Book Review – Domina

Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome by Guy de la Bédoyère
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Writing a history of women and power in Roman history is tricky business. Contemporary accounts – and subsequent versions based on now-lost documents – are almost universally sparse and antagonistic when dealing with anyone other than men of senatorial rank. Nonetheless, Guy de la Bedoyere does a competent job of gleaning what may be considered accurate and recognizing problems with the rest of the record. Though the book’s title implies an ambitious ambit, most of the focus is on the Julio-Claudians (with a relatively brief epilogue devoted mostly to the Severans). The author makes some excellent points about the importance of matrilineal lines of descent and the tricky business of women exercising control of a system that denied them all official forms of authority. My only gripe is that this could have been a considerably shorter work. Much of the text is repetitive, and frequent numismatic digressions vary between historically significant and irrelevantly trivial. Overall, however, this is a worthwhile read.

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