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This is fascinating - detailed, well-researched by an author who chooses to be cautious, and yet beautifully told. It's unputdownable as a story of human drama alone.
From Livia and her complicated family saga, to infamous Messalina, later to Constantine's murdered wife Fausta and his renowned mother Helena--it's all fascinating storytelling and history. Freisenbruch's perspective is cautious to separate probable rumour from possible truth. Wives and daughters in political settings then and now are required to perform, and to have many rumours spread about them; Freisenbruch's work is aware of this and applies an incisive analysis to the question of public presentation and private life.
Freisenbruch claims to relate her material to modern First Ladies, particularly the wives of American presidents, but wisely the theme is not belaboured upon to excess and the reader is allowed to concentrate on the history and draw their own inferences.
One aspect I found especially interesting in the book was the accounts of fashion as displayed on statues and coins of these women. As eras change, so do styles of dress and hair - and these aren't unimportant at all, but a crucial part of the symbolism of these powerful women's portraiture and a cultural indication of altered times and valorised ideals.
I can't do better than quote the beginning of the book, which dramatises Livia's known start to her lengthy career.
The blaze had seemed to come out of nowhere, and it caught unawares those trapped in its path, scything a lethal swathe through the olive groves and pinewoods of Sparta. As tongues of flame billowed into the night air, filling it with the acrid smell of burning tree sap, the dry sounds of crackling branches were layered with panicked shouts and laboured breathing. A man and a woman were hurrying through a burning forest. The going was perilous, so much so that at one point the woman's hair and the trailing hem of her dress were singed. But there was little time to inspect the damage. Enemy forces were hard on their heels, and had been harrying them for some time now. Weeks earlier, the fugitive couple and their travelling companions had nearly been apprehended as they tried secretly to board a vessel out of the port of Naples - the fractious wails of their baby son almost giving the game away. The man's name was Tiberius Claudius Nero, and the woman was his seventeen-year-old wife Livia Drusilla.
The later stories are also well worth the read. Emperor Severus' time, too, is sometimes underappreciated in history books, and so the tales of his powerful and learned wife Julia Domna are especially interesting. (Interesting note: Severus was the first African emperor of the Romans.) And then there's the exceedingly dramatic story of Galla Placidia, daughter and sister and wife and mother to four different emperors, who went through many changes and reversals of fortune that included being apparently happily married to a Gothic barbarian king for several years. There's simply too much compelling material in this book!
This is fascinating - detailed, well-researched by an author who chooses to be cautious, and yet beautifully told. It's unputdownable as a story of human drama alone.
From Livia and her complicated family saga, to infamous Messalina, later to Constantine's murdered wife Fausta and his renowned mother Helena--it's all fascinating storytelling and history. Freisenbruch's perspective is cautious to separate probable rumour from possible truth. Wives and daughters in political settings then and now are required to perform, and to have many rumours spread about them; Freisenbruch's work is aware of this and applies an incisive analysis to the question of public presentation and private life.
Freisenbruch claims to relate her material to modern First Ladies, particularly the wives of American presidents, but wisely the theme is not belaboured upon to excess and the reader is allowed to concentrate on the history and draw their own inferences.
One aspect I found especially interesting in the book was the accounts of fashion as displayed on statues and coins of these women. As eras change, so do styles of dress and hair - and these aren't unimportant at all, but a crucial part of the symbolism of these powerful women's portraiture and a cultural indication of altered times and valorised ideals.
I can't do better than quote the beginning of the book, which dramatises Livia's known start to her lengthy career.
The blaze had seemed to come out of nowhere, and it caught unawares those trapped in its path, scything a lethal swathe through the olive groves and pinewoods of Sparta. As tongues of flame billowed into the night air, filling it with the acrid smell of burning tree sap, the dry sounds of crackling branches were layered with panicked shouts and laboured breathing. A man and a woman were hurrying through a burning forest. The going was perilous, so much so that at one point the woman's hair and the trailing hem of her dress were singed. But there was little time to inspect the damage. Enemy forces were hard on their heels, and had been harrying them for some time now. Weeks earlier, the fugitive couple and their travelling companions had nearly been apprehended as they tried secretly to board a vessel out of the port of Naples - the fractious wails of their baby son almost giving the game away. The man's name was Tiberius Claudius Nero, and the woman was his seventeen-year-old wife Livia Drusilla.
The later stories are also well worth the read. Emperor Severus' time, too, is sometimes underappreciated in history books, and so the tales of his powerful and learned wife Julia Domna are especially interesting. (Interesting note: Severus was the first African emperor of the Romans.) And then there's the exceedingly dramatic story of Galla Placidia, daughter and sister and wife and mother to four different emperors, who went through many changes and reversals of fortune that included being apparently happily married to a Gothic barbarian king for several years. There's simply too much compelling material in this book!
