Messalina: Empress of Rome
The Ancients
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The Illusion of a Straightforward History of the Ancient World
The illusion that you can write a straightforward, factual history of the ancient world is a dangerous one for an ancient historian. I think that's even more true when you're working with women because their lives tend to be more in private and so then we're easily manipulated by historical sources. So I don't think that we can write a history that there are no questions about any sort of piece of this. But I do think that we know a huge amount about the political and the cultural context in which Messalina lived.
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