What Everyone Gets Wrong About Women in Ancient Rome

When you imagine life in ancient Rome, do you ever picture women working as doctors or running their own businesses?

If not, then historian, author, and podcaster Emma Southon has some unexpected, definitely delightful stories to tell you about how women actually lived in ancient times.

In her most recent book, A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women: How Women Transformed the Empire, she shares a side of Roman history you may not have learned in school. In her podcast History Is Sexy she answers the history questions you probably don’t have time to research yourself. And on March 8, 2024, otherwise known as International Women’s Day, she’ll present an online talk, “A Rome of One’s Own: Putting Women back into Roman History,” for those interested in learning the stories of Roman women often excluded from history.

From her home in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Southon recently provided a glimpse into the realities of life as a woman in ancient Rome, from career prospects to shockingly dramatic hairstyles (think Triceratops).

You say on your website, “I just truly love and hate the Romans.” Why such strong feelings?

I love and hate them for the same reason: they’re horrible, but they don’t think they’re horrible. They genuinely believe themselves to be the best of all people. In Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, there’s a part when he’s describing all the races that he knows of in the world, and he says that the most blessed in terms of virtue are the Romans, because they’ve perfected everything. He’s writing this by dictating to an enslaved person. And everything he has ever “read” has been read aloud to him by an enslaved person while Pliny was doing something else.

So automatically, they’re the least virtuous people, and underneath their white togas and glorious rhetoric there is just cruelty and nastiness on every level. But they have such a deluded idea of how good they are, and they believe they conquered half the world because they are so glorious. That tension between the image they have of themselves, and that so many people have, and what they actually are is so fascinating and will never get old to me.

What’s the biggest misconception people have about women’s lives in ancient Rome?

The main misconception is that women in the Roman Empire were universally, horribly oppressed. Or that they were locked inside and not allowed any access to life outside of the kitchen, or some 1950s imagined version of what Roman femininity is. This massively homogenizes the Roman female experience by basically making it into an elite Roman female experience. Because as soon as you say, “All women just stayed in the kitchen,” you’re only talking about women who could afford to stay in the kitchen. You’re automatically erasing all the women who worked, and all the enslaved women. You’re also erasing all the very real freedoms that free Roman women had. They were disenfranchised legally, but for a large amount of time they could do a surprising amount of what they wanted, and they could be enormously rich or enormously poor.

How would you describe the average Roman woman’s ability to be part of society?

Very free, to be honest, other than politics. Women couldn’t go into politics or law, and they couldn’t command armies. Because politics and war are the spheres through which we typically see history, women have been totally excluded. But when you start looking at social history, religion, business, commerce, and really any other area, then women were out and about very happily doing all kinds of things. Unlike ancient Greek women, they were going to dinners, to the theater, to parties, they could do a lot with their own property. You had women in virtually every sphere of professionalism except the army and law.

When I first started researching women, the amount of relative freedom they had was surprising, because so much of what you learn about them is that they were legally not allowed to do a bunch of things considered important. I had to step outside those old-fashioned lenses of what history is. And then I was like, “Hang on.” There’s a woman doctor who is being honored by her town for being such a great doctor. And there’s a woman over here who built an entire building in the Forum of Pompeii and then put up a statue of herself and had her name carved across the top of the structure because she has so much money and she can. You just see women all over the place, doing everything and being very visible and engaged in their communities in quite powerful ways.

How possible was social mobility at that time? Could women improve their social standing, or fall?

One of the nice things about the Roman Empire is that there was a fair amount of social mobility. The most common method was to be enslaved and then freed, largely because there were so many enslaved people, and the enslaved population was constantly being replenished because of war. Romans would free people in their wills or as a present. So you have an entire class of what were called freed people who were once enslaved but now had some citizenship rights. That was a big step up—you were still under an obligation to your former owner, but it was significantly better than what it had been. Once you were there, you could marry up as well, because freed people could marry free people.

It could go the other way too. You could become enslaved or lose your status by not behaving properly. Romans were very hierarchical, and they made their hierarchy really visible. You could only wear certain clothing if you were of a certain rank; for example, you could only wear gold rings if you were of the equestrian rank [the second-highest social rank in Rome, below senator] and above. There were all these really obvious status symbols that you could have, and you could earn the right to wear them but also lose those rights too.

What beauty standards were women expected to adhere to at that time?

Your classically beautiful Roman women had pale skin, because if you were tanned, then you worked outside and couldn’t be in the shade or spend time indoors. About 20 years ago, a 2,000-year-old pot of cream in a watertight tin was found in London. The cream inside was still intact and had finger marks in it. Scientists were able to analyze the chemical makeup and found it was used to make skin paler. Romans also liked very dark eyes, and they loved a big, bushy eyebrow.

Fashion tended to focus on hair more than clothing, because clothing was fairly simple most of the time. Hair fashions changed an awful lot, and they’re really fun to look at, because you occasionally find these phases of intensely huge hair that was clearly done with hairpieces, because no one could possibly do that with regular hair. There was a trend during the Flavian period where hair just went up almost like a big fan around the head, and then there was nothing at the back. It looks like something out of Jurassic Park. Hair was where you could really show off how cutting-edge you were, and then presumably people were copying that down the ladder and putting in a small hairpiece or trying to just get a bit of volume.

Do you feel like art from ancient Rome represents women well? Or is there anything art tends to miss about women’s experiences?

You never see pregnant women. Sometimes on tombstones there is a depiction of what the person did, so a midwife’s tombstone will show a woman giving birth. But you never see pregnant women. You’ll see women with their children or husband, but never in any stage in between, which I find really fascinating because that feels like a big part of female life.

You are also seeing idealization almost all the time, even during the phases of Roman art where they claim they’re going for realism. There are periods where people start to look really old in their portraiture on purpose, and they’re very clearly putting in wrinkles and trying to look distinguished. But that almost never applies much to women. Even the empresses never really aged. Livia lived until she was 86 and looks 22 in all her portraits. On the walls, you’re always seeing younger women who are of a certain body type, which is slightly different from our modern “ideal” body type. It’s not that toned, skinny look that is more popular these days. It’s a bit softer, I suppose. But art is still showing an ideal sexy lady 99.9 percent of the time.

Do you have any favorite women of ancient Rome?

I do. I have an undying love for Agrippina the Younger. She was a Roman empress from 49 to 54 CE, sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. She is the perfect kind of horrible Roman woman who you’d never want to invite for dinner. She’s so arrogant and so utterly convinced of her own borderline divinity and supremacy over everybody. She just doesn’t seem to think that anything that applies to everybody else applies to her. She decides, “I’ll just be the empress,” and it basically takes murdering her to make her stop. Nero tries to kill her three times. One time he’s betrayed because her household likes her too much—he tries to get the army in Rome to kill her, and they say they won’t do it. He tries to poison her, but it turns out she takes antidotes. He tries to drown her by ramming a boat that she’s in, and it turns out she can swim really well. Eventually he has to give up and just stab her.