Latest / The Partial Historians / Fulvia with Dr Jane Draycott
Transcript
- Dr Rad 0:00 Welcome to a special episode of the partial historians today. We are joined by Dr Jane Draycott, who is a historian and archeologist and currently Lecturer in ancient history at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests are extensive and include displays of extraordinary bodies in the ancient world, the depiction of the ancient world in computer games and domestic medical practice in ancient Rome. In 2023 Dr Draycott published Prosthetics and Assistive Technology in Ancient Greece and Rome with Cambridge University Press. Now 2022 was a huge year for Dr Draycott in terms of publications. First, there was a co edited collection, Bodies of Evidence, Ancient anatomical Votives, Past, Present and Future with Routledge Then, there was a co edited volume, Women in Classical Video Games with Bloomsbury. Third, there was an edited volume, Women in Historical and Archeological Video Games with De Gruyter and fourth (and we're already tired thinking about this much coming out all in one year) the biography Cleopatra's Daughter, Egyptian princess, Roman Princess, African Queen Bloomsbury, which was all about Cleopatra Selene. So we are completely thrilled to be sitting down with Jane today to discuss her latest historical biography, Fulvia, the Woman who Broke all the Rules in Ancient Rome, which has been published with Atlantic books, Fulvia is one of the most fascinating women of the late Roman republic, very deserving of having a full length treatment. So we're excited to get into the details, because she is rudely often overlooked for those. Julio Claudian hussies. Dr G 2:00 hello and welcome to a brand new special episode of the partial historians. I am Dr G Dr Rad 2:08 and I am Dr rad, Dr G 2:10 and we are thrilled today to be sitting down with Jane Draycott to discuss her latest historical biography, fauvia, the woman who broke all the rules in ancient Rome. So Fulvia is one of the most fascinating women of the late Roman republic, so very deserving of having a full length treatment such as this one. And so we are very excited to get into all of the details. Welcome, Jane. Well, Jane Draycott 2:42 hello. Thank you for having me. It Dr G 2:45 is an absolute pleasure. It is a bit of a fan girl moment for me, because I love your work. And before we get too far into the nitty gritty details of Fulvia's life, I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about what drew you to the study of Fulvia and what inspired you to write a biography about her different Jane Draycott 3:07 ways I could try and answer this question, and I think all of them would be true in sort of some small measure. I mean, the first is that I suppose, as someone who has studied the Roman Republic and the early Roman imperial period for probably what, how do I do this about aging myself? And I've been teaching it for a long time as well. I'm a, sort of been broadly aware period, broadly aware of the historical characters in it. And to be honest, it's never really been that interesting to me, because I'm more of a social historian. I'm not a political historian. I also really don't find men that interesting. Sorry, male listeners, also Dr G 3:53 ancient Rome, Jane Draycott 3:55 yeah. So, so people, people like Cicero and Caesar. I'm just like and politics the same. I don't really care about, you know, senatorial debates and that kind of stuff. I'm much more at the sort of from below sort of situation, you know, like, yes, okay, you've got the great men in Senate who are making all decisions. But what does that actually mean in day to day life for everybody else? And so I've never really paid a huge amount of attention to that sort of history. But when I wrote my first popular history book, Cleopatra's daughter, and I focused on Cleopatra Selene And as part of that, I looked at Cleopatra and Antony and their relationship, and how Cleopatra Selene came to be, literally, I became sort of aware that there was a lot of other interesting stuff happening at that time. I mean, I teach a course on Cleopatra. I never really wanted to be someone who worked on or someone who people thought worked on Cleopatra, because it just seemed to be so obvious. You know, you're sort of like, oh. You're a woman, you're a historian. Of course, you're interested in Cleopatra because she's, like, literally, the only you know, ancient woman who ever did anything interesting. And so you sort of, yeah, that's exactly, that's the reason. That is the that's the reason why. But for me, because I worked on Greco Roman Egypt. That was my PhD, was on, you can't really avoid Cleopatra. You can't really avoid the sort of the end of Ptolemaic Egypt and the start of Rome in Egypt and everything that goes along with that. And if you work on sort of the late Republic, the Augustan Principate, you also can't really ignore Antony and Octavian and the Second Triumvirate and that sort of thing. And so I guess I was looking for ways that I could approach this period from a different angle, an angle that I found personally interesting. Because I don't, as I said, I don't find men interesting. I certainly don't find like male rivalry, you know, toxic masculinity, particularly interesting, either. And so cleopatraini was a way in, because she sort of breached Egypt and Rome and North Africa in the end. And there was a sort of a brief period where I touched on Fulvia, because, of course, Antony was married to Fulvia at the time that he met Cleopatra, and it did play into the perusing war and the sort of the the way that the the initial enmity between Antony and Octavian changed into this kind of rather fake, you know, bromance with with the Pact of Brundusium and the marriage of of Antony to Octavius sister' Octavia. And so when I was looking for something to do for my next topic. And I did want to work on something female related, simply because I find, I find women interesting. I think that there, there is not so much about women, really, Roman women. I mean, if you go into the sort of the bookshop and you look at the shelves of the ancient history section, there is a lot of stuff about politicians like Caesar, military campaigns, about various different wars, and for women, you know, there are some things about the the judicallian empresses and stuff like that. But, and there's loads about Cleopatra, inevitably, there's a whole shelf of, there's Tutankhamun and Cleopatra, that is the the Egypt section. Dr G 7:25 That's all you get people that's all of Egypt, Unknown Speaker 7:29 3000 years apart. But sure, whatever, you know. And so basically, I was sort of thinking about, Okay, well, what, what would be the logical thing to do here? And my agent and my editor, they actually said, Well, you know, what about this phobia character? She sounds quite interesting. And so I sort of thought right then, and I started, I started looking a little bit more because I came into it from, you know, she was married to Anthony, and she was the victim of a lot of sort of hostile invective. But when I read more about her, I was like, Oh, she actually, Anthony is the very end of her very interesting life. You know, he is her last husband. He is, he's one small part of a much longer and more interesting life. Because that's, that's the other thing as well. It's that ancient history is one of those funny things where people sort of pop up and suddenly, you know they're 30 years old, or 40 years old, or whatever else, but you've never heard of them before because the ancient historiography just didn't think they were interesting. That ancient writers don't care about children. They don't care about people's early lives. They they only really care about once. Once they're sort of adults and they are doing military or whatever sorts of things. And so I found that she was actually very interesting. She was very active. She there was a lot that could potentially be said about her, and it was also what she represents, as well as someone who is very literally on the point where the Republic dies and the Empire was born, and she's right there. And she is, as I argue in the book towards the end, she is actually, I think we could see her as one of those individuals in history where there really is this kind of point where things could have gone very different ways. And she was right there, and she was involved in that, if she, if she hadn't died, when she had died, and and things might have turned out quite differently. And obviously various people, I guess you could say all people are important, and all people have, you know, an effect, a ripple effect, what we do. But some people are a bit more important and a bit more ripple creating than others. And I think Fulvia was one of those people, and because she is a woman in this time, she's not had as much attention as if she had been a man in the same situation. So think about Antony, for example, and how much attention he has got. I mean, even he has fallen victim to. Of being Caesar's sidekick, you know, and Octavians, sort of, you know, the loser of the of the battle between them, and Cleopatra sidekick, too. Whereas thing Antony and his own right is very interesting. There is a lot that could be said, and it hasn't been said because it's been sort of covered over by other looking at other people or other events. And so I think we'll, we can talk a little bit later, I suppose, about why Fulvia isn't more widely known. I mean, people who study ancient history know about her because she's, she's one of the women of the late Republic. You know, along with Servilia and Caesar's daughter, Julia and Cicero's wife and daughter, that they we know who they were, and we know that they were important to these people in this period, but she hasn't had that, that sort of very lavish popular history, TV, film, etc, treatment at all. So I think a lot of people don't necessarily know her, but they know the period, and so doing a book about her allows them to approach the period in a different way, and see it from a different perspective, someone who's not a consul or a general or a senator, but who is on the periphery of all of those things. Dr Rad 11:11 I know it is crazy that there hasn't been a movie about Fulvia when you actually think about how action packed her life seems to Jane Draycott 11:20 be. It is. It is interesting. I mean, when you, when you think about the way that this period tends to show up on film, it's pretty much always about Caesar. It's, it's, it's following Caesar through his career and then to his assassination. And if it goes beyond that, the it then pivots to Cleopatra, when you, when you when you think of it like that, and the way that TV shows and films are sort of created primarily in a sort of by by by male creatives, the big the big budget ones that are seen as sort of epic. It's primarily male directors, male writers, and it's about men, male, male actors playing these male characters. And they don't really have a lot of women in them, you know, if they have women, it is as the sort of the the love interest. And so if you've got, you've already got Cleopatra and she, she is sort of, literally every single sort of a woman you could possibly want rolled into one that you can put on film. And then as a foil, you've got Octavia, who is you the good girl, the lovely, kind, gentle, caring, Roman wife, Roman mother. And there's no room for Fulvia there, because you've already got, you know, the ball buster and and the sort of the the vamp and the sort of the the kind of aggressive, power hungry, money hungry, whatever, woman in the form of Cleopatra. And so you can't, you know, have two of those. I mean, this is why I think if there was a story of Mark Antony's life and you, you would have to include Fulvia. And I think you could sufficient, if you want, if you cared to, you could differentiate full beer and Cleopatra very much. But in, in in TV and films, it's like, well, another woman, another female character, you know, too confusing. Too many women here already. They're just Dr G 13:17 taking up too much space. Well, Dr Rad 13:20 let's think a little bit about this, because obviously one of the issues for a woman in ancient Rome, as opposed to someone like Cleopatra in ancient Egypt, in that they couldn't really hold anything officially, in terms of political office. So I'm going to really embarrass you and quote you to yourself, a woman could not hold any sort of political or military office herself, yet she might exert influence upon those who could. So let's talk a little bit about a different husband of Fulvia. How do we see this particular idea upheld when it comes to thinking about Fulvia's first marriage to Clodius Pulcher, a person who probably also deserves his own movie because of the controversy he excited in his lifetime. And yet, where is it Hollywood? Where is it? You Jane Draycott 14:07 know, it's funny. Where you said you were going to quote my words back to me. I have the brain of a bird, so as soon as I finish something, I feel about Dr Rad 14:16 it. I'm glad I'm not alone in that. So I was like, Jane Draycott 14:19 it doesn't embarrass me, because I'm like, Oh yeah, that's good. Those are good words. Yes, I find I thank Clodius quite interesting, and for much the same reasons, actually, as several other people at this period, in that we do not we do not know what he looked like. We have no portrait of him. We do not have any thing from his perspective or anything else. Everything about him is is mediated through primarily Cicero, who obviously hated his guts and and sort of other people as well, who who found him rather problematic because of his his sort of when it comes to Fulvia's marriage to him. I mean, the thing. We don't really know very much about that at all. We know that happened because she is obviously involved in the sort of events surrounding Clodius' death and the funeral and the riot and the trial of Milo. So that is where we hear about Fulvia for the very first time. So we don't know when she was born, and we don't know really much about her, her childhood. We can, we can sort of venture to reconstruct based on knowledge of who her parents were and what their situation was. And you know that she had two children with with Clodius, so she's, you know, a relatively, relatively young as Roman girls women were when they first married to marry him, and she has this marriage, and these children, and what we what we know about their marriage is based on what Cicero tells us when he's trying to blacken Clodius' reputation, he tries to argue, in the ultimate act of victim blaming the man that got, you know, brutally murdered in the street and then run over by their horses and carriages and things like that. But it was all his own fault, because he actually, he was planning to murder Milo himself, but he severely, you know, underestimated how large Milo's entourage was and how many, you know, gladiators with with lethal weapons would happen to be in it at that point in time. And so the thing that Cicero tried, that the smoking gun for Cicero is, is that clearly close was up to no good, because usually Fulvia went everywhere with him, and on that particular day she was not there. And why was she not there? This is suspicious. And so the interesting thing about that is, is like, Well, I mean, you could say a lot about Cicero's attitude to women, including his own wives, but the idea that it's weird for a Roman man to want to spend time with his wife. Dr Rad 14:20 Gives me goosebumps just thinking about it. Dr G 16:58 What is Roman masculinity? Jane Draycott 17:00 is, I think this is interesting for us to think about from from Fulvia's introduction to politics. I mean, we know that her own father was not really a political animal. He had a speech impairment, and so that might have been part of it. He just didn't. He was just rich and that, well, that was fine, not everybody. I mean, this is the other thing about the Roman Republic. We get this sense, everybody's constantly trying to be the Consul General. And actually, a lot of guys were just like, You know what? I'm going to enjoy traveling around the ancient Mediterranean. Enjoy my villas. I'm going to enjoy, you know, my my my philosophical works, etc. But her stepfather, her mother, her parents divorced, and her mother remarried someone who became a consul, and was was at this very point in the in the sort of late 60s. So she certainly had sort of access to politics, you know, with her, with her stepfather, the Consul, and it was through him, it's, it's thought that her marriage to Clodius was arranged because the pair of them were connected. And so I think that there's something there that we can think about, that she, her marriage gives her sort of portray in into Roman politics and Roman populist politics. I mean, she, her three husbands, are all we could say populist politicians. They all hold the office of Tribune, so they all have a specific political position we, I wouldn't go so far as to call it ideology, but, you know, they have certain ways of doing things, and so she is given, I would say I would see it as a introduction to this world, and this, this way of of potentially attempting to connect with the plebs, the the generally ordinary people, the extent to which any of The Roman populist politicians genuinely cared about the plebs. I cared about the plebs. I mean, we can, we can debate that. I think till the cows come home. It is actually Dr Rad 18:48 probably something we should unpack for our audience, so our listeners would be very familiar with the idea that the tribune of the plebs is a troublesome person who is out there to make politics difficult for everybody. However, it's a little different, because we're in the 390s BCE, and this is much, much later. This is hundreds of years later. Perhaps we can quickly unpack the landscape of late Republican politics and this idea of the big clash that's happening between those who are trying to rule through more populist measures and those who disdain such politics. Jane Draycott 19:26 Disclaimer, I did say earlier, though I'm not, I'm not really one for the for the political history, but I do think it's something that happens in this period. So what we see in the first century BCE is this this increasing dominance by individuals and they, they are obstructing political business for their own benefits. So we have Sulla, we have Marius. We have the first triumvirate of Caesar and Pompey, and Crassus ,Antony. We have Octavian, and they are all stepping outside of the system the way that it was designed. So they they are not holding power for the short periods of time that they are supposed to. They they extend and extend and extend their Imperium, and they make sure that their armies are loyal only to them, rather than to the state as a whole. And I mean, I sort of again, I think that I wouldn't go so far as to say it's exactly the same as what's happening today, but you can see why people would become, shall we say, dissatisfied and discontented with the political system that it is dominated by a handful of extremely wealthy individuals who do not really care about anything except themselves and sort of limited circle of other people, and are using all the they have their disposal. And these powers are considerable, not to make other people's lives better, but to just enrich themselves, give themselves the the best assignments and things like that. So one of the things I find quite interesting about Caesar's assassination is that there was this period where, when Caesar came back from Egypt from the civil wars, that there are apparently all these ideas that he had. And we hear about some of them in Suetonius and Plutarch, but he was going to alter the course of the Tiber, for example. And he's going to do this because the Campus Martius, and then the part of Rome where the Tiber bends around, was prone to flooding horribly boggy and stagnant and unhealthy. And by changing the course of Tiber could actually be an improvement for people's like the ordinary people's lives in the city of Rome and other other initiatives like that. And so on the one hand, the the ancient historians are like, oh, you know, he thinks he's a god. Make these big, enormous, sweeping changes to the way that things have always been, and we don't like that. And for ordinary people, like, Well, my house isn't going to flood anymore, and I'm not going to die of malaria. I think that's pretty good. Yeah. Dr G 21:52 I mean the time, it does have this terrible reputation, Jane Draycott 21:55 when the when the so called liberators, Brutus and Cassius and all their cronies. They assassinated Caesar, and they just assumed that everybody would be as happy about it as they were, and the entire city just sort of looks at them, and they're like, What did you do? Why did you do that? And we're going to kill you. Run up to the capital, and they're like, hide themselves in the temple. Because they're just like, Oh, whoops. We didn't have Canberra afterwards. We just thought everyone would be as happy about it as we are, because our senatorial dignity has been tarnished by, you know, Caesar clemency. And it's like, yeah, that's exactly what everyone else cared about. You know, you cared about your senatorial dignity, and not you know how they were going to eat and you know how they were going to sort of support their families and everything else? Dr G 22:44 No, no. But I think it's really interesting, because what it does is it sets up the idea that the politics of this period is really at a knife's edge, like people are holding the extremities of their positions, whether they are coming from that tribunate position of I'm supposed to be upholding the will of the people in particular ways, or they're coming from that more senatorial position of the consulship and those more rigorous prestige positions on the cursus honorum, everybody is heading towards great and greater extremity. And I think this actually flows in nicely into thinking about Fulvia's reputation, because everybody is so on edge that everybody is willing to take the nth degree in the way that they pursue their opinions about topics and people. And she has an incredible reputation in the ancient sources. So I'm keen to know a little bit more about what are some of the big accusations that are leveled against her. So you've sort of foreshadowed Cicero a little bit, but I'm sure he's not going to be the only one who comes up here. Jane Draycott 23:54 So I think Cicero starts it to be perfectly honest. I mean, he it's interesting the way that when he talks about Fulvia in relation to Clodius, he mentions her a couple of times in a very sort of detached way. He's he's talking more about Clodius than he is about her. And I think it's interesting that 10 years or so later, when he's talking about her in relation to Antony, he talks about her in a very different way, and how much of that is about phobia herself, and the way that her, her behavior has changed. That's probably part of it is that, you know, back back in the day, when she was a sort of young, you know, early 20 something widow, there was only so much you could really say about her in public. And then towards the end, when, when she's a mature woman, mother of five, and very much involved in in political and military business, he can say different things about her. And of course, the standard way that you go about directing sort of negative. Of invective, oratory, etcetera, towards your enemies as you is you criticize things like their masculinity. I mean, in some respects, nothing really much has changed. You know, you attack people based on certain characteristics. And one of those characteristics, this is where Antony gets attacked, first, over Fulvia, later, over Cleopatra. So Cicero in his Philippics, really. And so in some of his letters, I mean, they weren't, they weren't necessarily widely disseminated at the time. You know, you get from his his letters, this is what he does, actually think what he's talking to his friends about, and he is criticizing the amount that Fulvia is involved in the business of running Rome, because Antony, he is away. He is He is off doing military things, first in the sort of the triangle period, when when there was the sort of the civil war against the the liberators, and then subsequently, when he is off in the east, sorting out the mess that the civil war left behind that so he's not there. And so who is running things in his absence? Well, the person who always runs everything in the absence of the patio familias, and this is, this is not something new, really. When, when Cicero was in exile after his his consulship, who was running things for him, his wife Terentia, was running things she she was running her her estates, his estates. She was trying to deal with the consequences of his exile. She was trying to arrange marriage for their daughter, etc. And so Fulvia is is basically no different to any other Roman senatorial wife, because in this period, wives did not go on campaigns with their husbands. They did not go with them to their their provinces. When they were being a provincial governor, they stayed at home. And so while they were at home, they were running things in their husband's absence. They were the ones that were seeing, you know, the the clients, and acting as patron and sort of doing that kind of thing. And so this is what Fulvia's doing. She is She is basically acting in Antony's place while Antony is away. And Cicero is not happy about this. I mean, he's not happy about what Antony is doing, but he's also not happy about the fact that Fulvia is is the means by which he's doing it. Yeah. So, so the reason, then, that we we get such negative accounts of Fulvia is is partnered with what Cicero was writing at the time, and Cicero's perspective, and also octavians perspective as well, with the poetry he wrote and the propaganda surrounding the perusing war. But also later than that, in 40 BCE, when Antony, and Octavian. Fulvia has died, conveniently, it must be said for both of them, and they form the Pact of Brundisium and Anthony marries Octavia. There is this agreement that the convenient and expedient thing to do, basically blame everything on Fulvia so that the two guys can wipe the slate clean, and they can make their alliance, and they can make the marriage, and they can enter a new era as as sort of brothers, not just brothers in arms, but actual brothers, because they're linked now by marriage. And so that's the second stage of it. Is this agreement that will blame everything on Fulvia. And then later than that, once Octavian is the last man standing, and he becomes Augustus. He spends the next, sort of 40 years of his life, and brain attempting to whitewash everything that he did earlier. And so in the in the progress of the process of him doing that, there are people that he ends up using to sort of hang all the bad stuff on. So, you know, the prescriptions, that's not his fault. He was young, he was innocent, he was he was overruled by Anthony and Lepidus. And also Fulvia because, you know, she was adding, adding names to the prescriptions as well, and and so this is, I suppose it sort of crystallizes in the Augustan principled and then all of our latest sources who were drawing on this period as the history being written by the victors, that sort of thing. They are using those official stories. And so as time goes on, Fulvia becomes more and more and more of a villain, until we get to Cassius Dio who is the one with the really sort of lurid account of how she abused Cicero's head. And Dio, he has, he has lots of he loves a little bit of color. I mean, his his descriptions of Cleopatra lying on her couch and attempting to seduce Octavian by showing him Caesar's love letters and things that the weirdest seduction strategy you can imagine. You want Dr Rad 29:33 to hear what got your great uncle going. Jane Draycott 29:35 I know, like father, like son, you know, yeah. Dr Rad 29:40 But the Romans, I mean, let's face it, they do like that kind of stuff, right? They do like following in the footsteps of their fathers, not Jane Draycott 29:47 as much as the Ptolemies, I think. Yeah. Dr Rad 30:20 The interesting thing, I suppose, about this late Republican period is that there are quite a few women running around, seemingly violating these traditional standards of behavior, particularly those for women. And so you've got Julia the Elder, for example, Augustus, only biological child, who infamously ends up in exile because of her bad behavior. And of course, you also have to go back to the Clodii, Clodia Metelli. What is it that makes her different from them, like, How is her behavior and the way that she breaks the rules different to those sorts of women in some ways, Jane Draycott 30:55 I don't think it really is. It's, it's that she's, she's unlucky in that she is the one who is held up as as the sort of, the paragon of bad behavior, and through, through her links to, to Antony. So this is one of the interesting things about her, because, on the one hand, a lot of what she was doing, I don't think was particularly different. And yes, I mean, potentially, she she was, she was breaking rules, in the sense of, you know, that whole thing about the the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, but she wasn't doing anything that lots of other women weren't also doing in this period, but the prominence that she comes to because of who it is that she happens to be married to, and The the fact that he is drawing so much criticism from from the person who I mean, if we if we didn't have Cicero's letters and his speeches, I think our view of the late Republic and the fall of the Republic would be quite different. And it is interesting that we have two separate accounts of the Capitol area and conspiracy and but from people who were there at the time, and the Cicero's tells us one thing, and Salus tells us something different, or puts quite a different spin on it. And so, you know, it's something that I think should be born in mind that the sources are hostile towards her, but the the source is hostile towards her, that the two, the two people who, the person who writes about this period is, is hostile towards her and her husband and her previous husband as well. Um, it's also one of the reasons I think I don't really have a problem with with Fulvia, supposedly, like enjoying the fact that that Cicero was was murdered because he'd been a thorn in her side for years. He had defended the man who had murdered her first husband and who had apparently planned to murder her son, the man who drove Antony out of out of Rome, and meant that she was being targeted and her other children were being targeted, and who were making very inflammatory speeches and writing about her. I mean, really, is it a bad thing that she was pleased that he was there? So, you know, thinking, oh Dr Rad 33:07 yeah, Sister sounds like a jerk from her point of view, from her, from her perspective. And also remember Jane Draycott 33:11 that Claudia had been her sister in law, and had probably been someone that she because she was older, she she was probably someone who she admired and, and, and thought was, was, yes, this is the kind of, the kind of life I want to lead, to be this sort of rich and influential woman with this great life, I kind of, I want some of that for myself. And so, you know, Cicero wrote the pro killio and destroyed, you know, Claudia's reputation. So, so he had done a lot of wrong to her and the people that she loved, and even if she didn't necessarily love them that much, they were still her family. They were still people that were associated with her. And so I don't think it's unreasonable for phobia to be very anti Cicero. And I think it's more unreasonable for Cicero to be anti phobia, to be perfectly honest, because how much of it was his, his own personal sort of opinion of her, and how much of it was him using her as a way to get to other people. And that's, you know, she's collateral damage in his campaign against against Anthony. Yeah, that's Dr G 34:17 that's not fair, definitely. And there's this moment where, in the wake of the murder of Clodius, she is sometimes attributed as giving a public speech, which seems to be quite moving to the people of Rome. And I wonder if that's where it started for Cicero, because Cicero has the task of defending the murderer, and all of a sudden, things are being swayed by somebody who ultimately is outside of the rhetorical tradition, or ought to be. She may have had theoretical training, but she's not supposed to be good. At it, and she's not supposed to be standing up and saying stuff like this in public, and effectively maybe showing him up. And so I wonder if that's where Cicero started. He's Jane Draycott 35:13 chewing for some reason he finds plastic bags incredibly tasty, and obviously it's not really something he should be hunting. But back to the question. I mean, this is, this is another example, actually, of Fulvia doing something that is not actually a bad thing for her to have done. So women were responsible for the funeral, or a lot of the sort of funerary rights. They were the ones who were supposed to, sort of, you know, prepare the deceased, and they were the ones who were supposed to mourn and, you know, wail and tear their hair, tear their skin, rend their clothes, etc. And so she's not doing something that, or at least see the thing that she's doing, the very basic kind of fundamental core of it is what she's meant to be doing as a Roman woman who has who has been bereaved. It's then how she is developing that, or how she is potentially steering that in the direction that she wants it to go. And yes, the direction that obviously other people like Cicero and Milo don't want it to go. They don't they don't want people to feel bad for Clodius, you know, the husband and the father. They want people to think, oh yes, that that rabble rouser, he's gone. That's brilliant. And so I think this is something that we sort of see with her again and again, is that the things that she does are very sort of standard, traditional Roman Republican Woman things to do, but the way that she perhaps does them, the way that she expands them, the way that other people see them as as inconvenient. This is what draws the ire and that it's possible to put this negative slant on it. Because perhaps, you know, she's very high profile, she's she's very visible, she's first. She's She's Clodius' wife, and if she's with him all the time, then people can see her. And then she's Antony's wife. And if she's with him, or she's with him when he's when he's around, and if she's acting in his stead when he's not, again, she's very visible. She's making herself visible because she needs to remind people of Antony. I mean, this is because, partly the the the one of the motivations for the Perusine war is that Antony is not around, and Octavian is attempting to woo the soldiers and the Veterans away from Antony by giving them like land that that has been promised to them and making him their patron. And so Fulvia, along with Antony's Brother, don't forget, and his brother, Lucius, who is Consul at that time. The pair of them are like, no, no, hang on. You know, Antony deserves to be involved in this. He deserves the credit for this. You you can't do this. And cut him out of it completely. And so Fulvia is there to represent Antony. She's got his sons, their sons with her, to represent the next generation. And this is the other thing I think that that is important to remember, is that she's got five children. You know, she she is pretty much the ideal Roman wife, because she has produced children for all three of her husbands. She's given all three of them a son. In Antony's case, she gave Dr G 38:19 them two. I mean, that's incredible, good work. You know that is, that is peak Roman woman, right there. Jane Draycott 38:26 I mean, she, she is married to her second husband, cheerio, for, like, literally a matter of months before he goes off to Africa and he leaves her with, you know, his his son. He's his only son. So, you know she, she is she, she did better than Livia. She did better than Octavia. You know, Octavia had, like one, one boy out of about five children. Livia had had two sons with her first husband, but didn't have any, any children at all with with Octavian. So she is actually the kind of woman that that Roman women in this period should be aspiring to be, because she is. She's ticking all the boxes. I mean, this is what makes it so funny, really, that she and so sad, that she gets the criticism that she gets. Because realistically, she is doing that is expected of a Roman matron, and yet, because she's doing it for the wrong people, it becomes something that that she, she loses all of the positives, and she, you know, the negatives are amplified. Dr G 39:26 It sounds like some people might be jealous and are trying to ruin her reputation, but I think you've touched on the children, and this is a nice lead into thinking about them. What is fulvius legacy in terms of her children. Do we know anything about what happened to them? Jane Draycott 39:44 Tha patchy nature of ancient Roman history is that we don't know very much about people that we really should know about. And so one of the things that we don't tend to know about is what children were doing, what happened to children. And and what you end up having to do is, if they don't make it into the sort of literary, uh, sources of the period, you end up having to do sort of prospography with inscriptions and things like that to try and find out what happened to people. And so Fulvia has five children. She has a son and a daughter with with Clodius. And we know about the son because he is mentioned in the course of the sort of the trial of Milo, because there is this suggestion that Milo, after murdering Clodius, was going to go to the villa and murder the young the young boy, the young Claudius. Then we hear about him in a letter that Antony sends to Cicero some years later, when Anthony was married to Fulvia, and he is he's close young Clodius or Claudius, and he seems to go by Claudius, his he's a stepfather, and he's sort of, essentially, he's trying to get Cicero to just let it go with his sort of enmity with with Clodius, and sort of agree to kind of focus on the next generation. And at this time, Cicero is sort of sucking up to ants. He's like, Yes, all right, then and then after that, what we hear about just just briefly in a later source, is that however much promise he had as a young man, he basically goes off the rails and sort of eats himself to death and falls into a life of dissipation. We have his funerary urn with with his sort of epitaph on it, and that allows us to sort of reconstruct his political career. So he has the standard cursus honorum political career, but because he's having it under the Augustan principle, where everybody's focused on the imperial family, we just don't really hear anything about it. So he has what seems to be a sort of a normal senatorial life in this period. And that's that's basically it. Her daughter Claudia, after she's divorced by Octavian we don't hear anything about her again. And so possibly, possibly she died, possibly She remarried, and just had, you know, again, the standard Roman life of marriage, children, etc, with the three younger boys. That's where things I think are really sad. And this is, this is one of the things that doesn't get so much attention. So Young Curio, he goes to Egypt with Antony and Antony's and Fulvia's oldest son, Antyllus. So clearly, Antony has has been this boy's father. He's been married to Fulvia since, since he was a baby. He was Curio's, one of curious closest friends. So I think it's quite nice that Antony sort of stepped in and married Fulvia and sort of took on her three prior children. But this is, this is very bad for this young man, because he's he is around 18 when the invasion of Egypt happens, and Octavian murders him. He comes to a sticky end because of who his his stepfather and his mother are. The same thing happens to Antyllus. Antyllus is murdered, and he is even younger. He's 16 or so when, when he's murdered in Egypt. So that's two of Fulvia'ssons gone around about the same time. Antyllus gets more attention because he's included in the Plutarch Life of Antony, which is where we get most of our details of this at the end of this period in Egypt from. And then Curio is just mentioned briefly in a different source. And then the one that everybody, I think knows the most about is Ulus, the youngest, and he is raised by Octavia. So he he is only a bottler, perhaps when Fulvia dies in 40 and so he ends up going into Octavius household during her marriage to Antony. And so he probably didn't have any memories of his father, or very, very few memories of his father, because Antony spent most of his his, you know, the next sort of 10 years between, between the marriage to Octavia and his death, off in Egypt or off in the east or trying to campaign against papius. So, so Iullus doesn't really have any memories of his mother or his father. He's been raised by Octavia, and he again, like his oldest brother, probably as Clodius Pulcher. He he goes off the cursus honorum. He reaches the point of consul. He's never allowed to command an army or govern a province. He's kept very close to to Augustus in Rome. And then he gets tangled up with Julia and her intrigues and her adulteries. And he, he is forced to fall on his sword over that. And so, except for, well, we don't know what happened to Claudia, the daughter, but the four boys all come to quite sad, pathetic ends in one way or another, and three of them die by violence at the hands or or sort of indirectly, at the hands of Octavian or Augustus, and so I don't know how much of that we can attribute to his feelings about Fulvia. He doesn't seem to have liked her very much. His poetry on the subject and the way that he campaigns against her in the in the Perusine War, that seems to imply that he's quite anti Fulvia, possibly because she represents all the things about women that he really doesn't like, but that it's probably part of it that he wants to make sure that there is literally nothing left of Fulvia or Antony in Rome that can be a problem for him during his his reign. Dr Rad 45:17 It is wild, though, how those families keep intertwining. I mean, the fact that Fulvia could have been octavians mother in law. I mean, was who she Jane Draycott 45:26 was, yes, yeah. And Claudia had been a little bit older, and if she had had a child with Octavian, you know, again, it's these things. Of things might have been quite different, because Octavian only has Julia with with his his second wife, scribonia, and she, she becomes very important for the Julio-Claudian dynasty, because she is, she's literally the, the only sort of direct line of descent from from Octavian, as opposed to Octavia. Dr Rad 45:56 absolutely crazy. And then for one of their children to be so enmeshed in Julia, he's one biological child's downfall. It is crazy. So Fulvia obviously lived at a time that we very much see now looking back as a crossroads for Rome, that tipping point from Republic to Empire, and given that the Romans were a big fan of the exemplar when they were writing their histories. So these examples of how to live your life or how not to live your life, can you perhaps explain what Fulvia's potential legacy would have been for people living under Octavian slash, Augustus and then into the Julio Claudian dynasty? This Jane Draycott 46:37 is a really interesting thing to think about, because there is this question of how long were people's memories. And one of the things that Tacitus actually he when he opens the the Annals, he opens it with the death of Augustus in in 14. And one of the things he talks about is how, basically, because Augustus had lived so long, you know, he was, he was 74 or so when he died. And so he had been in control of the the the Empire, really, for 44 years, and had plenty of time to sort of rewrite history to his liking. And so he talks about the fact that one of the reasons that Augustus is able to do this is because literally, everybody else was dead, and nobody, nobody alive, remembered what it was like. Or very few people remembered what it was like to live under, well, a functioning Republic. I mean, some of them did remember what it was like to live in in sort of times of horrific Civil War where people were being murdered in the streets, and their bodies threw in the Tiber and prescribed and all the rest of it. And so he's sort of like they were seduced by the promise of peace. And like, Oh yeah, Tacitus, that's terrible. You know this idea that you might actually be able to live your life and grow to old age and see your children grow up and not be in danger of assassination or or street gangs or conscription or whatever else. Yeah, so bad Dr Rad 48:05 to not have their father brutally murdered in the street and have to start a riot, Jane Draycott 48:09 exactly. And so with the question of Fulvia, the the interesting thing is, is that how, how long did people remember her for bearing in mind? She was sort of replaced by Octavia. She was replaced by Cleopatra, and there were attempts made to present Roman women in a different way. So part of octavians strategy was to highlight Octavia, to highlight Livia, and to present them as these paragons of Roman womanhood, and to give them the same sort of legal and sort of religious protection that the best virgins and the Caribbeans had to make it make them sacrosanct, so that they couldn't be used against him the way that he had used Fulvia and Cleopatra against Antony. And so there is this. This is a concerted attempt through this period to sort of rebrand Roman women, I suppose. I mean we have, we have the Augustan or the sort of moral legislation, the attempts to get both women and men married and having babies for the Roman state, and the attempts to keep the senatorial and equestrian orders separate from the lower orders and stop people marrying foreigners and non citizens and things like that. So there is this attempt being made to tell Roman women that you you should be like this. You should behave like this. In the material record, we see things like the araparius and all of the the coins and the cameos that present this image of, you know, woman, babies, etc. And I mean, we know with the times that we're living through that it's not that easy that you the state, can tell people all day long that you should get married, you should have children, you should behave like this, and plenty of people can say no, thank you. You know, get get your your nose out of my private life. Get out of my bedroom. I'm going to do what I want to do. Do. And we know that he wasn't so successful because he kept having to reintroduce more moral legislation to try and get people behaving the way he wanted them to. So Fulvia is also she is mentioned in the histories as as time goes on. She's always being mentioned alongside Antony and Cleopatra and everything else. So clearly people remembered her, and they they had a certain amount of information about her. And the thing that I think is is really thought provoking, is the way that the women of the imperial family behave in in the sort of the next few decades. So you have Octavia and Livia, for example, who are trying very hard to be as public as they can be, but in very sort of specific ways. You know, they're presenting themselves as wives and mothers, and they're quite successful at that. They it's the where it starts to fall down is this sort of subsequent generation. So you see Julia the Elder and Julia the Younger being really quite stupid Speaker 1 51:05 with their adulteries and their conspiracies. It's like, really very risky you're doing this so, you know, okay, Jane Draycott 51:13 and then you have Agrippina the elder and Agrippina the younger and Messalina as well. And there are elements of the things that they do. They the accusations made against them, the allegations about their behavior. These are quite similar to Fulvia you have this so Agrippina and Messalina are both accused of having people killed so that they can seize their property. So this, this seems to be this, this sort of standard accusation against women. Women are greedy and they covet things that they've got no business coveting. And good men find themselves coming to bad ends because these women want their villas and want their gardens I mean, it's funny, really, because one of the one of the things I think is quite amusing about Fulvia is that she's never accused of wanting, you know, jewelry and pretty dresses and all the stuff that women are supposed to want. She she's accused of wanting money and property and power and and diplomatic, you know, advantage and things, which I think is great, Dr Rad 52:12 which is similar to Agrippina, isn't it? Because when Nero tries to bribe her with dresses, she's like, nooo, thank you! Dr G 52:19 Not my flavor, actually. And Jane Draycott 52:21 I mean that that in itself, gives us a perspective on Roman women, that that, you know, that that we all of the sort of the sum tree legislation and things like that, and the the all the writing about the cosmetics and the perfume and the the silk and the things that that women are spending their husband's money on. It's like, well, yeah, some women, maybe not all women. You know, some women were like, I've got my own jewelry and my own silk man, because my thanks. I want some other stuff. I want the stuff that actually matters. But, but, yeah, so. And we see with acropony The elder the the her involvement in Germanicus is military campaigns, the fact that she goes with him, the fact that she she uses their marriage and their children in the camp, and is able to transfer some of the troops loyalty from Germanicus to her and to her children, particularly Caligula, who would, of course, grow up to sort of try and take advantage of that. And so it is this all, is this all coincidental? Are these women just doing this stuff with no knowledge of Fulvia, or no interest in Fulvia, or was there a sort of a slightly more calculated approach to it, that just as as I said earlier, she she was actually a pretty good Roman wife and mother. She was doing the things that Roman wives and mothers are expected to do, and so were women looking to her and thinking, Oh, yes, I will do some of that. But then they too, found that there is clearly a very fine, almost invisible line as to what it's okay to do and what it's not okay to do, and especially for high profile women who are very visible to to members of the public, like the imperial family, they they seem to have have difficulty. I mean, Livia has difficulty. It's one thing. During the the reign of Augustus, she seems to get away with literally everything that she wants to do. But when it comes to the reign of Tiberius, he is like no mother go away. You know, I'm a 50 year old man. I'm not having you tell me what to be involved in my reign. And he, he does very much try and put the brakes on everything that Augustus had apparently been happy enough with her doing. And so, yeah, when women can go so far, but when they, when they reach that invisible fine Dr G 54:42 line, well, it seems like the fine, the fine line might just be being on the more powerful side, essentially, because what Agrippina the elder is doing is actually very similar to what Fulvia is doing. As you say, and you. For both of them, it works out quite differently, because one is in the imperial family at that stage, and obviously they're holding all of the cards. And Fulvia is not furious. Jane Draycott 55:11 Is not happy about Agrippa and the elder either. I mean, he is very angry about her behavior, and is treats her very brutally after the death of Germanicus. So she she is sort of, she manages, for a little while, while Germanicus is alive, she manages to sort of thread this needle. But once he's gone and she's lost her male protector, then it is a different matter. She is much more vulnerable. He refuses to allow her to remarry, because he he doesn't. He doesn't want to face any more influential men or any more Imperial babies. And this is, this is something that Fulvia, I mean, she, she had experienced the death of two husbands that left her vulnerable, but she always had another husband that she she could then turn to to protect her and and the same thing with with Livia, for example, she she is protected during the life of her husband, but then once her husband is gone, she she has lost her plausible deniability. As long as your husband is letting you do things, it's fine. And then as soon as he's He's gone, he's not doing it. Other people have got things they want to say about it, even your son, or your horrible son, Dr G 56:20 really interesting to think about, isn't it, this whole period is just such a fascinating moment in Rome's history, and we're so lucky to have so many sources. I think this is part of how we get to that sense of it being interesting, because I'm sure every period of history has the capacity to be as interesting. And it's just we're lacking source material, but Jane Draycott 56:41 we're not looking in that. We're not looking at the right direction either. We're not looking at the right people. I mean, one of the things that, and I sort of, I didn't think this initially, when I was researching formula and I was writing the book, by the end of it, I came to realize that one of, one of the sort of the really interesting things about her is how important she was in the sense of what happened when she was no longer around. You know, it's, it's like, you you don't necessarily realize that someone is the linchpin of your social group until they're not there anymore, and then suddenly no one, no one's getting together. No, no. You know nothing's happening. And you're like, I didn't realize that that person was the heart of the group, but they clearly are, because without them, we're terrible. But with Fulvia, I think the really interesting thing to think about is, if she hadn't died in 40 when she did, I think Roman history would have been quite different. Dr Rad 57:32 It is so frustrating that she died at that moment. It's Jane Draycott 57:35 not that she I mean, she was one of these sort of quite dynamic, mover and shaker type people, but it was as much where she was situated and all of her connections that that was part of that. And so, so if she hadn't died in 40 she, let's assume that she had stayed married to Antony. And even if she hadn't stayed married to Antony, she was still the mother of his children and the the mother of his political heirs in Rome. And so while he was away in the 30s in Parthia or attempting to take water Parthia and in Egypt and everything else, he didn't have anyone protecting him in Rome anymore. His brother Lucius had gone to Spain and seems to have just died because he didn't. He's not really featured again after the Peruvian war. And so Fulvia was not in Rome on the spot to protect him. And so Octavian is able to completely demolish his reputation and do things like the will that may or may not have been fake that he opens and says, Oh, Antony wants to be you know, he wants to move Rome to Egypt. He wants to be buried with Cleopatra. He wants to leave all of his money, etc, to his Egyptian children, and so on so forth. If Fulvia had been around, that would not have happened like Antony's will. Would have been different if that even was Anthony's will. She had four young boys growing up to be Roman politicians, all of whom were part of very influential Roman families. So she had her oldest son, Publius Clodius Pulcher she had her second son, Gaius Scribonius Curio, and then she had her two sons of Antony. And so those four boys, growing up would have been able to basically take control of the Senate and have have a lot to say in Antony's defense. In Rome, they would have been able to run things to Antony's advantage, and then at the same time with if Antony had been able to put all of his his Eastern children into the positions that he and Cleopatra had planned for them, he already had. He had his his eldest child, Antonia, was already married into an Eastern royal family, and the four, those four children sort of ruling different parts of Near East, with Fulvia's four sons ruling the Roman West. I mean, that's the thing that I think is really interesting, what the world would have looked like, and when, when people would try and speculate on what would have happened if, if Antony and Cleopatra had won the Battle of Actium, how would his people look different things? Never think about that. They think more in the sense of Oh, Antony's in Egypt, and the Roman Empire moves its focus to the east and and things like. It's like, yes, but think about what's going on, what would be going on in Rome at that point. And Antony would dominate Rome as well in the traditional Roman way. It wouldn't have been Oh. Rome would become Egyptian and go Eastern. There would have been highly placed Romans in the Roman political system making sure that Rome sort of ticked over as well. And, and that is something that, because I hadn't really thought about that until I came to the end of a writing book, and I was like, oh my god, this is, this is really, potentially this fascinating sort of counterfactual history element of it. And of course, the Julio Claudian dynasty as we know it, would not have existed, because Octavius daughters, Antonia Major and Minor, would never have been born. And therefore, the only thing Augustus really had going to him without his Julia and her, her children with with Marcellus or Agrippa and well, the three boys die young, and the girls have have troubles with their own. So he Julio-Claudian dynasty would would be, would have been very different as well, assuming it had even, you know, come to be. So Fulvia is the sort of at the center of this very interesting, sort of complex network of cause and effect. And if you take her away, or you put her back in, you know, she, she, it really is. These are, these are turning points for world Speaker 2 1:01:28 history. Absolutely. Octavia obviously has completely conflicted loyalties between Antony and Octavian. In that decade, she's hardly going to do the same sort of job that Fulvia would have done if she had lived and remained his wife. And Jane Draycott 1:01:45 she does, she does try. And then she she does, apparently, voice, you know that it's very hard to be the wife of one imperator and the sister of another imperator, it's like, oh yeah, cry me a river, Octavia. But, I mean, she starts to try. She tries to support Anthony as much as she can, Dr Rad 1:02:01 totally but that's exactly it. It's still not the same, because Fulvia just doesn't have that, you know, that obligation to Octavian at all in spite of their brief familial relationship, Jane Draycott 1:02:15 he might have been quite keen to remarry her daughter. Then Julia wouldn't have been born, and potentially he'd have had other so. So yes, it's for people who dismiss Roman women as not being important because they don't hold the political or military offices. And why do we need women's history? Oh, it's just work, nonsense, etc. Well, individual women can actually be quite significant, whether it's because of the things that they say and do, or whether it's simply because of the person that they are in the position that they're in, they can have quite far reaching effects on on things and then. So that's that's another, another reason, I suppose, why I wanted to sort of write this book and write books like this that sort of put the women back in, because women are 50% or slightly more of the population, and they, I mean this all of our important family period. I mean, I went once sitting down and trying to work out Roman prospography In this period. It, oh, my God, it brings on a migraine. Once you start doing that, you realize marriage was really important. And we hear about the men because it's the men that have the public facing life and the literary and material and documentary evidence for them, but they are marrying women from other families, and they are creating links. And when you think about it, if you once you've traced all the family trees, you realize that the fall of the Republic was basically an extended family squabble. It Dr Rad 1:03:53 does increasingly feel that way, especially when you consider that. As you pointed out, Antony's children with Octavia become key players and makers of the Julio Claudian dynasty, Antonia Maior and Minor, without them, you don't have the members of the Julio Claudian family. Jane Draycott 1:04:12 But even even beyond that, outside of our specific sort of Fulvia, Anthony, Octavia, Octavian sort of situation, Fulvia was related to Caesar through marriage. You have, you have families like the she was, well, she was related to the Clodii by marriage. And they were related all the they were all married to the girls. Were all married to important members of individual families and things so, so really, what we're seeing in the Roman Republic, because the Roman senatorial class is so basically incestuous. I mean, they're all marrying each other cousins are marrying second cousins and so on so forth. So they are fighting amongst themselves and their own families and their own extended families. And it's sort of, it's almost like, you know, someone. Those situations where, at the reading of the Will all of the descendants start fighting over who gets the biggest share of it? And that is basically what the fall of the Republic is. It's all these, all these related people, related by blood, related by marriage, fighting over who gets to have the biggest share. And they're not. They're not very good at sharing. It's a zero sum game - one Person has to come out on top, and that means everybody else has to lose. And that's why we find ourselves in this situation. Dr G 1:05:30 Roman history summed up so well, Dr Rad 1:05:33 the Romans not very good at sharing, Dr G 1:05:36 not very good at sharing and ruining everything in the process, Jane Draycott 1:05:40 just like any elite, really, if we, if we think about it, any any modern country, you know, they're sucking up all of the money and all of the resources, and they're wondering why all of the sort of people beneath them are getting progressively more annoyed about sex. Dr G 1:05:57 Well, thank you, Jane, so much for coming on the show. It has been excellent to have a good old chat about Fulvia, the late Republic, how all of these pieces might be fitting together with what's going on with women. Where are they? What are they up to, and and how is this influencing the very nature of history itself. And I love your consideration of the counterfactual history here as well, and Fulvia's central positioning as this kind of linchpin person that is really holding different types of potential rooms together within herself, so the way she decides to act is pivotal, not just for her, but for everything that it influences the moment of her death is obviously pivotal, as well, as you've noted. And I would encourage anybody who is interested to seek out your book and to delve into the details even further. So thank you so much for your time. Thank you for having me, and Speaker 2 1:07:03 clearly we're sending out the message to Hollywood that it's a mystery that Fulvia has been so overlooked in popular culture given her importance, as demonstrated by this chat. Yes, because, Jane Draycott 1:07:14 because what Hollywood is doing currently is is green lighting, lots of stories about complex women and overlooked minorities. Dr Rad 1:07:33 Thank you for listening to this special episode of the partial historians. You can find our sources sound credits and an automated transcript in our show notes at www.partialhistorians.com Our music is by Bettina Joy De Guzman. You too can support our show and help us to produce more fascinating content about the ancient world by becoming a Patreon. In return, you receive exclusive early access to our special episodes, just like this one. However, if you lost all your money betting on a chariot race, please just tell someone about the show or give us a five star review. Until next time we are yours in ancient Rome. Transcribed by https://otter.ai