S8 Ep581: 7. Daily Life and Business on the Frontier (13) Moving away from royalty, Southon highlights Julia Felix, a Pompeian property owner who ran a vast entertainment complex featuring "bougie" baths and restaurants. Archaeology shows she offered the middle cla
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 15 March 2026
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
Moving away from royalty, Southon highlights Julia Felix, a Pompeian property owner who ran a vast entertainment complex featuring "bougie" baths and restaurants. Archaeology shows she offered the middle class a taste of luxury normally reserved for the rich. Meanwhile, at the northern frontier, the Vindolanda tablets reveal the lives of educated women like Sulpicia Lepidina. Her letters, including a birthday invitation, prove that Roman military forts were not just for soldiers but were active domestic spaces filled with families and social networks. (14)
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| 0:33.9 | This is CBSI and the world. I'm John Batchel with Emma Southern, a Rome of one's own, the forgotten women of the Roman Empire. |
| 0:41.5 | The women who were not royal, who were not part of the coups and backstabings and famous, ambitious, tellings of histories to please Augustus, or in Cassius' case, to please himself. |
| 0:56.3 | We go now to Julia Felix, whom we know of because of Vesuvius. |
| 1:01.1 | Remember, the ash rained down on Pompeii and Herculaneum, |
| 1:05.8 | and the excavation since the 18th century are telling a story that nowhere else is written, |
| 1:11.6 | the lives of ordinary Romans, and the spectacular Julia Felix. |
| 1:18.0 | Sometime around 60 CE, 62 CE, she has a better idea to build an establishment on her own, owning an on her own, |
| 1:30.1 | and what's striking here is that women in the Roman telling do not have the power of owning things. |
| 1:37.2 | They must own it through their fathers or brothers or husbands. |
| 1:40.6 | But Julia Felix, who might even be illegitimate, is a powerful imagination. And if you see |
| 1:47.1 | the pictures of her place that has been excavated, it's vast, it's attractive. It had worked today. |
| 1:53.5 | Emma, it's impossible not to love Julia Felix. And her fate may be with Vesuvius, but what have we learned so far about how she |
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