7/8: 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
🗓️ 13 April 2024
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
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.
1656 Roman cavalry
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a CBSI and the world. I'm John Bachelor with Emma Southern, a Rome of |
| 0:09.5 | one's own, the forgotten women of the Roman Empire. The women who were not royal, who were not part of the |
| 0:15.9 | coups and backstabbing and famous ambitious tellings of histories to please Augustus |
| 0:22.3 | or in Cassius' case. of his |
| 0:24.1 | case to please Augustus' case to please himself. |
| 0:26.6 | We go now to Julia Felix, whom we know of because of his Suvius. |
| 0:31.3 | Remember the ash rain down on Pompeii and Herculaneum. |
| 0:36.0 | And the excavation since the 18th century are telling a story that nowhere else is written, |
| 0:41.0 | the lives of ordinary Romans and the spectacular Julia Felix. |
| 0:48.4 | Some time around 60 CE, 62 CE, she has a better idea to build an establishment on her own, |
| 0:57.7 | owning an on her own. |
| 0:59.9 | And what's striking here is that women in the Roman telling do not have the power of |
| 1:05.8 | owning things. |
| 1:06.8 | They must own it through their fathers or brothers or husbands. |
| 1:10.7 | But Julia Felix, who might even be illegitimate, is a powerful imagination. |
| 1:16.0 | And if you see the pictures of her place that has been excavated, it's vast, it's attractive, it had worked today. |
| 1:22.8 | Emma, it's impossible not to love Julia Felix. |
| 1:26.4 | And her fate may be with the Suvius, but what have we learned so far about how she conducted ourselves? |
| 1:35.0 | Was this commonplace for women's or is Julia Felix standing all by herself as a woman of |
| 1:39.6 | property? |
| 1:40.6 | I think it's more commonplace than the written sources would allow you to believe |
| 1:46.8 | and you look at archaeology you find women running all kinds of businesses |
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