PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
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.
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
