English journalist, crime novelist and human rights campaigner Joan Smith’s latest is an engrossing, highly original, hair-raisingly gruesome, nonfiction retelling of one of the most lurid dynasties in European history, from the point of view of its imperial women.
The Julio-Claudians were two dizzyingly intermarrying patrician families who produced Rome’s first five emperors: Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero. Since their murderous reign from 27 BC to AD 68, these bloodthirsty dictators and their family dynamics have provided rich material for historians, writers, film-makers and exhibition curators.
Telling the harrowing stories of 23 women who had the misfortune of being closely associated with the Julio-Claudian emperors – as their mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, granddaughters and nieces – Smith rows into the mix with a comprehensively researched, superbly written, re-interpretative feminist history that makes Game of Thrones look like a Jane Austen TV adaptation.
In most Roman histories and narrations – from 1st-century Tacitus to Robert Graves’s novel I, Claudius and its 1970s BBC TV spin-off – Julia, Messalina, Agrippina and the other Julio-Claudian women have been vilified as lustful, scheming, wilful, disobedient, immature, power-hungry nags, deserving of all the torment, terror and torture that the emperors meted out to them. Even contemporary commentaries robotically repeat these age-old misogynistic slurs without corroborating their basis in fact.
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Smith is an acknowledged expert on violence against women and girls. She brings this to bear in her re-evaluation of the experiences of the Julio-Claudian women who, while ostensibly privileged, had no legal protection and no redress to justice in their male-supremacist culture.
Despite being routinely forced into sex and marriage while still children, used as heir-breeding machines, raped, beaten, tortured, exiled, kept from their offspring, compelled into suicide, deliberately starved to death, and murdered through other grim means by their infallible all-powerful male relatives, many of these 23 women put up extraordinarily brave fights against what Smith reframes as systematic domestic abuse and femicide.
In her final chapter of this exceptional, truth-restoring book, Smith makes the evidence-backed case that currently, around the globe, you don’t have to be a Roman emperor to get away with terrorising women. Culture-producers, Smith argues, who continue to exonerate Roman emperors’ mistreatment of their female folk perpetuate the system of misogynistic violence that still plagues the world.
