Hello and welcome to Life of the Week from History Extra, where leading historians delve into the lives of history's most intriguing and significant figures.

She supercharged Mark Anthony's rise to power, whipped up gang violence, went to war with Octavian, and maybe, just maybe, abused Cicero's decapitated head with a hairpin.

Here, in conversation with Spencer Mizan, Jane Dracott explores the life of Fulvia,

the extraordinary figure who rewrote the rulebook of what a woman could achieve in the cutthroat world of ancient

Roman politics. We're here to talk about the extraordinary life of the ancient Roman noblewoman

Fulvia. So I wonder, Jane, if you could start by giving us a brief overview of Fulvia's life. Who was she in a nutshell?

Right, well, she was the last member of two very significant Roman noble families, or at least

they had been significant in the past. By the time we

get to Fulvia's birth in around 80 BCE, they do seem to have really lost the shine a little bit. They're

not as politically or militarily important or influential as they had been. So she's born in about 80,

and we don't know very much about her for the first 15, 20 years

of her life because our ancient sources generally aren't interested in children, male or female,

definitely not female. And so we hear about her when she marries for the first time,

she marries the infamous populist politician Publius Clodius Pulker.

And, well, we don't even really hear about her then.

We hear about her when Claudius dies, when he is murdered on the Appian way by his political rival Milo.

And this murder kicks off a whole load of gang violence. His body is

taken home to his house and presented to Fulvia. And this is the point at which she enters the

historical record because she decides that what she's going to do is open her house and display Clodius's battered,

decomposing corpse to the people, to the plebs, the ordinary men and women,

the working people of Rome who had thought that Clodius was their champion.

And in so doing, she possibly inadvertently, possibly

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