8/8: 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
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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.
undated Nero
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I'm John Bachelor with Emma Southern. |
| 0:05.8 | This is the Rome you've never seen before. |
| 0:08.6 | Remember, Augustus had one weakness. |
| 0:10.8 | It was his daughter. |
| 0:12.0 | Well, the Roman Empire has one weakness, it was his daughter. Well the Roman Empire has one weakness and it's |
| 0:14.3 | Christianity. And we're about to go to a saint, a saint who lives between the end of the |
| 0:21.3 | second century a.D. and the beginning of the second century a.D. and the beginning of the third century |
| 0:24.3 | a d in Carthage, the destroyed city rebuilt. Her name is Perpetua and we find |
| 0:30.8 | her at 23 condemned as a Christian. |
| 0:36.2 | Emma, at this point, Pliny the Younger is commanding |
| 0:40.6 | for the Roman Empire, the governor of Carthage. He writes Rome, he writes his |
| 0:45.5 | emperor saying, what am I to do? Why was he, why was he flummoxed and how was at |
| 0:52.1 | this point what was the policy of the empire towards young women who said they were Christians? |
| 0:57.0 | So yeah, Pliny's letter to Trajan which was written just slightly before this, but about 112, his letter was written, is from |
| 1:10.6 | Bithynia, and he is baffled because technically it's not illegal to be a |
| 1:17.1 | Christian but it is illegal to not worship the gods and so he doesn't when people come to him and say these people are |
| 1:25.6 | Christians and he isn't entirely sure whether to punish them or or not and eventually he decides that if they refuse to |
| 1:37.0 | worship the Roman gods then he will have to execute them as heretics |
| 1:41.1 | essentially and as traitors to the Romans because the worship of the |
| 1:46.7 | Roman gods is fundamental to their understanding of citizenship and keeping the empire safe |
| 1:51.9 | and refusing to keep the empire safe is treason. |
| 1:55.0 | And so he sets out what becomes the policy which is that if a Christian insists on saying they're a Christian and won't sacrifice to the emperor or to the the |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John Batchelor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of John Batchelor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.