2019’s film Horrible Histories: Rotten Romans might not have been a major blockbuster, but there’s one scene that all three of my sons have memorised. Convinced of the success of his plot to kill his mother Agrippina in a booby-trapped boat, the Emperor Nero launches into the song “Isn’t It Funny (How I Don’t Need My Mummy)”. I’ve lost count of the number of times this has been sung to me, usually when I am reining in relatively minor ambitions on the part of my offspring (“so many plans / but Mummy tied my hands!”). I like the song and the scene itself, which ends with a drenched, enraged Agrippina — played brilliantly by Kim Cattrall — putting an end to Nero’s premature celebrations. 

The actual demise of Agrippina, as recounted in Joan Smith’s new book Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac, is less amusing. The real woman did not emerge, mascara-smudged, crown askew, to chastise her son with an imperious “my boat sank!” Knowing the danger she was in immediately after her rescue, Agrippina sent a messenger to try to convince Nero she believed the sinking to have been accidental. This tactic did not save her. Having survived the shipwreck, she was slaughtered in her own bed by three men sent by her son. 

In Tacitus’s account of the death, Agrippina points to her womb and asks to be struck there. Smith is doubtful as to whether this could be what really happened. “Domestic homicide is painful and messy,” she writes, “often involving a great deal more violence than is required to kill the victim … Would she really have been conscious long enough, and had the presence of mind, to call out something that would resonate down the ages?” 

There’s something jarring in seeing the death described in “domestic homicide” terms. Like the burning of witches, or the murder and mutilation of five women in nineteenth-century Whitechapel, we don’t tend to think of those sorts of deaths in that sort of way. It is as though these women were not like us, and the violence they faced  — that excessive, dramatic violence — is too ridiculous to bear any similarity to the abuses women suffer today. Femicide — like child sexual abuse and coercive control — are treated as modern concepts, as though even if female bodies end up in the same condition — raped, beaten, dead — the women themselves could not have suffered, certainly not psychologically, in quite the same way. 

In her history of Rome’s Imperial women, Smith seeks to correct this misconception. Although best known for her work on contemporary misogyny, through books such as Misogynies and Home Grown, Smith is a Latin graduate with an interest in bringing her understanding of male violence to these particular stories. While there have already been some challenges to historical narratives in which murdered women have been treated as props — for instance, with Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five, a study of the lives of Jack the Ripper’s victims — recent re-evaluations of past violence, as Smith shows, do not always work in women’s favour. A more sophisticated understanding of the very worst things that men have done to women and children can reject Carry On-style othering, only to move straight to “and because it’s so extreme, did it really happen? How plausible is it that those men were really so bad?” Perpetrators are over-humanised at the expense of their victims. 

One example Smith mentions is a caption from the British Museum’s Nero exhibition of 2021:

Nero’s mother and wives were powerful. Ancient writers said that Nero had them killed. Nero said his mother and first wife betrayed him. Who would you believe?

It’s a bizarre question to ask. Not only is it unclear which sources visitors are supposed to refer to, but, as Smith points out, the suggestion seems to be that rather than view Nero as a monster (such an unsophisticated take!) the emperor ought to be granted “the defence offered by just about every abuser who has killed a current or former wife: ‘She made me do it’”. 

Further examples of over-correction come from the way in which doubt has now been shed on stories of incest on the basis that the stories are salacious while incest is terribly rare. Smith notes the flippant way in which historians such as Anthony A. Barrett, Anneliese Freisenbuch and Mary Beard have treated rumours of Caligula having sex with his sister Drusilla, as though one would have to be very naïve to think they could be true. Yet brothers sexually abusing sisters is not rare; that it can be dismissed as some crazy slur when applied to the past perhaps tells us something about how far we are from addressing the problem today.

People of the past were as psychologically complex as you or I, but that doesn’t mean some of them were not cartoonishly monstrous 

Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac is a timely book not least because its publication coincides with some contemporary examples of woman-hatred that also seem too extreme to be true. What is happening to women in Afghanistan at this very moment — a ban on them so much as hearing one another’s voices — feels like the kind of thing one might read about having occurred in some very distant past, whereupon one might think “well, that’s probably an exaggeration. Maybe the historians who first wrote about this just wanted to make the Taliban look bad. As if anyone would actually go that far!”. Similarly, the story of Dominique Pélicot and the fifty men who joined him to rape Gisèle Pélicot has that feeling of “just too awful to be plausible”. If this was a story about Nero or Caligula, one can easily imagine modern-day historians discussing its apparent implausibility. As if any man would be so monstrous! As if so many other men would be involved and not one — not even those who had refused the invitation to rape — would report what was happening! Yet clearly there are men like that — lots of them. 

Having read Smith’s excellent book, I find myself thinking a lot about how the misogyny that is around us today might be viewed in the future. What would Horrible Histories: The Terrible Taliban look like? In many ways, I think the dark humour approach — camp Kim Cattrall awaiting her death — is not as bad as the “clever” approach which ends up saying more about how little we believe our own eyes when it comes to the prevalence of femicide and sexual abuse. 

People of the past were as psychologically complex as you or I, but that doesn’t mean some of them were not cartoonishly monstrous. You only have to look at the flesh-and-blood cartoon monsters around us today.