Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome

by Jane Draycott

Male Roman writers, such as Cicero, were not kind about Fulvia (born 80 BCE), calling her “a woman as cruel as she is greedy.” She married three powerful men, the last of whom was Mark Antony, who left her for Cleopatra before getting himself killed at Actium. It was one of many tragedies in Fulvia’s life. In this biography, historian Jane Draycott painstakingly reconstructs the life of this elite woman of the Roman Republic and tries to separate the misogynistic stereotyping from the real woman.