Excluded women?

Barry Baldwin dismisses an axe-grinding book which has far too many omissions

A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women How Women Transformed the Empire Emma Southon Oneworld Publications 2023 Hb, 416pp, £18.99, ISBN 9780861542307

This book is both pot-boiled from the author’s previous books and an outdated feminist moan about the exclusion of women from male-written histories of Rome. Southon (who quit Academe, dubbing it “grim”) kicks off by lambasting an unnamed professor who deprecated Womens’ Studies as no better than those of Dogs. Well, there was such a time. But now long gone. Men have been writing about ancient women for decades. Three conspicuous examples: Charles Seltman,

Women in Antiquity, 1954; Stewart Perowne, The Caesars’ Wives: Above Suspicion?, 1974; JPVD Balsdon, Roman Women: Their History and Habits, 1962. All of these are omitted from a somewhat unscrupulous bibliography, as are (eg) Vassiliki Panoussi’s Brides, Mourners, Bacchae: Women’s Rituals in Roman Literature (2019) and Ann R Raia’s online “Being Female in Ancient Rome: Gender and Class Matters” (2012).

Naturally, she cannot overlook multiple contributions by the inevitable Mary Beard. However, her much dust-jacket-touted business women and sex workers have been fully recognised and catalogued with translated primary sources by Mary R Lefkowitz & Maureen B Fant,

Women’s Life in Greece and Rome (1982), another notable omission.

Southon chooses a team of 21 women, providing biographies. She makes the point that the earliest females in Roman history, the Sabine Hersilia and Etruscan prophetess Tanaquil (both widely regarded as mythological) were not Roman. Same applies to later Queen Zenobia (the genuine article). So, why no Cleopatra? Perhaps dismissed as too familiar? Another strange surprise is the complete absence of Roman empresses, especially as Southon’s first book was a biography of Claudius’s fourth wife and Nero’s mother Agrippina. Julia Mamma and Julia Maesa get in, but they were basically quasi-Camilla Queen Consorts. As to late antiquity, she misses an open goal by leaving out the mathematician philosopher-martyr Hypatia.

Still, Augustus’s daughter Julia (famous for her jokes) and the poetess Julia Balbilla were good choices, as are Perpetua and Melania as voices of the new Christian presence in pagan Rome.

The book is written in lowest common denominator demotic (albeit mercifully jargon-free), with, for example, the historians Livy and Dionysus of Halicarnassus as “two blokes”, Romulus with other Roman men as “bloody awful, but then they all were”, a Roman general is “a posh bastard”, while Sabina’s poetry is “pretty fucking thrilling stuff”.

There is nothing new for professional ancient historians in this remorselessly axe-grinding book. Lay readers and newcomers will, though, get a briskly written and often very funny survey of Roman women, laced with many freewheeling modern analogues such as “Leather-face” and Beyoncé.

Look out for the forthcoming book on this same subject by one of the brightest stars in Britain’s classical firmament, Daisy Dunn. ★★

The Mystery of Doggerland Atlantis in the North Sea Graham Phillips Bear and Co 2023 Pb, 224pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781591434238

Are similarities between the designs on Fair Isle jumpers and patterns seen in Neolithic Grooved Ware pottery and on large carved stones in the Boyne Valley proof of the persistence of a folk memory from the pre-“Megalithic Age”? A question surprisingly not asked by this book for it appears that Fair Isle is the last remaining fragment of Northland – itself the cradle of civilisation (yes, yet another). The isle is also a last remnant in the book, only really appearing, anticlimactically, in the final dozen pages. Despite being in the title, Doggerland (generally accepted to be further south in the North Sea) takes an early bath and is lightly mentioned, nor is its relationship to Northland really explored.

The book is rather a reworking of modern-day existentialist worries, most notably sea-level rising, mega-tsunamis/volcanic eruptions and thawed-out pandemics (not yet, however, AI or asteroid strikes), dredged up as warnings from the past.

As is standard in “alternative” archaeology books, much of the discussion is based on secondary sources and is so simplistic that it has become inaccurate/ sub-accurate. The author’s use of “Megalithic Culture”, a term that is strenuously avoided by mainstream prehistorians as being misleading/meaningless or rather having a Humpty Dumpty meaning, is a leading example as is his use of latest scientific thinking.

Graham Phillips, whilst tripping down well-worn ley-line paths, has knitted together a fabric that is surprisingly and disappointingly bland. This is a tepid place-holder cum pot-boiler, with much winter cladding, and is padded out with unnecessary pages of descriptions of archaeological sites from the Yucatan to the

Orkneys, all rather sounding like pages taken from official guide books. Whilst elsewhere some of his central tenets (herb-picking by moonlight for maximum strength) are repeats having been expounded at length in his recent book Wisdom Keepers of Stonehenge.

But there are a couple of positives: there are 25 very wellcomposed colour plates of the usual British Isles megalithic super-sites (Wayland’s Smithy is missing); and early chapters dissect both earlier vanished lands/supercontinents and their Victorian/Edwardian protagonists. Chapter two, essentially about the rise of urbanisation, is all about Atlantis; but it is chapter three that is perhaps the most interesting, about lost continents and their doomed world-seeding ur-civilisations, namely Pacific Mu and Indian Ocean Lemuria.

Against expectations, Phillips, in good journalistic mode, dismantles all aspects of these conceits showing the false premises supporting them plus providing the abundant archaeological and geological reasons that prove them to be silly. This is an exemplary case of poacher turned gamekeeper and to be roundly applauded.

Ironically, should the same reasoning be applied to Phillips’s Northland it can only achieve the same result. The book is a quick-read, hand-me-down, modern existentialist worry-list bandwagon-jumper, knitted from faded/well-worn old patterns.

Rob Ixer

★★

Living with the Dead How We Care for the Deceased Vibeke Marie Viestad & Andreas Viestad, tr. Matt Bagguley Reaktion Books 2023 Hb, 240pp, £16, ISBN 9781789147681

Death may be one of the few human universals, but human responses to loss are far from uniform. In Living with the Dead, Vibeke Marie Viestad and her husband Andreas explore some of the different ways in which human societies have dealt with death, grief and commemoration, from the seemingly-orderly edge-oftown cemeteries of 19th-century Europe to the fantastical, custom

ised coffins of Ghana or modern practices such as fusing a dead loved one’s ashes into a diamond.

Living with the Dead combines personal experience, accounts of travel, interviews with archaeologists and funerary specialists, and more, creating an introduction to the vast variety of human cultural responses to death. Each section looks at a particular aspect of dealing with the dead, with chapters on cremation, dividing bodies into parts, transforming bodies into jewellery, the technical challenges of managing decomposition, constructing funeral monuments and more. Within each chapter, the authors draw on examples from cultures around the world to illustrate the different ways humans have approached these issues.

Even when dealing with practices that might seem gruesome to Western audiences, such as the traditional Zoroastrian practice of allowing birds to scavenge human remains, the Tibetan custom of “body-breaking”, or the obligation of male relatives to suck out the deceased’s bone marrow in the Trobriand Islands, the Viestads avoid gawking. Instead, each of these customs serves as an illustration of the wide variety of human responses to death, approached with curiosity and empathy.

Living with the Dead isn’t an exhaustive history or analysis of human funerary practice, and isn’t meant to be. It reads more like a collection of magazine articles on related topics. It’s easy to imagine it as a series of 30-minute episodes of a television series about funerary customs: informative and thought-provoking, but more interested in using variety as a way to illustrate its themes than exploring them for their own sake. This does mean that the book runs the risk of being less satisfying to readers who already have some in-depth knowledge of fun-erary practice. If you’ve already studied the history of European urban cemeteries, the Viestads’ brief summary isn’t going to tell you much you don’t already know. But the other consequence of this broad approach is that even readers with extensive knowledge of one area of the field will still find something new in the book.

Engaging, informative and sometimes humorous, Living with the Dead is an accessible and entertaining look not only at the many and diverse funerary rites of the world but also at the larger issues that underlie them: an intelligently human introduction to one of the most complex aspects of human society.

James Holloway

★★★★★

On Disinformation How to fight for truth and protect democracy Lee McIntyre MIT Press 2023 Pb, 144pp, £13.99, ISBN 9780262546300

This short (24,000 words) book is mostly about what philosopher Lee McIntyre calls denialism – how powerful groups persuade people to deny political and sci entific truth. He dates this back to 1953 and the gathering of tobacco manufacturers to consider what to do about the research linking smoking to cancer. Answer? Fight the science. He sees “a straight line between the manufacture of doubt about whether cigarettes cause lung cancer and today’s conspiracy-fueled dumpster fire of disbelief about any facts that conflict with one’s political agenda ... What began with a few tobacco executives at the Plaza Hotel culminated 70 years later on the steps of the US Capitol ... a tide of money ... [is] doing for election denial what the tobacco and fossil fuel industries did for science denial.”

This is possible because our beliefs are not based on facts; they are rooted in identity. Most of us believe what our group believes. “Hundreds of experiments have been performed by social psychologists over the last 70 years that demonstrate the social nature of belief.”

His second theme, of course, is the Internet and especially social media with its “automated algorithms ... formulated to maximise engagement, clicks, and time spent on the site. Rather than promote truth, they are engineered for profit.” The solution is obvious but politically impossible.

The first thing would be to reinstate the “fairness doctrine”. Before 1987, the Federal Communications Commission’s rules required the holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that fairly reflected differing viewpoints. After the doctrine was scrapped by President Reagan, America had the rise of the radio “shock jocks”, notably Rush Limbaugh, and then Fox TV, who could say anything. Into that legislative vacuum came the Internet.

The second thing would be to remove the legal immunity of website platforms so they could be sued for the content they broadcast. But neither is politically practical. The Internet owners are so rich, any attempt at either of these would drown in a torrent of hostile political spending. So neither of the parties in the US will contemplate it. They – and to a lesser extent we – are stuck.

Nicely written, witty and impassioned, this was a pleasure to read. I would have given it five stars but for the fact that McIntyre omits entirely the (surely relevant) fact that nearly half the US population thinks the Bible is the literal truth. It’s not that big a step from there to belief in the existence of Jewish space lasers.

Robin Ramsay

★★★★

Eleanor of Aquitaine, as It Was Said Truth and Tales about the Mediaeval Queen Karen Sullivan University of Chicago Press 2023 Hb, 270pp, £36, ISBN 9780226825830

Prof Karen Sullivan takes an unusual approach in this study of the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine: as well as the known factual history she focuses heavily on what various informal chroniclers and writers of romances have said about her over the centuries – “it is said [ut dicitur]” – i.e. how Eleanor was perceived as well as the straight facts. This seems a very fortean approach, akin in some ways to how we examine reports of alien abductions, ghosts and other phenomena. Unfortunately it doesn’t work out that way.

The book is unremittingly negative throughout. Whether discussing Eleanor’s first marriage to Louis VII of France (“she said that she had married a monk, not a king”), or her supposed affairs with everyone from her uncle Raymond of Antioch to Geoffrey Plantagenet, the father of her second husband Henry II of England, to the Saracen leader Saladin, she focuses almost entirely on scurrilous reports, even when they’re clearly nonsense. Saladin was just 10 or 11 when she was on the Second Crusade and supposed to have had an adulterous relationship with him; despite that, Sullivan spends eight pages on the story.

This imbalance continues throughout the book: her relations with Henry II and with their sons, her influence on troubadours (apparently non-existent, according to Sullivan), her entering the monastery at Fontevraud in her old age – all are presented as self-serving acts unbecoming of a woman, a wife or a queen.

There’s no doubt that the book is scholarly; there are 53 pages of notes, and the author frequently (but often pointlessly) gives the Latin or French or Occitan source words in brackets, so: “Contrary to regal dignity [regiam dignitatum], she neglected her marital vows…”. But her writing is incredibly repetitious in places, which makes it something of a dull read, something I never thought I’d say of a biography of Eleanor. The complete lack of any illustrations compounds the dullness. Literally on the very last page of the text she quotes Matthew Parris on “the noble Queen Eleanor, an admirable lady of beauty and astuteness”, and mentions sources that “stress her liberality, her intelligence and her energy”. The entire page is full of positive references and praise for Eleanor – which only serves to point up the gross imbalance of the previous 200+ pages.

An interesting semi-fortean approach – but so poorly done.

David V Barrett

★★