1/8: A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire by Emma Southon (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 6 April 2024
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
1/8: A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire by Emma Southon (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Rome-Ones-Own-Forgotten-Empire/dp/1419760181/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
The history of Rome has long been narrow and one-sided, essentially a history of “the Doing of Important Things.” And as far as Roman historians have been concerned, women don’t make that history. From Romulus through the political stab-fest of the late Republic, and then on to all the emperors, Roman historians may deign to give you a wife or a mother to show how bad things become when women get out of control, but history is more than that.
Emma Southon’s A Rome of One’s Own is the best kind of correction. This is a retelling of the history of Rome with all the things Roman history writers relegate to the background, or designate as domestic, feminine, or worthless. This is a history of women who caused outrage, led armies in rebellion, wrote poetry; who lived independently or under the thumb of emperors. Told with humor and verve as well as a deep scholarly background, A Rome of One’s Own highlights women overlooked and misunderstood, and through them offers a fascinating and groundbreaking chronicle of the ancient world.
1790 Rome
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS I on the World with John Bachelor. |
| 0:07.0 | This is CBS I on the World with John Bachelor. |
| 0:10.0 | This is CBS I on the world, I'm John Bachelor. |
| 0:16.0 | A Rome of one's own, the forgotten women of the Roman Empire. |
| 0:20.0 | I welcome Emma Sullivan, the author of an extremely witty and careful |
| 0:25.7 | expectation of what I've never read the Roman Empire, the Roman Republic, the Roman monarchy, from the point of view of the women who lived |
| 0:37.2 | and died in it. This book presents a completely new version of everything you've assumed about where did Julius Caesar come from? |
| 0:47.0 | What was the decline in fall of the Roman Empire? |
| 0:50.0 | Why did it divide into Constantinople and allow Rome to attenuate so that there were less than 10,000 people there at one point around a thousand years ago? |
| 1:01.0 | Emma, congratulations and a very good evening to you. We begin in the monarchy, the |
| 1:05.9 | kingdom somewhere in the mid-aged century, B.C. ending somewhere in the sixth century B.C. E. as told by the historian Livey, chiefly, |
| 1:16.9 | there are other voices, but Livey is a major driver here. |
| 1:21.2 | When did Livey write this, and who was the audience Livy had in mind? Good evening to you, |
| 1:26.2 | Emma. Good evening, thank you so much for having me. Livy is writing a very long time after |
| 1:32.1 | the period that he's writing about. |
| 1:34.0 | He's writing in the first century, CE. |
| 1:37.0 | So he's writing in the reign of the first emperor, Augustus. |
| 1:42.3 | And he is writing for an audience of people who are being forced to |
| 1:46.6 | come to terms with the return to monarchy essentially to the having one man who is in charge of everything |
| 1:55.0 | and who is reshaping the Roman Empire around himself. |
| 1:59.0 | And Livy is part of a large cultural project essentially to write Roman history so that it leads to Augustus and so that it explains Augustus's prominence and his reign. |
| 2:14.0 | The other big writer from that period is Virgil and his Enyad, |
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