Fulvia, Playing for Power at the End of the Roman Republic
By Celia E. Schultz
Abstract: Fulvia, Center Stage is the first full-length biography focused solely on Fulvia, daughter of Sempronia and Bambalio, who is best known as the wife of Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony). Born into a less prestigious branch of an aristocratic Roman clan in the last decades of the Roman Republic, Fulvia first rose to prominence as the wife of P. Clodius Pulcher, scion of one of the city’s most powerful families and one of its most infamous and scandalous politicians. In the aftermath of his murder, Fulvia refused to shrink from the glare of public scrutiny and helped to prosecute the man responsible. Later, as the wife of Antonius, she was the most powerful woman in Rome, at one point even taking an active role in the military conflict between Antonius’s allies and Octavian, the future emperor Augustus. Her husbands’ enemies painted her as domineering, vicious, greedy, and petty — a caricature of woman who pushed against the boundary of female propriety, a woman about whom there was “nothing feminine except her form”. Fulvia, Center Stage peels away the invective to reveal a strong-willed, independent woman who was, by many traditional measures, a successful Roman matrona: she was never single for long, her husbands flourished, her children were many, and there was barely a whiff of sexual impropriety about her. On top of all that, Fulvia proved herself over and over again a valuable asset, a shrewd political ally, and a fearless defender of her family’s interests.
Published by Oxford University Press, 2021.