Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac by Joan Smith review – debunking misogynist myths of ancient Rome

Joan Smith is braver than I am. A classicist, as well as a feminist campaigner, she describes pulling up a male guide in Rome’s Palazzo Massimo on his description of one of the women of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. “It’s in the sources,” he protested, to which Smith replied, possibly with an eye-roll, that she was familiar with them. His belittling phrase provides the title for her book.

There was a chapter on ancient Rome in her 1989 classic, Misogynies, but the impetus for a full-blown study came from the British Museum’s Nero exhibition in 2021, which aimed “to question the traditional narrative of the ruthless tyrant, revealing a different Nero, a popular leader”. This revisionism, Smith proposes, is rarely if ever extended to the wives, sisters, daughters and mothers of the emperors, perennially depicted as shrews, scheming bitches or lust-crazed she-wolves. Accordingly, she sets out to tell alternative stories of 23 Roman noblewomen.

Each chapter starts with a grim spoiler outlining the subject’s fate. First off are the three wives of Augustus. Livia (made infamous by Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Siân Phillips’s performance in the 1970s TV adaptation) and Scribonia died of natural causes, while Claudia Pulchra’s cause of death is unknown. What follows is a catalogue of cruelties: beating, starvation, rape, poisoning, beheading and torture. Nero’s wife, Poppaea, dies particularly horribly, haemorrhaging after being booted in the stomach while pregnant. Nero’s subsequent wooing and castration of a young male who resembled her is often cited as proof that he loved and missed his bride, rather than, as Smith contends, that he saw human beings as replaceable.

Elite men fared little better in those times, packed off to exile or war, or given the choice between suicide or assassination. When Smith uses the term bloodbath, she means it literally (hot water helped opened veins bleed out more quickly). But men had more agency, were not handed around as tokens in a game of status, or forced to give birth in undeveloped bodies (girls could be married off to much older men from as young as 12). One of Smith’s most startling observations is the tradition of not giving girls distinguishing first names; Drusilla was a version of Drusus, her father, Agrippina of Agrippa; sisters might have identical names. It accounts for the dizzying parade of Julias, Antoninas and Livias that the author works hard to bring to individual life.

Smith takes aim at modern historians (not all of them male) who unthinkingly repeat ancient slanders, and rereads the sources with an eye to misogynist tropes. She makes her own translations, setting them alongside the Latin, sometimes to lively effect, as when describing Caligula’s attentions to his own sisters: he “often prostituted them to his horrible mates”.

Her most stirring and contentious strategy is to relate the misdeeds of the Roman emperors to contemporary crimes, to indicate just how little has changed. Thus the fate of Claudius’s much younger wife Messalina, her name for centuries a byword for lust, is linked to the scandal of grooming gangs. Nero’s alleged sexual interest in his mother, Agrippina, leads Smith to observe that “mother-son incest” is a common internet search, and his matricide brings to mind the Sandy Hook killer’s first victim. Nero’s habit of throttling his wife, Octavia, meanwhile, is a sinister echo of the “rough sex” murder defence. “You don’t have to be a Roman emperor to get away with terrifying women,” Smith drily observes.

Daisy Dunn’s recent The Missing Thread, which aimed to restore women’s place in a traditionally male-centred account of the ancient world, is considerably more measured in its pages on imperial Rome. Where Smith’s Claudius is indifferent to his wife Messalina’s murder, to Dunn he’s “in denial”. Dunn has Julia the Elder dying “probably of starvation”; Smith makes no such caveat. Sources can be read in vastly different ways. Still, on this impassioned reading, the “nymphomaniac” slur can confidently be put to bed.

• Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women by Joan Smith is published by William Collins (£22). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.