Welcome to the History Extra Podcast, fascinating historical conversations from BBC History magazine

and BBC History revealed.

How do you surface the stories of women in the Roman Empire when the majority of ancient

texts were written by men, telling of military victories and losses or intrigues in the political arena?

That's something that Emma Southern has been grappling with. In her latest book,

chronicling hundreds of years of Roman history, all through the lives of just 21 women.

Emma joined Eleanor Evans to share some of their stories.

Emma, thank you so much for coming back on the History Extra Podcast. It's really lovely to

be chatting to you again. Last time we were talking about Agrippina, the younger, and you have

a raft of other Roman women to talk about with us today. I wanted to start by asking, as your book

does, with a question about an anecdote regarding some students at an American college in the 1970s,

who asked for a course on women in Roman history. Tell us, how does that go?

This is a story that comes from Amy Rischlin, who is one of the first generation of historians who

wrote about Roman women in classics. She says, they asked their professor, their very eminent

professor at Ivy League University in America if they could have a course studying Roman women,

like what were women doing in the background of all these sister-o-stories. Their professor told

them that he may as well do a module on Roman dogs, because as far as he was concerned, women

were not part of what you were supposed to be learning about. When you came to learn classics or

you claimed to learn about Roman history, then you came to learn about sister Roman Caesar,

and that's about it. The reaction of the students was to say, I don't think so, and several of them

went on, including Amy Rischlin, to be very prominent researchers about women's lives and how

women were written about and how women appeared in Roman sources and revolutionised the field,

...