The courtesan who brought down a cult, and other unsung women of ancient Rome

Enlarge / A Roman bad girl: Tullia was the younger daughter of a Roman king, Servius Tullius. She plotted the king’s overthrow and murder—callously running over his body in the street—so her husband Lucius Tarquinius could become king. (credit: Public domain)

Around 186 BCE, a former slave turned courtesan named Hispala Faecenia fell in love with a young upper-middle class Roman man named Publius Aebutius. Then she learned his mother and stepfather planned to have Aebutius initiated into the Mysteries of Bacchus, a religious cult that, legend holds, featured drunken orgies and frenzied women tearing young men limb from limb. Hispala objected strenuously, fearing her lover’s reputation would be ruined or he would be injured or killed. And she questioned the parents’ motives—with good reason. Apparently Aebutius’s mother had squandered the young man’s inheritance and he was about to come of age, thereby exposing her financial mismanagement.

Eventually the local consul got involved and set up an investigation into this Bacchanalian scandal, with Hispala reluctantly testifying about what she knew of the “obscene rites” from her younger days as a sex slave. Deeming it a religious conspiracy, the Senate issued a formal decree prohibiting the Bacchanalia throughout Italy—all because a lowly freedwoman wanted to protect her lover.

Chances are you’ve never heard Hispala’s story (she is only mentioned in Livy’s History of Rome), but historian Emma Southon is out to change that with her new book, A Rome of One’s Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire. Southon earned a PhD in ancient history from the University of Birmingham and is also the author of the wittily irreverent 2021 book, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome, discussing how the people of ancient Rome viewed life, death, and what it means to be human. She brings that same sensibility—combining solid scholarship with a breezy conversational tone—to her female-centric revisionist history of the Roman Empire.