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Josephine Quinn

Josephine Quinn teaches ancient history at Oxford and is ­currently a Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman ­Center for Scholars and Writers.
 (January 2020)

IN THE REVIEW

Mothers and Emperors

Agrippina crowning her son Nero emperor of Rome, 54 CE; relief from the Sebasteion, an excavated temple in the ancient city of Aphrodisias, in present-day Turkey

Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome

by Guy de la Bédoyère
For ninety-nine years a single family ruled Rome. Five of its members in turn controlled the government and the army. But this was not a monarchy: none ruled by right, and the institutions of the old Roman republic remained in place—the consuls, the Senate, even the elections. This peculiar regime …

Caesar Bloody Caesar

The Landmark Julius Caesar: The Complete Works: Gallic War, Civil War, Alexandrian War, African War, and Spanish War

edited and translated from the Latin by Kurt A. Raaflaub
When Julius Caesar was thirty-one years old in 69 BCE, so the story goes, and serving as a junior Roman magistrate in Spain, he once stood lamenting before a statue of Alexander the Great because he had achieved so little at an age by which Alexander had already conquered the world. He had good reason for concern.