This is CBSI in the world.

I'm John Batchel, visiting with Emma Southern, the author of a new book, A Rome of

One's Own, the forgotten women of the Roman Empire, highly recommended, making the Romans

as fresh as the 21st century in their ambitions and their retelling of the details.

And we now introduce the other side of the coin from Lucretia the virtuous one, who was celebrated

by Augustus and his first century AD and passed on to the Julian Claudian family as the paragon of how a woman should behave.

Tullia is the other thing.

She is the granddaughter of Tonekeel, that young woman who with her husband traveled from the Truscan city of Tarkinia to Rome as the foundation of the monarchy.

But now, Tanakil, Tullia, is more ambitious than her grandmother,

although, you know, the acorn doesn't fall very far, et cetera.

And she's married to the wrong man.

Emma, this story is extremely believable because of Tullia's wickedness.

Do we know what drives Tullia?

Did the Romans hear this as just inheritance or something?

They hear this as a kind of almost to them cliched story of a female ambition

and how women have can go wrong in a very specific way because Tilia has a sister

who's also called Tilia and they're both married off to their cousins.

Each one is married to a man.

They're basically married in basis of age.

So the oldest Tilia is married to the oldest brother and the youngest,

Tilia is married to the younger brother.

And they turn out to have fundamentally opposed personalities.

...