Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome

Vulgar History Podcast

Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome

July 30, 2025

Hi everyone, Ann here. Before we get into today’s episode, I just wanted to acknowledge what’s going on in the United States right now, where the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, has been overseeing a mass deportation campaign affecting hundreds of thousands of people through detentions, confinements, and expulsions. I know that there’s a lot of listeners in the US, and I know a lot of you are affected by this, so I just wanted to make a statement and suggest some ways that people can help.

The stated goal of this mass deportation campaign is to arrest 3,000 people per day. To attain this number, people are being taken from public places like churches, schools, and hospitals. The people being targeted are predominantly from a Hispanic background. Families are being separated, and people are living in fear. This is a horrific campaign affecting people all across America. I want to highlight some organizations working to help those being affected.

Today, I want to highlight the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, which defends and advances immigrant rights in Washington State through direct legal services, systemic advocacy, and community education. You can donate to support their work at NWIRP.org. That’s NWIRP.org to support the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. Enjoy today’s episode.

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Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster. This season, we’ve been looking at various revolutions: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution. All of these revolutions, frankly, were all inspired by people of ancient Rome. And so, that got me thinking about like, well, what was ancient Rome like? Was it this amazing republic where everybody was treated well and, you know, all these ideals were lived out by all the people in charge? Like, no. It was not. It was not. But the people in these, you know, 18th-century revolutions were very much inspired by how ancient Rome wanted to be, how ancient Rome kind of thought it was.

Last week, we were talking about the role of women in ancient Rome, as well as specifically Livia, who was the first Roman Empress. This week, we’re talking about another woman from ancient Roman times. She and Livia overlap a little bit, but this woman came before her, and her name is Fulvia. And I have as a special guest, actually a returning guest to this podcast, it’s Jane Draycott, who we had on a few years ago when her previous book was about Cleopatra’s daughter, Cleopatra Selene. If you remember that, that’s such a good book. You should read that book. It’s called Cleopatra’s Daughter by Jane Draycott. Just like in that first book, her new book, Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome—amazing title, really tells you what you need to know about this person—she takes a time period where I kind of knew a bit about it, and where I think a lot of people know a little bit about this time period, and sort of flips the camera around to show what some other people were doing, people you might not have heard about from this time period.

One of these people is Fulvia, who we’re going to explain her whole deal and why she should be so much more famous than she is, and why she’s not more famous. I mean, spoiler, it’s because there were so many strong and powerful and interesting women in ancient Rome at this time. When people do things like I, Claudius, the BBC miniseries, or when they’re making a movie about Cleopatra, it’s like, “Well, we can’t also have Fulvia in here. There’s already enough women characters.” She’s an incredible figure. Jane is such a fun person to talk to. And I hope you enjoy this conversation with Jane Draycott about Fulvia, the woman who broke all the rules in ancient Rome.

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Ann:So, I’m joined today by Jane Draycott, author of Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome. Welcome, Jane.

Jane:Thank you for having me, pleasure to be here.

Ann:To be back again! We spoke when you had your last book about Cleopatra Selene.

Jane:Yeah, that was a couple of years ago now. So, yeah, it is nice to be revisiting this.

Ann:So, I guess my first question is: How well-known is Fulvia? Like, I notice your book title is Fulvia, is the main title. And I have learned that when you’re talking about a woman from history that no one’s heard of, usually the book title is like, “Cleopatra’s Sister-in-Law,” you know, it’s like, or even your other book was Cleopatra’s Daughter. So, like, Fulvia is famous enough for the book to be her name. So, how famous is she?

Jane:Well, this is the thing. I mean, I didn’t want to call my previous book Cleopatra’s Daughter because there was already a novel, at least one novel and at least one kind of academic book that had that title. But my agent and my editors overruled me. They said, you know, “This is what you have to tell people. This is why people might be interested.” And the same thing with Fulvia, actually.

The original title of Fulvia was from a Cicero quotation. It was A Thoroughly Rapacious Female because I thought, you know, people don’t know who Fulvia is. I mean, classicists and ancient historians know who Fulvia is because she’s one of the prominent women in the late Republic, along with, you know, Servilia, for example. So, if you know the late Republic, you know her because whenever there’s anything written about women in the late Republic, she is one of a handful who is used as a representative of the women of this period. But if you’re not a sort of classicist or ancient historian, Fulvia… You know, if you put Fulvia into social media, you’ll come up with like Italian car pictures, you know. It’s not like Cleopatra or Clytemnestra or something like that. So, the original title was A Thoroughly Rapacious Female, and that is how I sold the book. And then, further down the pre-publication process, my publisher, my editor, came back to me and they said, “How do you feel about changing the title? Because when we talk about this in the office, people think it’s erotica.”

Ann:Oh!

Jane:I was like, well, I don’t have a problem with that, personally, because erotica sells like…

Ann:Yeah, whatever sells the book. Yeah.

Jane:But it did also have a, you know, it was A Thoroughly Rapacious Female. I think it was How Fulvia Played the Game, Won and Lost, and Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome. But then that didn’t work as the main title because it’s just quite long, and it sounds like a subtitle. So, it sort of went around, and they suggested Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome. So, first name and then, sort of, slightly shorter subtitle. I didn’t really like it, personally, because I did think, “Well, Fulvia. Is that going to be interesting to people? The subtitle, well… [mumbles] Broke all the rules in ancient Rome… Okay.”

I mean, ultimately, it’s one of those things that I’m not really good at coming up with titles. I think I’m great at coming up with titles for conference papers because you always, you know, you have your…

Ann:Those are quite long, yeah.

Jane:… to reference, then you have your colon, and then you have your boring, explanatory subtitle. And that’s great because conference papers can be long. But for books, it’s got to be something that fits on a book jacket, fits on a spine, is easy to search for in bookshops and on the internet and stuff. So, it does need to be a bit more, like, you know, this is what it is.

So, I’m still not sure, to be perfectly honest, because as I said, I think classicists and ancient historians know who Fulvia is. And while it would be, it’s great if classicists and ancient historians do read the book, at the same time, I would like lots more people to read the book. So, the jury is out, really. It remains to be seen what people think about the title and if they have heard of her. I mean, people tell me they haven’t. So, people who have messaged me on social media have come across the book. Because in the UK, the book cover is quite different to how it is in the US.

Ann:The book cover in the UK, listeners, I don’t know, maybe I’ll attach it to this episode somehow. It’s incredible. It’s fantastic. I have a book coming out, and, honestly, that was on our mood board. It’s like, we have to have a cover that’s this good.

Jane:Yeah. Again, I was a little bit uncertain about it because it’s a well-known painting and it’s used in other discussions of Fulvia. And so, I thought, “Is this just going to look like I’m ripping off other people?” But the way that they did it with the neon colours and everything, I thought that made it look really dramatic and attention-grabbing, and hopefully the kind of book that people would pick up in a bookshop and go, “Oh, this looks cool!” And they read the back and they’re like, “Hmm, it’s a nonfiction book. It’s a history book. Hmm, I’m not entirely sure if this is quite what I want.” Then they read the description and think, “Yes, actually. This is what I want. A woman causing trouble. This would be great.”

Ann:What’s also great about that cover, I just wanted to mention for the listeners (and this is also on our mood board from my book), is you have quotes from people from ancient times talking about what a horrifying woman she is. It’s like, “Blah, blah, blah. -Cicero.” Usually, where a quote is like, “Dah, dah, dah. -Lucy Worsley.” It’s like, “Dah, dah, dah. -Cicero.” And I was like, that’s fantastic. I love this because it’s just to show that in her time.

Jane:The kind of holdover of the original A Thoroughly Rapacious Female. Because when I said I was a bit sad to lose that, I was like, yeah, this is dramatic and everything, I think it was my editor, she said something along the lines of, “Oh well, we could use those in the marketing.” And I was like, “Yeah, all right then.” That way, we get to keep them. And some of them, they’re very dramatic, they’re very evocative. So yeah, they were in the marketing, they’re on the book cover, they’re on the Amazon page and stuff like that. So yeah, these celebrity endorsements from the late republics. So, I was quite happy about the way that went.

I mean, the American cover is beautiful too. It’s very, very different to the UK one. But I think it’s still very striking because it’s a sort of lovely orangey-yellow colour, and it’s got these red highlights. I think hopefully that will also be quite noticeable in a bookshop. A lot of the history books, in the UK anyway, I don’t know so much about the American market, but in the UK, they have very, sort of, austere, quite boring covers and titles. I mean, it’s like, a blank, a kind of cream or a black or something like that, with just the title, and then maybe some very small, little motif of a crown or something. And they just… They don’t look that interesting to me, and I didn’t really think that was quite the right vibe I wanted to be projecting. So, I’m really pleased with both of the covers and how they do, sort of, say something exciting lurks within. [laughs]

Ann:Well, and your book certainly starts off with something exciting. We won’t start our story there, but I will just let everybody know there is… In reading history, I’m always excited when a vengeance-fueled mob shows up. So, just listeners know, there is more than one of those.

But first, can you explain to everybody how… Like, we just did an episode about Livia, for instance, that’s probably fresh in people’s minds. People know about Cleopatra. How does Fulvia fit into the stories that people might already know?

Jane:So, Fulvia is basically, she’s at the very end of the late Republic. So, she was born around about 80 BCE, and she dies in 40 BCE. And so, she lives for 40 years, and during the course of the 40 years that she lives, this is pretty much where the Republic lurches from, like, crisis to crisis, death throe to death throe. We go through the First Triumvirate with Caesar and Pompey, and Crassus. We go through the Second Triumvirate with Antony and Octavian, and Lepidus. We have the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. We have the dictatorship of Caesar. We have the assassination of Caesar. We have the civil war between Antony and Octavian; it’s the first iteration of that civil war. We also have the proscriptions and the murder of Cicero.

Basically, this period is a complete disaster for literally everybody in Rome except a handful of very clever, savvy politicians and generals, because it is just nonstop horror. You’ve got gangs roaming the countryside and murdering people in the roads; you’ve got gangs roaming the streets murdering people in the streets; you’ve got bodies being thrown into the river, thrown into the sewer; you’ve got people grassing you up to get hold of your money and your other valuables. It’s really a horrible time. For a lot of this period, because there are these civil wars and conflicts between very powerful men with very large royal armies, if you are a woman, like Fulvia or like Livia as well, you are constantly worried because all of your male family members have basically gone off to war and are they on the right side, and are they going to survive? And if they do survive, are they on the right side, or are they on the wrong side, and are they going to get punished because of that? Are you in danger? Are your children in danger? What’s going to happen to your fortune? Is it going to get seized? Are you going to get taxed?

There are all these really… They’re fantastic stories, but they’re also pretty horrible as well in Appian’s account of the civil war about things that, people who are on the proscriptions list, men who are on the prescriptions list, and what their female family members (their wives and their daughters and even their enslaved people), what they did, whether they were good wives and they hid them, or they tried to bribe their way out of it, or if they were bad and they basically shopped them to the authorities and betrayed them. If they were murdered, did the wives basically end their own lives too? What happened?

So, we get these really interesting accounts of what women’s lives were like in this period that we don’t get in the normal peacetime because no one thinks that housewives, however wealthy, are really worth writing about unless they’re doing something exciting, and that’s generally a bad thing because Roman wives are not meant to be exciting, they’re meant to be boring, they’re meant to be seen but not heard. They can be powerful as long as they’re doing it quietly behind the scenes for the betterment of their husbands or sons or whatever else, but they can’t really be first and foremost and in your face about it. So, when we do hear about women doing those things, it’s always a sign that something has gone terribly wrong, like society is breaking down if women like Fulvia are stepping forward and are able to manage any sort of open power-grabbing and politicking and things like that.

So, we hear a lot about Fulvia in the ancient sources of this period because the very fact that she is so visible and she is so powerful and influential is a sign of everything that’s gone wrong with the normal political process, military process, government of the Republic and the wider empire. It’s also a way… If you’re talking about women, what you’re really doing is talking about how weak and emasculated and under-the-thumb and not proper men, their husbands or fathers or brothers or whatever are. So, you talk about women being bad as a way to talk about men being ineffectual. And so, we hear about Fulvia when her husband’s enemies want to make a point that they are deficient in some way.

Ann:And we will absolutely get to this because this is a very satisfying part of your book… Well, first, I was just like, “Oh my god, I hate Cicero.” Cicero is like, number one enemy, to me, personally, because all he does is hate on Fulvia. We will talk about that, but your book includes how he dies, and I was very satisfied when that happened, and I was very happy with Fulvia.

Jane:I’m also very satisfied that his corpse is on the cover. [laughs]

Ann:Thank god, being, yeah, disrespected. Because Cicero, I remember ages ago, I did a Cleopatra episode, and I was just like, “Wow! This guy sucks.” And so, to hear this, it’s like, a lot of what we know about Fulvia comes from his writing about her, and in your book, you’re kind of saying like, “Well, he hated her. So, here’s what he said,” but like, you know, what is the kernel of truth to this? But it’s not just like he hated her because she was a woman who was doing stuff, but he hated her because they were neighbours [chuckles] and they were, like, kept trying to get each other’s property and seizing each other’s property and stuff. So, he like, personally hated her.

Jane:Yeah. Sometimes you don’t necessarily think about it, but Cicero is pretty much 90% of our source for this period. Of the people that were writing at the time, he is perhaps the most important, most prolific. I mean, obviously, we have Caesar’s commentaries, for example, and we have fragments of other things, but we have Cicero’s writings, his longer writings, but also his letters as well, and that’s how we reconstruct the period. So, for many centuries, the understanding of what was going on was entirely from Cicero’s perspective, and so Cicero’s friends were your friends, you know, and his enemies were your enemies. It was rather uncritical in a lot of ways, so Cicero’s depiction of Fulvia must be accurate; she must be awful.

And then, when you start trying to look for other sources from this period or from slightly later, you can then start to maybe see some variations. And then, the later sources, you can also see how the tale grows in the telling, how extra details get added, and the benefit of hindsight, and the history is written by the winner’s situation. So, Fulvia gets worse and worse and worse as time goes on because everybody knows what happened, they know how the story ends. So, there isn’t new information in the sense of, like, new discoveries, it’s more just new writers adding their own sort of extra, very lurid details to make their work that little bit more exciting. They can get away with it because, of course, we know that Antony loses and Octavian becomes Augustus.

So, there’s a very interesting sort of… You can see it happen in real time that the cleanup of his reputation over the four years of his principate, from he’s really quite reprehensible in the late Republic. I mean, he’s quite young, and so he kind of plays the, “Oh well, I was just this young, innocent boy, and I was misled by all these older, more influential men.” But he’s pretty nasty, he’s a thug; he tortures people, kills people, does all sorts of really unpleasant stuff. But later on, when he wants to present himself as, like, the benign, you know, Pater Patriae and the pater familias of the imperial family, good, traditional, moral guy, he obviously can’t have the nasty stuff being raked over again. So, it’s all kind of, “Let’s look over there instead. Let’s criticize Antony. Let’s criticize Fulvia. Let’s criticize Cleopatra. They’re really bad and I was just trying to, you know, make sure that Rome survived,” when, of course, he was doing no such thing. He was out for himself.

Ann:So, I think we should go through… Fulvia was married three times, some more dramatically than others. I guess, by dramatically, I mean the conclusion of the marriage. But can you talk about, so at the very beginning, like many young Romans, she gets married as a young teenager, and who is the first husband? Clodius.

Jane:Right.

Ann:Not I, Claudius. Clodius. [Jane laughs] Different person.

Jane:Yeah. His name is Publius Clodius Pulcher. He’s a member of the Claudii, but he changes his name at some point to, sort of, be more fashionable and appeal more to the common people. So, his brothers are, you know, they are Claudii; he’s Clodius, one of the Claudii smaller group.

He is what we would today, I suppose, especially with the way things are with global politics at the moment, we would call him a populist politician. Because although he is incredibly wealthy and incredibly aristocratic, and the very definition of the silver spoon in your mouth sort of situation, he presents himself as a man of the people. He deliberately pitches himself towards the, sort of, ordinary, working Romans. He deliberately tries to get supporters from the sort of the poor, the disenfranchised, you know, the working people, and he tries to basically circumvent the traditional way of doing Roman politics. I mean, he is very wealthy. He’s got consular ancestors and siblings; his sisters are all married to consuls and generals as well. You know, he’s a senator, he’s surrounded by senators. But he stands, is elected as a tribune so that he can basically say, you know, “I represent the working, ordinary people of Rome.” As part of that, he’s not content to just stick to politics; he does have street gangs and thugs and intimidates political rivals. There’s a lot of, sort of, electoral corruption and bribery and stuff like that.

At the point at which he and Fulvia marry, he has literally just been prosecuted for blasphemy and sacrilege because he gatecrashed the Bona Dea celebrations, all women celebrations, in the house of the pontifex maximus. There was Caesar at the time, and his wife, as the wife of the pontifex maximus, was hosting these celebrations. Very secret; we don’t really know anything about them because they were all women, and they were so secret. So, what we hear from the sources is that Clodius dressed up as a woman and sneaked in, somehow, to the house. There is this question of, was he having an affair with Caesar’s wife and was, like, sneaking in to, you know… Terrible choice of timing if he was trying to get his leg over on this particular night. Or was it that he wanted to find out what the celebrations were because, as a man, he would never know. And so, there is this big, sort of, scandal because the rituals are interrupted and it’s terribly offensive, and so on and so forth. So, he is prosecuted for this, but he gets away with it, basically bribes his way out of it. So, even though there seems to be this sense that everybody knew he did it, he does, as incredibly wealthy, influential people tend to, simply just buys way out of it and gets away without consequence.

Ann:He’s got, Clodius… Listeners are listening from all kinds of different countries, and I think we’re all thinking of a politician in our country who is exactly like this.

Jane:Absolutely. I mean, nothing really much has changed in 2,000 years. The people who have the right sort of advantages, by and large, are above the law. It catches up with him eventually, we will talk, I’m sure, very shortly about how it catches up with Clodius—you know, you live by the sword, you die by the sword—but at this particular point in time, this isn’t the first scandal that’s been attached to his name. I mean, previously, when he was on a military campaign with his brother-in-law, he tried to foment mutiny because he felt like he wasn’t being given a sufficiently important command. There were allegations about him committing incest with his various sisters. So, he is a very sort of high-profile, scandalous, salacious kind of person. I think probably very much with the mentality of that whole, it’s better to be talked about than not talked about, and as long as people are talking about you, it doesn’t really matter what they’re saying because then, you know, your name is on people’s lips and things.

So, it’s at this point in the sort of late sixties where he and Fulvia seem to have married. It’s been suggested that because she was from… She was also from, like, old, wealthy, respectable families, but her father’s family, the Fulvii, and her mother’s family as well, they were not as important as they had been, you know, 100 or 150 years earlier. So, although they were wealthy, they were no longer influential; they hadn’t had consuls for several generations. And so, it’s been suggested that this is why someone like Clodius would marry someone like Fulvia, because basically, she was filthy rich, she wasn’t politically—

Ann:He needed money to reap, like, all these bribes he’s paying. He needs the money.

Jane:Exactly. Her family weren’t politically important, although her stepfather was the consul, and it seems like he was quite close to Clodius from military campaigning anyway. So, it’s been suggested that this was an opportunity because while the very conservative aristocratic families would have thought, “Oh god, no. We’re not marrying one of our daughters to this scandal monger,” a slightly less prestigious family with lots of money, they were like, “We will do that. We will take this opportunity.” And because her stepfather was friends with Clodius, it’s possible that that’s how that came about. So, they marry.

We don’t really know anything about their early life together. I mean, they had two children; they had a son and a daughter. But we only really start to hear about it when Clodius, you know, spoiler alert, if you haven’t… [laughs]

Ann:Spoiler for the first page of your book.

Jane:He gets murdered. One of his political rivals, Titus Annius Milo, they have had a whole several years’ worth of bad blood, and their gangs have fought in Rome, and they’ve each been trying to screw each other over and get each other charged for things like corruption and stuff like that. Anyway, they encounter each other on the Appian Way outside of Rome. Clodius is sort of coming back to Rome from having been out of Rome doing some sort of local political stuff, and Milo is leaving Rome and going to his own state. Their two entourages meet, and Clodius is travelling quite light; it’s him, and just a handful of sort of companions. Milo seems to have a much bigger entourage, including his wife and other, sort of, household people, as well as a huge load of security.

The two groups sort of heckle and get into some trouble and jostling and all that kind of stuff, and it very rapidly escalates to a rather brutal and bloody, it’s called the Battle of Bovillae later on. So, when you’ve got gladiators and people like that with weapons, perhaps it’s inevitable. So, Clodius tries to escape; he goes and takes shelter at an inn, but he’s dragged out by Milo’s thugs and stabbed to death in the road, left in the road while Milo and everybody else, they just carry on, they carry on down to their villa. And so, he’s just left there, and then another senator who happens to be going that same way comes across the body, sends it back to Rome. He does not go back to Rome, too. He’s like, “No, thank you. I don’t want any part of this.” He just sends some of his enslaved people back to Rome with the body, and they take the body to Clodius’s house and present it to Fulvia.

It’s at this point that Fulvia seems to enter the historical record for the first time, because when she sees Clodius’s body, rather than do what you might expect—which is get it very nicely washed and dressed and laid out in the atrium for everyone to come and see it and pay respects the way that you’re supposed to do with a traditional Roman funeral—she doesn’t do any of that. She leaves it mouldering, covered in gore, et cetera, and opens the doors and invites everybody—ordinary people who would not under normal circumstances get to go into this kind of super-rich mansion—she invites the men to see it, “Look at what they’ve done!” And this kicks off a riot. The mob go crazy, they seize Clodius’s body, they march it down the Via Sacra to the Forum, they put it in the Senate House, and burn the place to the ground. Then it kicks off several days of rioting, people are looking for Milo. When they come across people that they think are Milo, they beat them up and potentially even kill them. And everything is just really violent and awful. It takes the institution of martial law to get all of this stuff to calm down.

And then, a few months later, there is the trial. Milo is found guilty of murder and is exiled. It’s a funny thing, actually, the guy that actually did the murdering on Milo’s orders, he gets away with it. He’s found not guilty by a slim majority, but Milo is found guilty, and he is exiled. But during the trial, it seems to be the kind of thing that keeps people gripped for weeks because there are all these details. Cicero is defending Milo, and he tries to argue that Clodius was actually trying to kill Milo all along, and Milo was just defending himself. Whereas the people representing Clodius and his family, they actually argue, “Well, no, Milo went to Clodius’ villa and tried to kill his little son. And when he couldn’t find his son because the enslaved people had hidden him away, he killed a young male slave!” And there’s all this fenagling about enslaved people who were there were freed, so they would then be citizens, so they wouldn’t be able to be tortured for information. And it’s just lies and lies and layers of lies, and everyone’s attempting to implicate everybody else. Fulvia actually testifies at this trial. Her mother, who seems to have potentially been at the house when Clodius’s body was brought back, they both testify, and apparently, they’re very sympathetic, and there are tears and their laments and everything else.

So, this is where we see Fulvia entering Roman history and the things that she’s doing. Prior to this, we assume she has been an ordinary wife and mother. We hear from Cicero, in his defence of Milo, his argument about why Clodius was really trying to kill Milo is because Fulvia was not present. And this is apparently something very strange because Clodius and Fulvia were always together; they would not be seen apart from each other. So, that’s an interesting detail that it sort of makes you think, okay, so clearly, they have a close marriage. They enjoy each other’s company because why else would they always be together? So, you kind of start to think, this is actually a marriage that, while it may have been potentially just political and financial, there does seem to have been affection on both sides because they enjoy each other’s company. And then when he’s dead, she’s very, very determined that she’s going to get revenge on the people that killed him and do everything she possibly can.

It’s also interesting because there is a political dimension to this as well, that if she was with him all the time, then she was part of his political life. She either learned from him these ideas about using the crowd, and playing on people’s emotions, and getting what you want outside of the normal channels. So, either she learned that from him, or it’s something that he potentially learned from her, or the pair of them sort of worked it out together. That’s just quite interesting to see this possibility of sort of Roman women do not get to have the same sort of political career, or the political education that Roman men do. But you can perhaps have a different kind of education; you can be there, and you can absorb, and you can see what’s happening, and then you can learn from that.

Also, I suppose, one thing you can’t necessarily teach someone is to have a sense of timing, and to know when it’s the right moment to do a particular thing, and how to turn a situation to your advantage. Clearly, this is something that Fulvia has, because she does it when she’s presented with the body of Clodius, and she does it again at the trial, and she does it again at later points in her life as well. She recognizes that, “This is a moment where I can actually make something out of this.” So, although we don’t have huge amounts of information about her at this point in time, the information that we do have, I think, is suggestive. We can start to see patterns emerging that we’ll see over the next 15 years of her life and her career.

Ann:And then also, just the way that Clodius was this populist politician, you could see by the way that the mob assembled, he was beloved by these people. And after he died, Fulvia inherits those followers or those fans. And then eventually, we see that that is, much like her wealth is an attractive thing to somebody who wants to marry her, it’s like, well, here’s this woman who brings with her… Whoever she marries next, people are going to support him because people supported Clodius so much.

So, then she gets her second husband, who’s this… various things, but among other things, a theatre impresario who has this revolving stage, we don’t need to get into that. But she marries, basically, as soon as she is allowed to after the period of mourning is over. And who is the second husband?

Jane:Yes. So, her second husband is Gaius Scribonius Curio, and he too is from a very respectable, wealthy, aristocratic family. His father is actually still alive, at least to start with, and is very influential as a politician in the Senate, and he and his father worked together quite closely together for their causes. To start with, he is more on the conservative side, and you sort of think, oh, this is clearly the influence of his father, because after his father’s death, he goes way over the other side and joins up with Caesar. He, too, is a tribune and sort of goes for the more, kind of, populist element, although not as extreme as Clodius. He still seems to be working within the normal parameters. So, the theatre is part of, sort of, funerary games to celebrate his father, as well as being a very effective marketing tool for himself.

So, because we don’t know exactly when he and Fulvia married, there is this question of, well, did he woo her with his amazing revolving theatre? And she thought, “Oh yeah, this is a guy I can work with. He’s got a bit of pizzazz.” Or was she involved in this? He was like, “I need to do something to honour my dad and to make my name and to get attention.” She’s like, “Well, you know what you could do…?” So, we don’t quite know, but there is this sort of period where they are married, and his career is going quite well.

Then we see civil war. He takes Caesar’s side in the civil war, and he goes off to North Africa, leading Caesar’s army. Unfortunately, they’re only married a year or two. They’re married long enough for him to father a child on her. But that is basically it. So, he dies in North Africa, and once again, she is left alone, as a widow with a young family, young children. So, she has her two children from her marriage to Clodius, and now she has her one child from her marriage to Curio.

It’s such a short period of time, and there’s so much other stuff going on, we don’t really know anything about their marriage, their relationship and their life together. Because frankly, Clodius, her first husband, and Antony, her third husband, they’re what people care more about, really, than Curio. He is sandwiched between them. But he is probably the bridge to Antony because he and Antony are very close friends. There are suggestions that when they were younger, they were lovers because they were so close. Again, it’s suggestive because you sort of think, well, Antony, his closest, bestest, oldest friend has just died, leaving a widow and a very young baby, and it’s actually quite a nice thing to do, if you think about it, to sort of be there for your dead friend’s wife and baby. You know, you can think about it also in a completely mercenary way as well, that yes, she’s got this political…

Ann:These followers, yeah.

Jn:Yeah, these followers. And he’s like, “Oh, I can make use of that. And oh, she’s going out of money! I can make use of that,” because Antony is perpetually poor. But at the same time, there is perhaps a human element to it as well, that he’s stepping in to support his best friend’s widow. So, we know a bit more about their marriage because we have a lot more sort of information and anecdotal information about their relationship.

Ann:Well, I’m going to say because Cicero was their neighbour and he hated her and them. So, it’s like this homeowners’ association blog of just [Jane laughs] what’s happening at the house. But also, like, Marc Antony, just to remind listeners as well, he is famously Antony and Cleopatra… That’s where he’s going to end up. So, this is pre-Cleopatra Marc Antony. So, we see him with another strong, interesting, intelligent woman, speaks well of him.

Jn:I mean, this, I think, says something about Antony personally. He seems to have had a lot of good relationships with women. He seems to have had a good, long-running relationship with his mother, Julia; he has a long-running mistress, Volumnia Cytheris; he has Fulvia; he has Cleopatra; he has Octavia. And although he does not necessarily always treat these women as nicely as you would like to be treated, by Roman standards, he’s an absolute, you know, prince as far as you think about the way that other Romans treated their wives in this period and the opinion they have of women. It seems like Anthony does actually see women as people; he respects them, their opinions, he listens to them, he takes them around with him and stuff like that.

Again, I think just as we can infer that Fulvia’s marriage to Clodius was quite a close one and sort of a partnership in that respect, I think we can see with Fulvia and Antony a similar sort of thing. Because when he is away, when he has to go away to fight in civil war, or when he’s in the Second Triumvirate and he is made the triumvir with this purview of the East, in his absence, she is representing him. She is the one who is running their multiple households and seeing all of his clients and enacting business on his behalf. And when, in 41, he and Octavian fall out again and have their sort of second round of civil war, she and Antony’s brother basically declare war on Octavian in Antony’s name to protect his interests while he’s away. So, I think all of this tells us that she was very much an equal partner in his endeavours. Whether she was telling him what to do, he was telling her what to do, basically, they both had a working partnership. She had a considerable amount of agency in this relationship as his proxy.

This is, again, this is why we hear so much about her in this period, because, as far as Cicero and other onlookers are concerned, this is not okay. It’s one thing to have your wife running your household while you’re out of rogue on political business or military business, but to extend that remit so that she’s basically running the Republic, running the Empire, that is not okay because women are not supposed to have this kind of power. And there’s something wrong with her that she wants this kind of power. So, we get all these, like, rather amazing criticisms of Fulvia that she’s basically a man in every respect except for her sort of physical body, and she doesn’t want to weave and spin and do girly stuff. No, she wants to be a politician, she wants to be a general, she wears a sword, she gets splattered with blood during military discipline, she’s enacting international political stuff by giving client kings kingdoms, and all of this. And then, of course, the very same people then say, “Oh, but she’s really jealous of Glaphyra and Cleopatra, and she only declares war on Octavian to try and get Auntie’s attention away from Cleopatra.” And you’re just like, well, which is it? She’s either not womanly at all, or she’s just as weak and vapid and jealous as all the other women.

I mean, one thing I find that is quite interesting, again, about… It’s hard to know how far to trust these, kind of, really negative descriptions, because you sort of think, “Well, come on, almost nobody is all bad.” Presumably there’s truth to this, but presumably it’s also exaggerated. But one thing I think is really interesting is that we never hear about her spending her money on jewelry, or purple clothing, or any of the other, sort of, silly fripperies that Roman women are supposed to be obsessed with. What she wants is property and money and power and influence. And I guess you could say that that sort of feeds into this idea that she’s not womanly at all; if she was a proper woman, she’d just want diamonds and stuff.

But at the same time, I think it’s worth putting this in context, and thinking about how her first marriage ended because her husband was brutally murdered in the street, and there was a suggestion that his murderers wanted to kill his son, her son, as well. Her second marriage ended because her second husband was killed in battle in Africa. Again, there’s this question of, well, what happens when you’re a Roman woman and you lose your husband, your protector, the father of your children? Who have you got to look after you? As far as we know, she potentially has a much older brother, but he never seems to have been particularly politically important, and we don’t even know when he died. So, possibly her father and her brother are both dead at this point; they can’t help her. And then, with Antony, there is this whole period in the wake of the assassination of Caesar, where Antony initially goes from being the most powerful man in Rome as the other consul upon Caesar’s assassination, to basically being run out of town. We hear from Cornelius Nepos about, basically, the vultures descending on Fulvia while Anthony is away and trying to strip her of her property. Again, there’s this suggestion that they’re going to kill her children because you get rid of the sons so that they can’t follow in their father’s footsteps.

So, I sort of think that in the space of about 10 years, she’s lost three husbands, she’s had all of her children threatened, she’s had people trying to take her property and leave her with nothing. So, it seems to me quite sensible that once she has got power and influence, the thing that she’s trying to do is restore her battered family fortunes and shore up her situation so that, you know, if you’ve got your own property and you’ve got your own money and you’ve got your own power, it makes it very difficult for people to mess with you in the future. And so, it seems to me as perfectly sensible. The other thing is that if you’ve got nice jewelry, we hear at this time all the stories of the women in the proscriptions, the good women have to sell their jewelry to pay for their husbands to be able to escape Rome, and then they’re left, they’ve got no husbands, they’ve also got no jewelry! And if their husbands get caught and get killed, their property and their money get seized as well. So, it just seems very sensible to me that she is trying to accumulate her own security because she’s seen multiple times that it can so easily be taken away.

So, all of this, I think, is perfectly understandable within the context of that situation— I mean, it’s still perfectly understandable now, really. People who have assets are more secure than people who don’t have any. So, this is, for me, what I find interesting about her is that, yes, she’s doing a lot of very, at first glance, very unusual, untraditional, innovative things. But actually, if you think about it within the context, and this is something else that doesn’t necessarily come through from Cicero’s invective, but when you look at other sources, other letters of Cicero, for example, Servilia, the mother of Brutus, is doing the exact same thing. She’s involved in politics. She’s just a friend of Cicero, so it’s okay. And there are other women that Cicero borrows money from, and goes into business with, and tries to buy property from, but that’s okay because they’re friends of Cicero, and they’ve got something that he wants. And then you’ve got Terentia, Cicero’s wife, who, while Cicero’s in exile, she’s managing his estate, she’s arranging to sell property to send him money, she’s trying to arrange another marriage for their daughter, she’s trying to get their son educated. So, she’s doing all of this because Cicero is not there to help her. And again, that’s okay, but Fulvia’s behaviour is not okay?

So, I think you sort of have to know a little bit more about what women are generally doing in this period, and you see that Fulvia is not, in fact, that much of an outlier. And if you look forward in time to women like Livia and the other women of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, you can see a lot of them doing pretty much exactly what Fulvia did. I mean, they don’t necessarily have as much success as her, and in fact, women like Livia who are more subtle about it have a lot more success than women like Julia or either of the Agrippinas, for example, who are a lot more blatant. Being obvious about it doesn’t endear you to people, not the people at the time and not the writers who are writing about it later. So, I think it’s interesting that you can see this continuity, this long continuity through the late Republic into the Principate, but through into the Julio-Claudian dynasty of women… Basically, as soon as women get a little bit of power and influence, they all use it in the same ways, just to have greater or lesser amounts of success.

Ann:Well, and then I think this is also a good time to talk about, because again, so much of what we know about this period and specifically about Fulvia and how… Whereas what you’re saying is from the writings of Cicero, who, other women who he liked, did the same things, and he didn’t criticize them but he did criticize Fulvia. Can you just briefly describe the extremely satisfying way in which Cicero dies, and what happens to his head?

Jane:Yes. Well, I mean, Cicero is… When the Second Triumvirate get together and they realize that they need money, they try taxing people, it doesn’t go so well. So, they decide what they need to do is draw up a hit list and have these people murdered and seize their property. So, they draw up a list of hundreds of names of people that they think are against them and in favour of Brutus and Cassius and the Liberators. So, it basically is open season on these people. So, if your name was on the proscription list, you needed to get out of Rome as quickly as you possibly could. A lot of people went down to Sicily to join up with Sextus Pompey. We don’t hear so much about him at this time because Octavian later defeats him, and so he’s like a historical footnote, even though, at the time, he was really important. This is where we get with ancient historians writing later and knowing that…

Ann:Yeah, who’s important and who’s not, yeah.

Jane:Yeah, he’s important at the time, but you wouldn’t know it from the way that it’s just brushed over later. Anyway, so if you can get out of Rome and get down to Sicily and join up with Sextus Pompey, you’re okay. If you can’t, basically, anybody, anyone at all, whether they are a freeborn person or a freed person or even an enslaved person, they can basically find you, cut your head off, take the head to a member of the Triumvirate and then claim some of your property. The Triumvirate get some of it because they need it to declare war on Brutus and Cassius, but you can get some too.

So, if you were not a friend of the Triumvirate and you were wealthy, then you had a target on your back. And Cicero is very much not a friend of, or particularly not a friend of Antony, because he has written a lot of horrible letters and speeches and pamphlets about Antony since the assassination of Caesar in 44. So, he spent the last year writing these speeches, delivering speeches publicly, et cetera, et cetera. These are called the Philippics, and this is where we get a lot of our information about Antony and a lot of the negative qualities of Antony. So, this is where we read about how he’s drunk and is permanently drinking and he’s surrounded by all sorts of unsavoury actors and prostitutes and stuff like that, and that he seized all Pompey’s property and spends loads of money and is in loads of debt. This is where we sort of hear a lot of stories about his marriage to Fulvia and how she basically wears the trousers, that he’s completely weak and emasculated, and she bosses him around. There’s a great line in Plutarch’s Life of Antony, written much later but using these sources, that essentially Cleopatra was grateful to Fulvia because Fulvia had broken Antony and trained him to be ruled by a woman. So, Fulvia is seen as the precursor to Cleopatra in that way.

So yeah, Cicero thought it would be a really good idea to assassinate Antony’s character. And in response, Antony thought it would be an even better idea to assassinate Cicero, like, quite literally. And the way I’ve been thinking about this recently is, I don’t know how aware you are of the feud between Kendrick and Drake. [laughs]

Ann:Oh, very. I’m in Canada, so like, yeah.

Jane:Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing. It’s that sort of thing, these two people attempting to kind of one-up each other. The way I see this, I’m sort of like, who is who in this situation? Is Antony, Drake? I mean, Cicero would have you believe that Antony is Drake, and Cicero’s writings would have you believe that Antony is Drake. But ultimately, it’s Antony that we’re— [laughs]

Ann:It’s like, you know, the Super Bowl performance by Kendrick Lamar, it was like a philosophical murder of Drake, and then Mark Antony does, like, an actual murder of Cicero.

Jane:Yeah. So, I mean, so Antony does attempt to kind of write back, but we just don’t have that literature, unfortunately. I mean, he is a victim of Octavian later, because Octavian goes out of his way to just bulldoze Antony’s reputation and any sign of it. So, it is just this sort of situation where Cicero… I mean, I firmly believe that he had it coming, frankly.

Ann:Oh my gosh… Your book, I didn’t know that that was the end of Cicero, and I was so happy. Because you know, your book is very well written and whatever, but just, like, you hold no… You’re like, “This is what Cicero is doing. He’s just, like, a hater. He hates Philip, he hates Mark Antony, he’s writing these things.” And when he’s killed, I was just like, “Fuck, yeah! Yeah! Finally, good!”

Jane:From Antony’s perspective, you’re like, of course, absolutely. Killing Cicero is a sensible thing to do, because he was against Caesar, he was against Antony, he is the foremost orator and politician in the…

Ann:If you can do this, if you’re in ancient Rome and you can, just do it.

Jane:Yeah. You need to get rid of him, you know, he is a thorn in your side. From Fulvia’s perspective—because we shouldn’t really forget that she’s involved in this too—Cicero is the man that attempted to get Clodius done for sacrilege. They had a neighbourly feud for years. Clodius got Cicero exiled, and then Cicero came back and, you know, caused loads of trouble for Clodius. He took Milo’s side, and then Milo and Clodius were mortal enemies. When Milo actually murdered Clodius and attempted to murder Fulvia’s son, Cicero defended him publicly and tried to get him away with it and tried to argue that Clodius was going to kill Milo. He also had given a very long speech a few years earlier about how Clodius was having sex with his sister, you know. Would you like it if people were saying that your husband was having sex with his sister? No, you would not. And so, all of that was kind of earlier on. And then with all the stuff with Cicero and Antony, like Cicero going around after the assassination of Caesar and saying, “Oh well, if I’d been involved in the planning, Antony would have been murdered too! You’re so stupid, Brutus, for not killing Antony.” It’s like, oh yeah, that’s a great idea, you know, go around telling people that you think that someone’s husband should be murdered. And then, when he’s driven out of Rome as a public enemy, starts threatening her kids as well.

I’m just like, if I’d been Fulvia in that situation, I would have been so thrilled when Cicero finally got hit, and I absolutely would have wanted to see the proof of it. You know, “Show me that head!” I really want to just bask in this feeling of like, schadenfreude. [laughs]

Ann:And that’s what, like, you know, listeners, the cover of the UK version of this book is—and there’s multiple artworks in history of, like, Fulvia with the head of Cicero, which now when I see those paintings, I’ll know what a satisfying moment that is and what that’s portraying, because the picture.

Jane:The paintings are probably not coming at it from that perspective. The paintings are like, “Oh, poor Cicero. He was martyred, just like Cato the Younger. He believed in his political cause, and he died for it.” It’s like, no! He was a complete… I don’t know if I can— I don’t know what words I can use on this.

Ann:You can use literally any words. He was an asshole. He was a monster. He was the worst.

Jane:Asshole, absolutely. He was. And he absolutely deserved it, and it’s very, very fitting. And yes, it’s very satisfying. So, frankly… [laughs] But when you look at those paintings and when the artist wants you to, I suppose, feel sadness and regret, and it’s always so poignant that such a great man came to such an end, look at them and think, “That’s what you get for being a complete dick,” frankly. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and if you threaten women’s husbands and children, this is what you get.

Ann:To me, like the painting, again, the one that’s on the cover of your book, it’s like, she’s kind of grinning. She just looks so happy and relieved, and there’s this dead head next to her, and I guess you’re supposed to be like, “Oh my god, what a monstrous woman.” I’m on her side. When I see this painting, I’m like, hell yeah.

Jane:It’s very, very Arya Stark and her list of names, I think.

Ann:Yes!

Jane:And we even do get, don’t we, in that episode of Game of Thrones where she basically serves up the Frey children to the head of the household. It’s very… Yes. So, this is what we want to see.

Ann:You’re on that side.

Jane:Yeah, we want vengeance.

Ann:That’s, to me, a very satisfying moment in her life and also in your book.

And then, the final act of her life, it’s like, Cleopatra enters. A new bombshell has entered the villa, [Jane laughs], it’s Cleopatra and Mark Antony. Well, I guess the other thing too, is Octavian is getting more power. I don’t know. You’ve mentioned it’s like, okay, and then there’s civil war again. I feel like it’s just been all civil war this whole time, but it’s, like, officially. So, it’s kind of like, are you Team Antony? Are you Team Octavian? And she is Antony’s wife, so she’s Team Antony. And then Octavian starts going after her a bit, right?

Jane:Yes. I mean, the thing you have to remember is it’s not just Team Antony and Team Octavian in that sense. I mean, it’s made out, a lot of the ancient sources; they sort of lead a lot of things, but the thing to remember is it’s not just individuals. There are a lot of other people behind those individuals. There are entire political factions behind those individuals and people who thought that, you know, Antony was the better bet; he was older, he was a successful politician, a successful general, he had all this experience. And Octavian is this kind of young psycho, basically, who’s just appeared out of nowhere, is riding the crest of the sort of nepo baby wave by insisting that everybody calls him Caesar, and trying to get Caesar’s soldiers and veterans on site so he can throw his weight around and become consul, like, 20 years too early and do all sorts of other illegal things.So, all the way down to, sort of, 31 and the Battle of Actium, Antony had hundreds of senators on his side, consuls and whatnot. He had many, many legions and things. So, it’s also not just about them, it’s about their families. This is another thing that we sort of bear in mind is that Antony has children; he has his two sons with Fulvia, he has step-sons (Fulvia’s son with Curio, Fulvia’s son with Clodius), so Antony has basically a dynasty.

This is a way to think about it that I don’t think gets enough attention and it’s something that I was very keen to emphasize towards the end of my book, is that if we look at this as entirely about Antony and Octavian, and even if we look at it as Antony and Cleopatra and Fulvia versus Cleopatra, I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. That’s a very sort of… I guess it’s a very, like, modern way to look at it. I mean, we have to bear in mind that Roman marriage was not like contemporary marriage, or at least not your normal average contemporary marriage. So, Roman men were generally not faithful husbands at all. They could be unfaithful with just about anyone as long as they kept it sort of quiet and dignified and everything else.

So, when Antony goes off to the East and he has an affair with Glaphyra, a courtesan, and then he has an affair with Cleopatra, a client queen, these women are, you know, they’re foreigners, they’re not Roman, they’re not even in Rome. He can’t marry them. They are not any kind of threat to Fulvia and her position as his wife, his Roman wife, the mother of his Roman heirs. The way that I think… By the ancient sources trying to basically dismiss Fulvia is, “Oh, she was just jealous. She caused all this trouble trying to get Antony to come back from Egypt.” He was going to come back from Egypt anyway, you know. So, ultimately, it wasn’t really… It wasn’t something that she necessarily needed to pay much attention to.

She dies in 40, and Antony lives for another 10 years and has another sort of 10 years of her relationship with Cleopatra and children and everything else. But if you think about it in the sort of political sense, so Fulvia is in Rome, she has Antony’s two sons. So, she has three very ancient and important Roman families that she has children as members of. She has Clodius’s political faction supporting her son and her other sons. And with Antony in the East as the senior triumvir, he was planning to go to war with Parthia and had he been successful, he would have had lots of conquests in the East. He has these three children with Cleopatra, and with the donations of Alexander in 34, it’s clear that there are plans, basically, to give these children kingdoms in the East. He has another daughter who has already been married from his previous marriage, prior to Fulvia, he has another daughter who has already been married into a near Eastern dynasty. So, he’s got his Roman children and stepchildren in Rome; his eldest stepson, Clodius, is already in his twenties, late teens, twenties at this time and so he’s on the political ladder. His second stepson, Curio, is getting there, he’s 18 in 30. And then he has his own two sons, Antyllus and Iullus.

So, he has got a huge amount of future power in Rome through these four boys and then Claudia, who is Fulvia’s daughter who can be married into another family. And then in the East, he has got his daughter, his three children with Cleopatra, who the plan is for them to all have these kingdoms. And so, with Antony in the East, paying attention to Parthia and other things, Fulvia would have had, had she been alive, absolute power in Rome, she would have had Antony’s political and military heirs. And under such circumstances, things would have, I think, been quite different between Antony and Octavian, because Octavian is able to make inroads in Rome and in Italy, and in the Western half of the empire because Antony’s not there. And Antony doesn’t have a proxy anymore because Fulvia dies in 40. His brother Lucius seems to go off to Spain in 40 and dies soon after. So, there’s nobody really there who can fill that gap that Fulvia and Lucius left. His sons and stepsons, they’re either with him in the East as well or they’re too young to be doing anything significant.

So, had Fulvia continued to live, I think the thirties would have been quite different, Octavian would not have gotten away with a lot of the stuff he got away with because Antony wouldn’t have married Octavia, so Octavian wouldn’t have been able to use every private detail of that marriage as political ammunition. He would not have been able to get Antony’s will out of the House of the Vestals (assuming that it was even the genuine will), because he wouldn’t have been able to get away with that. Fulvia would have been able to say, “Well, A, that’s not his will. I have his will. It says very different things.” Or B, she would have just been able to argue with him, or he wouldn’t have dared to do it in the first place.

So, I think something that’s quite interesting that when we’re dealing with this sense of, “History is written by the victors and everybody’s writing with the benefit of hindsight,” that is true, obviously. But at the same time, I think we can look at when particular historical figures die and we can think about would they have made things very different? So, when Cicero dies in 43, would things have really been different if he hadn’t have died at that point? What, realistically, could he have done? He was an old man, he was not a strong general or anything like that. All he could have been able to really do is write some more bitchy speeches and there’s only so long that those are really important when everybody’s tooling up and going to war. Whereas when Fulvia dies in 40, this, I think, has a really significant effect on what follows; her absence has a significant effect.

If she had been present, then everything would have been very different in the period from 40 down to 31 at the Battle of Actium and even potentially afterwards, if the battle had still gone the way it went with a nominal Octavian victory over Antony. Fulvia was still in Rome and could still have perhaps drawn on a lot of power and influence to continue to support Antony at that time. But she died and Antony lost his best asset. The more time he spent in the East and with Cleopatra, the more of a gap he left, and that enabled Octavian to step in and fill it with all sorts of stories. It may have been true; he’d been seduced by Cleopatra, been seduced by the East, he thought he was a king, blah, blah, blah. So, all of that may well have been true, but there was no one there to really counter it. You know, it takes two to three weeks to travel from Alexandria to Rome so if he was ever sending letters trying to argue, he had already sort of three weeks past whatever it was that Octavian had said. So, the debate had moved on and he couldn’t answer it.

Ann:So, I just want to let everybody know that your book, Fulvia, that is the title of the book, there is a subtitle as well, but just look for Fulvia by Jane Draycott. It’s now available in the UK and also North America. Congratulations.

Jane:Yes! Thank you.

Ann:So, people can get it all over the place. Are you going to be making appearances and stuff, or have you been? Do you have a website? How can people keep up with what you’re up to?

Jane:I have a website, I have an Instagram. I don’t tend to use other forms of social media these days for obvious reasons. [laughs] They’re not really the kind of places you want to be anymore. I am going to be doing a few events just this week, coming actually, and I’ll be doing at least one festival in the autumn. So, I am not yet at the stage where I’ll have, like, a massive book tour, like Natalie Haynes or Mary Beard, maybe one day. But I do periodically do events. I do podcasts and things like that. So, you can certainly find me online.

I mentioned this earlier, or I said I was going to mention it earlier, but if you read the book, you will be getting the story that you won’t necessarily get anywhere else, because Fulvia is not featured in TV and film retellings of the late Republic and the early Empire. She is completely excised from them because they tend to focus on Antony’s relationship with Cleopatra, and she complicates things because she is yet another sort of powerful, strong female character. I think there is this sense that, “Well, if we have her in, it will take people’s attention away from Cleopatra. We want to get to Cleopatra, so we don’t need her.” And then, when you have this sort of dichotomy between Octavia, who is the good Roman matron and Cleopatra, who is the bad Egyptian whore, Fulvia complicates that because she is technically a good Roman matron; she was a good wife, she was a good mother, she worked hard to maintain her family’s wealth and power and property and everything else. So, the way that the story is usually told with the good versus the bad, and the Madonna versus the whore, and Rome versus Egypt and stuff, there isn’t space for Fulvia because she complicates things. We all know that in our dramatizations of historical periods, they don’t want loads of women. In fact, not even just dramatizations of historical periods, it’s that whole Smurfette situation where you have one woman, one token female character with, like, 10 guys, but there’s one woman, because any more than that and it’s, “Oh, that’s too many. Oh no, too many women.”

Ann:Well, and especially if there’s women and they’re all strong, powerful women, it’s like, well, they cannot be strong, powerful women. One of them can be, the other ones can just be sort of like, in contrast, but if you have Fulvia and Cleopatra, yeah, it’s just like, well, that’s confusing.

Jane:How can you have nuance? [Ann laughs] Because the way that women tend to be strong in TV and film, they tend to be macho. You make them tough and macho as if that’s the only kind of strength that a woman can possess. And so, how do you provide nuance and multiple female characters with multiple different kinds of strength and power? I think that’s something that screenwriters and directors seem to really struggle with. So yeah, we don’t see Fulvia in these stories. So, this should be a relatively new and fresh take on a story that people are familiar with, you know, Caesar, the assassination of Caesar, et cetera, et cetera. And so, this is a whole new angle on it that you wouldn’t necessarily have approached it from before. So, you know, you think you know this period. You think you know Roman history, the Roman Republic, et cetera. Maybe you don’t know all of it.

Ann:Well, and that’s part of what I appreciate about the book as well. It’s sort of this kind of like, you know, to have Marc Antony and Octavian is kind of like, background supporting characters, where it’s like, but what’s Fulvia doing? Yeah. So, it’s just kind of like turning the camera around to be like, “Well, that’s all happening.” It’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. It’s like, “Well, that’s all happening there, but here’s what she was up to, and that actually connects directly to what the story is that you know,” and just in ways.

Jane:Absolutely.

Ann:Yeah. It’s filling in the gaps.

Jane:Because even ultimately, if what you care about is Antony and Octavian, then Fulvia’s story enriches your understanding of Antony and Octavian, especially because she is part of their rivalry. There is a period where Octavian is married to her daughter, Claudia, for sort of diplomatic reasons, and they have their own sort of hostile mother-in-law, son-in-law relationship. And Octavian accuses her of basically trying to get him into bed and, you know, trying to… Sort of chasing him around, desperate for sex. And the way that I kind of read the poetry he writes about her, I’m sort of like, “You wish!” [Ann laughs] This is a woman who A, was married to Antony, who’s like, the most virile Roman to ever exist in this period. And B, you know, one of the things he said is, “Oh, you’re so old. I have no interest in you.” You’re like, she’s just had a baby, so she’s not old. She’s just like, in her late thirties. She’s still fertile; she’s still in her childbearing prime. Well, most women who have literally just had a baby are not trying to…

Ann:Run around seducing people.

Jane:Seducing their, sort of, grotty little son-in-law. So, the fact that he kind of brings this element into their rather fraught mother-in-law, son-in-law relationship, and then there is that—  We haven’t even really talked about the Perusine War and the propaganda surrounding that whole situation. But yeah, they have a relationship of their own. It’s not just Octavian versus Antony; ot is Octavian versus Fulvia. And looking at that, and the dynamic, and the way that that plays out, it’s another sort of mark in the anti-Octavian column, to be perfectly honest, because it shows him as a really sort of horrible misogynist, and really just, kind of… Another way in which he doesn’t stand up very nicely compared to Antony, because you know, Antony doesn’t necessarily have this really vile attitude towards women that Octavian happily publicly displays. Anyway… [laughs]

Ann:I mean, this is where I’m happy that we could have this conversation, so we can give everybody, sort of, who is Fulvia, so people now know that. And then your book has so much nuance and so much more description of all of these dramatic events.

Jane:So much detail. I really try… I look for every single bit of, like, colour and world-building stuff that I can find, you know, to try and support the literature and the archaeology and everything else. So, I would like to think that people will come away from it, they will know the broad sort of history better, and also have lots of little details like, you know, a really good place in central Rome to buy smoked cheese. [laughs]

Ann:You’re getting all your travel tips for ancient Rome. [both laugh] But it’s such a good book. It’s so readable, it’s so fun. And thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Jane:Thank you for having me.

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So, I do really strongly recommend this book. You know, I have authors on here a lot, and I’m always being like, “Yeah, you should listen to those books!” And I always mean it. Like, when I have an author on the show, it’s because I read the book and I vibed with it and I liked it. I don’t just invite anybody on this podcast. But this book is so fun. Man, like, it starts off with the Fulvia’s vengeance mob-instigating funeral riot. And I was just like, oh, I like this book. I like this woman. It’s such a fun story, like fun, asterisks, but it’s fun in the way that, like, a soap opera is fun, or a really dramatic, like, Love Island or something. It’s just the twists and turns. So, Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome is available in North America, and also in the UK and other Commonwealth territories, I assume in Ireland as well.

And we’re talking about ancient Rome, so I have to bring up her brand partner, Common Era Jewelry, because that’s her whole vibe. So, Common Era Jewelry is a company I connected with because… [chuckles] Well, frankly, because their Instagram ads were being shared to a bunch of listeners of this podcast who shared it with me who were like, “Ann, I think you would like this jewelry.” And I was like, “I do. And in fact, I want to work with them.” So, Torie, is… It’s not a one-woman show, but she runs the whole company, even as she’s at home, like, breastfeeding her newborn child. Congratulations again on your baby, Torie. But anyway, so she does the designs herself, and the whole vibe of the company is because she is really into the classical world, just like Jane Draycott is. That’s her passion. So, Common Era Jewelry makes designs based on either jewelry that’s been discovered from ancient Roman times, ancient Egyptian times, or just jewelry inspired by people who lived back then. This is a small woman-owned business, which I think is important to note, and they have several gorgeous pieces inspired by Rome and the women of ancient Rome.

There’s not one of Fulvia; she’s not famous enough yet to make it there, but there is a beautiful pendant inspired by last week’s topic person, Livia, as well as a person we’ve talked about on this podcast before, Agrippina the Younger. And both Livia and Agrippina the Younger, they were sort of, like, one generation after Fulvia. Like if Fulvia was the elder millennial, Livia is like the younger millennial, and Agrippina the Younger is like the Gen Z in this situation. They were all, like, living close to each other, but not exactly the same generation. And for sure, Livia and Agrippina the Younger saw what Fulvia was able to do and clearly took some inspiration from what she was able to accomplish. So, you can get those pieces from Common Era, Livia and Agrippina the Younger.

Common Era also brings Roman vibes to pieces like they have two pieces that are inspired by artwork that was found in Pompeii, which, like, it’s a dream of mine to go visit Pompeii one day. Pompeii was an ancient Roman city, and they excavated so much stuff, and you’re able to see, like, the murals and the frescoes and the artwork that people had just on the walls of their buildings. One of those things was an image of Leda and the Swan, which is from a very sexy myth about a God who came down and took the form of a Swan and had sex with a lady. People throughout history have liked to reinterpret that in burlesque and various things. But anyway, Leda and the Swan, the pendant, is inspired by specifically the portrayal of the story in Pompeii in ancient Roman times.

Also, another thing that was uncovered, another piece of artwork, or sort of like a puzzle, that was discovered during the excavations of Pompeii, the ancient Roman city, is the Magic Sator Square, which is a word puzzle. I love that. I love the vibe that people in ancient Roman times were doing word puzzles. I feel like Fulvia would have been really good at Wordle and things. Anyway, this is what they had at the time, the Magic Sator Square. So, this was discovered, and then I love that Torie took this and turned it into beautiful jewelry. So, you can get that as a ring or also as a pendant. There’s also a design from Common Era featuring the Vestal Virgins, who are kind of, other than Fulvia, the most powerful women in ancient Rome. And it’s based on an ancient Roman coin that had the Vestal Virgins on it.

These pieces are available in solid gold, as well as a more affordable gold vermeil. And Vulgar History listeners can always get 15% off all items from Common Era by going to CommonEra.com/Vulgar or using code ‘VULGAR’ at checkout. That’s CommonEra.com/Vulgar or use code ‘VULGAR’ at checkout.

Next week on the podcast, we’re getting back into the 18th century of it all. We’re getting back into the revolutionary vibes, like, we’re powering through to get to our ultimate destination this season, which will be a discussion of Queen Marie Antoinette. This is another reason I wanted to talk about the ancient Roman stuff because Marie Antoinette was… Some of the people who hated her. Some of the haters were comparing her to some women from ancient Roman times, negatively. But I would say that these women from ancient Roman times, if anyone compared me to Fulvia, I’d be like, “Thank you. Thank you.” Anyway, we’re powering through. We’re going to get to Marie Antoinette, not next week, but soon. Next week, we’re going to be talking about somebody else from the revolutionary era, and I hope you join me then. Until then, my friends, keep your pants on and your tits out.

Vulgar History is researched, scripted, and hosted by Ann Foster, that’s me! Editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. Transcripts of this podcast are available at VulgarHistory.com by Aveline Malek. You can get early, ad-free episodes of Vulgar History by becoming a paid member of our Patreon for as low as one dollar a month at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWwriter. Vulgar History merchandise is available at VulgarHistory.com/Store for Americans and for everyone else at VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. Follow us on social media @VulgarHistoryPod and get in touch with me via email at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com.

References:

Buy Jane’s book Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All The Rules in Ancient Rome (affiliate link)

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Support NWIRP (the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project)

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Get 15% off all the gorgeous jewellery and accessories at common.era.com/vulgar or go to commonera.com and use code VULGAR at checkout

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