Jane Draycott, "Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome" (Yale UP, 2025)

Before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself and tell us how you got interested in your area of expertise? And again, more importantly, what gave you the idea to write this book? What was the inception story of this book?

So I am a senior lecturer in ancient history at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and I work mainly on the Roman period, the late Roman Republic and the early imperial period.

And I've been interested in many different aspects of the ancient world over the last 15 or so years.

I sort of see myself as sitting kind of at the midpoint between ancient history and archaeology.

So I'm a social historian and I like to use not just literature like a classicist, but also material culture like an archaeologist.

So I'm very interested in histories that I can bring all of that together in.

And when it comes to ancient women...

It's very hard to actually locate ancient women in the historical records.

If women are mentioned at all, it's very briefly or it's subject to a whole lot of...

Well, you can't necessarily tell that it's realistic.

It's a lot of cultural and literary motifs and stereotypes.

And so if you're reading about one ancient woman, a lot of what is being said about her is very similar to other ancient women that get mentioned in the texts.

And so you're like, well, how far can I trust this? Is this true or is this just a sort of a literary conceit? And so that's when you can turn to the material culture and you can look at representations of women in ancient art and you can look at their actual belongings and the things that they would have used.

And so I'm interested in both specific ancient women, the ones who do appear in our named sources, the high-profile women, the empresses, the priestesses, etc.

I'm also interested in the more ordinary women who don't get named in the sources but who get found in the material record.

And Fulvia is somebody who, in many respects, is a very good example of all of this because she does get mentioned in the historical record of the late Republic because she is a high-profile woman.

She is a member of the Roman senatorial elite.

She is married to high-profile men who are involved in politics.

And she does quite transgressive things that you wouldn't necessarily expect a woman to be doing at this time, or at least if women were doing it, they were not quite so talked about as she was.

And so the way that she is talked about is very exaggerated and over the top.

And so...

in an attempt to try and find out more about her because we only have so many ancient sources from this period and we know what they are.

We've known what they are for centuries now.

There are suddenly new discoveries of historiography or anything like that.

So in order to try and get something new out of these literary sources, I also have been looking at, well, what were women doing in this period? What were their lives like? What can the archaeological record tell us? And I thought, having written my previous book, Cleopatra's Daughter, that was about Cleopatra Selene, who is the her virtually unknown daughter of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, and Marcus Antonius, the Roman triumvirate.

Before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself and tell us how you got interested in your area of expertise? And again, more importantly, what gave you the idea to write this book? What was the inception story of this book?

So I am a senior lecturer in ancient history at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and I work mainly on the Roman period, the late Roman Republic and the early imperial period.

And I've been interested in many different aspects of the ancient world over the last 15 or so years.

I sort of see myself as sitting kind of at the midpoint between ancient history and archaeology.

So I'm a social historian and I like to use not just literature like a classicist, but also material culture like an archaeologist.

So I'm very interested in histories that I can bring all of that together in.

And when it comes to ancient women...

It's very hard to actually locate ancient women in the historical records.

If women are mentioned at all, it's very briefly or it's subject to a whole lot of...

Well, you can't necessarily tell that it's realistic.

It's a lot of cultural and literary motifs and stereotypes.

And so if you're reading about one ancient woman, a lot of what is being said about her is very similar to other ancient women that get mentioned in the texts.

And so you're like, well, how far can I trust this? Is this true or is this just a sort of a literary conceit? And so that's when you can turn to the material culture and you can look at representations of women in ancient art and you can look at their actual belongings and the things that they would have used.

And so I'm interested in both specific ancient women, the ones who do appear in our named sources, the high-profile women, the empresses, the priestesses, etc.

I'm also interested in the more ordinary women who don't get named in the sources but who get found in the material record.

And Fulvia is somebody who, in many respects, is a very good example of all of this because she does get mentioned in the historical record of the late Republic because she is a high-profile woman.

She is a member of the Roman senatorial elite.

She is married to high-profile men who are involved in politics.

And she does quite transgressive things that you wouldn't necessarily expect a woman to be doing at this time, or at least if women were doing it, they were not quite so talked about as she was.

And so the way that she is talked about is very exaggerated and over the top.

And so...

in an attempt to try and find out more about her because we only have so many ancient sources from this period and we know what they are.

We've known what they are for centuries now.

There are suddenly new discoveries of historiography or anything like that.

So in order to try and get something new out of these literary sources, I also have been looking at, well, what were women doing in this period? What were their lives like? What can the archaeological record tell us? And I thought, having written my previous book, Cleopatra's Daughter, that was about Cleopatra Selene, who is the her virtually unknown daughter of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, and Marcus Antonius, the Roman triumvirate.