Joan Smith is not only a well-respected feminist journalist and author — she also really knows how to tell a story. She’s one of those raconteurs who, just as you think she’s finished and released you, drops another hook to make you lower yourself back into your seat, not wanting to miss a thing. 

If she’s telling the stories of women associated with the leading men of the Roman Empire, you can be certain you don’t want to sneak off, just in case.

Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac begins with a definition of femicide — a crime so globally pervasive, so overwhelmingly shocking, that it is astounding that it goes unaddressed in the official crime statistics of most countries. Keeping the stories of women alive is the job of women and always has been. In this book Smith is doing this job to perfection.

An expert in misogyny, Joan has revisited the evidence of it as a young working-class woman in the seventies when she was enchanted, against social stereotypes, by the study of the classics.

The account of Smith’s upbraiding of a museum guide in the Palazzo Massimo who was making accusations against Julia, the daughter of Augustus, namely that she was a nymphomaniac, is typical of my experience of Smith. “Excuse me,” Smith tells us she said as she interrupted him, “Julia’s mother was not Augustus’s first wife. And Julia was not a nymphomaniac.” She has a laser sharp beam for the hypocrisy and misogyny of men, as our current prime minister has frequently found to his discomfort. 

If anyone needed to drag the men of the Julio-Claudian Empire into the light to account for their treatment of the women in their lives, no one could do it more effectively than Smith. 

The stories of the twenty-three women in the book show how the reality of their existence was hidden from public life even in art. Their names were rendered interchangeable and indistinguishable by the men who “owned” them. Their faces were lost from statues, literature and other artworks. Joan was removed from her post as VAWG advisor to the Mayor of London for her outspoken views on women’s rights. She knows all about dismissed and hidden women. 

But it is on the retelling of their lives, by misogynist chroniclers of the time, and subsequently swallowed without question by modern historians, (also male), that Smith is most eager to focus. Those narrating the lives of the women at the time were frequently hostile to the women of the period and she works with dexterity to unpick the semantically embodied misogyny from the bones of truth left about these women. 

Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac finds a distinct laziness amongst classicists when it comes to the women of the period. Much is excused, little is questioned, most is fundamentally untrustworthy when it comes to women. Anger flies from the page at the way women have been flippantly tossed around by various biased sources. 

As Smith writes at one point, “Astonishingly, Juvenal’s misogynist fantasy about the Empress Messalina has been treated as fact by commentators who should know better.” Juvenal, we are told, constructed an image of Messalina with an extended clitoris, resembling a penis, after a night of exploitative sex in a brothel. A seventeenth century play describing her surviving her ordeals as “a pleurisy of lust” and many as thought she was competitive with other women in enduring repetitive rough sex. As Smith points out, when women are informed of another woman having faced rough sex with multiple male partners consecutively, they understand this as painful, humiliating and exploitative. As in the case of Gisele Pelicot, allegedly raped by more than 50 men, women hearing the evidence understand the horrific suffering faced by a woman who goes through such an ordeal. Yet somehow Roman women have relentlessly been portrayed as seeking and enjoying the same — and been judged and condemned for it. 

There are many descriptions of patricians raping women which was passed off in narrative as Roman men being, well — men

Here are descriptions of very young girls being sold to older men by fathers, and women being passed from one powerful husband to another even while suffering post-partum bleeding. There are many descriptions of patricians raping women which was passed off in narrative as Roman men being, well — men. Rapists sure, but not that kind. The text is packed with the horrors of the lives of women of the period which have been reframed to glamourise the more privileged existence of Roman men. 

The women are misrepresented, not only as sexually insatiable, but as lust-crazed nags or scheming, manipulative power seekers. Men’s violence against women has been treated as a private concern, “behind closed doors”, with the past partners of an abuser labelled the “crazy ex” who ruined his life. Such tropes, of course, have not lost their relevance today.

The book pays attention to the lives of modern historians, such Robert Graves, the author of I, Claudius, seen by many as an accurate representation, who had personal reason to present a misogynist take on the lives of Julio-Claudian women, given his own complex relationship with women. 

So many men, with such a poor interest in accurately reflecting the lives of women, are taken as authoritative sources. As Smith attempts to be more accurate, she resists the trap of presentism — her extensive knowledge of the classics deftly demonstrated as evidence. This is not retelling, it is truth-seeking. 

Smith has refused to let these twenty-three strong women, mistreated in every way, continue to be hidden by the modern historians who would continue their abuse by accepting lies. She leads them forward, and pays tribute to them with as much truth as she can salvage from the words of historians who did not take the care to be truthful. To many men, the lives of the women were simply interchangeable trinkets adorning the glory of Roman emperors. This book displays them as jewels, tarnished only by the abuse of brutally violent, misogynist men.