“She returned smelling of smoke and sex:” why powerful Roman women were branded nymphomaniacs

Messalina, the wife of emperor Claudius, is similarly sullied, with some sources accusing her of running a brothel from the imperial palace. The ancient satirist Juvenal describes her sneaking out at night and “working a night shift”, returning “smelling of sex and smoke.”

In one particularly salacious turn, she’s portrayed as competing with a sex worker for the most men bedded in a night (in a version told by Pliny the Elder, Messalina reportedly won –with 25 partners).

These are just some stories of the stories told about elite Roman women of the first century AD that journalist and author Joan Smith doesn’t buy – and she is encouraging others to question them too.

Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast about her book Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac, Smith argues that the truth behind these women’s reputations is far more unsettling.

Why are so many elite Roman women represented badly?

For Smith, who turned beyond more modern translations and looked to original sources for her book, these women weren’t promiscuous threats to imperial virtue, but victims of misogynistic representations that have been written and repeated without question.

Considering Julia’s supposed nymphomania, Smith points the fact that she was “famously fertile – she had five children with Agrippa, one with Tiberius”.

“If she was so sexually reckless after her separation from Tiberius, why did she never get pregnant again?” asks Smith, suggesting a possible answer: “Maybe the sources have made things up.”

The sources are the crux of the issue, admits Smith. When returning to the Latin sources for her book, “the bias springs out at you,” she says.

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“What [the sources] say about the emperors tends to be taken at face value. What they say about the women is very, very pejorative.”

But even if one disregards what Smith calls the “Roman misogyny” in the original stories, Smith believes they have also been uncritically accepted for centuries.

Take Livia Drusilla, wife of Roman emperor Augustus and mother of emperor Tiberius. Most often recognised today as a figure in Robert Graves’s 1934 novel I, Claudius (which was in the 1970s adapted into a much-loved BBC TV series), Livia has a popular reputation as a cold and calculating murderess.

Graves “created an incredibly sensational account on top of the sensational account that’s in the ancient text,” says Smith, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.

“In his novels, he accuses Livia of eight murders. Seven of those people were not murdered, and the one who was murdered wasn’t from her orders.”

Graves wasn’t inventing from nothing, says Smith, but amplifying ancient misogyny.

“What he’s done is create her into a kind of arch villain, which is a story that lot of readers like, the idea that powerful men have been manipulated by women in the background.”

Graves was drawing on the allure of ‘Lady Macbeth’ figures, says Smith, and he also accuses Livia of sending a poisoner to kill her younger son, Drusus, when he fell from a horse in Germany.

There’s “no evidence for this whatsoever”, she says, but thanks to Graves’ popular portrayal, it’s a story about Livia that “most people believe”.

Why were some women branded nymphomaniacs?

“People like pornography,” says Smith. “Can we believe that Messalina was so mad for sex that every night she crept out of the palace, worked a ‘night shift’ and nobody noticed? How would she have managed to get past the Praetorian Guard?”

For Smith, the story is “the most extraordinary pornographic fantasy”.

Alongside the more titillating aspects of these stories, says Smith, for the Romans, they also became a way of punishing women who resisted control.

“The emperors tried to exert an extraordinary degree of control over their wives, mothers, and daughters,” she says, and the slightest act of defiance was “interpreted as treason”. Women who resisted were recast as threats to moral and political order. “It’s the idea that because they resisted, that gets turned into a kind of complete inability to control themselves.”

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The accusation of insatiable sexuality, Smith argues, was a convenient way to punish female visibility and autonomy. “If a wife defied her husband in any way, that was an affront to the state […] it all comes back to control.”

And for writers and historians who have since reinforced the stories, it’s the appetite for the salacious, says Smith, far more than historical truth, that has driven the phenomenon. To reduce women to a simple label – murderess, adulterer, nymphomaniac – is to ignore the cruelty of their fates, and their resilience and bravery in facing them.

Smith describes what happened to Julia after she was denounced; after a forced marriage to Tiberius, she was exiled by her father Augustus to a barren island, Ventotene, and was forbidden to drink wine or eat proper food. “It’s 3000 by 800 metres,” Smith said of the island where Julia died. “She never saw her children again.”

Despite being nearly 70 years old, her mother Scribonia volunteered to join her daughter as she starved to death in isolation. “That’s solidarity,” Smith said. “But instead, we’re just told that Julia was a nymphomaniac.”

Joan Smith was speaking to Elinor Evans on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.