Turia: A Roman Woman's Civil War

by Josiah Osgood

Overview

The civil wars that brought down the Roman Republic were fought on more than battlefields. Armed gangs infested the Italian countryside, mansions were besieged in the city, and bounty-hunters searched the streets for "public enemies." Among the astonishing stories to survive from these years is that of a young woman whose parents were killed, on the eve of her wedding, in the violence engulfing Italy in the late first century BC. While her future husband fought overseas, she staved off a run on her father's estate and raised money to help her fiancé in exile. Further, when her husband, back in Rome, was declared an outlaw, she successfully hid him, worked for his pardon, and joined other Roman women in staging a public protest. The wife's tale is known only because her husband had inscribed on large slabs of marble the elaborate eulogy he gave at her funeral. In this book, Josiah Osgood reconstructs the life of Turia, as the wife is commonly known, more fully than it has been before by bringing in alongside the eulogy stories of other Roman women who also contributed to their families' survival while working to end civil war. He shows how the wife's story sheds rare light on the more hidden problems of everyday life for Romans, including a high number of childless marriages. This unique narrative is more than a biography of one woman: it is a portrait of a vivid period in Roman history and a tribute to married love which though from another world speaks to us today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199832354
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	08/05/2014
Series:	Women in Antiquity
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Josiah Osgood is Professor of Classics at Georgetown University. He is the author of Caesar's Legacy: Civil War and the Emergence of the Roman Empire (2006) and Claudius Caesar: Image and Power in the Early Roman Empire (2011). Professor Osgood held a Rome Prize fellowship and returns to Rome to study each year.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations, Tables, and Map
Prologue
1 Father's Death
2 The Fiancé
3 At the Tribunal of Lepidus
4 Children Hoped-for
5 Preparing for Death
6 Between the Torches
7 Missing Pieces, Other Pieces
8 The Monument Itself
Appendix 1: A Brief Note on Chronology
Appendix 2: Reading Text and Translation
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Osgood skillfully interweaves the story of the unnamed wife (Turia) with those of other prominent women, mostly from senatorial families, and allows the experience of each individual woman to inform that of others, using both comparisons and contrasts. In this way this discussion offers far more than a single biographical sketch; rather, it explores the huge cultural changes of these years in terms of the experiences of two generations of elite Roman women. Insightful treatments of most of the prominent women whom we know about in the mid to late first century BC encourage a whole new way of looking at Roman women, their social and political roles. Meanwhile, Osgood's analysis of the famous inscription itself is fresh, lucid, and flawless." —Harriet I. Flower, Princeton University

"In this wonderfully learned and beautifully written book, Josiah Osgood enables his readers to feel the transition from the Republic to Empire through the experience of a woman of astonishing determination, a woman who survived tragedy and abuse to save her husband and family from great wrongs. Viewing the period from this unique perspective, Osgood has brought these troubled years to life in an original, persuasive, and deeply humane way." —David Potter, University of Michigan

From the Publisher