A New History of Rome's Imperial Women with Joan Smith

Wayward: Unfortunately, She was a Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome's Imperial Women with Joan Smith

Join us in welcoming author and journalist Joan Smith to talk about her latest book Unfortunately, She was a Nymphomaniac, a revealing new history of Rome’s imperial women: their lives, fates, and often inspiring resistance to authority.

Unfortunately, She was a Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome's Imperial Women

Ancient Rome is more popular than ever.  But there’s one important, hidden side of the story that’s not being told: that of the women of Imperial Rome.

The wives, mothers, sisters and daughters of the five first Roman emperors, from Augustus to Nero, have had an almost universally bad press, portrayed as murderers and nymphomaniacs. But these images say as much about the misogyny of Roman society – amplified by modern authors such as Robert Graves in his best-selling but wildly inaccurate novel, I Claudius.

Writer and campaigner Joan Smith tells a different story. Drawing upon years of campaigning against domestic and sexual violence, she identifies familiar strands of abusive behaviour against women, showing how the history of the Julio-Claudian dynasty represents a century of femicide. The women described in this book might have been the most privileged women of their age, but they suffered everything from child marriage, marital rape and separation from children to exile and murder.  Their reputations were shaped by the Emperors and their chroniclers – Tiberius’ mother Livia as the wicked stepmother, Augustus’s daughter Julia as the ‘nymphomaniac’, her grand-daughter Agrippina as the power-hungry mother of Nero.  After their deaths, some even became non-persons, with statues and images destroyed.

Joan Smith revisits the original Roman texts to tell a new story – of spirited, inspiring and sometimes reckless resistance to male authority.

About Joan

Joan Smith is an author and journalist. She has written columns for most national newspapers and reviews crime fiction for the Sunday Times. One of her earliest successes was the feminist classic Misogynies, and two of her novels were made into films by the BBC. She was Co-chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board from 2013 to 2021. Her book Home Grown drew on that experience, revealing the links between domestic violence and terrorism. She has also worked extensively on free speech, chairing an English PEN committee that campaigned on behalf of imprisoned writers, and advising the UK Foreign Office on free expression. 

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A New History of Rome's Imperial Women with Joan Smith

Thursday 1st May, 6:30pm

The Poly, Falmouth

Tickets: £8

A £1 Poly Fund payment is added to each ticket sold. A 50p booking fee is also applied per ticket for online and telephone transactions.

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