Fulvia

 Transcript:

For our special guest today we have the perfect person  to talk about this particular Roman woman because she's written a book about her.  Would you like to introduce yourself please?  

Hello everyone, I am Dr. Jane Draycott.  I am a senior lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Glasgow.  I am the author of Cleopatra's Daughter and the author of Fulvia.  And it's Fulvia that I'm going to be talking about to you all today.  

 Now whenever I'm approaching a subject that I don't know a lot about  I usually go back to the usual textbooks that I always rely on  to give me a quick summary of what's happened.  And I looked up Fulvia in one of my favourites, Scullard, and she's mentioned twice.  She started a war and then on the next page she dies,  which I think is rather depressingly brief.  So I want to start off with the beginning, not the end. Who is Fulvia? What's her background?  Can we even tell what her background was?  

Right, well, Fulvia is a member of the Roman social elite,  so the senatorial class or the equestrian class.  And her life sort of overlaps with the gradual fall of the republic.  So we don't know exactly when she was born.  Estimates are sort of about 80 BCE just based on the trajectory of her life  when she was public and when she was doing things.  And she dies, we know she dies specifically in 40 BCE.  So we have about 40 years worth of her life crossing over with the events  like Sulla and Marius and the fallout of that.  The first triumvirate of Caesar and Pompey and Crassus.  Cicero's whole career and his recording of Roman politics over that period of time.  And we know that she was married three times to tribunes.  So likewise, members of the Roman senatorial elite  who were involved in politics on the sort of populist side of things.

  So her first husband was probably Clodius Pulcher,  who has his own important events and contributions to the fall of the republic.  And then her second was Gaius Scribonius Curio.  And then her third was Marcus Antonius, more commonly known today as Mark Antony.  And Fulvia's marriage to Antony overlaps with the beginning of his relationship  with Cleopatra, the seventh queen of Egypt.  So she is on the periphery of that.  And the second triumvirate between Antony and the second Gaius Julius Caesar,  Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, we call him Octavian today, Marcus Lepidus.  And although she dies in 40,  before the sort of struggle between Antony and Octavian really gets going,  she is actually quite important to that as well,  quite foundational to how that transpires over the course of from 40 down to 30 BCE.  And so we have a little bit of information about her family.  

I mean, her name Fulvia, she only has one name.  In some of the sort of older scholarships,  she's linked with other Roman elite families.  But in our sources, she's always called Fulvia.  And she is very wealthy because her father is a member of the Fulvia,  and her mother is a member of the Sempronius.  So these two very wealthy Republican families  that sort of seem to have kind of died off.  It seems like she is the last member of both of these families.  And so she seems to have the money from both these families.  And she uses this money to further her agenda, her husband's political agendas.  I suppose the starting point that's important to learn is that she's very rich.  Her own families are sort of on the periphery of politics.  Her father, he is called Bambalio.  That literally means stammerer, stutterer.  So it's thought that he has a speech impairment.  And that's why he's not involved in politics.  Cicero later on is quite mean about him in one of his speeches  and kind of dismissive about him.  So it sort of seems like her own family are not politically active at this point,  although they have had consuls in their ancestry.  Her mother and father divorced.  And so her mother marries a consul.  And so Fulvia's stepfather is quite politically powerful  and politically significant.  And that seems to launch her into Roman society.  

That seems to be what facilitates her first marriage to Clodius.  And so we don't know anything about the first 15, 16 or so years of her life.  We can only really reconstruct that with what we know about the two families  that her parents come from.  And then it's thought that she has estates outside of Rome.  So she sort of has Tuscan estates, like a lot of Romans do.  But yeah, it's not until she's married to Clodius and she's part of his world that we really hear about her in the sources.  And the reason we hear about her in the sources,  and we can talk more about this later,  is we hear about her in relation to the men in her life.  So there's so much more I would like to know about her for her own sake.  But because of the nature of Roman sources,  Roman women tend to only really appear in them  when men have got something critical to say about them.  And so in her case, she's criticized in relation to her three husbands.  Interesting information, interesting insights into her behavior because of that.  

So just so we're clear, let's talk about, for instance,  when she's a teenager, rich family who may be politically on the wane, let's say.  But what would be societal expectations for a girl like Fulvia at the time?  What would she be being trained to do as an adult?  

So the societal expectations for elite Roman women,  so women who were in the senatorial and equestrian class,  they began and ended with marriage.  So that was what Roman women did.  If you were a lower class Roman woman,  you might well have some kind of career, some kind of craft,  but you would also have marriage and hopefully potentially children as well.  But for the women of the upper classes,  the point was that they were an asset to their male relatives.  And this is how they were largely seen.  So when you were born and a child, you were seen in relation to your father.  You were the daughter of someone, and that someone could use you to create  political financial alliances with other powerful families.  And so Roman girls find themselves married off quite often to their dad's friends.  Much, much older men.  That can't really have been fun for them.  If you sort of think about the potential of what that means for you in reality is  that you are leaving your house and leaving your family because in the Republic,  the traditional Roman type of marriage involves the woman leaving her birth family  and becoming a member of her husband's family,  which means that she is completely isolated.  Her husband is the paterfamilias, the head of the family,  and she can't do anything without his say so.  Whereas by the time we get to the late Republic  and the period that we're talking about,  this has become very old fashioned, very unappealing for obvious reasons.  It was basically like a sort of social death or a familial death for you.  

So any property or dowry that was gone from your family  or your husband had complete control of it.  And so this is not very appealing to women or their families by the time we're talking about.  So at this point in time, women remain members of their birth family,  which gives them sort of an additional layer of protection.  So if your husband is treating you badly,  optimistically, if your husband is treating you badly,  you can ask your father and your birth family to intervene.  Realistically, what tends to happen is if your father's political alliances  cease to be useful and he wants a new one,  then he'll facilitate a divorce and then remarry you to someone else who is more useful.  But yes, this is what young Roman girls could expect.  They would be married to a man that their father chose to help him, really.  Roman marriage ideally had love and companionship as part of it.  That was the ideal that you would be striving for,  that husband and wife would love each other, but not too much,  because too much love and too much passion was seen as bad.  But they would have a sort of healthy level of affection and mutual respect.  And then they would work together.  So you go from being an appendage of your father  to being an appendage of your husband.  And your husband then uses you to support him, support his career.  So we have the idea of the women working away in the background,  doing things like there's a whole sort of network of women who talk to each other  and pass sort of information on and mediate between their husbands.  

And so then once you were a wife and you were doing all those things,  ideally you would then become a mother and you would birth the next generation  of whatever elite family and then you would be seen in relation to your sons.  We have cases in the Republic of famous women like Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi.  She's sort of partly famous for her father and her husband,  but mainly famous because her sons go on to be quite important.  And so for a Roman woman, first you were a daughter,  then you were a wife, then you were a mother.  

So all relationships to do with men?  

Yes, you were seen in relation to men.  In our sources, we don't see much interest in women's relationships with other women.  We get hints about mothers and daughters having close relationships,  hints about sisters having close relationships,  but men aren't interested in talking about those.  Even today, men are not really interested in women's relationships with other women.  So we don't hear too much about those in the sources.  And if we do, they're just very stereotypical.  You either have the sisters who are enemies or the sisters  who are basically the same person but in two bodies.  And that's as far as it really goes.  And so this is what Fulvia was brought up to do,  was brought up to be a wife and be a mother.  And this is something that she actually did excel at  because she had three husbands and five children.  She gave them all heirs.  Each of her husbands, she gave at least one male heir to.  So she did that job really well.  Not just that, that's the thing.  That could be where her story could start and finish,  that she married three men,  she gave them the children that they needed to further their families.  And then if that had been all she'd done,  we'd never really have heard about her anymore.  But she did other things.  She had loftier ambitions than to simply be the sort of the helpmeet.  And that's what she enters the sources.  

I mean, she doesn't sound like a trad wife.  

No, no.  It's fun, actually, because in some respects,  for this period, we get a lot of indications of women  sort of stepping out of the shadows and doing certain things  and contributing to the politics of the late republic.  And we have to ask ourselves, is this what was actually normal?  In the same way that today, the trad wife is a very artificial,  very contrived, cosmetic creation to make certain political points.  In the Roman period, the idea that women were seen but not heard  and didn't do anything for themselves,  is that equally artificial?  Because realistically, when men were going off on military campaigns  or to run provinces for years at a time,  well, who was looking after the house?  Who was looking after the kids and the clients and all the rest of it?  We hear more about it in the late republic  because it's a shorthand way of saying,  look how bad things are.  Look how much everything is unraveled and how topsy-turvy the world is.  Women are actually doing things.  We're seeing them, we're hearing them, and oh my God,  you know, this is like the end times.  And with Fulvia, it's like that on steroids.  Later on, she is used as the poster girl  for everything that went wrong with the republic  and led to its collapse.  

So let's go back to husband number one.  Sounds like Blind Date, doesn't it?  Who is Clodius?  

Well, Clodius, I think he is somebody who,  there are so many modern counterparts to Clodius, actually.  In some ways, he's very timeless  because he is basically a spoiled, rich,  nepo baby brat with an enormous sense of entitlement.  And so he is a member of the, well, the Claudii,  really these are all very important,  venerable, ancient Roman family.  He's got many, many consuls in his family tree.  He's got a very big family, actually.  I think at least two brothers and two to three,  maybe more sisters.  We're sort of unclear about how many sisters there actually are  because of course they all have the same name.  But in this period, his family are,  his sisters are all married to very important elite men,  consuls and generals and things like that.  And his brothers are themselves consuls and generals and things.  And Clodius in a way is sort of the black sheep of the family.  They're very, very powerful, proud,  potentially arrogant family because they are so aristocratic, so wealthy.  And he carries with him this sense of entitlement  about all the things that he is due because of who he is.  He's also incredibly petty.  He's like the pettiest man.  It's hilarious, really.  But anyone that he thinks doesn't give him his due,  he's like, right, I'm going to get you.  

And one of these men is his brother-in-law,  Lucullus the Republican general.  He goes on campaign with Lucullus into the East.  And because he doesn't feel, bearing in mind he's young  and he's green and he's incredibly inexperienced,  he thinks that Lucullus should be giving him more power and more authority.  And when he doesn't get what he wants,  he basically inspires a mutiny against Lucullus  and is sort of instrumental in having Lucullus recalled from the East.  And Lucullus then divorces Clodius' sister  because the family alliance does not suit him  and his Clodius has got everything up for him.  And this is where the allegations of incest between him and his sisters come about.  I mean, it seems like he is to bend or just outright break the rules  because he thinks they shouldn't apply to him.  

So the Bona Dea incident where he gatecrashes sacred private women's rights,  you know, the Bona Dea festival at the house of Caesar being run by Caesar's wife.  And he apparently dresses up as a woman and sneaks in  to see what's going on with all the rights  or possibly to try and seduce Caesar's wife.  I mean, this is one of the explanations given later.  And this is really serious.  This is like a big problem for ruining these rights.  It's sacrilegious.  He gets tried for sacrilege,  but he gets found not guilty due to massive amounts of bribery and influencing.  And this is one of the reasons that Cicero hates him so much.  We have a very negative presentation of Clodius and the sources  because the sources are largely written by Cicero who hates his guts.  And they go on to have a feud.  As I said, Clodius is very petty.  So he, after Cicero attempts to sort of prosecute him for sacrilege,  he gets Cicero exiled because of his role as consul during the Catalinarian conspiracy  and the fact that he had several Roman citizens executed.  And so Clodius retrospectively has,  causing the death of a Roman citizen made illegal  so that Cicero then has to go into exile to avoid being a prostitute for this.  And when he's gone, Clodius levels his house on the Palatine,  which was the symbol of his success as a new man and having made it.  So Clodius is like, no, sorry, but I'm going to destroy your house  and I'm going to build a temple dedicated to the goddess Liberty.  There he's dead, you know, ha ha.  Just rub salt in that wound, you know.  And so, yes, this is the kind of man that Clodius is.  But at the same time as he is this sort of horrible,  today he would be a member of the Bullingdon Club.  You know, he's that kind of guy.  I don't know if it's necessarily appropriate to name specific people  that I think are kind of in our modern politics that sort of map on to Clodius,  but he is very much this sort of, well, I'm rich, I'm aristocratic,  therefore, of course I should run the world.  Of course I should have what I want.  Yeah, that is sort of, he becomes a populist politician  because he somehow manages to get the people to love him,  despite being, you know, super posh and super rich  and clearly, you know, wouldn't spit on any of them if they're on fire.  But, you know, he manages to get the ordinary people,  the poorer people, the enslaved people, et cetera, to support him.  And so he uses that populist support  to circumvent the traditional Roman political system.  

I mean, he sounds like Nigel Farage!!  

Although probably sort of more attractive.  His third name, Pulcher, means he's thought to be beautiful.  So not like Nigel Farage.  So if Nigel Farage came in a more sort of, I don't know,  supermodel type package, you know, but yes, the danger, of course,  in ancient society, people judge you by how you look  because it's thought that if you have a very attractive exterior aspect,  then you are a good person, you have good qualities.  Whereas if you are unattractive, therefore, you are wicked.  And like, you know, whatever is inside will be projected on the outside.  So Clodius, he starts off as Claudius.  He changes his name to Clodius because it's more edgy and fashionable.  To make him sound like a man of the people.  

Oh, my God.  

And some of his sisters do the same thing  because it's like the Pulp Common People song, you know.  It's like getting down with the plebs  and, you know, pretending that he's more sort of working class  or whatever than he actually is. So as I said, there are so many modern parallels with Clodius  and his behavior and the things that he wants to do and wants to get.  But he has done all of this at the point that he marries Fulvia.  And it's been suggested that one of the reasons that Fulvia is able to marry him is because her family is not very politically important at this time.  They are rich.  And Clodius has basically spent tons of money  trying to bribe people to get himself out of trouble.  And so he's good friends with her stepfather.  Her father was one of his seniors in the East with Lucullus.  So there's that connection.  And so it seems like this is how the marriage comes about.  Clodius needs her money.  But Clodius is not completely devoid of positive qualities.  Well, from a Roman perspective, he kind of is.  But from a modern perspective,  one of the interesting things that we know about him  and one of the ways in which he's so transgressive to the Romans  is that he actually seems to like his wife and wants to spend time with her.  The information that we have about their marriage comes from Cicero.  And Cicero uses this sort of allegation  to sort of underline how bad Clodius is.  Because he says, and when he is trying to defend Annius Milo,  who, spoiler alert, murdered Clodius,  he tries to defend Milo by suggesting that Milo killed Clodius in self-defense  because Clodius was really going to kill Milo on that particular day.  

And the reason Cicero knows that Clodius was trying to kill Milo  is because Fulvia was not with him at the time.  Because otherwise, they went everywhere together.  They were always together and you never saw them apart.  And so the fact that on this particular day,  Fulvia wasn't there indicates that basically Clodius was going to kill Milo.  And this is quite interesting.  This idea that bearing in mind everything that I said about Roman marriage to start with  and the idea that poor girls were married off to these much older men  and didn't really have a great time.  The fact that Clodius seems to genuinely enjoy Fulvia's company  and includes her in his life and his political dealings  and the fun times that he has with actors and actresses and gladiators  and playwrights and stuff.  

I mean, it's interesting to speculate about Fulvia's transition from sheltered Roman girl  to fashionable and sophisticated Roman woman  who is mixing with people that she would never normally have mixed with  and having experiences that most other Roman women didn't get to have  because they weren't part of their husband's lives.  And so it seems like they have a good marriage.  They have two children, a boy and a girl,  and they're together doing all these things.  And then when Clodius is murdered,  Fulvia's introduction to this historical record,  this is when it happens, is because Clodius gets murdered  and she basically engineers a riot upon his death  and is instrumental in getting vengeance on his murderers  and bringing about the trial and the conviction and the exile of Milo.  

So I'm really interested.  How does this sheltered girl who's now a grown woman  living life in the fast lane with her petulant man-baby husband  who nevertheless clearly has political clout  if he can get rid of Cicero for a couple of years,  when Clodius is murdered on the Appian Way, how does she react?  Why is she creating riots?  What's happening?  

Well, exactly.  So Clodius and his small group of bodyguards and enslaved people  and so on encounter Milo  and his much larger group of bodyguards and enslaved people  and they get into a fight and Clodius is killed in this altercation.  And most of Clodius' slaves are too.  I mean, this is the other thing we've got to remember  is it's not just Clodius.  Pretty much everybody with him is killed too.  This is happening on the Appian Way, on the way out of Rome  because Milo is leaving Rome and Clodius is coming back to Rome  and they sort of encounter each other.  And Milo having had his entourage murder Clodius and his entourage  just carries on.  He's off on holiday to one of his estates.  He just leaves Clodius and all the bodies lying in the road  and another senator who is leaving Rome comes across Clodius' body.  'Oh, I know who this is.  I better sort of pick him up and get his body taken home.'  The funny thing about this is that the senator is like  'and after that I want nothing to do with it.  I'm going to carry on.  I'm leaving Rome.  I do not want any part of this.'  

So he sends Clodius' body back to Rome, to Clodius' house  with some of his enslaved people  and then just washes his hands of the whole situation.  So when the body is brought back to Clodius' house  Fulvia is there.  So the body is brought in, put in the atrium.  She sees it.  And we know quite a bit about Roman death and Roman funerary practices  and the interesting thing about what happens is that women  were primarily responsible for the sort of funerary practices  in the sense that wash the body, anoint the body, dress the body,  get it ready for everyone to come and see it and everything else.  And so that is what Fulvia should have done.  That was the sort of the duty of the Roman wife  was to sort of clean up her husband's body  and make it presentable so that everybody could kind of just  come in and see it and so on and so forth.  But instead of doing that and this is kind of this question mark  because if we had Fulvia's perspective on what had happened  we might have a bit of explanation as to how this sort of  how her thought process has worked in this moment.  

But instead of doing all the things that she would normally  or should normally have done, she doesn't do that.  She looks at the body and she leaves it exactly as it is.  So, you know, stabbed full of holes, covered in like mud  and filth and ore and whatever else is on the atrium way.  She leaves it exactly the way it is and opens the doors  of her house and their house is one of the biggest  and grandest houses in Rome on the Via Sacra.  So very important central location right next to the forum.  She opens the doors and invites everybody in.  So bearing in mind that, of course, the enslaved people  have walked or carried a corpse all the way through the city  and brought it, I imagine that there were quite a lot  of people milling around outside being like,  what's going on? Who was that?  What's happened? You know, the way that people  can just sort of smell tragedy and drama.  And so everybody comes in and of course,  Clodius being a populist politician,  very beloved of the ordinary people,  rank and file Romans, they all come into the house  and they wouldn't necessarily normally get to go  into such a fine house necessarily.  So she is making Clodius accessible to the people of Rome.  And so they're standing in the atrium  and within the doorway and everything,  looking at this wretched mess of the corpse.  And she basically triggers this riot.  

She tells them what has happened.  Milo has murdered Clodius, your champion, your hero,  the only member of the Senate who cared about you  has been murdered by this other guy.  And the crowd goes bananas, basically.  They take Clodius' body and they carry it  through the streets of Rome and they put it  in the Senate house and they basically burn  the Senate house down.  They turn it into a funeral pyre for him.  And it's important to note that death  was very polluting to the Romans.  So people's funerals took place outside of the pomerium,  outside of the sacred boundary of the city,  under very controlled circumstances  to control this death pollution.  And so in this particular instance,  that does not happen.  He does not get the traditional Roman funeral  that someone of his status should have had.  He gets a riot and he gets arson  and a bunch of buildings in the forum  around the Senate house, you know, they burn down.  People get lynched because the crowd goes  hunting through the city for Milo  and anyone that they think is Milo,  they lynch them.  

And so there is complete chaos in Rome for a few days  and martial law has to be declared  to try and get control of this situation.  I think it's Cicero who later on talks about  how Clodius, you know,  because he's burned in the forum,  there's nothing left of him.  That, you know, his remains are scattered to the winds  and the dogs ignore his bones and stuff like that.  Very dramatic.  So that is something that Fulvia does,  you know, or facilitates or instigates.  And there is this question,  did she do this in a very calculated fashion?  What was, was it female hysteria?  You know, she just lost control of herself  and then lost control of the situation.  Or was it this calculated action to make something happen,  to continue Clodius's sort of populist,  dramatic way of communicating with the Roman people  and getting what you want through non-traditional means.  

This is why she is mentioned in the sources this time.  It's through the trial accounts of Cicero.  He gives an account to the trial.  He writes a defense speech for Milo  and the one that he gives on the day  is not the one that survives.  He basically did a very bad job of it on the day  because he was so intimidated by Clodius's gangs  and gangs of supporters and thugs.  And so the one that we have today was written later  and it's sort of what he would have said  if he hadn't been such a chicken.  But he talks a little bit about Fulvia in that context  and then Asconius who is writing later,  sort of a century or so later,  he's doing sort of commentaries on Cicero's speeches  for his sons who are learning rhetoric.  He gives some extra details.  So he tells us Fulvia and her mother Sempronia  testified at the trial and it was their sort of tears  and their emotion that really sort of influenced proceedings.  And so that is interesting too,  this idea that whatever Fulvia was doing  on the day of Clodius's death,  she clearly continued to play this role  and try and engineer proceedings  through the weeks and months that followed  to the actual trial  and then performed in public there as well  because Roman women were supposed to be,  they were supposed to grieve,  they were supposed to mourn.  That was an important part of this sort of funerary procession  and funerary rites was wailing women.  So it's interesting that she is taking  this traditional role of a Roman woman  and sort of subverting it to suit herself.  And this is sort of Fulvia in a nutshell really,  is that she operates according to the letter of the law  but not the spirit perhaps.  She does it in a way that suits her and her agenda.  So time and time again, you see her do this.  

She's being by the sort of official rules,  she's being a respectable Roman matrona  and doing the things that a Roman matrona should do  but she's not doing them in exactly the way that is expected.  So it's not so much delicate feminine grief  as destructive feminine rage, still feminine.  I mean, this is something we can also talk about later on as well.  The idea that the way that scholars talk about Fulvia  changes so much over time  and it is very much a bellwether  of what's going on in the world  and in sort of discourse and culture more generally  because earlier historical writing about Fulvia  is very negative.  She-devil, you know, et cetera.  And then as time goes on and there starts to be this sort of change  in the way that women are expected to be in society,  it becomes more positive.  And then today we have this  let's reclaim Fulvia as a feminist icon sort of thing.  Feminine rage has never been so timely as it is right now  for very good reason.  And so Fulvia is very much a woman of right now  just like Clodius in fact has parallels.  Fulvia has parallels today as well.  

So because she's been widowed, she gets to keep her children.  What would the expectations be then for a typical…  I mean, she's not typical!  We've established that!  But what would other Romans expect her to be doing right now?  Is she immediately looking for husband number two?  

In this period, in the Republic,  it was quite common for women to marry once.  And if their husbands predeceased them, which was usual,  while women risked death in pregnancy and childbirth,  men were obviously doing dangerous political and military things  and they were older anyway.  So if you were widowed,  one thing that you could do was stay a widow forever  and you drew quite a lot of power and prestige from that.  So power in the sense that you were able to control  your household and your finances  and not have to pass that on to a new husband.  And power over your children because yes,  Roman children were the property of the father.  So under normal circumstances,  they would be if you divorced, your husband would keep the kids.  And if you were widowed, potentially his family would keep the kids.  So you could become what's called a 'univira',  basically a one-husband woman.  

The aforementioned Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi,  she did that.  She stayed single despite being wooed by other men,  including a king of Egypt.  She was like, no thanks, I'm fine.  I'll just raise my kids and live my life.  I mean, even being a queen is not worth it  giving up my independence.  So Fulvia could have done that.  She was rich in her own right, you know,  so she didn't need to marry for any more money.  And she has her children, a boy and a girl  that she can oversee and look after.  But she doesn't.  She marries again fairly quickly to her second husband, Curio.  And he is a friend of Clodius.  He is part of the sort of same general political faction as Clodius.  

The timing of it is interesting  because this is the point that Curio is starting  to embark on his own personal career.  And he's doing it with quite a bit of style and flair.  As aedile, he throws an incredible set of games  with an amazing revolving theater,  which is like a sort of architectural marvel.  It's interesting again, just because we don't know,  we don't have our perspective on this,  but to sort of speculate that she sort of looked around  and she was like, who can match Clodius, you know?  Who has got a pizzazz of Clodius?  Hey, that guy has done some incredible engineering  and showmanship.  Maybe him!  So they get married.  And once again, she provides him with a child,  his only child as far as we know,  a son and heir to carry on his family name.  He's also a member of a very important aristocratic  politically influential family.  We know quite a bit about his father  and their politics.  

This marriage doesn't last very long though,  because at this point,  civil war between Caesar and Pompey breaks out.  Curio is a member of the Caesarian faction  and he goes off to North Africa  to fight for Caesar against Pompey and he dies there.  So their marriage is very brief.  And we don't know a huge amount about it  because he wasn't in Rome.  Beyond the amazing games, that's all really that,  you know, you can sort of say about him in this period.  But the interesting thing about Curio for me  is that he is basically a stepping stone to Antony  because according to Plutarch's biography of Antony,  Curio and Antony were besties,  and not just besties, but lovers.  From sort of a fairly young age,  they have the full bromance going on.  And so again, it provides an interesting  sort of alternative perspective on Antony  that his best friend slash lover has married this woman  and had a baby, a very, very young baby,  and has now died, quite unfortunately,  away in Africa at war.  And so he steps in and he marries Fulvia.  And, you know, you could say,  oh, well, he did it for politics  because he wanted her influence  over Clodius's street gangs.  Or he did it for money because she's rich.  Potentially, he did it because he wanted to provide  for his best friend slash lover's wife and baby.  

He'd already been married at least once himself,  and he had ex-wives and children.  And so he marries Fulvia.  

Mark Antony is marrying Fulvia,  and it might be because she's his best mate  and baby needs looking after.  Might be potentially because she's,  quite clearly, an extraordinary woman.  She might have just been simply very, very attractive.  Is this a kind of love match?  Can we see them working well together?  

Yes, I think just as with Clodius,  there does seem to have been a real relationship there.  I think with Antony, even more so with Antony,  because we have more information about it,  we can see that there is a real relationship.  There's this very interesting episode  where Antony is on the run in the period  where he's potentially going to be declared a public enemy.  Fulvia has been going around knocking on doors,  begging people to support Antony and facilitate his return.  And she is being targeted by all of Antony's enemies.  We have an account of them suing her  and trying to strip her of her property  and endangering her and her children.  And so this is clearly a very, very dark, dangerous time for her,  left on her own in Rome with all of the walls at her door.  And so Antony apparently sneaks back in under cover of darkness,  disguised as an enslaved person,  and gains access to the house  and presents her with a letter, supposedly from Antony.  And so she reads this letter and she cries.  She's like, oh, you know, where is he? What's he doing?  And then Antony's like, ta-da, I'm here.  You can imagine him like whipping off his cloak  and, you know, this is like surprise.  

Honey, I'm home!  

Yeah, exactly.  And so we have two separate accounts of this event  that paint it in a slightly different light.  So I think one of them is from Plutarch  and one of them is from Cicero.  But so Cicero is very critical of this, you know.  Such a risk taker, so irresponsible, you know,  so whipped basically by his wife that he would do this.  And then Plutarch uses it more as a sort of a,  this is kind of the dynamic of their relationship.  And so they clearly, you know,  they did have affection for each other.  And if you put any credence in the accounts  that Fulvia declared war on Octavian  because she was jealous of Cleopatra,  I mean, perhaps, you know, perhaps there was love,  there was passion in this relationship.  Clearly the pair of them worked quite well together  in this period when Antony was away,  he trusted her to manage his affairs.  And some scholars actually,  they are very dismissive of Antony  and there's this sort of view of him as, you know,  he was the brawns, he wasn't the brain.  And that finds its way into some of the portraits of him  in sort of TV and film that he's basically this…  

Himbo?  

Himbo, yeah, this punch first kind of himbo,  always played by a very hot actor, understandably.  

I mean, yeah.  

You know, they don't give him much credit  for any sort of political ability or military ability.  Although we do have in our sources,  he does seem to be at times a very effective politician  and a very effective general.  But for some historians,  they see this as Fulvia's influence,  that basically he's her puppet  and every success that he has in the 40s  is because she was basically there going,  you need to do this, you need to do this,  you need to do this.  And he was like, yes, dear.  And then you go and do it.  

What is Fulvia like during her marriage to Mark Antony?  What is she doing?  Because she doesn't seem like the shy and retiring type  from her last marriages, right?  

This is where we start to really hear  quite a lot about Fulvia and what she's getting on with  because Antony becomes very important in this period  because he's sort of a very significant member  of the Caesarean faction, Caesar's right-hand man,  left in charge of Rome and things like that.  The ups and downs of his career that follow  when Caesar's alive, he's riding high for a lot of it  alongside Caesar in 44 when Caesar is assassinated.  So he has a lot of power in this period.  Fulvia manages to enjoy that with him.  And then after Caesar's death,  Antony is the sole remaining consul  and he is the one that sort of decides  what's happening and it's, again,  interesting to speculate that him making  a big drama out of Caesar's funeral  and using the emotion of the crowd  to send a message to the assassins,  the liberators, they call themselves.  Having the crowds, the people run them out of Rome.  Is this something that he got from Fulvia  and Clodius's death and funeral?  You know, this is quite interesting,  the parallels between those two situations.  And so Antony's toing and froing in this whole period,  so from Caesar's death in 44 down to 40  and the sort of the tussle between him and Octavian  and how that's gonna work  and the second triumvirate and the proscriptions.  

Fulvia is very heavily involved in these things as well  because when Antony is in Rome wielding power,  she is next to him, she is wielding it too.  Cicero complains about this in his letters a lot,  how unfitting it is that a woman should be involved  in politics and international diplomacy  and making decisions.  And when he is out of Rome,  he gets chased out of Rome,  it's gonna be declared a public enemy.  She is going around Rome knocking on doors  displaying her children to Antony's potential allies  or enemies and saying,  look, you have to help me, you have to help us.  Antony has done this for you,  you should return the favor, et cetera, et cetera.  So I'm really interested  in Mark Antony's personality and career  because he was pretty controversial, wasn't he?  He had a lot of enemies.  

I think something that's often forgotten in this period,  we tend to pay attention to very specific individuals  that sort of, they float to the surface  because of the positions that they hold  their consul or their general or their tribune  or whatever else.  And so they get their names in the sources  in very prominent ways.  And again, that's because of the type  and we can talk about this later as well,  the type of sources that we have.  Our information for this period,  our contemporary information for this period  is pretty much entirely Cicero.  And so we are looking at this period  through Cicero's eyes.  And so we are seeing the people  that Cicero thinks are important,  positive and negative importance.  And we are seeing his take on the situation  and how it's unfolding and how it's working.  And so he doesn't like Antony.  He's got a long running sort of issue with Antony.  He, I mentioned the Catilinarian conspiracy earlier.  One of the men that was executed  as part of the Catilinarian conspiracy  was Antony's stepfather.  And so this seems to be a bone of contention  between them for many years.  They are very different politically.  They have very different sort of positions,  desires, approaches in any place.  But they've got very different personalities.  You know, Cicero is sort of very,  very prim and proper and self-denying.  And he makes a point of talking about  how he's not interested in sex and women and why,  you know, he cares about philosophy  and all those sorts of things.  And he's a new man.  

The first consul in his family,  he's from, you know, sort of an Italian town  and has kind of used his brains and his talents  to elevate himself and his brother and their family.  Whereas Antony is another aristocrat  who comes with a whole backstory  of a consul and influence.  And so there is this sort of, you know,  the new man, the old man, you know,  the sort of tradition, et cetera.  And so they do not get on at all.  And so the version of Antony that we see in the sources  is primarily the version from Cicero's perspective.  And yet plenty, if you read between the lines  and you look at what was actually going on,  plenty of scholars who have done  the sort of the reconstructive work  of the prosopography and epigraphy  looking at the way that things went in this period.  They give Antony a lot of credit for his politics  and they give him a lot of credit  for his military activity.  And so seemingly he's a very complex character.  You know, you can look at him in a positive way.  You can look at him in a negative way.  You can look at him as like any other person  as having positives and negatives  and being good in some situations,  bad in other situations,  being intelligent in some situations  and less intelligent in other situations.  

For Cicero, I mean, you've mentioned Clodius.  Cicero, they did not get on.  Clodius had him exiled,  which anyone who's read his letters from exile,  Cicero was truly, truly miserable  during the entire period.  And then he turns around.  There's Mark Antony who,  I mean, he's had his stepfather executed.  So he's not getting on with him.  And both times, Fulvia's there.  Does Cicero like Fulvia?  

No, no, he does not.  He's negative about her  when he's talking about Clodius,  he's really negative about her  when he's talking about Antony.  And it's interesting to think about  what their relationship must have been like,  because I don't imagine Fulvia likes Cicero either,  to be perfectly honest,  because the sources don't really give  any space to this at all.  But if you think about their interactions,  Clodius, her husband,  she, we assume loves or at least likes quite a lot.  Cicero is his enemy,  and the pair of them have this ongoing feud.  And then when Clodius is murdered,  what does Cicero do?  He sides with the murderer.  The murderer who apparently not only  did actually kill Clodius,  but was planning to kill her son,  like her and Clodius' son as well.  So there's this sort of story  that after Milo and his guys killed Clodius,  they went to Clodius' Alban villa  looking for young Clodius,  the young boy,  and they were going to kill him too.  And they couldn't find him  because the enslaved people  sort of hid him away.  And they killed an enslaved boy instead,  I guess under the impression  that this was young Clodius.  And so you've lost your husband,  and you would have lost your son.  And you've got this guy trying to,  not only defending the murderer  and the attempted murderer of your son,  but also trying to blacken your husband's name  by saying that he, in fact,  deserved what he got  because he was trying to be a murderer  and killed in self-defense  and so on and so forth.  So that would not endear Cicero to me  were I in Clodius' position.  And then Cicero has a better relationship  with Curio,  but then they end up  on opposite sides of the civil war.  And then with Antony,  Cicero has a bad relationship with Antony.  And Cicero is constantly calling  for Antony's death.  So when Cicero isn't involved  in the assassination of Caesar,  he's probably too much of a wimp,  even if they don't invite him to be part of it.  So he's not involved.  But afterwards, he's very,  he's thrilled to bits  that Caesar's been assassinated.  

And he publicly says to people,  if only you killed Antony too,  you know, you really should have done.  If I'd been involved,  I would have made sure that Antony died.  That's one of the kind of,  the way he puts it is,  you know, that there would have been  no leftovers at the banquet, you know.   

Apart from Catiline,  Cicero does seem like a man  who's all mouth and no trousers.  And the one time he had some trousers,  he talks about it incessantly  to the point where everyone starts really hating him for it.  So if I was Fulvia,  I would really be on tenterhooks  for the day that Cicero dies.  How does Cicero die?  

Well, Cicero is put on the proscriptions list.  So when the Second Triumvirate,  Antony, Octavian, Lepidus  are trying to work out  how exactly they can pay  for their war against the liberators,  because they've got to track them down.  You know, there are something  like 60 conspirators, you know.  Right, we're going to kill them all.  So they've got to go all the way around  the Roman Empire trying to find them.  They've all fled, they've scattered to the winds.  So they have to try and find them.  They need to pay for their armies  and they're like, how are we going to do this?  How can we pay for this?  And so they decide to, you know,  prescribe their political enemies.  I mean, this has the useful combination  of being able to get the money.  So you prescribe people,  you put them on a hit list.  You basically say it's open season on them.  Anyone can murder them.  And if you murder them  and you cut their head off  and you bring us their head  to prove that you've murdered them,  we will take all of their money  and their property and everything else.  You will get a finder's fee,  but we will get most of it.  You'll get some of it.  And so this serves a sort of double purpose of,  you know, it raises the money,  but it also gets rid of their enemies.  And there's something like 3,000 people, you know.  So this is, again, an interesting insight  into how in this period we hear about  the sort of the top level  of political movers and shakers,  Anthony, Cicero, Octavian, et cetera.  

But there are clearly hundreds,  if not thousands of other people  that are thought to be significant enough  that they need to die.  

Yeah, because the Senate's not that big, right?   

So you're going beyond the Senate.  You're going into the sort of  the down into equestrian order.  Anybody who is in any way  powerful, influential, rich.  So, you know, that's clearly,  that's a lot of people that,  I mean, we know Cicero's best friend,  Atticus, for example, incredibly rich  and seemingly always on the fence,  able to be friends with everybody  throughout this whole period  because he wasn't in the Senate  and he wasn't a member of any political faction,  very deliberately kept himself out of it all  so that he could be friends with everybody.  And so he manages to die  in his bed of old age.  A miracle.  Yeah, nobody wants to murder him.  So, yeah, so that there are people  that are able to kind of  stay out of the whole thing, interestingly enough,  but there are also people who are vulnerable.  So three of them sit down over dinner,  draw up a list of people  that they want to prescribe.  And interestingly, Cicero is not  Antony's choice or Lepidus' choice.  Cicero is Octavian's choice.  They agree that they each have  to put forward some of their friends  or some people that they are closer to  as part of this.  So Antony's, I think it's his uncle  that he gives up in this situation,  but his mother is basically  his uncle's human shield  and she's like, no,  if you're going to kill him,  you have to kill me.  And of course, no one's going to kill Antony's mom.  So she manages to save him.  

But yeah, Octavian is like,  yeah, you can have Cicero.  He's not useful to me anymore.  Octavian is very transactional  and Cicero helped him earlier,  got him everything that he wanted  when he was sort of 18  and trying to make a political name for himself.  And now he's got a few years  and a few battles under his belt.  He's like, whatever, I don't care.  So Cicero is put on the proscriptions list.  There are also suggestions in the sources  that Fulvia gets a few people  she has issues with  put on the proscriptions list.  And again, I think this is interesting  for what we're not told.  And if we read between the lines  of everything that has happened to Fulvia  that we've heard about,  dead husband number one,  dead husband number two,  threatened death of husband number three,  threats against children,  her property and her money  being targeted by Antony's enemies, et cetera.  It seems to me that it's fairly reasonable  that if people have targeted her,  she's targeting them right back  when she's given the opportunity.   So anyone that if Fulvia did add names  to the proscriptions list,  and it's not just an attempt to smear her,  then presumably these were people  that she had good reason  for wanting to make pay.  Certainly Cicero is,  she wouldn't have been sad  to see his name on the list,  I don't think.  And when he was murdered,  I bet she was pretty happy about it.  

Our sources tell us,  and this is again,  this is one of the most colorful episodes  from Fulvia's life.  When Cicero was killed,  his head and his hands were cut off.  They needed the head  because they had to prove that it was Cicero.  But the hands were cut off as well  because he used them  to write his inflammatory speeches  against Antony that we call today,  we call them the Philippics.  He wrote a series of speeches  and pamphlets and letters  slagging off Antony in 44 to 43.  And this is where we get  a lot of our negative information  about Antony.  They are from these character  assassination writings from Cicero.  This is how we apparently  know that he and Curio  were lovers and things like that.  It's how Antony was always drunk  and vomiting in public  and sleeping with all in sundry.  It's because Cicero writes  these letters about him.  And so Cicero having written these,  his hands are cut off as well  and they are brought back to Rome  and shown to Antony  and shown to Fulvia.  And Fulvia supposedly  whips a hairpin out of her quaff  and stabs Cicero's tongue with it.  Very happy to see this,  laughs and abuses the head  and spits on the head.  And she's just very, very pleased  that this man has finally,  this thorn in her side  has finally been removed.  And whether that's true,  I mean, maybe it's completely true.  Maybe it's slightly true  in that she was just simply happy  that he was dead.  I mean, I don't think  we can blame her for that personally  how actively hostile he had been to her  and the people that she cared about  for, you know, a decade or more.  I mean, imagine hating someone  for sort of like 10 to 15 years  and dying in you.  It's like, great.  Champagne, you know.  

Who can't relate to that, really?  

Exactly, exactly.  I mean, I think we're all allowed  to be sort of petty and vengeful  given the circumstances.  

Okay, so Mark Antony and Octavian, they are now putting their  differences behind them, or trying to. Does Fulvia help with this at all? Her daughter,  she only has one daughter, she ends up having four sons, one with Clodius, one with Curio,  two with Antony, she has one daughter with Clodius. She marries her daughter to Octavian,  again, an example of marriage being used to facilitate political alliances.  So initially, Antony and Octavian are at odds because both want to be Caesar's heir,  and used his soldiers and his veterans and his reputation. Eventually, they decide that  they're stronger together and they can get what they want through sheer force if they  stop fighting each other. This is when they have the second triumvirate and are then in  charge. So part of this is that Claudia, as her name is, is married to Octavian to link them.  The marriage doesn't last for very long. When relationships between Antony and Octavian start  to go south and relationships between Fulvia and Octavian go very, very south, Octavian  divorces Claudia. And that is when there is the war, the Perusine War, which the hostile  sources blame Fulvia for, but it is a bit more complicated than that. 

Antony is out of Rome  because he is given responsibility for the eastern half of the empire. So it's an  incredible mess because there's been civil war all over it. Brutus and Cassius and  other members of the Liberators basically acid-stripped the eastern half of the empire  to fund their armies and their war against the Caesarians. Once they are finally defeated,  everything has to be tidied up over there. So Antony goes over to the east, 42, 41, 40,  and so while he's away, Octavian is stroking his beard and thinking,  how can I turn this to my advantage? I know while Antony is out of the way, I am going to provide  the soldiers and the veterans of the Caesarian forces with the land that was promised to them.  And if I do it while Antony is away, it'll look like it's coming completely from me. So  they will be loyal to me rather than Antony because I'm the one that's given them their  land. And there's this whole sort of interesting period where he's basically stripping land from  Roman citizens to give to his and Antony's soldiers and veterans as a sort of basically a  bride. And this causes a lot of trouble in Italy. 

The way that the war is sort of presented  in the sources is that Fulvia is jealous of Antony off in the east having affairs. He has  an affair with a woman named Glaphyra. He has an affair with Cleopatra. So she's so jealous  that her husband is away that she starts a war to bring him back. And actually,  what's going on is a lot more complicated because it's not just Fulvia. It's Antony's  brother is the consul at this time, his brother Lucius. And there are other members  of the Caesarian faction and sort of the Roman political establishment who are really not  with Roman citizens being stripped of their land, this whole situation. And so we don't know a  huge amount of the sort of ins and outs of the Perusine war because we're stuck with the later  accounts of it that are trying to whitewash Octavian and remove all of the responsibility  for it from him and all of the atrocities that were committed in this war from him  and blame Fulvia for it. But what we can see is that there is this quite fundamental disagreement  at this time between the different parts of the Caesarian faction.

 And there are plenty of  people who are on Antony's side and Lucius' side and Fulvia's side. And this is not the  way that this should be going. Octavian should not be doing this. He should not be taking  land from Roman citizens. He should not be trying to subvert the soldiers and the  veterans. Actually, I mean, Fulvia gets the blame for the war, but she's not even there.  She's a woman at this point in time. Women do not go on military campaigns with their  husbands. Lucius is the general who is leading the Antonian forces. There is a siege at  Perugia. So over the winter of 41 to 40, there is this really unpleasant  civil war around Perugia with Lucius' forces in the city and Octavian's forces laying siege to outside. And we have archaeological evidence of this. We have  lead sling bullets that have been recovered from both sides of the conflict. But this  is a really interesting snapshot of this very specific period of Roman history, this very  specific conflict and the people involved. Ultimately, Octavian wins because the rest  of Antony's forces, they could come to Lucius' aid and break the siege, but they don't  because they don't know if Antony would want them to or not because he's off in Egypt  and there's a couple of week delay between being able to send letters and wait for  replies and instructions. So they don't really know what they should do about this and they  don't want to make the situation worse than it is. So they don't help. So Octavian's  forces win.

 And we have accounts of the soldiers burning Perugia to the ground,  murdering members of the city's population. There's even the suggestion that some of them  were sacrificed on an altar to Caesar, horrible atrocities and civilian casualties.  Octavian is the commander. It's all happening in his name. But later on, he's like,  no, no, no, no. That wasn't me. It wasn't me. I didn't do that. I lost control of my soldiers.  And if these things happened, they did it. It's like also either you're a commander who  ordered this stuff or you're a terrible commander who can't keep control of your soldiers. Which  one is it? But yes. And so the outcome of this is pretty bad for Fulvia. Octavian allows  her to leave Italy with her children and go and reunite with Antony in Greece. And understandably,  he's not happy about this. He's not happy about anything that's happened while he's been away.  

Okay. So why is Mark Antony so angry with her? Because not only does it sound  majorly ungrateful, but she wasn't even at the battle.  

So she plays an important role in the lead up to the war in that she's in Italy.  She is working with Lucius because he is consul. Lucius Antonius is consul at this time.  She's working with him because Antony's brother, Antony's wife, they are representing  Antony's interests while Antony is away. She has the two sons, Antyllus and Iullus,  who are Antony's heirs. And so we hear about her putting forward Antony's interests to the  troops, showing them the boys, trying to make their loyalty to Antony more pressing at this  point in time. Supposedly, Octavian is threatening the life of the boys and using the boys to try  and remind the troops that they owe everything to Antony, really, because Antony is the one  that has won all the battles. He is the one that defeats Brutus and Cassius. Octavian is  reclining in his tent, supposedly ill. He has no real role in the battle. So it's Antony that the  troops should be loyal to. And so she does that. She supposedly raises troops for the  conflict. 

So she is more militarily active than Roman women of this period are because at this  period, wives do not go on campaign with their husbands. They don't even go to their  provinces with them. This is something that only really starts happening later. It's something  that Agrippina, the elder, it sort of seems to be her really and her going around with Germanicus  that sort of really starts this practice of wives going with their husbands on campaign  into provinces. 

Okay. So it's absolutely normal that Fulvia is not going? 

Yes. Women are  not involved in the military activity at all. Not elite women. Everyone always forgets that,  of course, there are enslaved people in the baggage train. There would presumably have been  sex workers and people like that sort of supporting the troops, but we don't hear  about them because they're not of interest to the people who are writing about the daring  deeds of the commanders. So elite women do not have anything to do with military activity.  And so the fact that Fulvia is anywhere near the military and whether she's with Anthony or whether  she's with Lucius, that is quite transgressive. That over time in the sources, it sort of goes  from her being present to her being actively involved, to her wearing weapons and marching  up and down the ramparts and things like that. But she wasn't in Perugia. She was probably  in Praeneste a bit further away. 

So close, but not too close.  

Yes. Right. So she's not there in person, but she does seem to be there in spirit because  she is mentioned in the lead sling bullets that are thrown over the walls of Perugia. So  Octavian's troops mentioned her. They have a lot of insults towards Lucius and towards  Fulvia on their sling bullets. They engrave them and then they sort of fire them,  shoot them. And so we get all sorts of sort of very horrible misogynistic,  sexualized commentary on Fulvia. And that is interesting because she's not there.  And carving messages onto bullets, you're not really expecting people to read them. I mean,  if you're shooting people with them, they're going to be in their bodies. They're not going  to be readable. So it's all this interesting kind of insight into psychological warfare,  I suppose. I mean, I guess you think someone might pick it up and might read it, but really I  think it's more about the people writing them. 

The immediate thing that crossed my mind was  people writing messages on bombs. 

Yeah, exactly. No one's going to see that  message when the bomb explodes. The people on the ground aren't going to see that message.  So it's some sort of outlet for the people who are doing the writing.  So clearly Octavian, part of his presentation of the conflict to his troops involves presenting  Fulvia as a commander, as a Virago, as an Amazon, some kind of transgressive woman.  It's a way of promoting the righteousness of their cause. We're proper men. We're proper  soldiers. We're not led by a woman. We're not being told what to do by a woman.  And we can treat her the way that we would treat a woman, an enemy woman.  

Which was always terrible. So she is getting support for her husband by playing up to her role  of wife and mother for support for Antony. Octavian is presenting her completely differently  to whip up his side. So she's being used by both!?  

Schrodinger's woman, really. Both of these things are true, but it just depends on which way you're  looking at it. And we can also try and think about the kind of interactions Octavian and  Fulvia would have had when she was briefly his mother-in-law. There is the traditional  idea of this fraught relationship between mother-in-law and son-in-law.  In the poem that he writes about her, which is still circulating over a century late,  Martial quotes it. He says that she's propositioned him. She's trying to have  sex with me and oh my God, I don't want to have sex with her. And it's like,  really? Really? Is this something that's happened? Because again, thinking about the  context, Fulvia at this time, she would have been in her mid to late 30s. She's basically  having Anthony's babies throughout their marriage. So Octavian is presenting her as  this kind of horrible old hag who's trying to proposition him. And she's literally just  had Anthony's baby, her last child, Iullus. So she's not an old hag. She is a fertile  woman. She's a married woman who is still capable of doing the job that married women  are supposed to do. And it's also a case of if you've got Anthony, why would you be  Octavian? This callow young man who's married to your daughter, it's very much a sort of  weak stripling. It's either delusional wishful thinking on Octavian's part or it's him  attempting to draw on a lot of stereotypes about women. Not faithful wives, not modest,  don't know their place. 

So it's interesting looking at their sort of interactions and  the evidence for their interactions and the way that he behaves later in his life and the  way that he passes a lot of moral legislation to try and pigeonhole Roman women and keep  them occupying a certain space and know nothing beyond that. And the fact that for  his wife Livia and his sister Octavia, he has them declared sacrosanct. So he has  them treated like tribunes, treated like bestial virgins so that nobody can physically  or verbally assault them. He makes them sacred. Presumably part of what lies behind this,  you know, oh yeah, he's been a great husband, he's been a great brother. That's just what  you'd expect someone to do. It's like, no, it's that he himself brutalized Anthony's female  relatives. He used them in this propaganda campaign. First, it was phobia. Then it was  he attacked Anthony through his women. And so he was smart enough to realize that he  needed to prevent anyone from doing that same thing to him. And so by making his  wife and his sister sacred, it means that people can't do to him what he did to Anthony.  It's all part of his overall political propaganda approach.  

Not for the first time, I find myself thinking that if he was alive today,  Augustus would be like the chief incel. We tend to think quite, hindsight is 2020, isn't it?  We tend to think about ancient wars as the outcomes always inevitable. The Perusine War,  we know that Fulvia lost, but was it inevitable? Was there a chance that she  could win? Did she manage to raise a solid army that was large and had the potential to win?  

Well, there were other armies. Anthony's subordinates had armies dotted around  Italy and that could have come to Perugia and intervened. They just chose not to because they  weren't entirely sure whether they should because they didn't have Anthony's instructions.  So Anthony manages to remain completely outside of the Perusine War. There are no allegations  that he's pulling the strings. It's all because of the way that it's presented in hindsight.  It was Fulvia's fault. It was Lucius' fault. Anthony is like, I didn't even know about it.  I was just enjoying myself on a Nile cruise and they just went off book and they did it  themselves. He doesn't get any sort of criticism for it.  

If his men had been more decisive, it sounds like that war could have been won.  It wasn't. He's blaming Fulvia before she dies. Is that a fair assessment on his part or is he  being a bit of a salty bitch at this point? Because it sounds like she set the wheels in  motion, but it wasn't her fault that they didn't win. If she had had support,  she could have. So is it fair for him to say that it was all her fault? 

I think it's incredibly ungrateful of him because what were Lucius and Fulvia supposed  to do? Let Anthony's influence in Italy drain away. The interesting thing about this is that,  of course, that's exactly what happens in subsequent years. After the Perusine War,  Lucius goes off to Spain and presumably he dies there because we don't hear any more about  him. Fulvia dies in Greece and Anthony spends most of the next 10 years away from Italy.  He's in the East. He's either in Egypt or he's on campaign trying to invade Parthia. He is away  from Rome. He has allies in Rome, plenty of political senators and people still support Anthony.  

So Fulvia, she doesn't die at the battle because she's not even there,  but she's been granted permission to go to Greece and reunite with Mark Anthony,  who was not pleased to see her. I'm looking at the timeline and it says that she doesn't  live long after reuniting with Mark Anthony. So what happened to her?  

There's this really sort of tragic ending to this story because Fulvia gets to Greece  and she's ill. There aren't any details about why exactly she's ill. So it could be disease  or whatever else. But the way the source is sort of presented is that it's basically she's  broken-hearted that Anthony has had an affair with Cleopatra and he's upset with her and he  goes off back to Italy to try and smooth things over with Octavian. So he just abandons her on  her deathbed basically and she dies and that's it. And then when he gets to Brindisium and  there is this very tense sort of standoff between him coming into the harbor and the  port and Octavian's there and it's like, oh God, what's going to happen? Is war going  to break out properly now that Anthony's here with his forces? And what actually happened is  kind of worse. 

The two of them sit down and they decide between themselves that  now that Anthony is conveniently single, he can marry Octavian's sister Octavia who's also  she's been widowed. So she's conveniently single and they can blame Fulvia for everything.  

Oh my God.

 All of their enmity that's happened before, it's all her fault and now they can  have a bromance. They can be brothers-in-law and forge a new era of political alliance  between the two of them. So it's called the pact of Brindisium where they come to  agreement and everything is hunky dory. That's one ending to Fulvia's story is her sad death.  And in fact, a second ending is almost worse because Octavian, we know that they did not  get on. They had issues over the marriage and divorce of Fulvia's daughter and Octavian's  later behavior as Augustus, as the first Roman emperor, shows that he had a particular  view of women and what he wanted from women and how he wanted women to behave.  And clearly Fulvia was not the type of woman that he was comfortable with. She was far too  aggressive and in your face and too much woman basically for Octavian to handle because he  writes this rather nasty little poem about her that Martial quotes a century or so later.  It's very unpleasant and misogynistic and abusive.  And so he seems to now, whether this was calculated or whether this is just  responding to certain situations, he basically kills three of her children. So her son with  Curio, who grew up with Antony as his stepfather, he is often forgotten about in the  So we hear about Antony going off to Egypt and taking Antyllus, who is the older of his two  sons with Fulvia, he takes Antyllus with him. He also takes Curio, young Curio with him as well.  And it's a very brief throwaway comment in one source that we have quite a lengthy  description of Antyllus's tragic death in 30 BCE when the Romans invade Alexandria.  He runs into the temple that Cleopatra is building for Caesar and he hopes that sort  of taking sanctuary in this temple will save him. But Octavian's soldiers basically find him  and kill him and they cut his head off. And then his corpse is robbed by a very ungrateful  enslaved person. But this is because he's Antony's heir. He's Antony's eldest son,  political heir. And Octavian knows from his own experience that when you sort of  fascinate someone, you don't leave their sons alive to get revenge on you. So Antyllus is  killed and Curio is killed as well. So he gets a much briefer mention in the sources,  but that's two of Fulvia's sons killed in Egypt by Octavian. 

And then her third son, Iullus Antonius, the youngest son with Antony, he is killed many years later. He is taken after  Antony's death and he is raised in Octavia's household along with her two daughters that  were fathered by Antony. And Antony and Cleopatra's children were brought back to  Rome as well. So Iullus is raised by Octavia and he is very carefully controlled.  He is allowed to have a sort of political career, but he is kept very far away from  anything military. He never commands an army or gets a province or anything else. He's kept  very close and he gets involved with Augustus' daughter, Julia. And as part of the supposed  conspiracy between her and her lovers and trying to do something supposedly against Augustus,  against Tiberius,Iullus is part of that. And so he is forced to die by suicide. And so that's  three of Fulvia's four sons who meet their deaths either directly at the hands of Octavian or on the orders of Octavian. And I think that's very sad. I don't know if you can dismiss that  as a coincidence, the fact that they were Fulvia's sons. But I think that there is  this element that they were obviously raised to be political animals like she was. And  so it's one of those sort of sad historical footnotes. So her death and then over the  10 years, the two boys die in Egypt. And then another 20 or so years after that, Iullus dies.  

So all three husbands die violently. All sons die violently…  

Three of her four sons die violently. Her remaining son, probably is Clodius Pulcher. So there's the son of Clodius. We know a little bit about him because he is  included in a sort of description of children who seriously disappointed their parents.  And we have his funerary urn as well. So we know a little bit about his career.  He follows the political career, climbs the cursus honorem, holds the positions,  the magistracies, et cetera. But at the same time, he also gives himself over to pleasure  and has an extended relationship with a sex worker and basically eats himself to death.  So although he sort of has this political career, as a Roman should, he's not able to  in the way that he should. So he is also, he's a disappointment, basically. And I suppose you  could see that as, well, of course, Clodius's son is a complete, yeah, again, I wish we had  more information about him and his life, because it sounds interesting. It sounds very  interesting if nothing else. 

And we don't know what happened to her daughter. The only real  mention of her is the divorce from Octavian. So potentially she died, potentially she married  someone else and just lived a very low profile life like many other Roman women. You know,  if she wasn't married to somebody who was significant in this period, she wouldn't  really make any impression on the timeline on our sources. But yeah, so three of sons  have these very tragic ends. Well, all of them have tragic ends, but three of them have  violent tragic ends.

After Fulvia dies, you mentioned that Mark Antony really quickly  remarried and not to his beloved Cleopatra. So tell us more about his next wife. And is  he marrying her for love or is he doing it to placate Octavian?

 His wife in Rome is Octavia,  who is Octavian's sister, who she has to walk a very fine line between the two of them. She  can't, you know, she's a good wife to Antony. She tries to support him, but she can't do it  quite as enthusiastically as Fulvia did. And I don't think it's a coincidence that Fulvia's  death really sees the end or the beginning of the end of Antony's influence in Italy,  influence in Rome, his success. Because without someone there who was really  vocally strongly in his corner and fighting back against Octavian's smear campaigns  and things like that, Octavian's attempt to turn everybody against him. You know,  Antony gradually loses all the support that he had. And so it's really, it's a taste of things  to come. 

The idea that by not sort of supporting Fulvia and Lucius in their efforts to fly  Antony's flag in Italy, Octavian gets the upper hand. So yes, I can sort of, on the one  I can sympathise with Antony being a bit annoyed that this conflict has broken out  and it's brought things to a head between him and Octavian when they had been sort of getting  along. But at the same time, it was a zero sum game. You know, neither of them wanted to  share power. In this period, everybody is out for themselves. You know, the Republic is  dying if not dead. The corpse is being sort of moved around to sort of pretend that  everything is normal. But realistically, it's been dead for a while. So you've got warlords  using their own private armies to enforce their own whims. And so there was always going to  be this issue between Antony and Octavian of, well, who is going to come out on top.  And initially, Antony was the senior, you know, he was much older, he was much more experienced  and Octavian was just this young boy. But of course, as time goes on, Octavian gets older  and he gets more experience and he becomes, you know, more within this sort of what people  expect to see from a Roman politician in general. You know, he's the right age. He's  got the experience. 

He's got the victories, even if he doesn't necessarily deserve to have  attributed to him. He's got his best friend, Agrippa, who is his general and his admiral,  who wins him these victories. But he's got the CV that he can wave around and say, you know,  yes, I am actually now a fitting match for Antony. I have now got this prestige, this  authority, this dignity, the altruism, the dignitas, etc. I have these now.  

I want to ask, was marrying Octavia a good idea? Because, yeah, she doesn't seem as fiery as  Fulvia. But does marrying for political peace backfire for Mark Antony at all?  

The stupidest thing he ever did was marry Octavia in 40. I mean, it's one of those  decisions that clearly at the time, it looked like it was sensible because it drew a line  under his and Octavian's previous rivalry in the Perusine War. And apparently, the soldiers  were really happy about it. They wanted this sort of alliance. They wanted this  unification of the two sides. So in the short term, yeah, great. You know, let's all be  friends. In the longer term, this blurred the lines between sort of public and private.  So by marrying Octavian's sister, Antony's marriage to Octavia becomes part of Octavian's  ammunition to use against him. So anytime Antony and Octavia have a disagreement or  a problem, this is a massive disrespect to Octavia. I'll make it all about me.  The massive narcissist that he potentially is. He's like, well, any disrespect shown to  Octavia is actually disrespect to me. And it's Antony disrespecting me and disrespecting  my position and disrespecting my faction and so on and so forth. And so this just gets  worse and worse throughout the 30s until all out civil war in 31. 

And so if Antony hadn't  married Octavia, probably they would have got there in the end, but by a different  route. And it means that Octavian was able to use so much more personal propaganda  against Antony. It would have been if they had just remained allies rather than brothers  in law. 

So if marrying Octavia is a dud and his career takes a nosedive, I find  it really interesting that the Roman historians and some of the modern ones like to say that  Mark Antony was successful in the 40s because of Fulvia essentially puppeteering him from  behind the scenes, right? So as much as they hate her, they hate him more, but they  actually seem to be giving her credit for being quite a savvy politician. Is that fair?  Almost like a backhanded compliment? 

Well, that's the thing. It's do they come out and  say that specifically? Or is it like with the Roman approach, it's criticizing men through  their wives. Your female relations are your weak point in your armor. If we attack them,  if they're strong, you're weak and you're effeminate and you're not keeping them in  control. And if they're misbehaving in some other way, if they're immoral,  again, that's your fault for not being a proper man and not keeping them in line.  And so it is this very sort of regressive idea of women and of men and of the way that  relationships work and personal dynamics work. I mean, it's good for us in a sense,  because it means that women do get into the sources and we do get to read about them.  But it does mean that the stuff that we're reading is very black and white,  and then we sort of have to try and see if we can see any context to what's going on.  

We could probably spend hours talking about what ifs. What if Fulvia had won the Perusine  War? What if she hadn't have died seemingly of a broken heart weeks afterwards? But she did die  alone in Sicyon. Anthony's gone back to Italy in a sulk. He's using her death rather  conveniently. It was all her fault, but he lives for another nearly a decade. Can we see  him at any point admitting publicly or maybe even privately, wow, okay, yeah, she was trying  to do the right thing. I was a little bit too grumpy at the time. She was beneficial to me,  and I miss her. Or does he just draw a line under it? She's dead. I'm going to pretend  none of it ever happened, because it sounds like they were in love at the beginning!?  

Well, this is again, we don't have Anthony's perspective on any of these events. We have a  few quotations in Suetonius' life of Augustus from letters that the two of them apparently  exchanged. But according to our sources, Anthony never mentions Fulvia again, never thinks about  her again, because we don't have his writings. We don't have any of his speeches and things  like that, sadly. That was all this process of unofficial damnatio memoriae and the history  being written by the victors. After Anthony's death, Octavian goes out of his way to take  credit for all of Anthony's successes and emphasize Anthony's failures and play up all  the negative elements of his life and his personality. We don't hear anything more about  Fulvia, but I think probably there would have been some private reflection while he was  married to Octavia. Well, potentially Fulvia was a better wife. For starters, Fulvia gave him two  sons and Octavia gave him two daughters. So if you're in patriarchal society, it would  have been handy to have a few more sons to do things with. In his relationship with Cleopatra  as well, I mean, Plutarch sort of says, and whether this is Plutarch's own editorializing  or whether this was a sort of general thrown against Anthony, that basically Fulvia had taught  him to be controlled by a woman. So Cleopatra simply stepped in and hooked up where Fulvia  had left off. Anthony was nicely trained. 

So again, potentially privately, Anthony may have  reflected on the similarities or differences between the two women and between their two  in his life and his work. But yeah, unfortunately, we don't get Anthony's take on it.  Perhaps he did believe that Fulvia was at fault. I mean, he'd been informed of things by other  people. So before Fulvia even got to Greece and got to see him, he'd already had letters  from Italy telling him what had happened and presumably putting the worst possible spin on it.  And also people trying to cover their own asses. This is why I didn't intervene because  I didn't think that you would want me to. So Fulvia was sort of having her name blackened by  Anthony's friends and allies before she was even in a position to explain herself to him.  So was he genuinely thinking negatively about her for it or was he conveniently making use  of the situation? Maybe a little bit of both. Yeah, he did blame her for it because everybody  around her encouraged him to because they scapegoated her. So then he in turn scapegoated  her because he genuinely thought that she was at fault and it was convenient to make use  of that when it came to Octavian and the Pact of Brundisium. And after she's dead,  she can't argue. She can't give her side of the story. I mean, you see this all the time  in ancient history that people, after they die at a convenient point,  yeah, let's blame it all on them. It's all their fault.  

Yeah. Crassus springs to mind. So we don't have any written things from her husbands.  Do we have any written sources from Fulvia? I'm going to guess no!  

No, no. I mean, the first hint that we get of an ancient woman writing about their own  life is with Agrippina the Younger. She apparently wrote a memoir, an autobiography of herself.  So quite a while away. Yeah. So whether, I mean,  presumably ancient women did write, they wrote letters. We know that some ancient women did  write history, poetry, prose, just not sadly the ones that we would like to have written it  at the period that we would like to be reading about. 

Yeah. And I'm guessing that even if  she did have correspondence with all of these people because of the nature of her death,  they're not going to be preserving them and publishing them for the public to read over.  

Yes. Well, that's the thing is that nobody is preserving and publishing women's letters  in this period and the women's letters that we do have. So I think the earliest  Latin writing from a woman we have is one of the Vindolanda tablets. And that is from  nearly 200 years later. And the only reason we have it is because they were excavating  at Vindolanda and they found it. It's the birthday party invitation. And so that was  thrown away. That's just a sort of humdrum everyday life sort of party invitation letter.  

Pure luck that we have it. 

Yeah. Yeah.  We don't have anything from her husband. We don't have anything from her.  What are the sources we have? You've mentioned some of them already, but  who are they? What are they writing? I'm guessing it's not a biography of Fulvia. They're mentioning  her in passing? 

We don't even have a biography of Clodius, which is interesting because you'd  see. And we don't have any writings from Clodius and we don't have a  portrait of Clodius. So for someone who exerts quite a powerful presence in the politics of  this period, he is a phantom in many respects as well. So for Fulvia then contemporary to her  life, we have Cicero, we have his letters in which he mentions her. We have some of his  speeches in which he mentions her, but they are negative for all the reasons that we've  talked about. We have a brief account of her in Cornelius Nepos's Life of Atticus.  So I mentioned Atticus already as a friend of Cicero and somebody who managed to play  all sides at once. And so Fulvia is mentioned in his biography, which was written very shortly  after his death, the 30s, 20s or so. And she's mentioned because during the time when  Antony was on the run and she was being targeted by all of Antony's enemies and they  were stripping her of her property and stripping her of her money. Atticus steps  in to lend her some money in this period. And so it's not so much about Fulvia as it  is about showing how great Atticus is. But the fact that he bothered to do it is interesting  because clearly Fulvia is not as horrible as the sources make her out to be if someone  is prepared to stand up for her. And that someone is a friend of Cicero, is a friend  of Octavian, is also a friend of Antony as well. So clearly she does still have  friends and allies, but those are the references. And there are the Perusine lead sling  bullets. And there are some coins minted by Antony that it's been suggested that they  depict Fulvia. 

But there isn't really any consensus on whether they do or they don't.  So we don't have a portrait of her, like a marble portrait. We possibly have some  coin portraits because Antony later on, he depicts Octavia on his coins. He depicts  Cleopatra on his coins. So potentially he depicted Fulvia too. But again,  there's no consensus about that. And then later on for writing, it's the historians. So you have  Valleius Paterculus, Cassius Dio, people who are writing accounts of this period,  Livy, et cetera. Some of them we have in full like Cassius Dio. Some of them, so Livy for  this period, we sort of have the summaries of the books. And some of them are longer,  some of them are shorter. And these are the things that they give us the narrative of this  period. They give us quite a lot of information about the Perusine war, but the information that  they give us is written much later in hindsight after Octavian has done his attempt at  whitewashing and cleaning up his own reputation. 

So again, this is like, let's blame Fulvia for  everything. Now we have Antony's life, Plutarch's life of Antony. And that talks  about Fulvia in relation to Antony. So we get some interesting insights there. And then  there are some later just brief references here and there. So they coalesce around two points,  really. The first is the death of Clodius and everything that happens then. And the second is  marriage to Antony and the Triumviral period. So those two things, the rest of her life is  rather blank to us. But apart from one source, they're all pretty much saying  she was terrible. Yes, yes. She's a monster of a woman.  

Now, my assessment of the study of ancient history for the last couple of centuries,  which I'm sure is shared by some, is that it's generally been rich men of a certain  class and type writing solely about rich men of certain class and type, little interest in  pretty misogynist when they do write about women. Is this what we're seeing with the  last couple of centuries of assessments of Fulvia? Are they paying attention to her or would they  rather sweep her under the rug?

 It has changed quite a bit, particularly over the last  60 or so years, you know, with the sort of the feminist movement and the realization that  there were people in history other than powerful rich men who were doing things.  So, you know, feminist history, queer history, subaltern history, etc. So early attempts to  talk about Fulvia, they were rather uncritical. They followed the line of the ancient sources  that here was this dreadful woman who was doing these dreadful things that women shouldn't  be doing. And then it started to change. And she started to be viewed as an interesting  example of what women could potentially do in this period, but still very singular. She's  different, transgressive, unusual. And then as there became a more nuanced understanding  of women in this period and that there were more examples to look at, like once you  start looking for information about what women are doing and you look at people like  Fulvia, Terentia, for example, and you bring in the archaeological evidence to  epigraphy and things like that and you see that there are priestesses and there are artisans.  Then she was less singular and she was just more better attested. So, you know,  it's not that she's doing unusual things. It's just simply we have an unusual amount  of evidence about her. 

And now we're at the point where I wouldn't say it's gone  too far, but perhaps there are different ways to look at the type of sources we have. And the  first is that they're all lies. They are incredibly negative. Or rather, they're  incredibly negative and they're all true. Or they're incredibly negative and that's all  lies. And it's all completely made up. And that Fulvia actually was fantastic and great  in everything else. Feminist trailblazer, unfairly maligned, down with the patriarchy,  yeah. I think the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle of all of that,  because I think it's important to remember the context. 

And this is one of the things that I  talk about towards the end of my book is that literally everybody involved in this whole period,  this whole sort of sequence of events, they all suck, you know, by our modern reckoning.  These are awful, awful people. You know, they are enslavers. There are no feminists. If we're  going to talk about women specifically, there are no feminists in ancient Rome. There is a  rigid social hierarchy that people are very happy to be part of and to perpetuate.  Senatorial women are not feminist heroines looking to lift up other women. They are very  happy with the various glass ceilings that are in place. And they are not freeing their slaves.  They are not treating the enslaved members of their households with their own love and respect  and all the rest of it. 

So for starters, you know, you've got slavery. There is that  element of ancient Roman society. And there is the sort of the imperialism and the conquest  and the genocide as well. And again, the Roman women are perpetuating that. They are  supporting their husbands while their husbands go off and do that. So when it comes to Fulvia, I think it's safe to say, looking at the context, she's just as ghastly as everybody else  in this story. And that's not to say that she's not incredibly interesting or that she  didn't have rationales for being ghastly. I mean, as I've said, you know, if your husbands  have all died by violence and your children, you know, have been threatened with violence  and you have been threatened with violence and, you know, that there is ancient Roman society is  very brutal. Your success is someone else's failure. It's all very competitive. It's not  all let's all be friends and let's all get along. It's, well, only one of us can have  this thing and it's going to be me. And so I think we have to look at it in that sense  that, you know, she can be a complex woman. She can have been given a raw deal by the  sources because they're inherently sort of misogynistic, but at the same time, she's  not Mother Teresa. She's operating within the parameters of the system that she is in. And  that system is a very sort of brutal system. 

So would you say then that when the sources are  calling her monstrous, it's not because she's doing things that the boys aren't doing all  the time. It's just because she's a woman doing what the men are doing. 

Yeah, exactly.  So she is stepping out of the accepted parameters of female behaviour. And so things like raising  an army or undertaking international diplomacy, she's doing these things, she's doing them  openly. We have hints of other women doing these things, but doing them subtly, privately,  the way that women are meant to do things, which is, you know, quietly out of the  therefore, it's wrong. She shouldn't be doing them like that. 

That's a really important  point to make, isn't it? Is that we shouldn't necessarily be judging her by our standards,  but we should also be recognising that the standards of her time weren't exactly stacked  in her favour. 

No, absolutely. And it sort of seems like you're damned if you're  doing you damned if you don't, in a way, because she does everything that a Roman woman  is expected to do. She married multiple times. She had multiple children. She supported her  husbands. She represented their interests. She did all of these things that Roman women and  wives are expected to do and all the things that Augustus's later moral legislation would  demand that they do. Your husband dies, you must immediately marry someone else. You must have babies for Rome. You must protect the family and all the rest of it. And so it's kind of funny,  really, that she is doing all of these things in a period where they really needed to be done.  This is a period of civil war. When Augustus brings, you know, the supposed Pax Augusta  to Rome and there's peace and women don't need to do these things anymore, he's telling them  they still need to do them. And so it's probably doing them earlier in a time of  considerable upheaval. It's like, well, what is so wrong with all of this? And it's simply,  I suppose, that she was doing them in a flashy way. And it's that modern idea,  little girls should be modest and shouldn't draw attention to themselves and wait for  someone to notice you rather than make them notice you. 

I can't help but think that some of  the women in Augustus's life were, you know, like cosmic karma. So when we think about,  you've mentioned that these women are perfectly content with working within a patriarchal society,  not fighting against it. They are part of it and perpetuating it.  As long as it works for them.  

As long as it works for them. 

So is her career, because she's desperate for power,  and she desperately wants to be a politician, or does it seem like she's doing all of this  because that's her job as a wife and a mother?  

Hmm. I think this is the question to ask, I suppose, is that the way that the sources  talk about it, or talk about her, and the way that some scholars have talked about her as,  like, the first empress and stuff like that. Well, within the political system that she  found herself, there was no, a woman could not be a consul. You know, a woman could not hold  any of these magiciansies. The best they could hope for was to be a priestess of some  kind. And as far as we know, she wasn't one of those. The system didn't have an official  role for her beyond wife of someone. And so I don't know that she was necessarily  trying to create a new role for herself because the role that she had was perfectly  valid.

 It was wife, it was mother, but the men that were her husbands were occupying  slightly more unusual roles at that time because the system was breaking down. It was providing  a degree of flexibility that it previously hadn't done. So, you know, we don't hear about  the wives of the first triumvirate wielding political influence, Caesar's wife and Pompey's  wife and Crassus' wife. We hear virtually nothing about them. The only thing we hear  about Caesar's wife doing is having a dream that he was about to die and trying to tell  him this and him just being like, yeah, yeah, whatever. The fact that the wives of the  second triumvirate are in a position to do things is quite what's changed in the  sort of 10 to 15 years or so between those two things happening. And it's that the  political system has become more and more fragile and it's just teetering. And  therefore, women do need to perhaps step outside of their comfort zones or their  previously demarcated areas that they could. 

I think a lot of the sources, they  say about Fulvia, they say things like she wanted to rule a ruler and command a  commander. That's not she wanted to be a ruler and she wanted to be a commander.  It's that she wanted to be the wife of someone who was those things and exert the  influence that a wife would perhaps exert. So that's Plutarch talking about her there.  And things like we hear in the Valleius Paterculus and Cassius Dio, there's nothing  feminine about her except her sex, except the fact that she is a woman. She's got a  female body and she's had babies and these things. That's a fairly fundamental  thing. I am inclined to think that she was opportunistic, that she was very  intelligent, she was very savvy. 

She had learned, I suppose, during her marriage  to Clodius, things like populism, manipulating voters, manipulating people's emotions to  suit yourself. And then during her marriage to Antony, she's learning about  government, basically, because he is, he is consul. Clodius didn't have that  kind of influence during her marriage to him, whereas Antony is not just a  consul, he then becomes a triumvirate. And so he is governing the Roman Empire.  And she is governing the Roman Empire in his stead. There's all this talk in Cicero  of diplomacy taking place in the women's apartments of Antony's house. She's  making decisions for him because he's not there and so on and so forth. And so I  think it's opportunism, seeing a space and stepping into it, but also having  to step into it because of the times that she was living. 

She could have just  done any of that at all, I suppose. But then who would have done it? Octavian. We see  what happens with the power vacuum. When Antony goes to the East in the  late forties, Octavian steps in and starts trying to spawn Antony's  followers. So you can't trust anyone else in this period to represent your  interests. You have to do it yourself. And she'd already seen, you know,  dead husband number one, dead husband number two, people threatening children,  people threatening property, people threatening wealth. The only person to  count on in the absence of your husband and partner is yourself. I mean,  she couldn't count on her parents because her father didn't have any  influence anyway and they don't seem to have been around that point in  time. She couldn't count on her brother. Likewise, he seems to have  been gone by that point. So she's got to count on herself. 

You have  a biography, which by the way, we will link in the description because it is  astonishing as a biography. I love it. I love it. I love it. I'm so pleased  that you've come to talk to us about it because this book, just read it.  Trust me. 

Thank you. 

I'm going to allow myself one 'what if.' I'm wondering  if she were in a society where women could become politicians or had she  been born male? You know her as well as anyone does, knowing her skills,  knowing her ways of thinking, her decision making. If she'd have been  born male, do you think she would have had what it took to become  really prominent in this period and we would have 20 different  biographies on the shelf in the bookshop?

 I've never thought about  that. I've always been very sort of fixed on looking at her as a woman  occupying a woman's sphere in this period. Yes, I think so, to be honest,  because you have biographies of Antony and Octavian. You have  biographies of Caesar and Crassus and Pompey. You have biographies  of Clodius. You have biographies of Cato. So yes, I think she would have  done enough in this period to warrant interest. Had she been a man  able to use her money and her position, I think she would have been  doing quite important things in the Senate and in the civil wars.  

It just happens to be that she was born female? 

Yes. 

And isn't that  the story of so many women in the ancient world?  

Well, exactly. I mean, if you think about it, the experience  of women in the ancient world is one of just fundamentally unrealised  potential. There are so many women. This is something that I hadn't  really realised until quite recently. As a young woman who was looking  for women in history, I was very much yes, girl power, herstory.  Women were kept down by the patriarchy, sort of consciously kept  down. And then as I got older and I started realising the burden  of pregnancy and childbirth and motherhood, and it really made me look  at things in a different way. Because if you are existing in a  society where your role is to have children, well,  having children is hard. It is a massive burden, a physical and  mental and emotional burden. And you're pregnant for nine months.  You have a baby potentially breastfeeding for a year or two.  I mean, this is what the ancient sources tell us. Ideally, you  breastfeed for sort of two years and then you wean. 

Now,  obviously, many women in antiquity used wet nurses, so they weren't  necessarily breastfeeding their own children, but some did. I mean,  we do have some ancient philosophers encouraging women to breastfeed  rather than hiring wet nurses. And physically, your body takes time  to recover your energy levels, etc. But then if your entire  role in society is to have babies, your husband's going to be trying  to get you pregnant again as quickly as possible. So it really  made me understand, well, hang on. This is actually why women  aren't more visible in our ancient sources because they're busy.  They are imprisoned in their own bodies. It is not easy to  sort of do anything when you are pregnant or when you are  recovering from childbirth or whatever else. And so yeah, that  made me think about history and women's history and women's roles  in society in quite a different way.

 And then, well, leaving  aside children, perimenopause, menopause, and the way that  older women are treated in our ancient sources, it sort of  shows that even when you'd finished having babies, it  didn't suddenly open up a whole world of possibilities for  you because that's the very point in time where people  start completely dismissing you because you're seen to be  this sort of withered old hag with nothing to offer  anybody. So yes, I think it's something to bear in mind when  we look at these figures. I mean, Fulvia dies around  about the age of 40, just after she's had her last  child. So what would Fulvia's later life have looked like?  Yeah. Would she have been basically a stage mom organizing  the political careers of her sons? Would she have been  wielding influence over her sons? Had history worked out  a different way? Because we do hear about these sort of  powerful matriarchs who have sons and grandsons.  

So it sounds like even though she had a really sad end, and  it does sound devastatingly sad, and that she was  immediately used as a scapegoat, I mean, it sounds  like she was a genuinely intelligent, powerful woman.  So final question, let's wrap this up. What do you  think is her biggest impact on Roman history?  

I think her impact on Roman history is actually, it's not  necessarily what you would first think of. I mean, so I  said earlier that it's irony that she does all the  things that Augustus later encourages women to do in  that period. And the thing is that she provides a  blueprint for women to exert influence. And that is  what the women of the imperial family go on to do.  So you've got Octavia and Livia. So Octavian, Augustus's  wife and sister. You've got his daughter, Julia.  You have got the later empresses and imperial women.  So Agrippina the elder, Agrippina the younger,  Messalina, Nero's wife, Poppaea, Sabina. So they  do a lot of things in the sources that can be traced  back to Fulvia, the ways that women are able to navigate  and negotiate political power. And it's interesting to  imagine. Certainly, I think Livia and Octavia would  have looked to Fulvia and seen her as a cautionary  tale and be like, right, okay, I don't want what  happened to Fulvia to happen to me. 

And certainly  Octavian was thinking that too, because as I said  before, he gives them this sort of sacrosanctity to  protect them. So they, having lived at the same  time of Fulvia and seen her occupy the space that  she did the way that she did, they learned how to be  a bit more subtle and sneaky about it all.  Whereas the later women, imperial women, they do  the same things. They do the same things as  Fulvia and they meet the same results in some  respects. Again, they are criticized for stepping  outside the bounds of femininity and the  exerting too much influence over their husbands  and over their sons and things like that. So I  think she has a certain amount of influence in  that, in that this is what a Roman woman looks  like. This is what a Roman woman can look like.  This is what a Roman woman can achieve. And so  later, Roman women can look to her and they  can decide, right, I'm going to either do what  she did or I'm not. And so they're sort of  by her in that respect.  

So the men may have chosen to forgotten her,  but the women, they're still paying attention.  

Well, exactly. I mean, that is what we do,  isn't it? We look for role models who we can  relate to. And Roman men could not relate to  her. What Roman man would ever, you know,  voluntarily admit to looking at a woman and  seeing her as a good example, you know?  Possibly sometimes mummy, you know, if mummy  has been good, you know, you sort of, you  wouldn't want to be like mummy, you'd want  your wife to be like mummy. But for the  women themselves, yes, absolutely. I think  they'd be looking around to see, well, who  should I model myself after? Who achieved  things? Who got results?  

I think it's really interesting that she  didn't get what we would perhaps want for  her as an intelligent woman, which is a happy ending.

Bear in mind who gets a happy ending in  this period. Most people have horrible  deaths, ignominious deaths. They end up  failures in many respects because of this  whole zero sum nature of Roman politics.  So although Fulvia does have this sort  of sad end, I mean, Livia gets a  somewhat happy ending. She lives to a  very old age, but, you know, she has a  terrible relationship with her son  Tiberius in the last few years of her  life. I mean, Octavia has a sad end in  that her son Marcellus dies and she  loses all of her political influence.  Agrippina the elder, treated horribly  and basically sort of tortured to death.  Agrippina the younger, murdered on the  orders of her son Messalina, driven  to suicide. So if you're  operating at this level of society,  chances are the stakes are really high.  Very few people get the happy ending.  Augustus gets the happy ending, which is  I don't think he deserves it.  

That man… I mean, she doesn't get a  happy ending, but I think the fact  that you have written this book and  that we are talking about her now and  we're not just carrying on  regurgitating the same old insults  is a testament not only to your work  but to how incredible she really was.  So yes, go out people, read the book,  talk about Fulvia. She deserves it.  Thank you so much for coming to talk  about her. She sounds fantastic.  Even if not necessarily I wanted to be  best friends with her.  She is extraordinary and fascinating.  So thank you so much for coming to  talk about her today.  

Well, thank you for inviting me.  We may not want to be friends with  her, but we want to read about her  in the gossip columns, you know.  

Absolutely!