Review: Unfortunately, She was a Nymphomaniac

Joan Smith, Unfortunately, She was a Nymphomaniac, (William Collins, 2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/211051402-unfortunately-she-was-a-nymphomaniac

The durability of ancient Roman misogyny

A misogynist myth about women has been going round for millennia. That some women are infected with a psychological madness, an evil insatiable appetite for sex called furor uterinus, a disease which was supposed to originate in the womb.Accusations of sexual promiscuity, true or not, were used as justifications for femicide (the killing of women because they are women).

Girls were often forced to marry as early as age 12, even before menarche, and death in childbirth was common. The husbands could be in their 30s, 40s or 50s. Divorce was easy, and the children remained with the father.

The brilliant title of this book came from the mouth of a tour guide at the Palazzo Massimo museum in Rome. He was talking about Julia, the only child of Augustus, whom the all-authoritative ‘sources’ so maligned and who is the main subject of the first few chapters of this book. Augustus exiled his ‘nymphomaniac’ daughter Julia to Pandateria, then her ex-husband Tiberius locked her in a room and starved her to death, while her mother Scribonia had to listen through the walls to her anguished cries.

We’ve taken so many of our assumptions about this dynasty from Robert Graves’ highly fictionalised and sensationalised I, Claudius (who can forget the terrifying G-g-grandmother?), which Smith calls ‘a misogynist’s fever dream’.

But the real history is not much nicer. If the Julio-Claudians weren’t poisoning their women or stabbing them to death in the uterus, they were exiling them to distant rocky islands and starving them to death. Smith comments, ‘It’s impossible to overestimate the durability of Roman misogyny.’[1]

From Nero to Henry VIII, all a ruler had to do to justify bumping off a wife or a mother was to accuse her of infidelity. The empress Messalina, according to the satirist Juvenal, had a second career as a brothel madam, about as credible as Anne Boleyn’s incest with her brother.

The final chapter, outlining the violence against women that is still going on today, is harrowing.

We’re all somewhat familiar with the history of these people, but Smith exposes the shocking prejudices of the ‘sources’ and rights some of the myths. Contains copious footnotes, from the author’s own researching Latin sources, and includes many choice exactly translated phrases. Scrupulous scholarship, with the ability eloquently to cut to the gist of things. This is especially appreciated with ancient Roman history, with its plethora of names, dates and complex and inter-related family trees.

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[1] p. 224.