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Fulvia (a name, “like dear”) is probably the most famous woman in ancient Rome never forgotten. A parent of Julius Caesar, the mother-in-law of Augustus, and a rival of love in Cleopatra, she was, according to Plutarch, “a woman who did not think of the rotation or the housekeeping”, and has become rather a political and even military figure, as well as the first woman on a Roman room.
However, today, the only reference you find in pop culture is as a minor character in the hacking video game Dante's hell (where her name is “the most greedy woman of all Rome”).
Fulvia is, supports Jane Draycott in her latest popular history book, a Rorschach test for researchers. For some, Fulvia is the “first princess in Rome”; For others, it is just a footnote. The biography in part, partly social history, the portrait of Fulvia de Draycott is both light and complete, wide and concentrated, entertaining but not sensationalist. But it would not be necessary to sensation – the last century in the Roman Republic is the greatest soap opera that history ever written.
Draycott proves to Fulvia a main and complex main character while we follow her of the girl, playing with dolls disguised in Amazons, to her role as a woman as a politician (or a proto mob) to her three husbands – Clodius Pulcher, Curio and Mark Antony – as a mother to her five children, and finally, in a bizarre torsion, Between the supporters of Mark Anthony and those of Octavian, the future Augustus. Throughout, Fulvia exercises political power behind the scenes. Draycott skillfully showing him without his story overthrowing in the territory of Lady Macbeth.
But did she manage to rebuild Fulvia as “a living, breathable Roman woman, flesh and blood”? The inevitable obstacle is that Fulvia never speaks; No account on his part survives, so we can only see her from the distance. This silence is unfortunately underlined by the intensity of men in his life, which, through their letters and poems And the memories are funny, camp, scary, mean and dynamic.
Even without his voice, there are enough brilliant images mentioned by Fulvia to support us: Fulvia in her wedding veil, the color of the egg yolks; Fulvia encouraging a crowd to build the funeral pyre of Clodius inside The Senate house; Mark Antony Disciplining the soldiers by torturing them in the Fulvia lounge, the blood splashed on his face. And then there is the most famous image: Fulvia stabbed the tongue of her dead enemy, Cicero, with her golden hair pin.
Sometimes Draycott seems to be overcompensary for the Vitriol Fulvia suffered – a sling ball found on the perusine war site, for example, had been engraved with a flash and words “I aim for the clitoris of Fulvia!” – by depicting his first and before everything as a married wife and mother. Everything she does, she does, she does For his family.
But it is the strangeness of Fulvia, its intensity, its lack of Stepfordesque-Ness, which makes it so convincing. (And there is a truly frightening scene of violence, mainly adopted so that it can get an extension of the kitchen.)
As for today's Rorschach test, you can imagine that women take Fulvia as a kind of desire for secret. She embodies the moment of the horror film when power finally passes into the hands of the intimidated girl.
Fulvia: The woman who has violated all the rules of ancient Rome by Jane Draycott Atlantic £ 20, 288 pages; To be published in the United States in July by Rizzoli, $ 30
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