IRON CHANGED EVERYTHING: 3/8: 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
⏱️ 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
1569 LONDINIUM
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is |
| 0:03.7 | is CBSi and the world. I'm John Bachelor visiting with Emma Southern, |
| 0:08.0 | the author of a new book, A Rome of One's Own, |
| 0:12.0 | The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire, highly recommended, |
| 0:15.7 | making the Romans as fresh as the 21st century in their ambitions and their retelling of the details. |
| 0:25.0 | And we now introduce the other side of the coin from Lucretia, the virtuous one, |
| 0:30.0 | who is celebrated by Augustus and his first century AD and passed on to the Julian |
| 0:37.2 | Claudia family as the paragon of how a woman should behave. |
| 0:42.6 | Tullia is the other thing. |
| 0:44.7 | She is the granddaughter of Tanakeel, |
| 0:47.2 | that young woman who with her husband |
| 0:49.4 | traveled from the Tuscan city of Tarkinia to Rome as the foundation of the monarchy. |
| 0:56.7 | But now Tanakil, Tullia, is more ambitious than her grandmother, although the acorn doesn't fall very far, etc. |
| 1:09.0 | And she's married to the wrong man. |
| 1:11.5 | Emma, this story is extremely believable because of Tullia's wickedness. Do we know what drives |
| 1:19.1 | Tullia? Did she inherit, did the Romans hear this is just inheritance or something? |
| 1:24.8 | They hear this as a kind of almost to them cliched story of female ambition and how women have can go wrong in a very specific way because Tilia |
| 1:42.0 | has a sister who's also called Tilia and they're both |
| 1:45.1 | married off to their cousins. Each one is married to a man that basically married in basis of age, so the oldest Tilia is married to the |
| 1:56.0 | oldest brother and the youngest Tilia is married to the younger brother and they turn out to have |
| 2:01.7 | fundamentally opposed personalities. |
| 2:05.7 | So Attilia is very, very ambitious. |
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