Overview

This is the story of Messalina - third wife of Emperor Claudius and one of the most notorious women to have inhabited the Roman world. According to the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius, the Empress Messalina was a sexually insatiable schemer. The tales they told about her – including a twenty-four-hour sex competition with a prostitute – have taken deep root in the Western imagination, but Messalina’s real story is much more complex. In her reappraisal of one of the most slandered female figures of ancient history, Honor Cargill-Martin finds an intelligent, passionate and ruthless woman who succeeded in asserting herself in the overwhelmingly male world of imperial Roman politics. Rather than setting out to ‘salvage’ Messalina’s reputation, she looks at her life in the context of her time. Above all, she seeks to reclaim the humanity of a life story previously circumscribed by currents of high politics and patriarchy.

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9781801102605

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Honor Cargill-Martin is an author, classicist, and art historian from London. She read Classical Archaeology and Ancient History at Oxford, winning a scholarship and graduating with a first-class degree in 2019. She has masters degrees in Greek and Roman history and Italian Renaissance Art. She is currently studying for a doctorate focusing on political sex scandals in Ancient Rome at Christ Church College Oxford. She has published a number of children's fiction titles. Her upcoming biography of the oft-slandered Roman empress Messalina is her first non-fiction title.

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