different perspective to these historians. While she has some background in the classical world, she has spent much of her career investigating domestic abuse and violence against women in the UK today. Her general impression on researching Rome was that the situation was ever thus:
What I saw when I began to look more closely at the Julio-Claudian dynasty was a pattern of behaviour that amounts to extreme abuse: child marriage, serial rape, house arrest, exile on distant islands, forced suicide and murder.
Such behaviour is well borne out by the sources. Most of the women who feature in this book were about 14 when they married for the first time – typically men of at least 30.
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