IRON CHANGED EVERYTHING: 2/8: 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
⏱️ 6 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
UNDATED ROME
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batson with the author Emma Southern. |
| 0:06.0 | Her new book is a Rome of one's own, the forgotten women of the Roman Empire, |
| 0:10.0 | forgotten not in the least in this telling because we go immediately to we'll go quickly |
| 0:16.0 | through the story of a couple of a truscan kids some of Luca |
| 0:20.5 | leuco who is a Corinthia, is a Greek, but he married an Etruscan young woman |
| 0:28.8 | named Tanakeel and they pick up stakes and go to the new Rome and through an amazing |
| 0:35.0 | series of coincidences they become the king and queen of Rome. |
| 0:40.0 | I'm going fast through their story not only because it's fantastic but because I want to get to Lucretia and Tullia because I'm looking for this |
| 0:50.9 | Diad that sustains the Roman telling. We're recalling always that this |
| 0:56.1 | is pleases Augustus. So we're not getting a story here as we understand history. We're getting a story here that pleases the boss. |
| 1:06.0 | Yeah. |
| 1:08.0 | Tannakeel and well Tarakineus he takes on the name of a Naturuscan city to make himself king. |
| 1:18.0 | Tarkinius and Tannakeel produce heirs and those heirs become the kingship between the 8th century and the 6th century. |
| 1:29.7 | And in the telling, it's important to come across a woman named Lucretia because Emma |
| 1:36.1 | assures me you can remove all the women in these stories except for Lucretia and |
| 1:41.7 | you're okay but if you remove Lucretia you've lost Rome. |
| 1:45.8 | Yes. |
| 1:46.8 | Lucretia is a good woman at home spinning wool for a toga and her husband and his friends are out battling somewhere |
| 1:56.7 | and one night they're drinking and they propose to each other what is their test? |
| 2:08.0 | Their test they get into a bet or a drinking game about who has the best wife. And the test is what their wives are doing when their husbands are away and the idea is that if |
| 2:17.3 | their wives are being good then they're and are being faithful then they're good wives and and if they're not, then they are bad wives. |
| 2:25.2 | And they sneak back to Rome. |
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