Joan Smith: Unfortunately She Was A Nymphomaniac

Ancient Rome is more popular than ever. But there’s one important, hidden side of the story that’s not being told: that of the women of Imperial Rome.

The wives, mothers, sisters and daughters of the five first Roman emperors, from Augustus to Nero, have had an almost universally bad press, portrayed as murderers and nymphomaniacs. But these images say as much about the misogyny of Roman society – amplified by modern authors such as Robert Graves in his best-selling but wildly inaccurate novel, I Claudius.

Writer and campaigner Joan Smith tells a different story. Drawing upon years of campaigning against domestic and sexual violence, she identifies familiar strands of abusive behaviour against women, showing how the history of the Julio-Claudian dynasty represents a century of femicide.

The women described in this book might have been the most privileged women of their age, but they suffered everything from child marriage, marital rape and separation from children to exile and murder. Their reputations were shaped by the Emperors and their chroniclers – Tiberius’ mother Livia as the wicked stepmother, Augustus’s daughter Julia as the ‘nymphomaniac’, her grand-daughter Agrippina as the power-hungry mother of Nero. After their deaths, some even became non-persons, with statues and images destroyed.

Joan Smith revisits the original Roman texts to tell a new story – of spirited, inspiring and sometimes reckless resistance to male authority.