Fulvia by Jane Draycott

Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome

By Jane Draycott

Yale University Press 2025

Fulvia, the ancient Roman woman who’s the subject of Jane Draycott’s new book, was a well-known and notorious figure in Republican Rome, wife to Marc Antony and dedicated enemy of both Octavian (later the emperor Augustus) and Cicero. Fulvia first married political schemer Publius Clodius Pulcher, and when he was killed by a rival, she married the political schemer Gaius Scribonius Curio, and when he had his shapely body speared through and through while in battle in Africa, she married arch political schemer Marc Antony, schemed right alongside him (it’s possible that it was a pastime of hers, not merely a byproduct of her marriages), fought an abortive little war in his name, and disappeared to die off-stage, leaving Marc Antony free to marry Octavian’s sister.

Fulvia made it onto the coinage, but like almost all women in the ancient world, she scarcely made it into the reliable annals as anything more than a cautionary-tale virago. The most famous story that later circulated about her involved her aforementioned nemesis Cicero: when he was executed, she had his head shipped to her in a box and used one of her long hairpins to skewer his tongue. Draycott knows perfectly well that she must address this, and since her book is clearly intended to be a kind of revisionary historical reclamation of Fulvia, she goes about it in a decidedly odd way:

It is entirely fair to criticize Fulvia for her unnecessary desecration of Cicero’s head (assuming that such an event did, in fact, occur), even if her motivations, given her and Cicero’s long-standing enmity, are somewhat understandable. Indeed, as we have seen, other Roman women who resorted to mutilation and torture were likewise criticized. So far, so reasonable.

So far, so reasonable for stabbing the lolling tongue of a decapitated head: Okay. A book that’s willing to make such an allowance is probably willing to make all the allowances in the world. But since it’s not possible to write a legitimate biography of Fulvia (we know virtually nothing about her aside from a few tidbits preserved mostly for subsequent political reasons), it’s likewise not possible to write a revisionary biography of her. Even in Draycott’s somewhat strained attempts to contextualize her into a semblance of humanity, she remains a political stalking-horse. Draycott’s even willing to suggest the whole pin-in-the-tongue business may have just been a bit of bad timing:

What we must remember is that Fulvia was living at a very different time, and through very different circumstances to us, and we should judge her accordingly. After all, she lived and died a century before the advent of Christianity and the prevailing belief in turning the other cheek and forgiving trespasses.

Fairly silly stuff (if Fulvia was indeed a savage political animal, the whole point of the stories circulating about her was that such savagery was anything but typical), but thankfully, not all of this book is silly, far from it. As she demonstrated in her widely-praised earlier book Cleopatra’s Daughter, Draycott is an effective teacher and researcher about the ancient world. This present book’s bibliography and notes are excellent, for instance. And if, through all that research and all those notes, we could somehow encounter the real flesh-and-blood Fulvia, she might be more sympathetic than her legend portrays her. But don’t bet your last denarius on it.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News