A woman scorned

British academic sets the record straight on an ancient Roman aristocrat, while a NZ writer reimagines her life.

- ANNE ELSE

In a forthright introduction to her excellent biography of Fulvia, British classicist Jane Draycott points out that “we have more literary, documentary and archaeological evidence” for her than for “almost any other Roman woman during the Late Republic”. These were the chaotic decades leading up to Octavian being installed as Emperor Augustus in 27 BCE.

Draycott writes that much of the evidence for Fulvia is negative in the extreme. “Nearly all of the authors writing during her life or immediately after her death were enormously hostile towards her ... Later authors took those portrayals and doubled down on them, adding spicy details that may be true or may simply be exaggerated falsehoods, designed to infuriate as well as titillate.”

The cover shows a shocking scene imagined by a 19th-century Italian painter. That’s not a lover in bed with Fulvia – it’s the severed head of her and her husband Mark Antony’s sworn enemy, the proscribed orator Cicero, with her hairpins piercing his tongue. She is recorded as having done this (though definitely not in her bed) after his assassination, when his hands and head were cut off and publicly displayed in Rome. His ceaseless, lurid attacks had included calling her “a thoroughly rapacious female” and “a woman as cruel as she is greedy”.

Many others, particularly Octavian, joined in. She was “repeatedly publicly pilloried in front of the entire Roman Senate and wider Roman society for daring to step outside the confines of the domestic sphere”. This “deliberate and systematic destruction of her reputation ensured that the allegations made against her have survived for two millennia, while most attempts at defence have faded from view”.