IRON CHANGED EVERYTHING: 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
🗓️ 4 October 2024
⏱️ 12 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
1900 ROME
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a |
| 0:05.0 | This is CBS Eye on the World. |
| 0:08.0 | Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:12.0 | A Rome of one's own, the forgotten women of the Roman Empire, I welcome Emma |
| 0:17.5 | Southern, the author of an extremely witty and careful explication of what I've never read the Roman Empire, the Roman Republic, |
| 0:29.0 | the Roman monarchy from the point of view of the women who lived and died in it. This book presents a |
| 0:36.9 | completely new version of everything you've assumed about where did Julius |
| 0:41.8 | Caesar come from, What was the decline in |
| 0:45.0 | fall of the Roman Empire? Or why did it divide into Constantinople and allow Rome |
| 0:50.7 | to attenuate so that there were less than 10,000 people there at one point around |
| 0:55.9 | a thousand years ago. |
| 0:56.9 | Emma, congratulations and a very good evening to you. |
| 1:00.4 | We begin in the monarchy, the kingdom somewhere in the mid-8th century |
| 1:05.0 | bc. E ending somewhere in the 6th century bc. E. as told by the historian Livy, chiefly, there are other voices, but Lively is a major driver here. |
| 1:18.2 | When did Lively write this and who was the audience Lively had in mind? Good evening, thank you so much for having me. |
| 1:26.7 | Livy is writing a very long time after the period that he's writing about. He's writing in the |
| 1:31.5 | first century CE, so he's writing in the 1st century, |
| 1:33.3 | so he's writing it in the reign of the 1st Emperor Augustus, |
| 1:38.7 | and he is writing for an audience of people who are being forced to come to terms with the return to monarchy, |
| 1:48.0 | essentially, to the having one man who is in charge of everything and who is reshaping the Roman Empire around himself. |
| 1:56.5 | And Lively 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 |
| 2:09.4 | prominence and his |
... |
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