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. That life spans were generally shorter in the Roman period than today cannot always be offered as justification for such early marriages. Several Julio-Claudians lived well into their eighties. Julia was one of a number of women banished from Rome under accusation of committing adultery or treason.
Augustus was celebrated for ushering in the Pax Romana, but when it came to the women in his family, he was anything but peaceable. He abandoned his second wife Scribonia while she was giving birth to Julia and promptly took up with Livia, who was already married and about to give birth herself. Smith draws attention to the aggression with which he led Livia away from her husband. The verb Suetonius uses to describe the act, abducere, gives us ‘abduction’. Why is it, then, Smith asks, that male historians tend to present the couple’s relationship as either a passionate romance or a calculated act on Livia’s part?
Of all classicists, Robert Graves comes in for the harshest criticism, not least for his villainisation of the empress in I, Claudius. Graves was writing fiction, of course, but Smith does well to remind us that there is no historical basis for much of what he imagined. In his loose translation of Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars, Graves has Augustus leave Scribonia because he is tired of her ‘nagging’, which doesn’t quite capture the meaning of morum perversitatem. Smith’s criticism of Holland’s description of Scribonia as ‘a woman of frigid dignity’ is weaker. The phrase is a nod to Seneca’s gravis femina (a serious/dour woman) which Smith fails to acknowledge.
That Smith isn’t entirely at home in the period – or sympathetic to the demands of writing narrative history or historical fiction with such complex material – can occasionally be felt. While dismissing much of what was written of the Julio-Claudian women as vituperative slander, she credits acts ascribed to the emperors that many of us would cite as equally malicious, such as Nero’s alleged murder of a constipated aunt with an overdose of laxatives. It would have strengthened her argument to have been more circumspect about the accusations levelled against the men, abusive though most of them were.
But the book is as thought-provoking as it is provocative. Smith anticipates being criticised for applying modern standards to the past, and while she cannot entirely escape this charge, her powerful wake-up call stands. It is all too easy to recycle damaging myths from antiquity when they are so sensational, without considering the consequences. The women of the ancient world deserve our compassion and empathy. A failure to give them this may indeed reveal more about our world than we usually acknowledge. That women reporting rape in England and Wales today face little prospect of justice, with the conviction rate remaining below 2 per cent, is a sobering reminder that our societies are not so very different after all.
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