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Biography, Women and Power

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CELIA E. SCHULTZ, FULVIA: PLAYING FOR POWER AT THE END OF THE ROMAN REPUBLIC (Women in antiquity). New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 144. isbn 9780197601839. £19.99/US$26.99.
JULIA HILLNER, HELENA AUGUSTA: MOTHER OF THE EMPIRE (Women in antiquity). New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. 432. isbn 9780190875305. £22.99/US$32.99.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 December 2023

Rebecca Flemming
Rebecca Flemming*
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
*
r.flemming@exeter.ac.uk
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Extract

Julia Hillner's life of Helena, mother of Constantine, is the twentieth volume published in OUP's ‘Women in Antiquity’ series, launched in 2010 with Duane Roller's biography of Cleopatra. An earlier and overlapping series on the same theme — Routledge's ‘Women of the Ancient World’ — began in 2006 and adds a further half-dozen titles to the portfolio, from Olympias: Mother of Alexander the Great by Elizbeth Carney to The Women of Pliny's Letters by Jo-Ann Shelton.1 The pace of publication picked up in 2018 and two lives from the later Roman empire — of Melania the Younger by Elizabeth Clark and Sosipatra of Pergamum by Heidi Marx — appeared alongside Celia Schultz's account of Fulvia in 2021, for example. Late republican and late antique women dominate the catalogue overall, with some empresses and exotic leaders in between, and alongside a smaller set of Hellenistic royalty.2

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Type
Review Article
Information
The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 113 , November 2023 , pp. 171 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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Footnotes

*

My thanks to audiences in Stevenage and Oxford who participated in discussions on some of the general themes of this piece, though not the books reviewed here, and to the journal editor and reviewers for their patience and helpful comments.

References

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