Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship's Reviews > A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire

An entertaining and educational work, from a scholar of ancient history whose work always comes across to me like lectures from “the fun professor”: someone deeply versed in scholarship but with a delivery that is hip, irreverent, and opinionated. The British title is “A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women” and that’s more representative of its contents, though less allusive, than the American one, “A Rome Of One’s Own” (although over a third of the book is set before Rome became an empire). The chapters each focus on a different woman (or two) and a different period in history, so for me, something to read a chapter at a time rather than blow through all at once.

Happily, I learned a fair bit about Roman history from this. The women profiled are diverse, and other than Boudicca (because no one can resist writing about Boudicca) were ones I hadn’t heard of before. The book moves from examination of the roles of women in Rome’s foundation myths; to the formerly enslaved woman who wound up giving information that brought down the cult of Dionysus, all in an effort to save her boyfriend from his malicious mom; to a businesswoman in Pompei, officers’ wives at the forts along Hadrian’s Wall, a highborn court poet, an early Christian martyr. There are women at the peak of political power, too: I especially enjoyed reading about Augustus’s daughter Julia Caesar, whose restricted upbringing ultimately turned into rebellion, and Julia Maesa, a Syrian woman whose sister married an officer who later became emperor, and who then fought successfully to get her two successive grandsons on the throne. There were some real Machiavellian moves there, but she seems to have been popular, and I’d love to read a novel about her if anybody could write a good one.

In the end, I definitely enjoyed this and found it well worth reading, as well as sometimes humorous. Too much of this author’s voice would probably begin to grate, but in small doses it is excellent, and a great way to learn more about Roman history.