Clodia Metelli: The Tribune's Sister is the first full-length biography of a Roman aristocrat whose colorful life, as described by her contemporaries, has inspired numerous modern works of popular fiction, art, and poetry. Clodia, widow of the consul Metellus Celer, was one of several prominent females who made a mark on history during the last decades of the Roman Republic. As the eldest sister of the populist demagogue P. Clodius Pulcher, she used her wealth and position to advance her brother's political goals. For that she was brutally reviled by Clodius' enemy, the orator M....

Berenice II (c. 264-221 BCE), daughter of King Magas of Cyrene and wife of Ptolemy III Euergetes, came to embody all the key religious, political, and artistic ideals of Ptolemaic Alexandria. Though she arrived there nearly friendless, with the taint of murder around her, she became one of the most accomplished and powerful of the Macedonian queens descended from the successors of Alexander the Great. She was at the center of a group of important poets and intellectuals associated with the Museum and Library, not the least of which was Callimachus, the most important poet of the age. These...

Berenice II (c. 264-221 BCE), daughter of King Magas of Cyrene and wife of Ptolemy III Euergetes, came to embody all the key religious, political, and artistic ideals of Ptolemaic Alexandria. Though she arrived there nearly friendless, with the taint of murder around her, she became one of the most accomplished and powerful of the Macedonian queens descended from the successors of Alexander the Great. She was at the center of a group of important poets and intellectuals associated with the Museum and Library, not the least of which was Callimachus, the most important poet of the age. These...

The Roman empress Faustina the Elder (c. 97-140) and her daughter Faustina II (c. 130-175) have been subject to criticism from the earliest records, described in turn as fickle, unfaithful, and treasonous. Yet their husbands, the emperors Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, have reputations as golden as that of the whole Antonine age and seem to have thought favorably of them as prolific mothers, loyal spouses, and useful complements to the military and political proceedings of the empire. On the most basic level of lineage and procreation, the two women were naturally important for...

The civil wars that brought down the Roman Republic were fought on more than battlefields. Armed gangs infested the Italian countryside, mansions were besieged in the city, and bounty-hunters searched the streets for "public enemies." Among the astonishing stories to survive from these years is that of a young woman whose parents were killed, on the eve of her wedding, in the violence engulfing Italy in the late first century BC. While her future husband fought overseas, she staved off a run on her father's estate and raised money to help her fiance in exile. Further, when her husband, back...

The civil wars that brought down the Roman Republic were fought on more than battlefields. Armed gangs infested the Italian countryside, mansions were besieged in the city, and bounty-hunters searched the streets for "public enemies." Among the astonishing stories to survive from these years is that of a young woman whose parents were killed, on the eve of her wedding, in the violence engulfing Italy in the late first century BC. While her future husband fought overseas, she staved off a run on her father's estate and raised money to help her fiance in exile. Further, when her husband, back...

Rarely did ancient authors write about the lives of women; even more rarely did they write about the lives of ordinary women: not queens or heroines who influenced war or politics, not sensational examples of virtue or vice, not Christian martyrs or ascetics, but women of moderate status, who experienced everyday joys and sorrows and had everyday merits and failings. Such a woman was Monica--now Saint Monica because of her relationship with her son Augustine, who wrote about her in the Confessions and elsewhere. Despite her rather unremarkable life, Saint Monica has inspired a robust...

Two of the most famous mosaics from the ancient world, in the church of San Vitale in Ravenna, depict the sixth-century emperor Justinian and, on the wall facing him, his wife, Theodora (497-548). This majestic portrait gives no inkling of Theodora's very humble beginnings or her improbable rise to fame and power. Raised in a family of circus performers near Constantinople's Hippodrome, she abandoned a successful acting career in her late teens to follow a lover whom she was legally forbidden to marry. When he left her, she was a single mother who built a new life for herself as a secret...

Rarely did ancient authors write about the lives of women; even more rarely did they write about the lives of ordinary women: not queens or heroines who influenced war or politics, not sensational examples of virtue or vice, not Christian martyrs or ascetics, but women of moderate status, who experienced everyday joys and sorrows and had everyday merits and failings. Such a woman was Monica--now Saint Monica because of her relationship with her son Augustine, who wrote about her in the Confessions and elsewhere. Despite her rather unremarkable life, Saint Monica has inspired a robust...

A philosopher, mathematician, and martyr, Hypatia is one of antiquity's best known female intellectuals. During the sixteen centuries following her murder, by a mob of Christians, Hypatia has been remembered in books, poems, plays, paintings, and films as a victim of religious intolerance whose death symbolized the end of the Classical world. But Hypatia was a person before she was a symbol. Her great skill in mathematics and philosophy redefined the intellectual life of her home city of Alexandria. Her talent as a teacher enabled her to assemble a circle of dedicated male students. Her...