Conversations: Fulvia, the Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome w/ Dr Jane Draycott

Liv speaks with historian Dr Jane Draycott about Fulvia of ancient Rome, a woman at the centre of the fall of the Roman Republic... Unsurprisingly the conversation became something wider, looking at ancient women more broadly. Plus, we rant about the patriarchy, because it deserves it. Find more about Jane's new book Fulvia: the Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome https://atlantic-books.co.uk/book/fulvia/ and Jane's work more broadly https://drjanedraycott.co.uk/. For reference, this episode was recorded at the end of April 2025. Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Liv Albert?

  Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com grouptrip.

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• 2:02Liv Albert?

  Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby! And I am your host, as always. Live here to share another conversation episode. I'm so thrilled to have these episodes. As you all know, I've had to pull back a little bit on the scripted episodes just so that I have time to work on this Odyssey retelling along with the other book that I've been trying to finish for well over a year now and the collective and you know, just countless other things as I try to build out my career outside of relying on American advertising dollars.

• 2:41Liv Albert?

  But thankfully, one of the types of episodes that I do not have to pull back on, even in the slightest, are these conversations because I absolutely, I mean, I fucking love these conversations. I love having these experts come in and share their knowledge with me, their passion. It is so much fun to record. It's so much easier than writing a 5,000 word script. So I am just so grateful to have access to all of these people and all of the incredible work that they are doing. And today's episode, well, I mean, it, it fits so well. I mean, with everything I just

• 3:17Liv Albert?

  said, but also this is an expert, a, an author, a scholar in the field who I have been wanting to get on the show for ages. She wrote a book a few years back called Cleopatra's Daughter, which was about, if you can believe it, Cleopatra's daughter, Cleopatra Selene. And she'll probably come back on my show to talk about her in the future. But what finally pushed me to say, oh, my God, just finally reach out, is that her latest book is on Fulvia, one of the most famous women of ancient Rome. So today I'm speaking with Dr. Jane Draycott. And we talk about Fulvia, this incredible, real historical woman from ancient Rome, along with so many things about

• 4:02Liv Albert?

  her that are probably not historical, but instead like misogynist rumors or fanfiction. But we also talk about that more broadly. Women in Rome, the expectations, the, the things that they were so often accused of doing if they didn't. Fit into the little Roman patriarchal box that had been ascribed to them and what that looks like. This episode started about Fulvia and it is about Fulvia as much as possible, but it is also, it just expanded into this larger question of women in Rome, aristocratic women in Rome, and the ways that their stories, their history, their

• 4:42Liv Albert?

  lives have been manipulated, both when they were still living and afterwards to sort of fit with what, you know, was expected of them. Obviously, Jane tells it way better than me, so please sit back and enjoy this fascinating episode about real women of ancient Rome. And don't let me take credit for this episode title. This is just me repeating the book's title because it's great.

• 5:27Liv Albert?

  Conversations: Fulvia, The Woman Who Broke All The Rules in Ancient Rome with Dr. Jane Draycott.

• 5:49Liv Albert?

  Instead of continuing to ask you questions about your cat, which I could easily do, I will, I will get us in to Rome. And so you have this new book on Fulvia and I, as we've kind of said off mic, I notoriously prefer to have other people come explain Roman things to me, but I do know enough to know that I want to know everything about Fulvia, not least because just we love a woman in the ancient world, but she, I feel like I mix up which of the, were the, maybe the wildest women of the, the Roman Republic, but was she one of them? Like what, what kind of, I mean, I don't want to just get you to just tell me her life story in this moment, but like maybe what, you know, drew

• 6:33Liv Albert?

  you to, to writing this book about her specifically?

• 6:38Speaker 03

  I think it probably depends on sort of who you are and what your perspective is because I personally don't think Fulvia was very wild at all, you know, I mean, I one of the interesting things about sort of researching the book and writing the book is that Fulvia stands out in the ancient sources because the the men who are writing those ancient sources want her to stand out there. They are using her as a cautionary tale for other women. They are using her as an attempt to undertake character assassination on Mark Antony. You know, he can't, he can't keep his wife in line. So, you know, he's,

• 7:19Speaker 03

  he's a poor manner of of bad things. And so because they wanted to sort of highlight her in an attempt to highlight many other problems during the late republican period and many other problematic people like her first husband, um, Miss Claudia's poor care and and this this idea of of all the traditional ways of of being Roman and doing things were were gradually sort of disintegrating in this period. And one great way of showing that is to show how the women were, you know, wild, out of control. And the thing is, is that once you start actually looking at the evidence that we have for this period and

• 8:03Speaker 03

  and to be fair, a lot of it is it's Cicero, really. It's Cicero's letters, it's Cicero's speeches, uh, and it's works of of historiography that are written much later with certain amount of hindsight. And because they present this this view, this rather conservative, traditional view of the late republic and and the the role of Roman women in it, you get this idea that that, yes, Fulvia is is unique and special. But then, when you read through the sources, you don't have a huge amount of references to other women. And when you do find, I mean, in Cicero's letters, he he sort of mentions real women doing real things in passing. And that doesn't always match up with the way that he depicts women in his speeches, because

• 8:48Speaker 03

  his his defence speeches, his prosecution speeches, etc., they're they're trying to make a point. And so women get used in their, you know, they get exaggerated in character and things like that. And so, once you start looking for these references, everything that Fulvia did. Is exactly what Roman women were supposed to do, you know, so they were supposed to get married, which she did. They were supposed to support their husbands, which she did. They were supposed to have loads of babies, which she did, you know, she she had children with each of her husbands. Even better than that, she had boys with each of her husbands. So she gave um publicis claudius pulchra and and gais gronius curio, her second husband, she gave them their their first, and as

• 9:32Speaker 03

  far as we know, only male heirs with um Antony, she gave him, well, as far as we know, again, his first male heir and his second one. And so while and while those those husbands were either absent from Rome, or while when they when they were dead, she protected their their property and their estates and their children and their political legacies and, you know, so all the things that a Roman wife was supposed to do and all the things that, you know, later on in the Augustan principate Augustus is is passing moral legislation to make women get married, to make women have babies, you know, all that kind of stuff. She's doing it. And so why exactly

• 10:14Speaker 03

  is she being criticised for doing the things that Roman women are expected to do and doing the things that all the other Roman women around her time are doing too? So, you know, you you you you read all these references to women like Cicero's wife um Tarentia, she's having to manage their joint estates and property while he's exiled and while he's um away being, you know, a provincial governor, etc. She's having to arrange the marriage or one of the marriages of of their daughter, um Seville, who is the mother of Brutus and and several other um women who are married into the um Assassins of Julius Caesar, that's all a family affair. She is dealing

• 10:54Speaker 03

  with a lot of political stuff behind the scenes. And so Phocia's not really doing anything that other women aren't doing. It's just that we have a lot more evidence for her doing them, and that evidence is all very inflammatory and critical because they are using her as this sort of scapegoat in a lot of ways, a scapegoat for the for the fall of the Republic, for the um. Bad relations between the members of the Second Triumvirate. And as a precursor to Cleopatra as well, she is like the warm-up act to the evil news Cleopatra later on. And there is this agreement, really, as far as the ancient sources are concerned.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  In 40 BCE, once Fulvia has died and Antony and Octavian are sort of basically on the brink of war. There's been a sort of a little bit of a war between Fulvia and Lucius Antonius, Antony's brother, who was the consul of that year, and Octavian while Antony's been away. And then that has been sort of put down by Octavian and Fulvia and Lucius have sort of been dealt with. But then there is this possibility of this sort of second war, this kind of worst war, new war between Antony and Octavian at this point. And then so they get together at Brindisium and they come to this agreement that actually that's not the best thing to do.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  And conveniently, because Fulvia is dead, Antony is now free to marry Octavian's sister Octavia, whose husband has also died. And so that that sort of is a very visible presentation of their new sort of partnership and concord. And they actually agree, and the sources basically say that they decide that it's convenient to blame it all on Fulvia because she's dead and she's out of the way. And so by blaming it on her and not really sort of, you know, not really talking about their problems or kind of dealing with their own individual problems, they can just conveniently say, it's all her fault. Let's move on. We're bros now, you know, we kind of, we have this, we're family. We have this new relationship. It's all lovely.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  And that of course just stores up trouble for the next 10 years.

• 13:10Liv Albert?

  I'm obsessed with that answer. I, I think that it betrays how I've, I mean, how I phrased that, but also just like generally, I don't even know quite how to get into it, but it's just purely this. I mean, I think I say wild now because what I mean is like essentially what you just laid out of exactly all of that. Like to me, the, in the like sort of depth of where I've gotten to in, in researching particularly, you know, Greece and Rome. It's just sort of, I now, I now automatically assume that any woman in that kind of realm, like is in some way, like her story is in some way serving a propagandic purpose. And

• 13:55Liv Albert?

  so, you know, I say wild because like, I want to hear why all the men were so mad at a woman existing, you know, but of course, yeah, there, there's all these other implications about what they were doing and what it really said about her. But it reminds me, I was having a conversation with a friend recently about, and this is going to be where I, again, I'm not great at Rome, but Julia, the daughter who, of Augustus, who was similarly seen as this like wild, right? Who was like expelled for being too promiscuous or what have you. And, but you know, what we were talking about is just this idea of like, well, where is that coming from? Like what propaganda does that serve to call her that? And what does

• 14:37Liv Albert?

  that really maybe imply about her as a real person? And so it, this, it fits so perfectly into that same idea. And I, I just, I mean, I'm obsessed with looking at women in the ancient world primarily because of stuff like this where it's like, but I also think like, and I would love to know your thoughts on, you know, how much of up until More recent years, was this type of thing taken at face value? Like that she was, you know, because the thing is, you know, it wasn't just the men writing the histories back then, right? It's like all the men up until this point. And the way that so often history has been interpreted in their image and in like the exact image that the sources wanted us to believe,

• 15:22Liv Albert?

  which the sources are also serving this very specific purpose. And you know, what goes into that? That was a really nonsensical kind of non-question. But like, was, was she kind of taken at face value more recently? Like, what kind of do, what is the broader idea behind her as a character in this kind of propagandic way? If that is a question?

• 15:45Speaker 03

  There's certainly been, I think, a lot more interest in her over the last few decades. You know, we, we have the sort of the feminist movement and that sort of led to, uh, uh, not, not just an interest in women in history, but a recognition that they were there and they were doing things. And there might be reasons why they haven't actually.

• 16:09Liv Albert?

  The bar is so low. Sorry, just to hear it described like that, you're just like, oh, my God. Like, that should be the bare minimum. But it took so long to get to that point.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  Well, I think as well, and I, I guess the, the easiest way to sort of, sort of put this is if we, if we look at TV tropes and things, and it's, it's started to kind of be understood that you have certain things like, um, the, the Wendy or the Smurfette or something like that, where, where you literally have, you know, one female character with a whole, whole group of, of male characters. And it's, it's tokenism, you know? Yeah, you know, stop, stop nagging us, we've got a woman. And in the same way that we've got a black person, we've got a gay person. So, so of course, we're, we're not sexist. We're not racist. We're not homophobic because we created them.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's like, what, what do you want? And I think that there, there is this kind of. There is something in this as well, is this idea, and I I encountered this with Cleopatra as well, actually. And you find it in the ancient sources that there's this, this woman is here because she is in some way special and singular. So Fulvia is special and singular, Cleopatra is special and singular, and therefore they have earned their position in this male dominated world of of ancient history and historiography. And it's, it makes me quite uncomfortable because it is is that sort of thing, as as a historian, I I was very resistant for a long time.

• 17:50Speaker 03

  I mean, I was I was always interested in women and I was I was interested in the women that had a presence in my in my history courses and things like that. But at the same time, I didn't want to do, you know, the obvious thing, which is, oh, you're a girl, you're interested in, you know, the girl, you know, you're you're interested in in the one female figure from ancient history because, of course, you know, in the same way that that there is this sort of idea that you know, women are are more interested in in babies and and children and the family and pregnancy and childbirth and and gynecology in in ancient history. And in some cases, that that might be true, because, you know, we we do perhaps look for signs of ourselves or things that we can relate to.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  Or possibly it's simply that your life experiences make you curious about life experiences in the past. But so with with Fulvia, it's it frustrates me a little bit that she is held up to be, you know, this this sort of this aberration by the men around her. When they know full well that's not true, because they have wives and and mothers and sisters and daughters who are doing all these things. But, you know, they they, this is this is this is kind of, I could go down a whole rabbit hole about how literally all the ancient sources are lying to us about everything. And we have to sort of bear this in mind that they they are presenting a very uh specific slanted view

• 19:13Speaker 03

  for often for sort of rhetorical kind of purposes and and that we have to try and decide what that slant is and and how we can kind of get around it. And so this is this is sort of what I was attempting to do with the book in that. I could be incredibly pessimistic about it, and some scholars have been. They have written relatively recently articles basically saying that Fulvia is a fiction. That obviously she existed as a historical person, but it is that the sources made her out to be much more important than she was because they wanted to criticize Claudius. They wanted to criticize Antony and in actual fact, she was not important. She was not significant. She was just, you know, an ordinary Roman person.

• 19:58Speaker 03

  In much the same way that Claudia Meteli, for example, you can say, well, Cicero's pro Cilio is all a fiction and Catullus's poetry is all a fiction. It doesn't tell us anything about the real woman and, you know, yes, that's one position to hold. It's a very depressing one because it's like, well, if that's the case, then we can never do anything with ancient women at all because we just dismiss it. And obviously some people do that. No, that's, that's, that's all, it's all made up. It's not, it's not real. Funny how that doesn't tend to happen so much with ancient male historical figures. I mean, we can accept that there is a certain, you know, the Alexander romance is a fiction, but Alexander the Great is real and historical and everything is true.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  And the same with Caesar, you know, he's like, oh, he's real. He did all these things. And so, yeah, that is, that is, well, that is, I've come quite a long way from your original question.

• 20:55Liv Albert?

  No, but that's exactly what I want to know. I want all of this because like it's what I think about in the mythology all the time, which is why I love having these connections to the historical side because I mean, you know, so much of what you're laying out is like why I do this podcast and why I started with, with myth, but it was particularly wanting to examine the idea that we have been presented with, you know, up until very recently, this like for me on the mythology side, it's, it's when we have all of these stories of the gods assaulting woman after woman after woman after woman. And then we have all of these. You know, male sources and then historians and mythographers and all of these men

• 21:41Liv Albert?

  saying that, well, oh, it wasn't like rape like we think of as rape. It was just, you know, like, oh, it was just like, you know, I don't even want to get into the arguments, but you know what I mean? Like, but this, this idea that like, it wasn't what we think it is. It was just the way it was back then, or it wasn't bad because it was the way it was back then.

• 22:04Speaker 03

  You can cover an awful lot of nasty stuff with the, oh, well, that was just the way that things were. And, you know, that we, we have different values today. And it's like, do we, do we really?

• 22:16Liv Albert?

  Do we not just have? Exactly, but that's.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  Two thousand years of misogyny, it's exactly the same.

• 22:22Liv Albert?

  It is.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  The same with Claudia, because all of the criticisms about her, both as a political spouse to Claudius and Curio and Antony, and as a politician in her own right, if you choose to see her as that. These are all things that women today, across all political parties, have been accused of. So you've got, you know, Cherie Blair, who, who was the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair's wife, and on the Labour side. And you've got Carrie Johnson, who was Boris Johnson's wife on the Conservative side. They both got accused of pretty much exactly the same thing, which was they were using their position to enrich themselves, with, you know, property and other things. They were using their closeness to the Prime Minister

• 23:06Speaker 03

  to get him to enact the legislation that they wanted, even though he weren't elected. And then you've got women themselves who are politicians, like Hillary Rodman, Clinton, or Nicholas Sturgeon, who are being criticized for, you know, all manner of things, every, every single thing you can think of to throw at them. You know, yes, their politics, but also their personal lives too. There's really sort of nasty sexual conspiracies and innuendo and things like that. And but them being blamed for what their husbands either have done or may have done or have been accused of doing. And so, yeah, it's it's all two two thousand years and exactly the same things are being said about exactly the same situations.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  And I I find it sort of interesting, but also depressing that this is the case. And one of the things I wanted to do with the book is that you you can, I mean, I I call it a biography, you know, historical biography. And I I call my my previous book, Cleopatra's Daughter, historical biography as well, with the caveat that you can't write a historical biography of an ancient person, no matter who they are, not not even Cicero really, despite we have his letters for a certain period of time, but we don't have other stuff earlier in his life and things like that. So you you can't write a biography of an ancient historical person in the same way that you can write a biography of a person from a later historical period or or even today.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  We just don't have the comprehensive source material of their entire life. And a lot of the time, we don't actually have their own words either, not their own um, letters to other people, not their diary, not their speeches. If their speech is recorded by somebody else, how do we know that it's actually true? Because ancient authors make up stuff over time. And so what I was hoping to do with the book was a sort of qualified reconstruction of this is what we know about her and this provides the framework for for her life. But this is also, this is what people said about her and it seems very inflammatory. So how to interpret that? On the one hand, oh, it's all true.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  Every single thing that any ancient author said about her was true, even the things that contradict. But I don't know, maybe maybe that's true. Maybe she did all the stuff that she was accused of doing, that, you know, she she did stab Cicero's head with a hairpin and she did spit on it and she did order someone else to be killed and have his head stuck up outside of her house. Maybe she did that. Um, maybe she did declare war on Octavian and dress in armour and all the rest of it.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  Or maybe she did none of those things. As I, as I said, some people do like to argue that it's, it's all just made up and that, that she's just a convenient sort of way to, to sort of flagellate, um, Antony or whoever. Or maybe the truth is somewhere in between. And how can we explain these actions? And one of the reasons that I thought she might have been doing what she was doing. Well, there, there were various different reasons. I mean, one reason is that her family, her, her, her father's family, her mother's family, these had been very powerful influential families earlier in the Republic, but by the time of, of Fulvia's, uh, life,

• 26:21Speaker 03

  they were still wealthy, but they had lost their political power. So one possible motivation is that she, she wanted to recapture some of that for herself, for her children. Another motivation is that she, you know, she loved her husbands and she was very much aligned with them politically. And so she, she shared their sort of views and, and was, was working towards that end. She married three tribunes. So, you know, they, they all were, were on the sort of populist side of things. And she chose to marry them. I mean, potentially her first marriage was arranged by her parents, but her second and third marriages, these, she is an adult woman who presumably had some choice in it. They were, they were friends. They were her husband's, first husband's friends, second husband's friends, et cetera.

• 27:06Speaker 03

  And then another reason, and I think this is I, reasonable to assume that this is a, a fairly strong motivator is that she had five children. And she had by, by three different husbands, three different sets of, you know, estates and property and wealth and everything else. And she potentially wanted to secure sort of safety for her children in her first marriage, when her first husband Claudius is murdered. There is a suggestion in the sources that the Milo, the murderer, wanted to murder her son as well. And he was, he was only stopped because um, he couldn't find him and he, he killed a slave instead. And I guess he, he got confused and thought that the slave was the boy or whatever.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  And so if you think that someone has murdered your husband and tried to murder your son, that's going to give you a very specific outlook on how to look after your family. And then later on, when she's married to Antony, the same thing happens again. Antony is is um declared a public enemy, he's chased out of Rome, she is left in the city with all of her children. And all of Antony's enemies descend on her. They they are trying to confiscate her property, drain her of her wealth, they're they're bombarding her with lawsuits and things, they are threatening her children. And so I sort of think there that assuming that this is stuff that really happened and we we do have the documentary evidence for it, we have the letters from Cicero about

• 28:35Speaker 03

  this is actually happening, he's very pleased about it because he doesn't like Antony at this point. So if you are a woman in this situation with children in this situation, what are you going to try and do? You're going to try and seek as much security for yourself through powerful marriages, political alliances, the acquisition of wealth and property and that's to me seems that is what she was was doing a lot of the time. She she was trying to create a safe space for herself and her children. And her her husbands and and potentially the people she is connected to that we don't know about. In a time where people were being murdered in the street and bodies were being thrown in the sewer and in the river and

• 29:19Speaker 03

  it was, you know, people were trying to break into other people's houses. You know, we we have the um the Laudate O Toria inscription of of um the woman who is is sort of generally referred to as Toria, that may or may not have been her name, but that actually records that people, the aforementioned Milo, seems to be really, really quite evil um in this period. He he, you know, gangs tried to break into her house. You know, her husband was was on the prescription list and and he was he was sort of in hiding and people were trying to break into her house and and rob her and people had murdered her parents earlier in her life and tried to steal her fortune. So this is happening to other women, not just Sylvia, because I guess they are without their men, folk. They are seen as easy targets.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  And of course, big mistake because Fuglia fights back, Choria fights back, she she fends off the attack on her home. So, yeah, the the the women um had had a lot going on in this period and and I think it's. We can, if we if we just even think just a little bit and exercise a little bit of of empathy and and compassion, we can kind of understand. Some of what they were thinking and feeling and, you know, was informing their decision-making process.

• 30:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, it it it feels, seems to me like so often um. That type of thing, the the type of actions that women take in situations like that. You know, are more often than not framed in this way that. Demonizes them, you know, makes them look bad in whatever way. Whereas, yeah, like a a the tiniest bit of critical thinking is like, well, that's. Practical, that is survival, like the ways that women survived. In the ancient world are so often turned against them.

• 31:11Liv Albert?

  Um, you know, it makes me, it makes me think of Cleopatra, I'm sure you think about her in that realm a lot, where people. Call her so many different things, or, you know, it's like either she was so beautiful, or, oh, my god, no, look. She wasn't beautiful at all, what were they thinking? Like, there's all of these ideas about her, you know. She was a slut, she was getting around, oh, my god, I can't believe she was with both of them, all of these things, and it's like. That woman knew how to survive in a world that was trying to kill her, like, that is. It's so simple and to the point, but it takes. It takes a a view outside of the patriarchal misogynist structure.

• 31:56Liv Albert?

  In which the history has been formed and i in which that it grew to the point. Where it is today, you have to be able to look outside of that. Structure in order to see this like basic level of humanity, i it it's the same as, you know, when when we're speaking earlier about. People saying, you know, it's just how it was back then. It was a different time. You know, I'm using a lot of air quotes that people can't see. Um, that because it's, it's so, it's so nonsensical. Like that is a basic human level of empathy. Like the, the, the context I'm thinking about now, just because it, I, I talk about Medusa a lot and I recently spoke about her um, at an event last week. And, and so she's on my mind and it comes up so often because people

• 32:39Liv Albert?

  love to say that, you know, because Hesiod, which is like the earliest slash, you know, almost the only like early Greek stor- source for her story, because Hesiod doesn't say that it was explicitly sexual assault, that it was non-consensual. Because he doesn't say it, that means that it was absolutely consensual. And it's like, no, he, he, just because he did not conceptualize the feelings of women, which like, we can read a lot of Hesiod and know that, like, because he didn't really see them as people. Like, let's be honest. Um, you know, that, that doesn't mean that it wasn't viewed as a, a violent act. Like, and, and the, the, there's only a very specific type of privileged man who can get away with saying like that,

• 33:23Liv Albert?

  saying that and not, you know, having it immediately be like, what are you fucking talking about? Like, this is not, I'm not, I'm not being particularly eloquent right now, but it's, it's just so interesting to me, these, the way that, this is why I love having on historians, because I can then connect it to myth and be like, well, this is, you know, it's all of the same stuff was happening with myth and women in just a different way. Um, but yeah, it, you know, it's the way that, that these women are doing all of these things, or the sources say they are. But the sources often, you know, like, the men were doing more terrible things. Yeah. Far, far, far worse.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think, I mean, this, this is in my, in my final sort of, towards the end, towards the end of my book. I'm like, okay, so, so say she did all of those horrible things.

• 34:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  Let's just compare, shall we? You know, she, she, she all, she, she put people's names on the prescription list. So did, you know, Antony and Octavian and Lepidus. And, and, you know, she, she potentially Stabbed Cicero's head with a hairpin. Well, Octavian gouged someone's eyes out with his bare hands, you know, and, and, and he supposedly sacrificed so Italian soldiers on the altar of Julius Caesar and he, he did so much nasty stuff during the triumphal period when, lest we not forget, he was, he was eighteen years old to start with and, and then he was sort of over the next decade, you know, so he, so he went from being eighteen or thereabouts to being around about thirty.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  Um, when, when he sort of took, took sole, uh, control. And so, I mean, I guess we can just, oh, boys, you know, they, boys do all sorts of horrible things. But he, he spent the next forty-four years of, of his political career trying to just whitewash all of this and wipe the slate clean and blame it on so many other people. And he's like, no, you were horrible. You did some really nasty stuff to lots of different people. Many of whom, most of whom are, are dead and so they can't really argue back, but, but their, their friends and their family are still around and, and so everybody is just, you know,

• 35:36Speaker 03

  holding their noses and agreeing to, to let it slide at this point because it seems like the political thing to do.

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• 38:52Speaker 03

  But, but yes, I sort of think the judgment that is sort of exercised against vulvia, it is, it is very, there is a massive double standard about what it's okay for women to do and that, uh, what it's okay for men to do and the circumstances under which it's okay for them to do it. So, uh, a couple of the other examples I use in the book that, um, when, um, when Claudius is, is murdered on the Appian Way, Milo's wife is with him when this happens. So there, there is like a full-scale brutal battle going on outside their carriage and she's just, she's what? She's just sitting in there? She, she, you

• 39:36Speaker 03

  know, she, she's just, she's, she's just watching out the window. I mean, she's, she's, she's just ignoring it completely and concentrating on something else. I mean, there is this point where Claudius, injured, goes into an inn to try and take shelter and Milo orders his goons to go in there, drag him out and like murder him in the road. And so was he still in the carriage at that point? He just stick his wind, his head out the window and, and, and Faustus is still there and then she's like, blah, blah, blah, you know, just disassociating, disassociating from this. Or because her father was Sulla, you know, she actually quite used to this sort of thing and doesn't really mind. And Cicero's brother Quintus,

• 40:20Speaker 03

  his, his wife, um, Compania, she apparently, and I, this is a story that I, I just uncovered, like, reading, researching for this book, but I hadn't really, um, heard much about her at all. She, she appears in Cicero's letters because he's right periodically, because he's writing to Atticus a lot of the time, who's Compania's brother. And he, he writes, the pair of them write about how Quintus and Compania don't seem to have a very happy marriage. They have a lot of arguments and, um, you know, there's, there's an occasion where, um, Quintus, you know, puts the moves on Compania and she's like, uh, no, thank you. I, I am not interested in having sex with you tonight. And Cicero is flabbergasted because how dare she be so dismissive of her husband when, you know, he, he has every right to, you know, want to get it on.

• 41:06Speaker 03

  Anyway, um, she apparently after Cicero has been murdered and Quintus, her husband, and Quintus, their, their son, they have all been murdered in the prescriptions. She gets hold of their freedmen who betrayed them. And she basically tortures and murders him. And it's just briefly mentioned in, I think, I think it, if I remember correctly, it's Plutarch's wife of Cicero or something like that. There's just a throwaway mention of it. And I'm just like, why is this not better known? Why, why is there not more sort of discussion about this? And is it that, that it's seen as, as being, I mean, Pomponia was, was always an unreasonable, you know, angry, out of control woman. So of course she tortures people.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  She, she apparently she carves off bits, bits of his flesh and makes him eat them. Or, or is this like, everybody just agreed? I know. I mean, this is the thing. If, if someone has murdered your husband and your son, even if you didn't like your husband that much, but you, you know, you love your son. And, and you're, you're really, you know, this is, this is your, how you get revenge. But did everybody just agree not to talk about that? Oh, this is, this is nasty. We, we don't, we don't want to kind of delve into how awful women can be, or some women can be when we just pretend that in. So it's like, well, so Phobia, you know, poking a, a dead head with a hairpin? If she even did that. Versus like, there's, there's another story and it's, it's from earlier in the Republic.

• 42:35Speaker 03

  Um, that there is a, there is a woman who, um, she, I think it's, if I can remember correctly, I think it's her husband has, has been killed in Punic Wars or something like that. And so she has some, some, some prisoners and she locks them up. And they, I think they, they're tortured and one of them dies. And she just leaves the surviving prisoner in an extremely small space with a decaying corpse of his fellow prisoner. And this goes on for like some time and she, her, her sons just kind of go along with this. And then at some point, it's, I think one of the household slaves tells somebody or something and it's discovered that she's done this and oh, this is terrible. How could she?

• 43:20Speaker 03

  This is, this is terrible behaviour from Romans and treating, the, the way they're treating captives, et cetera, et cetera. And these are sort of, the way these get used in the sources, it's like cautionary tales. Like, don't do this. This is, this is really bad. This is, this is not the proper Roman way to behave. And so I I find it interesting that this is especially the case with women. You know, we we hear all the time about new generals like Caesar and and so on. They cut the hands off of deserters. And that's fine, you know, they they they do all sorts of of of things like that. And then women, um, you know, do do anything. And it's it's not fine. It's it's not even excusable by this being a time of war or whatever.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  And then, yes, I I do, I do sort of wonder these. What what are we supposed to make of these stories, you know?

• 44:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I think about, I mean, just generally that I I I like. Sorry, now I can't phrase anything, but I'm just, you know. I think it's so interesting to think about that question. I I again, this is something I think about a lot when it comes to ancient Greece and and and myth broadly. But just, you know, what the stories, the sur- the stories that survive, the stories that were recorded, like what they say and don't say, right? Like, what what do they not say about every other woman? Or, um, you know, particularly the the crimes of women as compared to men, like you just said, in the way that they're not, you know,

• 44:57Liv Albert?

  excused away as being, you know, just part of war. I I think that that's something I was thinking of before you got to that point and just want, like, the idea that men are allowed to do just about anything in war. And it's not seen as, you know, barbaric and human, all of those things, but a woman does a fraction of it in some kind of defense or even not in self-defense. Um, but just does a fraction of it. And it is this, the the most sort of horrifying thing you can imagine. I mean, obviously, the double standard has always been there, but this, the

• 45:37Liv Albert?

  the world that was kind of created in that, particularly Greece and Rome, and the the patriarchal structure in which they were all kind of being developed, just created this world in which, you know, the the the rules around what women were and were not allowed to do were obviously so different. But I also think that the way that they recorded those stories and the women whose stories they did choose to record, be they real or mythical, were. Not necessarily, you know, intentionally selected, but inadvertently selected in this way that that does mean that they, you know, are are these cautionary tales like you mentioned, or, I mean, I think a lot about the the women and their stories that just

• 46:20Liv Albert?

  kind of represent male fear of women, the way they they they fear the capabilities of women, right? And so, yeah.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  And they and they should. I mean, this is when when you have a society that is sort of predicated on the fact that significant numbers of or sections of it are are kept down. I mean, there there are there are concerns about enslaved people. When periodically the an enslaved person either actively murders a member of the household or through inaction allows to happen, then there is this sort of, oh, well, we we must bring the hammer down, like, all all the enslaved members of that household must be must be killed because the action of the one. And there is a a story in in in some so it gets used

• 47:13Speaker 03

  in in the the Roman storyography about this this this idea that that at one point it suggested that enslaved people should wear a certain type of clothing to to mark their slaves. But then, in the debate around this, it's pointed out that if they do that, they'll realize that there are far more of them than there are of of of us, you know, the the the elite men that are in the Senate debating this. And so I think that there's perhaps something similar there with women that you can see in in the in the literature, the same fears about women appear again and again. And they get used in the sort of rhetorical

• 47:54Speaker 03

  training, the kind of fictional, some hypothetical court case scenarios, things like, you know, the idea that the stepmother will either poison her husband's children from his first marriage, or even worse than that, she will convince her husband to kill the children from the first marriage. And and I mean, This, this is a, is a sort of, I mean, you, you can understand, I suppose, what, what that's, that at the heart of that is this unease about mixing families, blending families, the family dynamics of, of sort of stepchildren, stepparents, et cetera. Um, but it's seen as this, this is what all women are like, all, you know, women couldn't possibly

• 48:37Speaker 03

  love their stepchildren. They, they must see them as, as sort of rivals for the, for their own children that they don't necessarily even have. And the idea that women are into poison and into witchcraft and spells and stuff. And, and again, at the, at the heart of that is, is potentially that women run the house. So women are the ones that oversee all the enslaved people who do the actual sort of cooking and cleaning, I mean, in, in, you know, elite houses where they have these, these large numbers of staff, obviously not so much lower down the, the social hierarchy, but we don't hear about those people. We hear about the elites and the, the elites' fears and, and, you know,

• 49:18Speaker 03

  that, that is, there is something to that, that, that women are responsible for a huge amount of making men's lives possible. And the idea that a man could, uh, well, that, that, this is, this is, uh, we see some of this pushback when Augustus is trying to pass his moral legislation to encourage everybody to be married pretty much all the time. And we, we hear in the sources the, the rejections of this, you know, for so, some men, they just don't like women. They don't want wives. They're perfectly happy with, with their, their own, you know, bachelor life, because of course they have households full of enslaved people who are running their life for them. But I think there is this recognition for, or at least it's not voiced, it's, it's sort of hinted

• 50:03Speaker 03

  at in the subtext that there is this recognition that women are actually quite important and quite fundamental to both the running of your household and the, the, um, survival of your family. Because if you, if you want your family to survive, you have to have heirs. And where do you get those from? Well, you, you have to have a wife who's going to provide you with legitimate children. And the state more broadly, because of course you you you always need more Romans. And where are they going to come from? Some of them will come from abroad, of course, but um for the senatorial order and the equestrian order, the the sort of the the wealthy elite people who like to think of themselves so much better than everybody else.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  There is this this problem of, well, you can't do without the women, you you need the wives and you need the children. And also in in the late republic as well. Women don't go um abroad with their husbands. When their husbands go off to campaign or to to run provinces, women have to stay at home. And so while the men are out of sight and and doing whatever they're doing in the province, the women are the ones who are responsible for running their household and they're looking after all of their sort of finances and everything else with sort of legal oversight and guidance, but they're the ones who are on the spot making the day to day decisions. And that is, you know, I think a lot of a lot of

• 51:29Speaker 03

  men in the ancient sources, they have perhaps they they have anxiety basically about what are the women going to get up to while I'm away. It's like, well, perhaps if you were nice to them and you trusted them, you wouldn't have this anxiety. But perhaps because you've not been so nice to them and you don't trust them and you you clearly think that they're going to take an opportunity to sort of try and get one over on you. Why would they do that if if you had treated them nicely and and loved them and, you know, everything else. So it is perhaps that fear of I have treated literally everybody but it's not me very badly and one day it's gonna come back to get me.

• 52:14Liv Albert?

  It's so interesting seeing like that that that historical side of of the very same thing that I look at every day in myth because. I mean, looking at the the sources from Greece are so interesting as compared to Rome, you know, for for so many reasons, but so much of what, you know, so much of what we know obviously does come from myth in that way of it being sort of translated into reality the way it was that in in Greece, which, you know, didn't necessarily like apply in the same way in Rome.

• 52:42Speaker 03

  Well, I'll just say about that, though, something I find very interesting is that we don't have the same amount of Roman myth as Greek myth.

• 52:49Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 52:49Speaker 03

  We have, we have a little bit, you know, you know, of it and and some stuff like that, but and you and you sort of see it in the the contemporary sort of enthusiasm for Greek mythological re- retellings from a sort of feminist perspective. Where are the Roman ones? Because, yeah, we, we, we have, you know, actually Le Guin's Lavinia, for example, draw drawing on the the Aeneid. But where are the rest of them that, you know, because we don't seem to see Roman myth in that way. And it's like, because we were like, oh, well, the Greeks have got myths and the Romans have got history. It's like, well, the Greeks have got history too, and the Romans have also got myths.

• 53:32Speaker 03

  But if, you know, you sort of, perhaps there's this this tendency to just dismiss them as having taken the Greek myths and they're just rewriting.

• 53:39Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, Ovid made that really difficult.

• 53:44Liv Albert?

  Like, Ovid is the main problem, I would say, for that narrative. Kind of going back to what you were talking about earl- like, earlier, the way that the sources, as they survive, you know, say so much about kind of what's going on there, but also what we don't know and what is not being told to us, either intentionally or otherwise. I've mentioned this on the show a handful of times now because I just can't get over the the way that I've just keep seeing these men try to, like, they think that they're telling like a strong woman's story, but in the process, they are lessening the importance of a very real woman. And so, but it, to me, it's really important to connect it with Socrates as we were talking about those sources earlier and the things we know and don't know, because I think.

• 54:30Liv Albert?

  We are so often, and obviously this is really different when you're, when you're in the real, the depths of, of study and things, but for a more broader audience, like we are so kind of expected to believe everything that the ancient male sources wrote to the point where there are these, these arguments I keep seeing about, about Socrates in Asperia where people will say, oh, you know, this woman, um, you didn't, you didn't hear about it in the history books, but a woman was Socrates's teacher. And they say this with such, with such strength and, and surety that like, look, I'm, you know, I'm bestowing this honor upon this woman that you've been, you've been ignored, people have been ignoring her in history because a woman taught Socrates and

• 55:12Speaker 03

  I'm an ally.

• 55:14Liv Albert?

  Exactly. And in doing so, they also, they try to say that, oh, she's been demonized because of the patriarchy. So they say she was just a prostitute. And it's like, actually her role as this, this sex worker, this like high-end hetero sex worker is like why she was able to ever speak with Socrates. And you ignoring that while sounding like an ally because you don't want to say that she, you know, was a sex worker, like is, is taking away the very real history of this woman who did really interesting things and was able to do so because she also was a hetero, you know? And it's like, it, it, it just reminds me of, of what you were saying with Fulvy at the beginning and, and the things

• 55:56Liv Albert?

  we believe of the male sources that they give us in relation to women. And then also the ways that like they, those then, phrasing this so poorly, but the way that then we can like, we see the other side of then the, the people who try to like make up for it. But in doing so, again, erase the lived realities, like it, it, we don't need to see women as perfect emblems of morality in order to be, you know, acknowledging and appreciating these very real women. It's actually far more interesting, impactful, powerful feminist to examine them as real, complicated humans in the exact same way that the men were real,

• 56:41Liv Albert?

  complicated humans.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  It's, it's funny because it's still, it's still in some ways, it's.

• 56:48Speaker 03

  It's anti feminist in that it's still, it's giving someone value because of their connection to a man. So, you know, it's, it's like, well, you know, a woman taught Socrates, therefore a woman, this particular woman has, has something, you know, she's worth paying attention to because she's associated with somebody that we value.

• 57:12Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  And Socrates or, or any other ancient Greek or Roman man is surrounded by women, many of whom will, will never get mentioned.

• 57:20Liv Albert?

  Or they're just hatera, just sex workers. Yep.

• 57:24Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. It is, it is frustrating that people, women, they get their entrance to the stage via their connection to a man. And this is something that it's inevitable really with ancient history because it's a, it's a, it's a patriarchal society. And it is the, the men who, who are promoted as being, you know, worth examining. And then the women connected to them are worth examining because they're connected to these men, not because they are, you know, independent, people of, of their own. And I just, it makes me, it makes me frustrated, I suppose, the, the, the limitations of the, of the sources.

• 58:06Speaker 03

  But it's, it's, it's funny when, when people do talk about, uh, the feminism or ancient feminists. And the idea that we can say that anybody in antiquity was a feminist in any way, shape or form. I mean, they, they absolutely were not. You know, what, what, what ancient woman was actively working to make life better for the other women and the, the, you know, non-binary people, uh, of, of her acquaintance? They weren't. Even when we do see some examples of female solidarity, it is very class-based. So, um, Hortensia, for example, marching to the forum and, and, um, speaking to the, the, the second triumvirate

• 58:51Speaker 03

  and, and demanding that they, they not tax the fourteen hundred richest women in Rome. And that's, that's a, it's a very famous, yeah, it's a very famous example of collective female action.

• 59:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 59:03Speaker 03

  But it's not a feminist at all. They're they're trying to tax dodge and and uh. It's it's it's all it's very contradictory in some ways. They've been seen to one of those areas where it's like, let's let's identify. Women who are ahead of their time. And it's like, were they ahead of their time? I mean, I don't think Phobia was ahead of her time. I mean. You you could say perhaps she was ahead of her time by maybe a decade. In that, you know, had had she been the the wife of. Um Augusta when he when he was the emperor, or had she been the wife of Antony, had he become the emperor? She was ahead of her time in that sense, in that.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  She she was anticipating a period where women empresses had a huge amount of of personal power. But it's not like they used that power for the betterment of of of all the other women. Uh or anybody else, really. It was it was all it was very sort of um selfish uh use of power to to uh. Promote themselves and their agendas. And it's it's one of the things I I try. I mean, as I was as I was trying to contextualize Phobia and try and you know. And look at her with a certain amount of empathy and compassion and and reconstruct her behaviour. Ultimately, I was I was still trying to remain aware of the fact that.

• 1:00:26Speaker 03

  There's only so far I can do that as a twenty first century person. You know, I I uh. There there there there is only so far that any ancient Roman woman. Would be someone that you you could potentially bear to be in the same room.

• 1:00:43Speaker 03

  Did you find any common ground with them at all? And I mean, I think the same is probably true of mythological women. I mean.

• 1:00:50Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:50Speaker 03

  We we don't obviously get sort of three dimensional depiction of them in the ancient sources. They tend to be quite. Archetypal or you know, let's tell us, let's tell it, tell a story so you can learn a lesson.

• 1:01:02Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  You know, but it's it's sort of, a lot of it is, well, I didn't care about any of this. And Tim, it happened to me and then it was the worst thing ever, you know, and I victimized all of these people. But then I got victimized and and I thought, no, that's that's terrible, you know.

• 1:01:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah, no, well, and it's, I think that it it's just, all of it is this reminder also of just the way that. It's just so hard because of, of, I mean, the patriarchal structure and then also where we're at now. But you know, even all of these mentalities, this idea that of finding women who were, you know, ahead of their time or what have you, like, also, all of that is still so tied in with patriarchal values that it sort of gets lost. You know, it, it reminds me of the, all the horrible nonsense going on right now with this very certain

• 1:02:01Liv Albert?

  type of woman who has gained a status in the patriarchy to the point where she wants to keep every other woman out of that status.

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  The handmaiden.

• 1:02:15Liv Albert?

  Exactly. It's the, well, it's, you know, it's the women who, who demonize, it's the cis women who demonize trans women because they have reached this point, because women have been, you know, subjugated to the degree that we have for this long. You know, there is this very specific type of woman who has achieved the next tier down from the men. You know, it, it's, it differs in varied places. You know, it's white women in North America, like a very specific type of white woman. It's the Trump voter white woman in the States.

• 1:02:51Speaker 03

  We have, we have them over here. They're, they're the ones who are celebrating the recent Supreme Court ruling on trans people.

• 1:02:58Liv Albert?

  Oh, exactly. It, it, yeah, I can't stop thinking about that Supreme Court.

• 1:03:02Speaker 03

  Well, it's, it's the strangest thing because it seems to have sprung up in the last five years or so. I'm not entirely sure where that has come from. And it's probably too simplistic to say that it's come from a very specific person with their enormous platform and their enormous wallet.

• 1:03:18Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm. But they're not there. If you have to pick one person, if you had to. But I, I do think it's important, particularly right now with the, with the Supreme Court decision that happened in the UK last week. Because I do think that it is really representative of the way that women become agents of that same patriarchy.

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• 1:05:14Speaker 02

  Okey doke, got it.

• 1:05:15Speaker 06

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• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  Well, I will bring this back to phobia, actually, because a lot of the criticism of phobia... She is not acting like a woman, or you know, she, the, the ancient authors say about her, the only thing feminine about her is, I, her body and. Well, it's sort of connected to that is the fact that, you know, she, she's, you know, as far as we know, a sort of. A cis hec woman who is married to, to men who is having babies. So there's, there's quite a bit about her body that is feminine, including her ability to, to have children, but. But the, the idea that she doesn't behave like a woman because she, she wants things that women aren't supposed to want. And one, one of the things I think is quite interesting about her is that there is a fairly standard stereotype in ancient Roman literature that.

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

  Basically, all women care about is, is cosmetics and jewellery and clothing. And your wife is going to spend all of your money on all of these things. And one of the interesting things about phobia is that there is never any suggestion that she wants money to buy, you know, pretty things. She, she wants money so that she can buy property and she wants political influence and, and, and she wants to sort of. Act as a patron to many different clients, including like client kings and client queens and. And, you know, the consul and, and other people like that. And so, so this idea that they are.

• 1:07:14Speaker 03

  Attempting, it's like the Lady Macbeth unsex me now sort of thing. It's that, the, the, the very way that she's acting. Renders her, you know, unfemale, un feminine, unwoman. But of course she can't be a man, you know, that's ridiculous. And, and it's, it's, it's interesting in, in ancient myths about, um. Sort of, um. Sex change or, or gender reassignment or, or whatever term you might want to use for sort of the, the ancient Homphorac stories.

• 1:07:45Speaker 03

  Men don't turn into women, women turn into men. And, and the, the idea being that they were always, they were always men all along, but, but, but, you know. And they're, they're, they're just revealing their true self, but doesn't work the other way because. Yeah. Who wants to be a woman in antiquity? Yeah. There, there, this idea that there's, there's, it's perfectly natural for a woman to, to transition and become a man. Yeah. On earth would a man transition to being a woman? Because, you know, the, the recognition that, of course, in a patriarchal society, being a woman really sucks. And and so it's it's with Foveo, it's this idea of she's she is really pushing her way into the male sphere and and making every and and again, I kind of come back to the fact that in some ways,

• 1:08:28Speaker 03

  I guess if you you would put it in a different way, she is, but realistically, she's not doing anything that lots of other Roman women weren't doing.

• 1:08:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  And were they all was was Sevilla trying to be a man was was she being unfeminine was was Torrentia being unfeminine was Claudia being unfeminine? And I suppose if if you have a very narrow definition of what feminine is, and it's the sort of ancient Roman equivalent of the modern trad wife, you know, that that is, I suppose, true. But, yeah, I I uh I she she she she's so interesting in in so many ways for what the Romans think about her, but also what later writers drawing on the Romans think about her and all the way into the present with how how women, they the idea that they they have to wear sort of trousers and and and you pant the whole pantsuit thing to be taken seriously.

• 1:09:19Speaker 03

  They have they have to lower their voices to be taken seriously and you you hear but you people like Margaret Thatcher doing that, but the actress Natalie Portman had to do that, you know, she had she had to have those sort of elocution lessons to speak in a sort of lower pitch because, you know, her her natural voice was was deemed too high pitched, made her sound too young, made her sound, I guess, you know, not intelligent, the idea being that if you if you have that kind of breezy voice, like high pitched voice, that you're a silly little girl and an intelligent woman who went to Harvard, I think.

• 1:09:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, I I think it all it it it's so interesting, the way all of this does connect so well. And I think it all just, you know, comes back to this idea of the the fear of. What the men couldn't control, you know, Fulvia was a man because she was threatening their masculinity, what they saw as masculinity, and that is control, right?

• 1:10:16Speaker 03

  And it well, it's it's interesting, isn't it, that what what man who is secure in his masculinity is threatened or feels that someone else, whether it's a a woman or or another man, can threaten his masculinity. And it's it's clearly there, there are some insecurities present and and for for Roman men, I suppose, it's because your reputation is everything.

• 1:10:39Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:10:40Speaker 03

  And you you need to be, you need to be on pretty much all the time. You need to constantly be acting in a way that is deemed to be, you know, um, manly and and virtuous. And sort of you have your your your dignity and your authority. And all all the the equivalent Latin words for those.

• 1:11:00Liv Albert?

  Um. Yeah.

• 1:11:01Speaker 03

  That they they don't necessarily translate exactly to to the words I've used. But but yeah, there's that sense of the these are all, you know, your your good name once lost is lost forever, that that whole sort of situation. And and so the worst thing that someone can do is cast aspersions on you, can call you effeminate. And so if if if that's the worst possible, the worst thing you could ever be is is womanly. I mean, it's just, oh, it's just too depressing to really think about how just how misogynistic the actual world is, just it's baked in, you know?

• 1:11:37Liv Albert?

  Well, I think that's a that's a good way of phrasing it and and kind of bringing everything full circle, because I think it's a good reminder that the the gender binary generally harms all of us. And the

• 1:11:49Speaker 03

  Yes, trying trying to force yourself into

• 1:11:52Liv Albert?

  Exactly.

• 1:11:53Speaker 03

  A very specific box. It's it's not made to to fit, and it by the very definition, it's not for everyone. It's it's barely for anyone.

• 1:12:02Liv Albert?

  Exactly.

• 1:12:03Speaker 03

  We're all sort of cutting off bits of ourselves to fit into it.

• 1:12:05Liv Albert?

  It it's like how toxic masculinity, you know, the m- men being expected to everything you said about the Roman man, right? That that those expectations. Create toxic masculinity because it gets ingrained that they cannot be anything else. And then that toxic masculinity hurts men as much as it hurts women and other people. Because it is, again, enforcing this gender binary. And I think it goes back again to, to the very specific type of women who are afraid of, of, of trans people. To those cis women who are afraid of, of trans women. And the way that that all comes down to, to control and power.

• 1:12:47Liv Albert?

  I saw a trans person, I, I wish I remembered, it was on a TikTok video and I, and so I don't remember who, who said it. But it was a trans person talking about, somebody had asked a, a question. Of like, you know, they were like, honest question, you know, why do you think that people are so afraid of, of trans people? And, and the answer, I think, will stick with me forever. And it's this idea that trans people exist outside of the patriarchal structure. Because the patriarchal structure is that binary structure. And it, it, it has put women into a place. And that place is where the men want them. And, and trans people don't fit into either of those places. They exist outside of that binary. And therefore they cannot be controlled by the patriarchal structure.

• 1:13:32Liv Albert?

  And it's why that, you know, these women, particularly that one with all the money. You know, she is one of the worst patriarchal agents, I would say, to ever, or to exist now, certainly. She is the least feminist person I can imagine. Because she is enforcing this binary that was created by the men to control us. Like, I, I don't, and it's so hard to understand that alternative. Once you recognize that, like, that, that structure, that idea of what does and does not constitute a woman. Be it from ancient Rome and, or Greece to now.

• 1:14:13Liv Albert?

  That structure of what does and does not define a woman is what is there to control us. It is the thing that is meant to keep us in check. And, and adhering to it is just another way of enforcing the patriarchal structure.

• 1:14:30Speaker 03

  It is, it is, it is interesting though, as, I mean, as we were talking a little bit earlier about the fact that, you know, we remember in our lifetime, you know, people feeling confident about being themselves, their authentic self, and, and doing whatever they wanted to do with, with their hair and their makeup and their clothing and just their way of living their life. And, I mean, that's, that's the thing, isn't it? It's like, all of those, those, the idea that you could perhaps see someone else and they could inspire you. And you could say, I mean, this is a very sort of simplistic example, but, but, you know, if,

• 1:15:11Speaker 03

  if a woman wanted to cut her hair short and she'd had long hair her entire life because she thought, oh, that's the appropriate woman they're going to do. But then she saw, you know, trans people or, uh, you know, LG, any, anybody on the LGBTQ spectrum doing whatever it was they wanted, you know, combining, you know, a shaved head with a dress or whatever else. And, and she thought to herself, oh my God, you know, I can, I don't have to dress this way or, or whatever. I'm going to do that too. And it's, it's almost like this is, this is part of the problem is, is that the, because these, these barriers started to

• 1:15:49Speaker 03

  become very permeable and break down. And it's like, no, no, no, we've got to shore them up. We've got, we've got to quick get in there and, and put everybody back where they're meant to be again. And it's, it's just really depressing because it's like, what, what business is it of yours? How someone else does choose? I mean, I, I think this about the, the sort of the supposed pro-life, uh, arguments as well. It's like, if you don't want to have an abortion and you don't believe in abortion, don't have an abortion. Don't have one. It's so easy. You don't have to. No one's going to make you. Whereas at the, you know, at the same time, if, if someone else

• 1:16:31Speaker 03

  does want to, or, or they may not want to, but they need to, or whatever other situation. Doesn't affect you at all. You don't even know about it. Tell you and if they if they happen to know what your thoughts are, they probably won't.

• 1:16:45Liv Albert?

  And that's the same. Yeah, trans people using bathrooms, it's the same thing. You don't need to know. If you know what somebody has in their pants in a specific bathroom, like that's a problem. And it probably means that they're not a trans person, they're an actual threat. Like, like, people love to use this idea of like, well, men going into women's bathrooms. So that's why. And it's like, well, that's a problem with men.

• 1:17:08Speaker 03

  Well, periodically. Yeah. Periodically in the UK, I mean, may maybe it maybe it's the same in other countries. We do periodically get news stories about men who have attacked women in supermarket bathrooms or department store bathrooms.

• 1:17:23Liv Albert?

  Because men are scary. And that's the issue.

• 1:17:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's like, they weren't dressed as women or anything else. They just went in, they just went through the door. You know, and and we have, we have signposts up in in our public toilets, which which say, you know, the the person assigned to clean this bathroom is male today. You know, to make you aware. So they're all men.

• 1:17:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:48Speaker 03

  Bathrooms because they're employed to be there. I mean, that's okay. That's that's.

• 1:17:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, it's also like you, you making a law about a trans person and where they can and cannot go actually doesn't stop a man from going somewhere and hurting someone. Like, it literally doesn't. It doesn't stop a man from doing that. And every time they try to make this argument, it's like, well, but a man has done this. And I'm like, well, then you're talking about a man, you're not talking about a trans person now, are you? You're talking about a man.

• 1:18:12Speaker 03

  This, this is, this is really the, the, the sort of the crux of the issue and and the, the depressing thing about it. And when we, when you were saying earlier about how patriarchy hurts everybody, toxic masculinity hurts everybody. And with the sort of, you'd think with the onset of like the body positivity movement and everything else, that things would get a bit better for everybody. And you know, that women would be allowed to not wear makeup or do whatever with their hair or their clothing. That's not happened. What's happened is that young boys and men are now being body shamed about, you know, they sat on the other and they're they're feeling like they need to have, you know, they need to take steroids and they're

• 1:18:52Speaker 03

  they're becoming really unhappy with the way they look. It's like, no, that that that how how is how has it gone in that direction rather than the other direction? If the other direction, you know, we we could have had women being held to less high standards and being allowed to be more what they were doing. That would have helped men too. But no, instead, keeping these standards getting ever ever higher is actually hurting young boys and men as well. Like, when it comes to the really superficial stuff, historically, it's been women that cared about makeup and clothes and hair. But now, you know, men are caring about it or being forced to care about it too. And everybody's increasingly unhappy. It's like, what is the end game here? That we are literally all utterly miserable all of the time. We hate ourselves. We hate our lives.

• 1:19:34Speaker 03

  And wow, I mean, if if if we look back through history at periods where this has occurred, it doesn't end well for anybody.

• 1:19:43Liv Albert?

  No, yeah, it's.

• 1:19:48Liv Albert?

  Oh, it's it's so terrible. You have to laugh like I just did.

• 1:19:51Speaker 03

  And with that kind of that sort of shrill kind of verging on hysterical. And there's a word that that, you know.

• 1:19:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 1:20:00Speaker 03

  That that kind of laugh, not a genuine haha chuckle. It's more of a.

• 1:20:05Liv Albert?

  It's that awkward ah, like it's.

• 1:20:08Speaker 03

  It's a laugh that could become a scream if it goes on.

• 1:20:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah. No, it's, yeah, it's so wild. But it is, I mean, this this conversation transformed. I should know. Like, every time I'm gonna talk about an ancient woman, it's gonna become me just ranting about the patriarchy. But I do think it's so interesting. It is, and it's.

• 1:20:28Speaker 03

  You can't avoid it really, because.

• 1:20:29Liv Albert?

  No.

• 1:20:30Speaker 03

  It's kind of, I think, because we know that we're so close to it.

• 1:20:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:34Speaker 03

  You know, because there is so much continuity and so much of the classical world has been deliberately. Or our our contemporary world has been designed deliberately looking to that as a as a as a sort of a role model, you know, our political systems. And a lot of our religious systems and social systems, they they are drawing on all of that. And so we we we took quite a lot of the bad stuff. And brought it into into our sort of contemporary.

• 1:21:04Speaker 03

  Uh, world and now we're we're just having to sort of muddle through and uh try and sort of point it out when we see it and argue with it and uh.

• 1:21:15Liv Albert?

  But we have platforms to do that. I do love that I can have women like yourself on to talk about ancient women because, I mean, I'll I'll have I'll let men do it too, but they have to do it right. Uh, but you know, I I just think a- a- at the very least, we can be examining these past figures. You know, and looking at, you know, even if you you know, you've talked a lot about about not being able to, you know, have any kind of comprehensive biography on on people from that world. And that's absolutely so true. And also, it's so nice to be able to look at what we do know, but also question why we know it

• 1:22:00Liv Albert?

  and what might have influenced that, right? And I think that is at least something that has come out of the the field in the last couple of decades, but that at least that ability to question what we know and why we know it, you know, because you said.

• 1:22:15Speaker 03

  That is part of the thing that's quite depressing, because if you think about it, there there are certain ancient sources that we we can recognize that they survived because the people at the time thought that they were important. Or but then, how do we, there are other ones, they, we we have to reckon with the the sort of the transmission of these sources and how it happened. And and a lot of the time, and this really depressed me when I thought about it, when I when I first read about it, the that just a lot of the sources that we have survived because they were used for teaching children. And so we we have the the sort of equivalent of the of what we have in the UK, we call the national curriculum.

• 1:22:59Speaker 03

  And it's it's what certain people have decided, this is the canon, this is what young people need to know. And therefore they get copied and copied and copied and copied. And then you get the sort of, I mean, the outliers there, there's just the completely wacky, random stuff that survives in, in one manuscript in one place.

• 1:23:20Liv Albert?

  Accidental survivals, yeah.

• 1:23:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and that's the sort of interesting thing that if, if you, if you sort of, you, you somehow um travelled through time and, and, and grabbed a, an ancient person off the street and, you know, you said to them, what are the, what, what do you think are the most important texts that we need to preserve? And they might give us very different answers because we, we're sort of judge, I mean, we, I think we, I guess we can accept that Elia and the Odyssey are seen as very important and were always seen as very important by, by the nature of just how many people engaged with them in, in their, in their own work and how many copies of them survive in, you know, out, out of the way places in Egypt and things like that. So we can accept that people thought that, you know, that Homeric texts were foundational.

• 1:24:07Speaker 03

  But what about the other, you know, all the others that we have? And why do we have the, the play, the tragedies that we have when there are other ones that won the, you know, the, the festival competition that we don't have?

• 1:24:19Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:24:20Speaker 03

  You know, Sappho was thought to be brilliant in the Ninth Muse and, is it the Ninth Muse? No, the Tenth Muse.

• 1:24:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:27Speaker 03

  How news, Tenth Muse?

• 1:24:28Liv Albert?

  Tenth Muse, yeah.

• 1:24:29Speaker 03

  And, oh god. But, but yeah, so, but we don't have her work completely. We have fragments.

• 1:24:36Liv Albert?

  Survived by accident, yeah.

• 1:24:38Speaker 03

  So clearly it's not about quality.

• 1:24:40Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:24:41Speaker 03

  Uh, of, of sort of writing, um, in the same way, I suppose that the modern bestsellers are not on the bestseller list because they're good literature.

• 1:24:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:49Speaker 03

  You know, including the ones written by a certain individual.

• 1:24:52Liv Albert?

  Uh huh.

• 1:24:54Speaker 03

  They, they, people, people readily acknowledge that they're not actually that good now, even, even if you're judging them as children's literature.

• 1:25:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:02Speaker 03

  But because everybody's had them in their house at one point or another and they're in all the shops and you, you would be forgiven for thinking, they, you know, that is the same. But, but yes, I, so I always wonder why, why we have the sources we do and, and in the case of Phovia, we, we have, um.

• 1:25:23Speaker 03

  We're missing some really significant sources. We're missing like the books of Livy that deal with that period.

• 1:25:28Liv Albert?

  Hmm, really?

• 1:25:29Speaker 03

  Um, and, and, and that period in, in detail, even though he was alive at that time, he lived through it, he was writing about it. Um, we, we don't have the work of Quintus Dellius, for example, one of, one of Antony's. So yeah, we, we don't have Quintus Dellius, but we do have Cassius Dio who used Quintus Dellius. So some of the more sort of pro Antony information and, and Attutac potentially used Quintus Dellius as well. So some of that is there, but it's like, what else was there? And then so, and when we, we tend to sort of think of ancient sources as being a sort of flat, um, m- morass of, of information, but they were written staggered intervals.

• 1:26:11Speaker 03

  So Cassius Dio is, is writing sort of 200 years after the events that he's describing. And so one thing that I, I always try and point out to students when, when I'm talking about this kind of thing is that they were writing with the benefit of hindsight about stuff that was, was ancient history to them. You know, if you think about what, what was happening 200 years ago, for us, it was the Victorian period. And so you know exactly who turns out to be important because you, at the time, they didn't know. They could be, could have been any number of people, but then somebody dies and they're off the table. Or, or somebody, you know, loses a baton and so they're off the table and so on and so forth. And so at the time, people appeared to be important.

• 1:26:54Speaker 03

  And so they are taking up quite a lot of the sort of historical bandwidth of, of the people that are living through that time with them and that people are writing about them, thinking they're very important. But then they die. And so they immediately ceased to be important as, as far as the, the historians writing later are concerned. Yeah, they know that.

• 1:27:16Speaker 03

  Augustus's adopted grandsons, his grandsons who he adopted as his sons, Gaius Lucius. They know that they die before they can really even do anything important. And so they are, you know, historically insignificant, they probably, you know, they have like a paragraph each in any given ancient encyclopedia. Um, like the Oxford Classical Dictionary or something. But at the time, that was not, you know, there were so many prophecies about how great they were going to be, they were being groomed to be the future emperors, they were being given all of these honours, there was this huge expectation. You see a little bit of that in Virgil's Aeneid with Marcellus, for example, Augustus's nephew. He was going to be potentially the, the, the heir, he was married to Augustus's daughter Julia.

• 1:27:59Speaker 03

  And it was anticipated that they would have children, the next generation of the Julia family. He died very young and so she was then married off to Agrippa. And, and then they, they had their children, but of course those children died young, the male children died young. And so we, reading 2000 years later, are reading sources that were already dealing with a several hundred years of hindsight. And so their, their sort of the established narratives about what mattered and what didn't and who was important and who wasn't. And I find, this was something that I found quite interesting thinking about Fulvia, was that she died in 40, we've already sort of discussed that she died and

• 1:28:41Speaker 03

  immediately she was used as a scapegoat for Antony and Octavian. But one of the things that I was thinking about when I was writing the book and as I sort of came to conclude it, I was like, well, what if she hadn't died? And this is, this is one of the ways I think you can potentially tell who was historically significant. If they had lived, would things have been different? Or slightly different, significantly different? And with Fulvia, I think things would have been significantly different for, for Antony and not just Antony. So, so my, the way that I think about it is that if Fulvia hadn't died in 40,

• 1:29:20Speaker 03

  maybe he would have divorced her over the Perusian War, maybe he still would have married Octavia and, and so on. But Phobia would have been alive and she would have been in Rome and she would have retained their children and her existing children. And she would have been in a position to defend Antony's interests in Rome. Even if she'd been extremely, you know, angry with him for divorcing her. Um, very ungrateful for her going to war to defend his interests. She would still have been the mother of his children and sort of seeking to advance their cause. Uh, and, and she would have been able to protect Antony's interests in that way. Um, not, you know,

• 1:30:00Speaker 03

  out of altruism, but, but out of the, the sort of desire to, to continue to wield influence through the next generation. You know, she, she had, she had four sons, you know, one of them was a member of the, of the Claudii. One of them was a, a, you know, they, they, they, they were from, um, these very influential Roman families. They would have been, could have the potential to be the sort of political leaders of the next generation. And had that happened, Octavian wouldn't have had the influence that he had in Rome and in Italy. And if Antony had retained his influence in Rome, then the ba- the outcome of the Battle of Actium might have been different. And the outcome of this sort of situation with, with Antony and Cleopatra and Octavian might have been different.

• 1:30:45Speaker 03

  And so you'd see Antony having considerable amount of, of influence in the Near East. You know, with, with the, um, with Cleopatra and her children occupying the, the kingdoms that he, he allocated to them. And the donations of Alexandria, his daughter from his, his earlier marriage to his cousin. She was married into a Near Eastern, um, elite family that would, would eventually go on to be a client kingdom, um, royal dynasty. And then his sons and his stepsons in Rome, taking care of the West, the Empire. And so I find that really interesting, that the possibility that, that if Phobia had lived,

• 1:31:25Speaker 03

  she would have, it, it would have been quite a different political scenario. Whether Antony married Octavia and, and had the two children with her that then created the Julio Claudius dynasty or not, the Roman, uh, political situation would have been quite different during the thirties and then potentially after that as well. And so I think that's, that's something to bear in mind when we think about history, thinking about. Not just, well, this was always going to happen. It's like, no, it wasn't necessarily. One, one difference, you know, you, you can think counterfactually about all the things. What if Caesar had not been assassinated? Well, Octavian would have not been important necessarily because Caesar would have continued to do what he was going to do.

• 1:32:10Speaker 03

  And Octavian would have just had to have been his minion. Antony would have been his minion too. Everyone would have been his minions. So, yeah. I could, I could, I could go on about that for a long time.

• 1:32:22Liv Albert?

  I mean, I think about that in relation to what we don't have so often too. I, you know, I was thinking back to what you said earlier about just, you know, how we can't really say that any woman from that time was ahead of her time or, or, or the ways in which, you know, we don't have evidence that anyone was objectively against the, the concept of slavery and all of those things. And it's, you know, I think it's, it's so true to think about it in that way of, of what if things had been slightly different? What if one person had lived when he, they might not have or what have you? But also to think about just what didn't get written down, you know?

• 1:32:59Speaker 03

  The Antikythera mechanism, for example, like we have the Antikythera mechanism, but we have no ancient literature that says anything about anything remotely close to it.

• 1:33:09Liv Albert?

  What is it? Exactly. Well, and, and I think that, and we have so many women, but we have them through these, these male lenses of, like you said too, often hindsight and, and knowing their eventual importance and all of that. And so it's, you know, the, the, the question of what we don't know, of course, is something that will haunt all of us, I think, forever. But it's also really interesting to, to just think about those, those questions and, and the, the question of what we do and don't have, or what might have been happening and we don't know about it.

• 1:33:40Speaker 03

  We have, we have references to hundreds of female authors.

• 1:33:46Speaker 03

  But we we don't have their work, you know, we we have we have fragments of about what a hundred hundred ancient female authors when we know there were more than that. But we just don't have anything that they actually wrote. And that's clearly not about quality, because there are plenty of ancient male authors whose works we don't have either. You know, plenty of of plays written by, you know, the the um tragedines and the comedians and the historians who are who are acknowledged to be brilliant. But not so brilliant that every single thing they ever wrote was preserved.

• 1:34:21Speaker 03

  And yeah, it's like what what what might we find if if if, you know, we we did look at all the papyri fragments in in uh that were uncovered in Egypt? Or we did find more uh uh tablets of of any number of different materials and and things like that.

• 1:34:41Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean, it's it's endless and I I could say a lot about the the handful of plays by Euripides that survived by accident. Because I think they say a lot of really interesting things because they were not selected to teach children or be preserved. Um but that would keep us going far too long. But it it is it's a great, it's just I I love to think about that. Um and just, you know, what may or may not have been there and um but knowing what we do know about these these women, I do. I mean, I I like hearing that that Fulvia, you know, was maybe just this very realistic person who maybe did some terrible things and some good things and

• 1:35:19Speaker 03

  Well, exactly.

• 1:35:20Liv Albert?

  Her history was written by men and here we are.

• 1:35:21Speaker 03

  Who is entirely virtuous and and and who is entirely not virtuous. I mean, we we all, you know, horrible people can do the occasional nice thing and nice people can do the occasional horrible thing and and depending on

• 1:35:35Liv Albert?

  Humans are complex.

• 1:35:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, this this is something I think that does get lost in this desire to try and

• 1:35:44Speaker 03

  You focus on an ancient person, a lot of the time you you find them interesting and you find them in some respects admirable. Cause you're you're trying to sort of, you know, reach, reach them, try and. And and so this, this, I guess you you can, there can be this, this inclination to try and explain away everything bad they did. Or, you know, um, focus on the good things that they did. And realistically, it's probably a mixture of both of those things. And I, this is with with full view, I think. I, I tried to explain why I thought she might have done things, you know, for for better or for worse.

• 1:36:25Speaker 03

  Um, and I certainly, I find her interesting. And and in a, in a way that it's hard to find a lot of other ancient women interesting, simply because we don't have the information about them. We don't have enough, you know, they get mentioned for one thing, like, oh, they had a very nice, you know, emerald necklace or something. It's like, well, that's, that's great. Good for them. But it doesn't tell me anything about them as a, as a, as a person beyond the fact that they, you know, liked large jewelry.

• 1:36:58Speaker 03

  Some people do, some people don't, you know, some, some large jewelry is incredibly tacky, some large jewelry is, is actually, you know, very luxe and.

• 1:37:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. But I think, no, I think that's so, that's so, it's, I, I love that we've had this conversation. I'm so glad I finally did. Reach out to you because I think even just the way you opened it was exactly what I want to hear about an ancient woman, which is that I want to hear how they were a woman, a human.

• 1:37:22Speaker 03

  We didn't necessarily talk about Phobia very much.

• 1:37:25Liv Albert?

  I mean, I know.

• 1:37:27Speaker 03

  Which is great because it just mean that, you know, when, when I do have a podcast, so that they stick much more family to the book. This is not just a, a, a repeat of all the bad.

• 1:37:38Liv Albert?

  Well, that's what I like to get out, though. You know, I like to make it this conversation, but also I just want to hear about women. And so the fact that we were just able to turn it into this conversation about Roman women more broadly, I think is so great because so often I think we have to use characters like Fulvia as an emblem, almost as all the others, because like you say, we don't have anything. And so being able to also use that to openly translate to the fact that we don't have much about these other women. And so what can we think about other women via Fulvia? Or and some of the others that you referenced, because I also do like that you've just been able to like, share all these little facts about all these other Roman women who did these things, or maybe they didn't, and it was to make them look bad, what have you.

• 1:38:20Liv Albert?

  But I just, I want to look at ancient women and mythological women even at as complex people. You were capable of lots of different things, because I think that that is far more interesting and realistic. And so, yeah, all to say, this is very delightful. I'm sorry we didn't stick too much to Fulvia in the book, but I've had a delightful time.

• 1:38:43Speaker 03

  Well, I suppose it means that for potential listeners, they're not spoiled. They don't think, oh, well, I don't need to read the book now. It's like, you do need to read the book.

• 1:38:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:51Speaker 03

  You need, you need to read it.

• 1:38:52Liv Albert?

  There's so much. Yeah. Also, the cover is great, just as I've been meaning to say that. I, I love the cover. I think that was a great painting they've chosen, or I don't know if you did, but yeah, it's.

• 1:39:04Speaker 03

  Well, that's not going to be the American cover. The American cover is going to be, but it's also really gorgeous. It's on my Instagram for anyone who cares to see it. But the, the American version, I think, is coming out in June. So not, not, not too far away.

• 1:39:20Liv Albert?

  Perfect timing. Well, then that was going to be the, how I wrapped it up of also asking, you know, more about that. I also, I was just in the UK for the first time, and I saw your book in a number of places. It was exciting to, the lead up to chatting with you. But yeah, so, okay, so it's out in the UK. Clearly it has a great cover. I'm going to go check what the North American cover is going to look like as well. We'll figure out those dates for the release of this episode. But is there anything more you want to share with my listeners, other than they should read Fulvia and maybe Cleopatra? Cleopatra's daughter, which I imagine is also really

• 1:39:50Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, this is, this is possibly more for you than the listeners, but maybe we could do a Cleopatra or a Cleopatra Selene episode, because there's so much that we could say about Cleopatra.

• 1:39:59Liv Albert?

  Please, again, you've been on my list since that book. I just end up, I get, there's too many things to do and it ends up and emails stress me out. So then people sit on my little to do list for ages until I send them a slightly manic DM. But no, I would love to talk about Cleopatra Selene, absolutely.

• 1:40:15Speaker 03

  Well, let's, let's do that then. No, I mean, I, I, I hope your listeners have enjoyed our, our meandering slightly ranty at times discussion, because I, I have and you have and I hope that they are intrigued enough to go and look my book. I mean, buy it. Yes, that would be great, but you can also get it from a library. I mean, it's, it's however, just however you, however you consume it, just, just try and consume it, please.

• 1:40:47Liv Albert?

  Heck yeah. No, we love, we love a library.

• 1:41:03Liv Albert?

  Ah, nerds, as always, thank you so much for listening. I, I'm just perpetually thrilled that I have these conversation episodes, that I get to record these kinds, kinds of conversations, that I get to talk to these kinds of people. I mean, it's, it's truly one of the best things to come out of this podcast and this job. So the fact that you all want to hear these, these nitty gritty details, these obscure, or in the case of Fulvia, not necessarily obscure, but just much maligned, much, I don't, you know, there's just, there's so much to stories like these. And I'm just so grateful that, that there are so many experts who have this kind of knowledge and passion

• 1:41:46Liv Albert?

  and who just want to come on and talk about, I mean, people like Fulvia, but I'm, I mean this about so much of the ancient world because it's just, it's just the absolute best. And I'm so grateful for this. Huge thanks to Jane for this episode. We had so much fun. Um, it's probably one of the few that I've had a little more trouble editing in recent months because it is just, we were able to go so deep into these wider issues around women and patriarchy and history. And oh my God.

• 1:42:16Liv Albert?

  But it was truly so delightful. So I do hope to have Jane back soon to talk about Cleopatra's daughter as well, because you, I mean, you name an ancient woman or a woman from the ancient world and fuck knows, I want to hear about her. So I mean, and on that note, if anyone has recommendations for either topics like that, or experts that I might have, or might maybe should talk to for the show, you can always feel free to share those with me either via email, [email protected], or via the ongoing form for Q and A, or for questions for Q and A episodes. That's mythsbaby.com/questions. And speaking of that, I could use some more

• 1:43:00Liv Albert?

  of those. So if there is something, some topic, some person, some burning question that you have, and you want to share with me, or you want to hear more from me about it, please submit those. Again, that's mythsbaby.com/questions. Let's talk about Myth Baby. It's written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Pangowish is the Hermes to my Olympians. My incredible producer. Select music is by Luke Chaos. The podcast is part of The Memory Collective, a group of creators and educators dedicated to sharing knowledge that is accessible, contextualized, socially conscious, and inclusive. To find more from The Memory Collective, visit collectivemem.com. By the time of this

• 1:43:43Liv Albert?

  episode's release, that website may or may not be the newly created thing that we are currently working on. If not, there's so much more coming soon. If it is, great. Check out the new website. But for now, just to keep up with what's going on, you can check collectivemem.com. You can also sign up for the Myth Baby newsletter, which one of these days will exist. Again, just got to find some of that elusive spare time. Sign up for that at mythsbaby.com/newsletter. Thank you all so damn much. I, I just love my goddamn job so much. And even while everything in the world seems to be like a little bit on fire, I'm just so

• 1:44:26Liv Albert?

  Grateful that I have this work that I can do, the, the history that I can share with you all, and just these ways that, that we can kind of find like resilience and inspiration from the ancient world. It means a lot. So it means even more that you all continue to want to hear me talk about it. I am Liv and I love this shit.

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