The courtesan who brought down a cult, and other unsung women of ancient Rome

Around 186 BCE, a former slave turned courtesan named Hispala Faecenia fell in love with a young upper-middle class Roman man named Publius Aebutius. Then she learned his mother and stepfather planned to have Aebutius initiated into the Mysteries of Bacchus, a religious cult that, legend holds, featured drunken orgies and frenzied women tearing young men limb from limb. Hispala objected strenuously, fearing her lover's reputation would be ruined or he would be injured or killed. And she questioned the parents' motives—with good reason. Apparently Aebutius's mother had squandered the young man's inheritance and he was about to come of age, thereby exposing her financial mismanagement. Eventually the local consul got involved and set up an investigation into this Bacchanalian scandal, with Hispala reluctantly testifying about what she knew of the "obscene rites" from her younger days as a sex slave. Deeming it a religious conspiracy, the Senate issued a formal decree prohibiting the Bacchanalia throughout Italy—all because a lowly freedwoman wanted to protect her lover. Chances are you've never heard Hispala's story (she is only mentioned in Livy's History of Rome), but historian Emma Southon is out to change that with her new book, A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire. Southon earned a PhD in ancient history from the University of Birmingham and is also the author of the wittily irreverent 2021 book, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome, discussing how the people of ancient Rome viewed life, death, and what it means to be human. She brings that same sensibility—combining solid scholarship with a breezy conversational tone—to her female-centric revisionist history of the Roman Empire. A Rome of One's Own chronologically presents the lives of Hispala and 20 other women, from Tarpeia and Hersilia (750 BCE) in the earliest foundational days, to "the political stab-fest of the late Republic," all the way to Galla Placidia (414 CE) of late Antiquity. These women are not just queens and princesses, but also vestal virgins and whores, traitors and patriots, saintly martyrs, savvy businesswomen, informers, poets, and rebels. "By focusing on women, we discover a whole new history of the Roman Empire, one where marriage is as important as war and where what it is to be Roman is constantly being reassessed," Southon writes. "Including women deepens our understanding of Roman history and Roman life." The topic of ancient Rome has been pretty good to Southon, and she has no plans to switch to a different historical period any time soon. She's currently working on a children's book about Britain during the Roman era, followed by another history book focused on the Roman court around the emperors rather than the rulers themselves. "These were people who had absolutely no power but a lot of contact with the emperor, and we only see them in little glimpses," Southon told Ars. "When you read the sources, you'll find these brief anecdotes: 'Augusta spent his evenings gambling with the boys he kept.' And you're like, 'The what now?' Emperors had pet dwarves and young boys that they kept around for no other reason than they liked them. Hadrian traveled with 5,000 people. Who were those 5,000 people and what were they doing?" Inquiring minds need to know. Ars spoke with Southon to learn more.

Ars Technica: What prompted you to write a book focused on the women of ancient Rome?   Emma Southon: It partly was spite. When you become an ancient historian, you pick a side: You either become a Roman person or a Greek person. I kept seeing books about Greek women retold and re-imagined, and I thought the Romans deserved some attention as well. What makes the Romans better than Greeks is that they have real women, not just goddesses—all these incredible stories of real women doing interesting things that very much are not part of the story that is usually told of Rome. I wanted to show that women have always been a part of history. Just because they're not in traditional histories doesn't mean that they didn't exist. When you look at women, you get stories that are completely different to the stories about men. If anybody already had a book written about them, I didn't want to include them. I think Boudicca is the only exception. I wanted it to be geographically diverse. I didn't want to get stuck in Italy, because the Roman Empire was huge and spanned a millennium. I wanted to show how the empire starts as a city-state, expands into a big empire, then contracts back to being just Rome. And I wanted to include the diversity of experience around the empire, to expand the definition of what has been previously considered a "Roman woman." Past books on Roman life cut out all of these women who had businesses or who were artisans or doctors or sex workers. But womanhood is not just privacy and domesticity, it is also working and living and being in public. Ars Technica: You make the point that much of what we traditionally consider to be "history" concerns important men doing important things. Yet for most people, history is happening to us. Has there been a shift in academic circles toward looking at the lives of people to whom history actually happened? Emma Southon: Yes, it's a fundamental shift in what you imagine history to be. Most people's experience of history is the school version: a list of wars that happened and generals and presidents. But since about the 1960s, people started to think that maybe history could also be about how people lived, about the texture of life, cultural shifts, and attitudes. It is still a relatively new way of thinking about the past. For a really long time, it was only the big headline events.

The shift started with a few people in academia. One of the book's epigrams is from Amy Richlin of the University of California, Los Angeles, talking about her experience in the 1970s. She was one of the trailblazers of including women in the history of the ancient world. For example, her work has dealt with how readers might react to how Ovid wrote about rape as though it's a comedy, but different readers might respond to this differently within a social context. This was completely radical at the time: the idea that you wouldn't just be imagining yourself as Ovid writing. I am the next generation. The field is only just now moving into the more public sphere of history. It stopped being a radical thing to think about women, to think about enslaved people, to think about history as culture, as lived experience—not just events happening one after the other. Some people still don't like it, don't think that it is an interesting or worthy way of looking at the past. But when you talk to people who are not historians, they always want to know: How did people go to the toilet? How did they sleep? What was their day-to-day life like? That's what interests people. Ars Technica: We've spoken before about the scarcity of information concerning the Roman Empire and the fact that many historical sources contradict each other. This is even more the case when it comes to women in ancient Rome. How did you handle the challenge of ferreting out enough information to flesh out these women as living, breathing people? Emma Southon: It is hard. There are a lot of women I would have liked to include, but we have just a couple of lines about them; we have too little to work with [regarding] all the enslaved women who were hairdressers, for example. You have to do a fair bit of extrapolation, but I'm always wary of doing that because it's so easy to be a bit too imaginative or hypothetical. For example, I might imagine Claudia and Lepida down in Britain on the Northumberland border, writing letters to each other and inviting each other to their birthday parties at their forts. You can imagine them as being super best friends who love each other very much. But maybe they are just the only two people in the nearest vicinity, and they have to hang out together politely. Or maybe one of them is really into the other one but the other is like, "Oh God, please don't invite me places. I have to go." It's a careful balance. I generally try to be as clear as possible that I'm imagining: these are not facts, this is me making up texture. But at the same time, you can say, well, we have her shoes and this list of things that we know that she owned, and we know what her husband was doing. We know that she had a scribe who wrote her letters for her. So you can build a limited picture of her life, perhaps of a woman lying down dictating her letters and throwing away her shoe because it broke a little bit.

We don't have any information about Turia other than a long inscription on her tombstone that her husband wrote, about how brilliant she was during the civil wars. After the wars, she offered to divorce him so that he could get another woman pregnant, as long as she got to stay in the house. We don't have any writing about her, but we do have a lot of writing about that time period, so we can extrapolate out of what other people experienced to get a sense of what it might have been like for her. We know what other people have said about living through the horrific events of the civil wars, or living through the proscriptions, or about infertility. You try to find as much information that you can that directly relates to them and their specific context. The thing that bothers me about a lot of history writing is when people aren't honest about what they are imagining and they present it as fact. Ars Technica: What was the most surprising thing you discovered while researching this book? Emma Southon: I did not know that the Pompeii businesswoman Julia Felix existed before I started writing; I found out about her through a friend who works at Pompeii. Julia Felix had a real entrepreneurial spirit. She owned a leisure complex. There was an earthquake, and the building next door to her was left derelict, so she bought it. Then people start coming down her way, so she opened up an extra food business on that much busier road. I love the insight that you get into the middle class of the Roman world that you don't see very often. She had a frieze in her atrium of the Pompeii market day with all of the tiny aspects of real life in Rome: people buying shoes, giving money to a beggar, horses, and the utterly inexplicable inclusion of a man being beaten with a rod, which is just so Roman. It's a beautiful little snapshot of business/entrepreneurial life, and middle-class life, that is often invisible. How do you leverage disaster to make money? How do you then build that business? Who are your clients? What do they want? They want 15 minutes of luxury and peace in a big city, something that is usually only available to rich people. I just think she's wonderful.

Ars Technica: Was there a favorite woman that you didn't get to include in the book? Emma Southon: Babatha, a Jewish woman who lived around 120 CE. I cut her out of the book with an enormous amount of pain in my heart. She was born into the Nabataean Kingdom, now modern-day Jordan where Petra is. She got married, her husband died, and she got married again to a guy who had another wife. She owned a date farm and lent him loads of money, and they had many arguments about property. At some point in her lifetime, the Trajan invaded and brought the Nabataean Kingdom into the Roman Empire, so she became a Roman subject. Suddenly her life completely changed because her status and all her dealings had to be filtered through Roman law. We know all this because there was an uprising in Judea, which spilled out into a war with Hadrian, which forced Babatha and her family to run away to some caves by the Dead Sea. She took all of her legal documents with her, assuming that she'd be able to continue her many, many lawsuits when the war was over. But for some reason they never came out of that cave. They all died in there. When archaeologists were doing excavations around the Dead Sea in the 1960s, they found her body and the bodies of her family. They also found this cachet of legal documents that demonstrate how her life had changed because she became a Roman subject. For instance, she was no longer able to represent herself in court. She had to have a Roman citizen represent her because it was now a Roman court. Her property ownership changed. She had loads of arguments with people to whom she lent money who then didn't pay it back. She had this woman who is representing her in court with the Roman governor in Petra, but they fall out over something and they had a fistfight, so she took this woman to court as well. It was the Real Housewives of Nabataean. And then, because of this uprising against the Roman world, she died as an unknown victim of it. We would never know about her if she hadn't died in that specific cave. One day I'll write about her somewhere else.