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

This retelling of the lives of much-maligned Roman women sees their plight through a contemporary feminist lens

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

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

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