Slut Shaming in Ancient Rome

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Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome's Imperial Women by Joan Smith (William Collins £22, 292 pp)



Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac  is available now from the Mail Bookshop

Libertines always receive hearty cheers, e.g. Jilly Cooper's heroes with their non-stop rogering.

Women who enjoy sex, however, are immediately dubbed sluts, slags, whores, and nymphos - so they must be suppressed, controlled or otherwise denied a free, independent existence.

It was ever thus. Joan Smith, in this powerful, angry, examination of the lives and fates of Roman ladies, in the period 27 BC to 68 AD, quotes an ancient philosopher as saying: ‘A sexually active single woman was no different from a prostitute.'

And a married woman, Smith implies, was pretty much no better than a slave.

Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac tells us that any intelligent female who'd dare look a man in the eye and speak without hesitation was slapped down as ‘wilful, ambitious, and sexually incontinent' - polluted, perhaps, ‘by every type of vice'.

Julia, daughter of the Roman general Agrippa, was ‘notorious for the raciness of her lifestyle and her taste in dwarves,' or so said the reports. She sounds like a saucy Snow White.

A woman who stood up to male authority was ‘deserving of everything that happened to her' - and Smith's book is a terrifying catalogue of false accusations of infidelity, arrest, exile, starvation, forced suicide, savage beatings, stabbings and the confession to non-existent plots under torture.

Smith has examined the original sources - Tacitus, Juvenal, Suetonius, Cicero, and Seneca. She has re-translated the Latin and picks out the obvious fabrication and sex-shaming embellishments. That's to say, tall tales of an empress who ‘went down into the forum at night and had sex with every barman and gladiator'.

It is also implausible that another empress exhausted 25 partners in one night. Ask any woman about this, says Smith, ‘she will look horrified, imagining the bruises, abrasions . . .'

Smith finds heaps of pornographic inventions, such as references to high-born daughters and mothers sneered at for possessing an ‘excessive sexual desire' and hence must have worked in brothels. Livia, wife of Augustus, was a wicked witch and cold-blooded poisoner into the bargain. Messalina, third wife of the Emperor Claudius, was transformed by over-imaginative chroniclers into ‘a sexual spectre'.




Fact Checking: Unlike their portrayal in I, Claudius, women weren't erotic manipulators but victims, subjected to child marriage and serial rape (pictured Sian Phillips as Livia in I, Claudius)

All these falsifications found their way into I, Claudius, which earned Robert Graves £350,000 in today's money, when the novel was published in 1934. Those of a certain vintage will recall the 1976 BBC series in which Brian Blessed mugged and raged like a Mafia don, Sian Phillips schemed and John Hurt minced.

Smith points out that if the historical Claudius was not at all like genial Derek Jacobi, but was more of a ‘sex-obsessed glutton who often drank himself senseless,' then Graves' book and the television adaptation's depiction of the women characters were equally wide of the mark.

For they weren't erotic manipulators but victims, subjected to child marriage and serial rape.

‘Girls were taught to satisfy the appetites of older men from a cruelly young age' - 12 or 13. They were often mothers at 15 or 16. Livilla, the sister of Claudius, for example, was married at 12, widowed at 16, and compelled to re-marry a few months later.

What struck me about this vigorously argued, disquieting book is there is never any sign of love or affection. Nobody behaves like Richard Burton's Antony or Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra, led by passion.

Marriages are arranged for political expediency, tribal bonds, alliances between factions and families. Women's consent was never considered. By Smith's account, the Ancient World was fully characterised by ‘violence against women,' and no contemporary chronicler, historian, or subsequent commentator has considered the personal cost of what it must have been to be continuously degraded, forced into premature sexual relationships.

As in the lavish X-rated 1970s film Caligula, porno starring Malcolm McDowell, Peter O'Toole and Helen Mirren, the emperors are monsters of paranoia, living in ‘fear of a coup or an assassination', and quick to kill relatives, wives, children, grandchildren - anyone who might become a threat. 

Newborn babies didn't count as fully human, nor did toddlers. The 18-month-old daughter of Caligula's fourth wife, Caesonia, had her brains dashed out against a wall. Caesonia was hacked to pieces.




Sexualised: Helen Mirren as Caesonia in Caligula, 1979

Emperor Nero, ‘a sexually perverse serial killer', was implicated in the murder of five women: his aunt, two wives, a sister-in-law and his mother - he booby-trapped her boat and fixed her ceiling so it would fall in.

Caligula raped his sisters and, if he took a fancy to a senator's wife, he'd take her immediately into the bedroom, have his way, and compel the couple to divorce.

Augustus and Tiberius were as bad. Tiberius on Capri lived a life of ‘sex, voyeurism and heavy drinking'. He'd whisper to a partner: ‘This beautiful neck will be severed as soon as I give the order.'

The only problem with Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac - apart from the confusing nomenclature: if it wasn't a Julia it's a Livia or an Agrippina - is the title, which was no doubt imposed by an excitable publisher, hoping to capture the Carry On Cleo market.

The actual subject is much darker: the murder of women ‘because they are women'.

Not that being a chap brought any immunity. We hear about Octavian in a bad mood gouging someone's eyes out and breaking the legs of his secretary.

Smith frequently makes parallels with the present day - if domestic abuse persists, it is because human nature does not change, or improve.

Rome's imperial women, for instance, might have been reincarnated as Princess Diana, when she was ‘subject to endless speculation and the age-old assumption that an attractive single woman must be having sex with somebody'.

Our laws against physical assault and controlling behaviour are poorly enforced, says Smith.

Chillingly, Hollywood icons, sex-trafficking billionaires and shameless politicians, with their vast egos, are bringing back the decadence of Ancient Rome.