Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac by Joan Smith – Review
By Clare Jenkins
If you recently watched Dame Sian Phillips reprising her role as the scheming Empress Livia in the Channel 5 series, Emperor: Rise and Fall of a Dynasty, you might think that Rome’s noblewomen were a force to be reckoned with. Journalist and campaigner Joan Smith agrees. But she also believes they were victims of misogyny and domestic abuse, often leading to ‘femicide’: violent death simply for being women.
Following on from her 1989 feminist classic Misogynies, Smith now forensically re-examines the mythologies that have arisen around the women who were married or otherwise connected to the Roman emperors Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero: the Julio-Claudian dynasty (27 BC to 68 AD).
The picture she paints is far from pretty. Every chapter starts with a spoiler alert, telling us how each woman (23 in all) died: starved to death (Julia, Augustus’s only child, reluctant wife of Tiberius); blinded and starved (Agrippina, mother of Caligula); poisoned (Antonia, mother of Claudius); forced into suicide (Lollia Paulina, Caligula’s third wife); stabbed (Valeria Messalina, Claudius’s third wife); kicked to death by her husband while pregnant (Poppaea Sabina, wife of Nero)…
It’s a far cry from the still-popular 1970s BBC TV series, I, Claudius. There, Augustus was played (by Brian Blessed) as a Trump-like buffoon, Tiberius (by George Baker) as the truculent pawn of his ambitious mother Livia, and Claudius (superbly portrayed by Derek Jacobi) as an engaging misfit far cannier than his enemies gave him credit for.
Smith, a lifelong domestic and sexual abuse campaigner, sets out to re-examine the lives and characters of these ultra-powerful men, and the often-tragic impact they had on their womenfolk.
Girls of noble birth in Imperial Rome, for instance, were often betrothed – sometimes to much older men – before puberty. Some became mothers before their bodies had fully developed. If their husband died, or fell out of favour, they might then find themselves ‘traded’ to another man. They had little or no say in the matter. Nor did they have much say in their children’s lives, often being forced to leave them in their father’s keeping if they divorced or were sent into exile. If the children were sons, they might even end up being mistreated by their own offspring.
Smith’s aim is to shine new light on these patrician women, seeing them as victims of an overwhelmingly male-centred society, and drawing parallels with women’s lives through to today.
“A pawn in the dynastic game”
Take Julia. The book takes its (rather unwieldy) title from a throwaway comment Smith heard in Rome’s Palazzo Massimo. A guide was telling a group of visitors that, although Augustus and Livia never had children together, he did have one daughter, Julia, by his first wife. “Unfortunately, she was a nymphomaniac.”
When challenged, he said this was “in the sources”. At which, Smith – a classicist by training – proceeded to debunk the very sources he referred to. She continues those arguments here, re-examining the evidence with the beadiest of feminist eyes, showing how women have been misrepresented over the centuries to suit what she sees as the anti-women attitudes of chroniclers like Seneca, Suetonius and Tacitus.
Julia, for instance, – whom Smith redefines as ‘lovely, kind and cultured’ – was a pawn in the dynastic game. When her first husband died, she was married off to her father’s chief lieutenant, the much older Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. Their two eldest sons were subsequently adopted as his heirs by Augustus. She was then married off again, to Augustus’s stepson Tiberius. Her subsequent behaviour, the ‘sources’ tell us, was so scandalous (orgies, sex with senators and slaves alike), it eventually led to her exile and death by starvation in an island prison.
Then there’s Messalina, great-granddaughter of Cleopatra’s Mark Antony. Depicted over the centuries as a by-word for unbridled lust, prone to actions worthy of what Smith calls a ‘pornographic fantasy’, her image is, claims Smith, ‘a complete fabrication’. The teenage Messalina was, in fact, ‘forced into a sexual relationship with a dissolute man more than thirty years older than her’. This man, the Emperor Claudius, was not only sexually dissolute, but also ‘gluttonous, a heavy drinker, and believed it was bad for the health to hold back farts, even during dinner….’
He also enjoyed watching men fight to the death and wasn’t averse to ordering the killing of members of his own family, including two of his own nieces.
Smith argues that, in such circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that the young Messalina ‘married’ another man – a senator said to be the handsomest man in Rome – while Claudius was out of station. Stabbed to death for her infidelity, she was subsequently depicted as driven solely by an insatiable need for sex. ‘In a testament to the irresistibility of victim-blaming,’ writes Smith, ‘a reckless young woman was thus transformed into a sexual spectre who would haunt the male imagination for centuries.’
Throughout, she launches a strong defence of these women’s behaviour, drawing parallels with the way women are sometimes depicted today. ‘Adult men have always wanted to have sex with younger women,’ she writes at one point. Hence the ‘sugar daddy’ websites that link men with money and young women in need of cash. Hence, too, the ‘grooming gangs’ that have been unearthed across the country (including in Rotherham and Rochdale), where men target vulnerable girls from impoverished backgrounds – and then, together with some authority figures, blame the girls for being ‘promiscuous’ or making sexualised ‘lifestyle choices’.
At times, she ‘doth protest too much’, applying sweeping generalisations to Roman men. At others, her arguments seem in danger of running aground. The repetition of names can also be confusing: there are any number of Augustus/Augustas, Agrippa/Agrippinas, Julias, Antonias and Livias. A genealogical chart would have helped (though it probably proved far too unwieldy).
She does, however, present a compelling ‘other’ view of the Roman empire, led by blood–, power- and lust-crazed emperors. A world where the lives of men as well as women were often in the hands of other men who, having been granted so much power, took delight in ordering the exile, torture, rape, beheading or suicide of those closest to them. The difference is that the men weren’t handed round like gifts or rewards, married before they’d started menstruating – as still happens around the world. It’s a passionate, doubtless controversial, revision.
‘Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women’, by Joan Smith, is published by HarperCollins, £22
Clare’s dream is to live in a hotel suite, safe from the bother of boiler breakdowns and crashing computers. In fact, thanks to her husband Stephen McClarence’s work as a national newspaper travel writer, she’s been lucky enough to stay at hotels and eaten in restaurants across the UK and abroad – and has loved (nearly) every minute. As a journalist herself, she’s made hundreds of features and documentaries for Radio 4, including interviews with many actors and writers. She’s also a former theatre reviewer for The Stage magazine, and co-author of Teatime at Peggy’s: A Glimpse of Anglo-India.
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