Book Review ‘Unfortunately She Was a Nymphomaniac, A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women’ by Joan Smith

Speed of travel aside, routine ‘posting’ of harmful content and the circulation of disinformation was common in ancient Rome; in her new history of Rome’s imperial women, author Joan Smith reveals just how much this harmful content was directed at the women of the Julio-Claudian empires (27 BC to AD 68) and sets about rehabilitating their damaged reputations.

Beginning with protocols for naming girls, the book discloses humiliating practices. Where men had three, ‘girls had two names, the feminine version of their father’s surname and nickname, a bit like referring to them as Jones or Brown’.  Consequently, households might contain several females with the same name, and the book’s Dramatis Personae does reveal a dizzying number of Julias, Antonias and Agrippinas. For Smith, managing the resulting anthroponomical overwhelm is fundamental to restoring these women to their unique identities; by knowing Julia the Elder is daughter of Scribonia and Augustus, not the daughter of another Julia, whose husband is Agrippa and whose daughter is Julia the Younger, individual voices emerge.

For Smith, passionate classicist and investigative journalist, critical enquiry is how we make meaningful connection between past and present; history is not ‘telling’ but questioning the past and those reconstructing it.  This brings Smith, a former co-chair of the ‘Violence against Women and Girls Board’ to query how, with so few questions asked, many of these imperial women continue to be reviled for crimes of moral turpitude, and why ‘history from below’, which champions the disenfranchised, still allows them to be portrayed as sex addicts, bigamists and murderers.

Smith examines those writing at or around the time, including Tacitus, consul, senator and writer of the well-regarded ‘Annals’, and Cassius Dio, whose history of Rome fills 80 volumes.  Unsurprisingly for the period, she finds patronage a strong motivator, but surprisingly, a lack of analysis of the imperial women’s contribution to history, either as individuals or by their marriages and offspring.  Re-assessing the sources, Smith posits new interpretations, suggesting that physical and sexual violence had -almost - eradicated them from the narrative.

Writing on a topic which continues to impact women and girls disproportionately, this book is uncomfortable but necessary reading. In the last year, data from the Office for National Statistics showed approximately 2.3 million people aged 16 and over experienced domestic abuse, of which 1,612,000 were female.  As we struggle with the recent consequences of putting reputation before the voices of victims, Joan Smith’s new history is an important and urgent reminder of the high cost to everyone when we fail to ask questions.