3/8: 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
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
3/8: 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.
1540 Rome
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a CBSI in the world. I'm John Bachelor visiting with Emma Southern, the author of a new book of Rome of one's own, |
| 0:11.0 | the forgotten women of the Roman Empire, highly recommended, making |
| 0:15.4 | the Romans as fresh as the 21st century in their ambitions and their retelling of the details. |
| 0:25.0 | And we now introduce the other side of the coin from Lucretia, the virtuous one, |
| 0:30.0 | who is celebrated by Augustus in his first century AD and passed on to the Julian |
| 0:36.3 | Claudia family as the paragon of how a woman should behave. Tullia is the other thing. |
| 0:43.6 | She is the granddaughter of Tanakeel, |
| 0:46.0 | that young woman who with her husband traveled |
| 0:48.7 | from the Tuscan city of Tarkinia |
| 0:52.4 | to Rome as the foundation of the monarch. the |
| 0:53.2 | trust can city of Tarkinia to Rome as the foundation of the monarchy but now Tanakeel |
| 0:58.1 | uh... tulea is more ambitious than her grandmother although the acorn doesn't fall very far etc. |
| 1:07.2 | And she's married to the wrong man. |
| 1:09.8 | Emma, this story is extremely believable because of Tullia's wickedness. Do we know what drives |
| 1:17.2 | Tullia? Did she inherit, did the Romans hear this as just inheritance or something? |
| 1:21.5 | They hear this as a kind of almost to them cliched story of female ambition and how women can go wrong in a very specific way because Tilia has a |
| 1:40.0 | sister who's also called Tilia and they're both married off to their cousins. |
| 1:44.3 | Each one is married to a man. They're basically married in basis of age so the oldest |
| 1:52.3 | Tullia is married to the oldest brother and the youngest Tilia is married to the younger brother and they turn out to have fundamentally opposed personalities. |
| 2:02.0 | So, A Attilia is very, very ambitious. She very badly wants a public life |
| 2:10.1 | where people see her as a queen and treat her as a queen. |
| 2:17.2 | She wants to be in charge and she wants to be worshipped. And the fact that she is married to a man who doesn't want those |
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