The Women of Ancient Greece & Rome | Book Recommendations from a Historian

one of her books is Agraina, the defiant story of Rome's first empress. Like the stories that surround Agraina are utterly wild but Sin treats her story with the kind of like care and consideration that any woman's life or any life deserves.

And a fantastic book on this subject is the Amazon by Adrien Mayer... it does a deep dive into what we know about real warrior women, what the mythology tells us about attitudes towards warrior women, what fears patriarchal societies had around warrior women. and it's just absolutely fascinating to be perfectly honest.

I wouldn't have conducted the research or written this book if I didn't genuinely think it was important and fascinating research that I would like more people to be introduced to and I think gives us a better understanding of women's lives in antiquity. So yeah, if you're interested in women's history or more specifically the history of sex, then check it out. I think it's pretty good.

And then a more recent release I'm actually in the process of reading right now, but I don't want to miss out of this video is Athena's Sisters. Reclaiming the women of classical Athens by Katherine Bachler. And this book looks at women's complex social lives and relationships outside of simply marriage and her role as a wife in the household, but actually what her life more broadly looked like. And I think that is so important.

Then if you've still not had enough of a Cleopatra, check out the Cleopatra by Claude Llewellyn Jones. And this book focuses in on all of them.

The first of which focuses on Cleopatra II's daughter. So, when most of us think of Cleopatra, we're thinking of Cleopatra II, the final pharaoh of Egypt. And this book focuses on her daughter, who is also called Cleopatra, specifically Cleopatra Selini.

she has a phenomenal biography of Falvia who was an influential aristocratic Roman woman during the Roman Republic. But also Fulvia is just a fascinating woman. She wielded what for many will be a surprising amount of power during her lifetime.

But this book really was like an absolute gamecher when it came out for focusing in solely on the lives of women for treating them seriously, taking them seriously and emphasizing their importance to understanding history. And for that reason, it will always be incredibly close to my heart.

if one woman is not enough for you, then Emma Sin actually has a phenomenal book called The History of the Roman Empire in 21 women. And this is one of those books where it's exactly what it says on the tin.

I find Messelina incredibly fascinating and I think on her cargo Martin does a phenomenal job of really like bringing to life the nuance of her story, the complexity of her story from the early days to the very end.

So, what's phenomenal about this book is that Emily Hower has used Homer's Iliad and Homer's Odyssey as a jumping off point to discuss what we really know about women who lived in Bronze Age Greece... It's fascinating and I would highly recommend checking it out.

I would recommend checking out The Missing Thread: A New History of the Ancient World Through the Women Who Shaped It by Dr. Daisy Dunn. Now, this book really does cover huge swades of time, almost 3,000 years, from the Manowans, the Mcinians to the late Roman Empire, and it does something I talked about at the beginning of this video, which I think is so important.

And an excellent book I think to start on this subject which is also accessible and super interesting is women writers of ancient Greece and ancient Rome by Ian Plant but also the women of antiquity. What's phenomenal about this book is it includes translations of the poetry and the medical writings and the philosophy that has been attributed to women writers of antiquity from both Greece and Rome.