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When in Rome retells Rome's civil wars from the point of view of the women who lived through them – not as footnotes to the careers of great men, but as agents, survivors and, in some cases, formidable political operators in their own right.

Across the most unstable decades in Roman history, women of every rank – aristocratic, middle-class and freed slaves – were deployed to serve men's ambitions, their marriages brokered, their loyalties traded, their losses unmourned.

Organised around individual women – among them Fulvia, Octavia and Cleopatra – Smith's history is radical in its reframing. Cleopatra emerges not as the seductive foreign threat of Augustan myth but as a capable strategist who came within reach of becoming Rome's first empress. Others are revealed as figures of unexpected power, making consequential decisions under conditions of repeated grief and loss.

Bracingly revisionist and compulsively readable, this is Roman history as it has rarely been told.

Books by Joan Smith

When in Rome