Southon, Emma. A Rome of One’s Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire. Abrams P., 2023.
As one might expect from a book written by an author holding a doctorate in Ancient History and examining the history of the Roman Empire, Emma Southon’s primary sources are for the most part the well-known and highly respected Loeb Classical Library editions; she also draws our attention to useful websites, some of which are available to all; for others, you do need institutional access. A Rome of One’s Own, again as one might expect, has a copious bibliography of secondary sources, detailed end notes, and explanatory footnotes. If, therefore, you’re tempted to think this work will be a somewhat ponderous tome, you’d be wrong. While the book is obviously scrupulously researched, what may surprise you is just how unacademic it sounds. Southon writes as if she is talking to her reader, as if you and she are in a coffee shop or bar where she is indignantly enthusing about her subjects: Roman women who are for the most part unknown.
Despite having played important roles in the development of Rome from a small city in the Italian peninsula to become the centre of an empire lasting about a thousand years, women like Hersilia, Sabine wife of Romulus, and Julia Felix, “the owner-operator of a business complex” (186) in Pompeii, are mostly forgotten if not unknown. If we are at all interested in Christian hagiography, we may have heard of Perpetua. Similarly, we may also have read Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece. Speaking more personally, I have a vague memory of having at least heard of Zenobia of Palmyra because her story is the basis for no fewer than three operas Albinoni’s Zenobia (1694), Pasquale Anfossi’s Zenobia in Palmira (1789), and Rossini’s Aureliano in Palmira (1813), about all of which I’ve read but none of which I’ve actually seen, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have visited Galla Placidia’s mausoleum in Ravenna, but it was the mosaics that interested me rather than Placidia’s life story. I’d hazard a guess that the woman we may know more about is Boudicca (Southon’s preferred spelling); she at least is commemorated by the Thomas Thorneycroft designed bronze statue on Westminster Bridge in London, and then there are the 2019 film Boudica: Rise of the Warrior Queen (Dir. Zoe Morgan) and Boudica: Queen of War (Dir. Jesse V. Johnson) released last year1.
As Southon remarks in her introduction, her book “is a history of Rome, from its foundation in 753 BCE to the fall of the last western Roman emperor in 476 CE, through the lives of women you have probably never heard of” (2). If your own gaps in knowledge are similar to mine, then you will find A Rome of One’s Own more than interesting. In fact, you’ll find it provocative and highly entertaining. In highly colloquial and personal idiom, Southon makes clear that “if the idea of people smashing windows and beating one another like football hooligans because they care that much about who is pope doesn’t tickle you, then I’m afraid we can’t be friends” (342). She’s parodic, often addressing her reader as “Dear Reader,” and allusive in her comparisons. I particularly enjoyed her description of the social circle that included Catullus and Lesbia (Clodia Metelli, a woman much reviled by Cicero) as “a kind of Bloomsbury Group, where Clodia is our Virginia Woolf and Catullus is our Lytton Strachey; rejecting the bourgeois morality of Cicero and their dads, and revelling in pleasure and feelings and art” (112). She calls Nero and Domitian “little idiots” (213) and designates as “Cute!” (211) the good-luck-when-meeting-the-senator-from-Rome-letter from his “pals Niger and Brocchus” to Cerialis, prefect of a cohortes equitatae stationed at Vindolanda.
As promised in the introduction, the book spans the whole of the period we think of as Ancient Rome, beginning with “The Kingdom,” and working her way through “The Republic” and “The Empire” to the last section “Late Antiquity.” In the short “Epilogue,” Southon discusses how the idea Rome has permeated our own culture and sense of western history, and, asserts how for the most part that legacy is negative:
These afterimages of Rome are as masculine as can be: military, imperial, political and philosophical. Of course they are. For so long, the classical world was (and is) a foundation of a form of masculinity that was racialized and idealized as white, western and perfect. (353-4)
However, once one includes the previously “deliberately excluded” women in the narrative, then the Rome that emerges is a “bigger richer empire—a more realistic empire” (354).
After reading A Rome of One’s Own, I was conscious of two emotions. One was simple pleasure. I enjoyed the book and the opportunity it gave me to engage with the lively personality of the author and to share her insights. The other was an uncomfortable sadness when I considered how the book reminds me of the ongoing erasure of the female. How well-known, for examples, are Margaret of Anjou? Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, Wu Zetian, or Laura Secord in comparison with such luminaries (?) as Henry V, William Shakespeare, Qin Shi Huang, or Isaac Brock? At least Laura Secord is memorialized by a chocolate bar manufacturing company bearing her name2, and her image was used by the Canadian Mint in 2013 in its Heroes of 1812 series of coins. She also has at least three schools named after her in Canada. In her introduction Southon talks about the understanding of history as “politics and public deeds” (1). Some of the women she writes about were heavily involved in politics and public actions; others, not so much. They just got on with their everyday lives. My understanding is that in circles where history is studied, social history is not so well regarded as political history, but without people getting on with their everyday lives, there is no 
society, no politics, no history. When we allow the activities of women to be discounted and forgotten, we erase our past; without understanding our past, we will stumble into our future. A Rome of One’s Own is one step in the journey to rectify unfortunate omissions.
1. You can find their trailers on YouTube where you will also find links to other resources, perhaps more historically reliable, about the queen of the Iceni who led a rebellion during the reign of Nero against the Roman occupation of Britain.
2. Laura Secord chocolate used to be available here in BC, but now it’s available only on-line unless you live in specific locations in Ontario or Quebec.
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