The Ancients - Domina: Women Who Shaped Rome

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

The crisis of the Roman Republic is a period littered with iconic male power players. Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Pompey, Brutus and the Gracchi brothers. But less famous, and often overlooked are the women that shaped these famous Roman statesmen.In today's episode of the Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr. Daisy Dunn to shine a light on some of the most remarkable women in Roman history. From Cornelia, the mother and tutor of the Gracchi brothers, to Fulvia, the wife of Mark Antony and a commander in the Perusine War, we take you on a journey through the lives and stories of four of Rome's foremost Domina.Daisy Dunn's new book The Missing Thread: A New History of the Ancient World Through the Women Who Shaped It is out now in the UK and publishes 7/30 in the US.Presented by Tristan Hughes. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight, the senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.The Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code ANCIENTS - sign up here.Vote for The Ancients in the Listeners Choice category of British Podcast Awards here.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today we are shining a light on some remarkable women from Roman history, in particular from the period known as the Crisis of the Roman Republic, when titanic figures like the Gracchi, Cicero,

Pompey, Cato, Julius Caesar and Marc Antony were when they rose to the fore. Now these are all well known names today to you and I, but alongside them were some extraordinary women who are less known, like the venerable Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi and highly respected by allies and enemies alike, or the alluring Clodia Metelli, whose reputation was brutally attacked by Cicero in his speeches, or even Fulvia, wife of Mark Antony, yes that's right, who fought a war on his behalf while he was away in Egypt having his affair with Queen Cleopatra. Now to talk through the stories of these women I was delighted to be rejoined by the classicist Dr Daisy Dunn who has written a brand new history of the ancient world

with women at the centre of the narrative. Daisy, she has been on the podcast a few times before to talk about topics varying from Homer to Pompeii and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. It's always great fun having Daisy on the show. She's a fantastic speaker and I really do hope you enjoy. Daisy, what a pleasure to have you back on the podcast. It's been too long. It's been far too long. Last time it was, we talked all things Homer, and before that, all about Catullus and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. But now your book, and this is a big one, Daisy, because you have

just written this massive book, some 3,000 years, about the history of antiquity written through women. This has been a book long in the making, hasn't it? It's been almost embarrassingly long in the making when I look back and think how long I've been working on this because it's kind of deceptive because I've brought out other books in between. But this is a book I've been working on in the background for years and years and years.

And there's about 15 years of research distilled into the pages of this book. So it's kind of a relief to have it out there at last. And ancient cultures that we're talking about, are we going from Mesopotamia all the way up to the Romans? Yeah, we're sort of darting around quite a lot because I'm a classicist and my specialism was Greece and Rome. But it's just so important, I think, that you have a much more broad global story. So a lot on Carthage, North Africa, Asia Minor, so the history of Turkey, Iran, the Persian Empire, a bit of Mesopotamia in there as well. So,

it covers quite a lot of geographical ground as well as a time span that is quite long. I mean, inspirations for the book, Daisy, I know in recent years, there've been quite a few books on mythical women, especially from ancient Greek mythology, whether it's Helen of Troy or Medusa and so on and so forth. Was that kind of an influence almost, having seen all of those books coming out, actually wanting to create a book that just doesn't do the mythological figures, but actually also explores the historical women that we know about from the surviving texts in archaeology? Yeah, very much so, because I think I've seen, I mean, if you walk into a bookshop today, the first thing you'll see probably about five different retellings of

mythical women's lives or Greek tragedies. You could name a whole bunch of them, but it just seemed to me really puzzling in a way that the focus has been very much on mythological women, because the women of ancient history are in many ways a lot more interesting and they seem to have been left in the shadows and I just don't think that's right I mean sort of one of my great motives of writing this book is to try and redress the balance of the fact that so many men from classical history we all know their names they're all household names you know Julius Caesar we will speak of Alexander the Great and for Nero, Caligula, we could reel off a dozen names just like that. But when it comes to ancient women, we've heard of Cleopatra. Someone might name Boudicca or Livia or maybe another Roman

empress. But beyond that, it's actually very, very limited. So I kind of want to bring some more of these women who are lesser known but deserve to be better known into the household situation. So when you're sitting around the dinner table, we should be talking about the women as well as the men. The source material that you have to try and learn about these women from all across the ancient world, are there challenges with it in the fact that almost always their stories are written about by men and sometimes these men have a very clear hostile agenda? Yeah, I mean this is the big challenge really. You're dealing with sources which are written in over 90% of the case by men and a lot of them sort of have a, they're sort of drawn to women

who are either rebellious or really, really virtuous and very few sort of in between. or really, really virtuous and very few sort of in between. And if they're writing about a woman who is rebellious, you'll find often an undercurrent of truth with a huge amount of exaggeration layered on top of that. So they almost use that as a sort of springboard to then go more and more and more extreme. So you can read something in the text and you think, okay, that seems feasible. That seems historically accurate when I compare it with other sources I've read. Then you read the most outlandish things about some of these women and you'll think, really, I can't believe this. So I'd say it just requires a lot of experience and familiarity with the sources to be able to distinguish and to be able to make a judgment. And as historians, that is what we are doing.

We're making judgments on source material. And this isn't obviously confined to the classical world, but with ancient sources, they make more of a demand on you in that direction. So wherever possible, I was drawing on women's writing. We've got fragments by Sappho. I've prefaced every chapter in this book by fragments of women's writing, which I've translated from the Latin and Greek. So we've got some of their voices ringing through the book.

But for the historical information, we are naturally reliant on the sources of Tacitus, Herodotus, Thucydides, the great men who've written history. And it's just up to us the way that we choose to filter through those sources and what we believe. You mentioned the likes of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Tacitus and the like. Do we know much about any women writers from ancient history, from Rome, from Greece, Mesopotamia even? We know of one in particular who I would love to have her work today, Pamphila of Epidaurus. She wrote a range of histories and she was a source for some of the men whose works do survive. But her writings in this direction just don't survive. So we know that

she was there. It's just such a shame. And I just think it's not really accident that a lot of these sources have disappeared it's just when people were copying them out they considered men's writing more valuable and more important to record than that of women it's just we're sort of left with a reflection of the judgment of the times when sort of the manuscripts were copied in terms of what was preserved. Well this has nicely set the scene for your book Daisy and. And in this episode, you know the ancients, we love to delve into the detail and focus on some particular areas.

So we're going to largely focus this chat on a period right near the end of those 3,000 years that you cover on the crisis of the Roman Republic, which we will get into. But lastly, I know it is sometimes a bit of a cringey question, but you know what?

I'm here for it because we may not cover her in this episode. I mean, do you have a favourite woman in the book that you've created over these past years? I have so many because I actually haven't counted how many women are in this book, but I think more than 200. So making a choice, my favourite is quite difficult, but I am very drawn to a woman called Tellus Scylla who defended her city of Argos from attack by the Spartans and she was a poet she was a defender she armed women with weapons and supposedly the Spartans were so threatened by the sight of these

women sort of forming a kind of human shield almost that they actually didn't fight and again we sort of read this and think is this an exaggeration but she was certainly celebrated in her own time and from that moment on in her city the war god Mars became a god that was celebrated as a women's god as well as a conventionally male god and there were statues of her that were erected celebrating her as a defender and also as a poet so she is quite an enigmatic figure who just draws me in just because she seems so multifaceted immediately for me that drew parallels with another figure kind of around that area like kratis kratis sipolis like a wife of one of the successors and she kind of does similar like defending one of these cities in in the peloponnese for one of as part of the successor wars but you know as you say that's just one example of some 200 that you've written

in your book and we'll have to talk about that in detail another time but anyway let's go into the main focus of today's chat which is this period known as the crisis of the Roman Republic and a few particular women we're going to talk about in detail. First thing, no such thing as a silly question, Daisy, when and what are we talking about with the crisis of the Roman Republic? We're talking about the period when the Republic that's been going for hundreds of years seems to be in trouble because of infighting between various different groups and factions, politicians. And this really comes to a head around sort of 130 BC. And it carries on and on and on for over 100 years, really. It's a very, very protracted crisis. Historians will apply different dates to this. In my mind, that is the period that we're talking

about where there's this sort of feeling of inevitability that the current system of political rule cannot last for much longer. There's going to be a change. And looking back far into ancient history, Rome had been ruled by kings, particularly of Etruscan origin. And Etruscan, that's a North Italian particularly of Etruscan origin. And Etruscan, that's a North Italian civilization, Etuscan-y kind of area. Yeah, so the Etruscans had really been based there and had dominated actually much of the Italian mainland prior to the rise of Rome. And so we're looking at 6th century BC, that sort of time, really early on. The last of those kings was overthrown.

The Republic had existed ever since. And for all that time, there'd been this fear of returning to any kind of monarchy or autocracy or dictatorship or one man rule of any kind. But towards the end of this period, so particularly from about 50 BC, it looks increasingly likely to people in Rome that it's going to be necessary or that there is going to be a resurgence of one-man rule of some kind. And this inspires fear in a huge number of people across Rome. And there's this great sense of uncertainty about what is going to happen next. And this whole crisis, as I said, this time period covers decades and decades of Roman history at that time. And we're going to go from the rough beginnings of it all the way

to the end and the likes of Caesar and Demarcanthony and the woman called Fulvia, who we'll definitely explore in depth. But if we start with a woman who seems to be prominent near the beginning, the emergence of this crisis, so the second century BC, and a figure called Cornelia. Now, Daisy, I must admit, I knew next to nothing about this figure before exploring, learning a bit more from your book about her. But give us a sense straight away about her background. Who was Cornelia? So there are many women called Cornelia in Roman history. Women's names in particular, you find them recycled again and again and again. But the Cornelia that I'm talking about is the younger daughter of Scipio Africanus, one of the great heroes of the Punic Wars,

a range of wars, three in total, between Rome and Carthage, the great superpowers of the ancient world. She was the younger daughter. Her mother was Emilia, a wealthy woman. And as a child, she was betrothed to one of the leading senators. And they got married. And supposedly, they conceived or had, it's unclear from the sources, 12 children, of whom three survived, which is probably a fairly typical number, considering the horrendously high rates of infant mortality in Rome and the classical world more widely. So of these three children, there was a daughter called Sempronia, and there were two sons who survived, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus. And these two boys were credited with overturning politics in the Roman Republic.

And it was largely due to their mother, Cornelia, that they are believed to have been able to do this. First of all, I mean, keeping on Cornelia, we'll get to the Gracchi, of course, but naturally, obviously, we're doing it through the lens of this particular Cornelia. I'm guessing if she had 12 children, but as you say, only three survive, was this quite typical of Roman noblewoman at the time? I'm guessing she would marry very, very early and almost be expected to produce lots of children. Was that typical for the time? very very early and almost be expected to produce lots of children was that typical for the time very typical you think on average in rome girls were marrying the first time usually around the age of 14 15 if they can had their first child quite soon after is that's a very young age you

know some of these girls wouldn't have been fully developed really at that stage to be able to to carry a child let alone deliver a child it's been estimated that about one in three deliveries ended up with either the mother or the baby dying or both so really horrendous statistics when you look at it like that and to think of someone conceiving or giving birth to 12 children I mean this did happen, but it's amazing that a woman could actually survive. When you think about how poor actually the level of care and sort of, you know, no antibiotics, obviously, but how poor the situation was. So you had to have been incredibly strong, I think, to be able to survive. Do we know much about how she brought up her children before they

become these prominent figures at the forefront of Roman politics? So Cornelia and her sister were quite unusual insofar as they were educated in both Latin and Greek literature as children. For girls, that was quite unusual. So when it came to raising her own children, she was able to actually oversee their education herself. So she taught the children Greek from the earliest age. And then when they were a little bit older, she entrusted them to some of the leading intellectuals of the day who she befriended. So particularly here of a philosopher, we hear of an orator as well coming to teach her children. But there's also, there's a description that is, if you look at the sources of Cicero and Quintilian, another orator, they talk about her as being very learned in her conversation. And the fact that her very learned education conversation was able to actually carry down into the blood of her children.

And this was quite a widespread belief that eloquence and sort of oratorical skill could actually be inherited in the blood as well as simply learned. So Cornelia was credited with both passing these tremendous skills that she had in conversation down to her children, but also enhancing them through overseeing their education. And this was particularly important because she was widowed while she was still in her 30s and she decided not to remarry she decided to become what was known in latin as a univera sort of a one-man woman which sounds a little bit strange as a phrase but she i mean she turned down proposals including from one of the ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt. What, a Ptolemaic king? A successor king, a Hellenistic king, came and offered his hand in marriage to Cornelia? He did.

So he had a long name. It was Ptolemy VIII Euergetes Sycon. Oh yeah, don't talk about Ptolemy VIII that much. Yeah, he's not a good man. So many, I know, he's not a well-known one, but his nickname that's kind of tagged on the end there means fat face or man with a large face. So you have to wonder don't you whether

she sort of looked at him on a coin and thought no not for me difficult to say anyway she decided to remain on her own so she it was her and her children and for this I mean she she gathered so much of admiration from people for this so there are all kinds of anecdotal tales that were written of her so for for example, you have someone describing the fact that other women would boast about their fine jewellery. And she would say, oh, well, my finest jewels are my children. Kind of thing that Roman men loved, really. Are we talking someone like Plutarch at the moment? Who are the main sources for this woman? Plutarch is an important source. A whole range of different people and Tacitus comes up in as well.

So we're looking across quite a wide range of different source material, but Plutarch is particularly important. So her two young boys grow up and of course her daughter as well. How does Cornelia, how does she go about supporting her children when they are very much there out in the political world? Well, the two sons decide to do something really extraordinary, which is that they both run for the early political office of Tribune of the Plebs, which I'm sure listeners of this will know what Tribune of the Plebs is. But to sort of recap, it was a position which allowed you to veto legislation, to sort of suggest new bills, to almost control, to a certain extent, ideas that were passed by the Roman Senate.

So it's a kind of early office that men could establish themselves within. And it was important in that it allowed you to communicate with a wider population of Rome. And you're sort of looking for the common interests of people around you. And this is what really interested the Brachii brothers. So they were really, really keen on land reform. And the fact that the existing system really privileged the interests of the rich, and the poorer members of society were being bought out, were unable to use common land. So both brothers used their office in order to try and support this and Cornelia herself she was clearly a great supporter of this as well even though she was from an aristocratic background herself she shared their interests and she'd kind of get farmers in for example to come into Rome to actually pass a

vote and you know come and vote for the legislation that they were putting forward so she was quite integral to what they were doing. Wow there we go right at the forefront of the politics happening right there and so that all seems to be going really well at that time Daisy however doesn't end quite well what happens to her two sons? It doesn't. So the two boys make the surprising move of running for the office of Tribunal of the Plebs again, which was strictly unconstitutional. And it really antagonised the Senate. It showed that they were removed from their ranks. It was a way they were recognised as being demagogues, as courting popularity. And in short, both brothers were assassinated as a result of their perceived politicking. This happens over a 10-year gap between the two.

And Cornelia, having seen her eldest son, Tiberius, being stoned to death by a mob, she tried desperately to deter Gaius from following in his footsteps and getting justice for his brother. One of the most extraordinary survivors was talking earlier about women's writings. We do actually have two lengthy excerpts of a letter that Cornelia wrote to try and discourage her son Gaius from making a mistake. Wow. And as you say, they had those 10 years in between as well. So Cornelia has seen this. She knows the nature of Roman politics and she's very much trying to make sure that her younger son doesn't follow that in the same footsteps. And can you call Gaius a bit

headstrong? I think he was very, very headstrong and he was seen as such by the Senate. And the Senate actually ended up passing the equivalent of the Senatus Consultum Ultimum, which is the last decree of the Senate against him, which officially really marks him out as an enemy of the state. This is quite extreme. That's how headstrong he was. Okay. And it doesn't end well for him, really, sadly for him and sadly for Cornelio. I can't imagine what it was like to see two of your sons who were once at the forefront of Roman politics suffer similar fates. I mean, how does this affect Cornelia? Do the assassins, do they then turn their attention on Cornelia? I mean, what happens to her in the aftermath of these assassinations?

Well, amazingly, I mean, a lot of the public gaze turns to Cornelia thinking, what's she going to do now? She's just got one surviving child, Sempronia, her daughter of the 12 that she had at the very beginning she actually withdraws from public life in Rome and goes to live in this amazing villa that she kept near Naples and this was a villa that she bought for 75,000 drachmas which was a huge amount of money in that time and to give you an idea of how splendid it was it was actually purchased and lived in later by Lucius Licinius Liculus who was the great loose historic politician of the late Republic. So that gives you an idea of how splendid it was. So she relocated

there, Sempronia came with her and she kind of used it almost to host like a literary salon in a way. She was paid court by people from all over the place. So she didn't bury her head in the sand after this, but she took herself out of the maelstrom of Rome, which had been left behind by what had happened as a result of the politicking of her sons. But her taking a back seat in the writings of these later historians and those people talking about her, it's amazing to have those two letters surviving as well. Is her reputation not diminished, not made, not hostile? Is there not a hostile writing of her story because of what followed the assassinations of her children, well, of her sons?

Well, amazingly not. This is the thing. I think this surprises us considering the animosity of the senatorial class towards the sons and the fact that a lot of the historians who are writing in this time were very much upper class people they actually had admiration for Cornelia rather than any kind of censure they they saw her as being tremendously strong they loved the fact that she had sort of played the role that she had in their education. Statues were put up to her after she died. That's an incredibly rare thing for a woman. These don't survive, but we do have the base of one of them. So we know that this is actually true, that she was honoured as the mother of the Gracchi brothers. And she was seen as being important because whatever people thought of the Gracchi, they had changed the face of Roman politics for good. This would basically end up with there being a division in the Senate between the optimates, who are the

old traditionalist class of senator, and the populares, who were very much of the Gracchi mold, the people who were there to champion the interests of the lower class people. And this would result in civil war. So Cornelia stands at the head of this incredibly important moment in Roman Republican history. And I think that's why she was written about and why she has been remembered. There you go. I must admit, I do need to learn more about the Gracchi in that period, because it's a period in Roman history that I have not looked at at all. So it's very interesting to highlight and shine a light on this important role Cornelia played in it. If we move a bit onwards, I've got in my notes now the next figure of the man being Cicero and a couple of women who are

very much intertwined with his story. And one of them I think we've talked about in the past when talking about Catullus right at the beginning. But is it fair to say as a bit of background, Cicero, this great orator, Daisy, there are quite a few women intertwined with his story, with his speeches, with his writings. There are quite a few women that play a significant role in why we remember him today. Yes. So I think on the one hand, we look back at Cicero and think, God, what a hero, you know, great orator, very much right at the forefront of Roman politics, entwined with all the key political figures of this period. But within his speeches, we also discover a lot about his view towards women. And it isn't great to be honest I mean I think Cicero a great man but terrible man to be married to or to be surrounded by if you're a woman particularly a woman who's in the public eye this doesn't seem particularly fair I mean he he was married to a very intelligent woman called Terentia she managed her own property she had sort of blocks of flats and these insulae in Rome that she managed independently of him.

She was quite a good match for him insofar as she was totally bored by anything domestic. So if the conversation was about cleaning or weaving, she'd be like, no, and change the subject back to politics. So she was really interested in the world that her husband was in. who was really interested in the world that her husband was in. Their marriage doesn't last. They end up sort of getting divorced after he returns from exile and he marries a younger woman of about 15 because he wants her money, essentially, they're falling on hard times. So that gives you a slight sort of background on his domestic situation.

But in his speeches, I'm sort'm particularly interested in the fact you come across women like Claudia, who was the woman who we think lurks behind the character of Lesbia in the poetry of Catullus. And it's largely through Catullus and Cicero that we know of this incredibly important woman who was very much at the forefront of Roman politics. Come on then, let's explore the figure of Clodia now. So Clodia Metellus, talk us through what explore the figure of claudia now so claudia metellus talk us through what is the story of her family because i believe she's also related to a very interesting figure of claudius who's interesting it doesn't do him justice to be fair i mean yeah so she's got an

interesting family talk us through that she's got a very interesting family so they are an aristocratic family they've been very prominent for hundreds of years. They're wealthy. Her brother, her younger brother is Publius Clodius Polcaire, and he is a demagogue. He is the guy who infiltrated a women's only religious festival, dressed up as a woman, went on trial for that. Supposedly he was sneaking in to try and sleep with Julius Caesar's wife of the time. He was ejected. He managed to sort of bribe his way out of all charges and got off quite lightly. with Claudia and all three of his sisters, in fact, which again, I think whenever we come across a description of there being incest between people, we again take this with a huge pinch of salt. It was a very, very common slur on someone that isn't really to be taken seriously. But

Claudia becomes a key figure, partly because she marries Metellus Caler, who is a very, very important senator. He is a man who was involved in the Catalanarian conspiracy, this great conspiracy which Cicero foiled, which Argel will come back to in a second, but he foiled, which preserved the Republic from being overthrown by a group of revolutionaries. Talas Caler saw off some of those revolutionaries, so he was very important from that respect. The information, as I discovered actually while writing this book, I hadn't realised that Cicero gets all the credit for foiling the Catalan-Aryan conspiracy. He's described as being the saviour of his country, and he swims in that, and he glories in that.

But actually you find in the sources a description of the fact that his information about this conspiracy came from a woman called Fulvia. And this is a different Fulvia from the one we mentioned at the head of the programme because this is a woman we know very, very little about, but she is someone who was on the ground. She was passing information, intelligence, we'd probably say, to Cicero, which enabled him to uncover this conspiracy. And she effectively saved his life. But do we hear about her?

No, we don't. So she's behind the scenes again, as another of the women lurking behind Cicero. Clodia is much more in the foreground because Cicero ensures that she's propelled right into the public consciousness by mentioning her and blackening her character in one of his famous defence speeches. are there any non-hostile sources that talk about Claudia Metella surviving? Because otherwise, it feels pretty unfortunate, really, the surviving material. It really is unfortunate because the key sources, Catalys's poetry and Cicero's writing as well,

with the sort of mentions of her, but not any kind of in-depth description of the kind of woman that she was. I lament this, but I think you do get quite a contrasting portrait between those two authors themselves. I think to look on the positive side when you read Vitalis' poetry, the poems that he writes for Lesbia, the pseudonym he adopted for Clodia, and I'm assuming most class think most classicists will see Claudia is lurking behind Lesbia. This poetry is clearly written for a very very intelligent literary woman. So we have that on one side thinking okay so this is a woman who is passionate she is engaged in this love affair with Catullus, supposedly while she's married to Metellus Cala. Metellus dies quite suddenly without obviously being unwell.

And rumours then pick up that she was behind his death and that she poisoned him. And Cicero really stirs up these rumours. and Cicero really stirs up these rulers. Catullus, when their relationship ends, likewise turns very viciously against her and describes her as being sort of worse than a prostitute. Catullus describes her as, shall we say, servicing men at crossroads, men sort of queuing up and her being, I mean, this idea of her being a prostitute comes up again and again and again, and clearly is just slander. It is unfortunate. So Catullus evidently has this personal grievance basically being dumped by Clodio, I guess, and him not taking it very well. Does Cicero, does he have more political reasons as to why he's doing it? Does he not like the family of Clodio's full stop and he finds any way to kind of smear their family, he'll do it. And one way

is via targeting Clodia. Or do you think that there is a personal animosity between Cicero and this noblewoman, Clodia? There's certainly a personal animosity between Cicero and her brother Clodius, resulting in part from the incident I described about the infiltration of the Bona Dea, the festival of the good goddess, and the fact that Cicero testified against him, Clodius never forgave him, and they become politically very, very antagonistic towards each other. So the family and Cicero are at polar ends, and there's a very good reason why Cicero would want to discredit him and her but it also really comes to a head because one of Cicero's friends essentially ends up in court accused of something really quite quite serious and this is a man called

Caelius Rufus who also appears in the poetry of Catullus. And he appears as the love rival who actually stole the woman off Catullus. All quite mixed up, all quite sort of incestuous, but Catullus describes this man as sort of ripping like a flame through my guts, I think he puts it, and stealing everything that he had. And Pallius Rufus is kind of a very tall, handsome, fashionable sort of man. And he was rich enough to be able to afford one of the luxurious apartments that Clodius owned on the Palatine Hill. And possibly he got to know Clodia through that connection, that proximity where they were living. He was then brought before the law, accused of paying slaves to carry out the assassination of a member of a deputation of Alexandrians who came to Rome.

And it's quite a complicated passage politically. But in the East, you have Ptolemy XII Auletes, who's the father. Another Ptolemy. Okay, another king of Alexandria. Another king of Alexandria. He's best known probably as being the father of Cleopatra, the Cleopatra who would come into her own. And he had effectively lost control, lost his power. And he was in a lot of bargaining situations with Rome to try and be installed back again. And he wanted to be installed so that he had his supporters

on one side then there's also this sort of rival embassy that came to Rome to try and stop this from happening and it's a member of this embassy who is killed isn't it a man called Dio and Cardius Rufus is described to have been behind this and being able to arrange this through borrowing gold from Clodia. So she's linked effectively to this death. And Cicero is involved in this trial. And basically, he wants to get Callius Rufus off. And in order to swerve the whole real main point of this trial, he basically focuses in on Claudia and decides to savage her, to blacken her as much as possible. Oh, goodness. I have been pretty much ruined as a result of having her name drawn into the public eye

in this really, really slanderous way. We think she carried on living. She definitely owned some gardens, which later Cicero wanted to try and procure in order to create a shrine to his late daughter, Tulia. But we know very little, really, of what happened to her later. It just seems she kind of fades into obscurity probably having had this horrible

very public downfall. Cicero, a nasty piece of work as you can see with the story of Clodia then, absolutely. But thank you for explaining her life and her story and also mentioning Fulvia there before as well and her role in helping Cicero defeat the Castellan conspiracy. but then Cicero

taking all of the credit. So we haven't put Cicero in a great light this time, but I think he probably deserves it. Now, moving on, and we're kind of keeping in that same area, the mid-first century BC, we've done Cicero, but now I'd like to talk about two figures linked to not one Brutus. There are two people called Brutus, big figures at this time that you can see associated with the assassination of Julius Caesar. And if we start with a woman key to Marcus Brutus, which is his mother, Sevillea. I remember seeing she's been portrayed in HBO's Rome. She's a massive figure. Daisy, let's explore Sevillea. Who was Sevillea? Sevillea is one of those women, again, who deserves to be a lot better known because she was, for a start, one of the key women in the life of Julius Caesar.

She was about the same age as him. They were born around the same time. She came from a very wealthy background. She was orphaned when she was fairly young. wealthy background. She was orphaned when she was fairly young. And she grew up, she married, had her son, Brutus. She married again, had some daughters. And probably just before that point, she began her affair with Julius Caesar. And it was largely as a result of that. And as a result of the very, very fraught relationship between Julius Caesar and her son Brutus that she came into the public consciousness. And this is Marcus Brutus we're talking about, not Decimus Brutus, if I'm correct. This is right, yes.

So Marcus Brutus, he lost his father to Pompey's forces. So he grew up with a sort of hatred of Pompey, quite understandably. And he, well, where to go with this? I mean, it's very, very fraught, isn't it? We sort of have through Julius Caesar's life, Seville being there by his side while he decides to marry again. He never married Seville. And I think this is actually quite interesting. He could have done. I think his relationship with her seems to have been genuinely one founded on love and affection. And one of the things it said about Julius Caesar is even though he was a notorious womanizer, he actually chose to show his affection for Seville by buying her this amazing pearl worth a huge amount of money. I think it was something like six million

sestasies. It was a huge amount of money, which had made her effectively one of the wealthiest women in Rome overnight. So she clearly has an important part in Caesar's life, but he decides after the divorce of his second wife Pompeia to marry Calpurnia instead, a younger woman. He's probably more likely at that stage to give him a child. Seville was about 41 at the time. I think in this day and age, it would be, maybe people would think about it differently, but I think at that time, 41 was a lot older than 41 is today. So they never married, but she remained probably his most longstanding mistress. Because it's interesting, Daisy, is there a rumour that actually Marcus Brutus was the

child of Julius Caesar and Sevillea? Or is that one which doesn't seem to have much credibility behind it? There is a strong rumour and it's partly results from the supposed last words of Julius Caesar. Go to the assassination of Julius Caesar. The two sort of ringleaders of this plot, Brutus is one, Cassius is the other. Cassius is actually married to Sevillea's daughter, so it's a son-in-law. So these two key assassins are closely related to Sevillea and they kill the man that she's in love with. This is how Messia gets. And his final words, supposedly, were, as Shakespeare put it, et tu, Brute?

But it was in Greek. So, kai su tec non, and you, my child. And so when people translate that literally, people sometimes say, well, is it, and you, my child, as in my, my child? Was this actually, was Brute as a result of an affair between Seville and Julius Caesar? I think looking at the dates, this is incredibly unlikely. Julius Caesar would have had to have been something like 15. Obviously, in ancient Rome, entirely possible, but I think this is a really stretching likelihood. I think you're right there indeed. I mean, I want to keep on Seville a little longer,

then we'll move on. But Daisy, how much of an influence do you think Seville has in influencing Marcus Brutus to join the conspiracy against Julius Caesar, fighting against Julius Caesar in the preceding civil wars? Do you see Seville as a deep-seated Republican like Cassius or someone like that? I mean, do you think she was very much inspiring Marcus Brutus to try and stay loyal to Caesar, even though Caesar had never married her? Does that love kind of remain? Do we know much about the influences she had? It's very, very difficult to understand and to know what her feeling was. I mean, I don't believe that she was in on the plot for one moment. I think time and time again, the fact that she was the mother of Brutus and the lover

of Caesar put her in an impossible situation. There's also the fact that she was the half-sister of Cato, who was another enemy of Julius Caesar. So from every possible angle, in terms of her familial connections, her familial loyalties, they are on the other side from Caesar and yet she's in a relationship with him. So I don't think for a minute that she wanted him dead. There's a strong feeling, for example, at the Battle of Pharsalus, Brutus actually fought on the opposite side of Julius Caesar. But Julius Caesar sent his assurance that he was alive. I think that's very clearly the saving of Brutus' life is a favour on the part of Julius Caesar to Seville. He promised him

a praetorship, a sort of junior position in the Senate, and a consulship for later on. Caesar was doing what he could to support Brutus outwardly and ensuring that he would have his own successful political career. But Brutus obviously was against everything that Julius Caesar as a man stood for. So it's really interesting, I think particularly Seville comes into her own after the death of Julius Caesar, because those positions that had lined up for Brutus effectively, they still held. But the Senate, in the immediate aftermath of the death, decided to assign Brutus a position, a more lowly position, to look after the grain commission. And what's fascinating in sources is we find Seville actually thinking, well, this is not good enough for my son. She actually says, well, I'll have that position revoked. I'll make sure

it's cancelled off the senatorial decree. And this is like one of those very few instances where you find a woman actually saying, like, I'm actually going to change something within the senate. She actually attends a meeting with Cicero. She attends a meeting with Portia. She attends this very important meeting in Antium near Rome after the death of Julius Caesar. So you think after the death of this man that she'd loved for so long, I mean, she must have been completely split. I mean, she's mourning the death of Caesar, and yet she wants the best for her son, who's been the murderer. So her position is absolutely fascinating. It really is and she is one of my at least someone i had kind of knew the name of in the past but like that importance she held in a period of such

strife such turmoil following the assassination of caesar and then her son being having to leave rome and then philippi a couple of years later and his suicide it's all really interesting how all these key figures are involved when someone mentions mentions Mark Antony, we always think Cleopatra, don't we? Shakespeare and the like. However, he didn't marry just Cleopatra. He had a couple of wives before that. And one of those wives was this extraordinary woman who seems to have fought a war on his behalf to initially, Fulvia. Daisy, who is Fulvia? Fulvia is the most extraordinary woman, I think, of the late Republic. It is incredibly surprising that she's not better known considering what she did and who she was linked to. So her first husband was actually Publius Clodius

Polcaire. Oh, okay. Demigod, we were talking about earlier. They had two children. They were inseparable. When he was killed by Milo, she ensured that his bloodied corpse was visible in Rome to sort of stir up animosity against Milo and his forces. So she was a woman who really knew what she was doing politically. She married again. She was widowed a second time, but her third husband, as you say, was Mark Antony. And as the wife of Mark Antony, she was widowed a second time but her third husband as you say was Mark Antony and as the wife of Mark Antony she was deeply involved in Roman politics and the war that you mentioned was really sort of the the centerpiece of her work because this is the Perusine war and it's fought between 41 and 40 BC at the site of Perugia in Italy. And essentially, while Mark Antony was busy in the East having his affair with Cleopatra, fighting a war against Parthia as well, Bolvia was really keeping up his end in Rome.

And she got involved in this war with his brother, Lucius. They banded together against the forces of Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus, and it resulted in a siege at the site of Perugia. And there are descriptions of her encouraging the forces, drawing up the men to fight, of her actually holding a sword, of getting reinforcements when their side was suffering. And you can read this all with a pinch of salt and thinking this seems slightly unrealistic but then you look at the archaeological record and you discover the most amazing things you find these bullets which would have been released by slingshot and they are

engraved with some of the crudest messages you can possibly imagine and one of them actually says I'm aiming for Fulvia's clitoris. Quite extreme. On the other side, you've got sort of uns which are aimed at Octavian's arsehole. You know, they're very, very crude messages, but they show, they attest to her presence at this site. Unfortunately, her forces were on the losing side of this siege. They were obliterated. And Mark Antony had absolutely no thanks for Bolvia and her efforts to really try and promote him relative to Octavian. And I believe that's what she was doing there. And the sources, they say, oh, she fought this war because she was desperate to try and drag Mark Antony home to her away from the clutches of Cleopatra. I don't see it that way at all. I think clearly what she

was trying to do was to remind the Roman people that he existed. This is at a time when Octavian was actually, his popularity was plummeting because of his involvement in the redistribution of land. He had a lot of enemies and she was really capitalizing on that and trying to champion Mark Antony's position relative to his so she had his best interests at heart but she was blamed and repeatedly in the sources she is blamed for being the person who caused the fallout between Mark Antony and Octavian and the breakdown of the alliance that was known as the Second Triumvirate. The proof in the pudding was that after she died, and unfortunately she did die young, not long after that, while in Greece, so meeting up with Mark Antony, after she died, the relationship between these men fell apart anyway. So clearly she wasn't the problem.

Exactly, kind of a scapegoat, isn't she? And there's so much more to her story than just the siege, as you highlighted, going all the way back to Clodius a couple of decades earlier. So an extraordinary woman I wish we could explore in much more depth. But she also has children with Mark Antony, doesn't she? Because there's an interesting legacy

if you go a couple of decades later, if I remember correctly, that in a funny twist of fate, although it doesn't end well for their son, he has a relationship with the daughter of Octavian, like a couple of decades later, if I'm correct. So it almost kind of goes full circle. Yes. Yes, this is true. So the young Claudia is the girl's name. She is betrothed to Octavian very, very early on. And they marry, Again, it's a political setup to try and

cement a new political alliance. And Octavian really antagonizes her by Fulvia, by handing back her daughter and saying, well, I haven't touched her. She's still a virgin. But this really leads to the breakdown in relations between Octavian and Fulvia. And Fulvia, I mean, she had a real knack for inciting sort of enmity in a lot of the men she came across. Another person is Cicero. She falls foul of these awful speeches that Cicero delivered against Mark Antony, the Philippics. Fulvia comes up in these speeches.

And worst of all, she's described as actually after Cicero is put to death on Antony's orders, she's described as actually after Cicero is put to death on Antony's orders, she's described as getting his head and spitting on the severed head of Cicero and sticking her hairpins into his tongue. So Bolvia is really a fascinating character in the swords, whatever, if you read that, I mean, mean some people believe it other people don't I think I have absolutely no doubt that she was not a fan of Cicero I think it's quite extreme to imagine her putting her hairpins into his tongue but it just shows the sort of things that were written about in her own time well Daisy we could go into much more detail about

all these figures whether it's Fulvia Corneliaelia, Sevillea, and so on. And of course, these are just a few of the some 200 women that you write about in your new book. Having, let's say, talked about these particular women that we've covered in today's podcast, I mean, what's the overarching messages that you'd like readers to take away, listeners to take away? Is it this idea of not viewing the sources of face value, that there is much more to these women that should be better known than they currently are? Yeah, I'd say sort of my enduring message is that the women are very much there. They're in the sources. You have to sometimes look quite hard to find them. But you can't imagine that

all the events you read about, the wars, the dynastic struggles, the various episodes of empire building, you can't imagine that women are absent from all of these agreements. They are actually there. And what I've tried to do is to draw them out and show what they were actually doing. What were they doing during these great exercises of power wielding by the men? They were very often pulling strings behind the scenes. So I've tried to throw some light on the roles that they played and the importance of women to ancient history more widely.

Daisy Dunn, this has been fantastic. Last but certainly not least, your book on this topic is called? The Missing Thread, A New History of the Ancient World Through the Women Who Shaped It. Well, there we go. Daisy, it just goes for me to say thank you so much

for taking the time to come back on the podcast. My pleasure. Thank you. Well, there you go. There was Dr. Daisy Dunn shining a light on these women from the late Roman Republic. Often overlooked. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you want more of Daisy,isy well you can check out the

ancients archive go listen on spotify you can search for instance poma or the eruption of mount vesuvius or life before the eruption daisy she features in all of those interviews she's fantastic and always an eloquent and lovely speaker so definitely do go check out our ancients archive last thing from me wherever you are listening to the ancients make sure that you are subscribed eloquent and lovely speaker, so definitely do go check out our Ancients archive. Last thing from me, wherever you are listening to the Ancients, make sure that you are subscribed, that you are following the podcast so that you don't miss out when we release new episodes twice every week. That's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.