Not Built in a Day

 Not Built in a Day: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire-Emma Southon

Simon & Schuster

Release Date: June 30, 2026

Rating: 📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul he boasted that he killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. This is the truth about the Roman Rome could not function without slavery as it underpinned every single part of their economy. Without the millions of people snatched from their homes in the aftermath of war, kidnapped from the streets, sold into slavery as punishment, or born into it as “home bred slaves”, the Roman empire’s great aqueducts and temples could never have been built. There would be no coins or tiles to find in fields, no limitless manpower for the army and navy that conquered the Mediterranean, no marble palaces or underfloor heating, and certainly no life of unimaginable luxury for the one percent who didn’t even tie their own shoes. For the first time, Not Built in a Day tells their stories.

Not Built in a Day takes readers into the invisible spaces of the Roman empire, where the millions of enslaved lives perpetuated the excesses of the empire that owned them. From the fields of wheat required to give every Roman his daily bread, to the actors and gladiators who provided their circuses; from the guards who kept the streets of Rome safe and the mines which kept Rome a city of gold and marble, to the builders who placed every brick in the Colosseum. It traces how people entered, experienced, and left slavery, covering the little known story of slave revolts and the complex realities of enslaved people who themselves owned enslaved people. Not Built in a Dayalso explores the lives of those freed from slavery, finally able to choose their own destinies.

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I'm a huge fan of historian Emma Southon. She's on my short list of must-buy historians when she has a new book coming out. She questions sources, she gets into the cracks of what archaeology and literature and laws have left us and works out what life would have been like for those who have been left out of so many re-tellings of history with a big H: women (A Rome of One's Own), and in Not Build in a Day, the enslaved population of the Roman Empire. And she does it all with a delightful snarky, irreverent sense of humor. 

As horrifying as Roman slavery was, the layers of complexity thanks to frankly weird laws that meant the empire literally could not survive without a massive enslaved population were fascinting. I had no idea about some of the financial and legal hoops Romans built for themselves. While I knew this was a civilization that was focused on status, I'm not sure I had absorbed just what that meant about daily life: your status had status and could change depending on so many things. This included people in slavery. Enslaved people, freed people and citizens, all had so many levels of status depending on who was involved with what that it must have been exhausting. 

The book breaks down into where people are enslaved (the imperial house, the city, the country, etc.) and the kind of work they are required to do, because that has massive impacts on the experience of the individual.

I can't tell you how much I think this book is a must-read for anyone interested in Roman history. Read it along side all the other histories that look at the big pictures and the big names and forget to tell you about what a Roman's daily life was like. Because this, this was daily life in Rome. You were on one side of the whip or the other, but every single person experienced this in some form every day. 

Wonderfully researched, well written, another triumph for Emma Southon. I can't wait to see where she takes us next. 

A Rome of One's Own

 

A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Romane Empire- Emma Southon 

Abrams Press

Release Date: November 7, 2023

Rating:📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: The history of Rome has long been narrow and one-sided, essentially a history of “The Doing of Important Things,” and as far as Roman historians have been concerned, women don’t make that history. From Romulus through “the political stab-fest of the late Republic,” and then on to all the emperors, Roman historians may deign to give you a wife or a mother to show how bad things become when women get out of control, but history is more than that.

 
Emma Southon’s A Rome of One’s Own is the best kind of correction. This is a retelling of the history of Rome with all the things Roman history writers relegate to the background, or designate as domestic, feminine, or worthless. This is a history of women who caused outrage, led armies in rebellion, wrote poetry; who lived independently or under the thumb of emperors. Told with humor and verve as well as a deep scholarly background, A Rome of One’s Own highlights women overlooked and misunderstood, and through them offers a fascinating and groundbreaking chronicle of the ancient world.

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Emma Southon is my absolute favorite historian when it comes to exploring ancient Rome. First off, she literally wrote a book on murder in Rome (A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) and I feel like that is a book everyone needs in their life.  I know I did. Secondly, she examines Roman history a)within its historical context b)looking at the historical sources in their context and c)with a dry wit and humor that makes me feel like I'm having a conversation with a friend about something that I would actually regularly talk to a friend about (because that's the kind of person I am). It's also the sort of humor that would make people not necessarily interested in ancient history really get into it. And have I mentioned that she doesn't look at what Traditional Historians usually look at: Important Battles In History? 

Instead, Emma Southon has been on the cutting edge of examining ancient Roman history from the point of view of women since her fabulous book on Agrippina came out in 2019 and she hasn't looked back since. In A Rome of One's Own she builds on Agrippina's success by exploring the lives of 21 Roman women who historians both past and present have relegated to footnotes (if they get mentioned at all) and reframe the story to remind us that really, it's the women who are incredibly important in the story of Rome. Even the Romans knew that, little though some of them liked to admit it. 

A Rome of One's Own spans the entire length and timeline of the Roman Empire, from the early women of Rome (Tarpeia and Hersilia- you probably never heard of them) to one of the most famous (Lucretia- Roman men loved to turn her into a literary trope and make it all about them). From Boudicca (you might have heard of her, here's as close to the real story as Southon can get) to Julia Felix (a Pompeii businesswoman you've never heard of, but she'll make you question what you think you know about Romane women) and into the strange world of Christian martyrdom (Perpetua, in her own words) and the end of the Roman Empire, when Christians ruled and everyone was still fighting (Galla Placidia). Some of these women ruled behind the scenes, or not so behind the scenes, some just wanted to run a business and stay away from the murder-happy aristocrats. But Southon gives us compelling arguments that their stories, and the thousands like them that are not told here, are more the "real" Roman Empire than all of the Important Things and Battles we read so much about. Here are the true people of Rome, the lives both small and large, overlooked and misunderstood, and completely fascinating to read.

Full of fascinating facts and delightful humor, A Rome of One's Own is one of those books everyone should read!

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review

A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

 

A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome- Emma Southon

Abrams Press

Release Date: March 9, 2021

Rating: 📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: In Ancient Rome, all the best stories have one thing in common—murder. Romulus killed Remus to found the city, Caesar was assassinated to save the Republic. Caligula was butchered in the theater, Claudius was poisoned at dinner, and Galba was beheaded in the Forum. In one 50-year period, 26 emperors were murdered.

But what did killing mean in a city where gladiators fought to the death to sate a crowd? In A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Emma Southon examines a trove of real-life homicides from Roman history to explore Roman culture, including how perpetrator, victim, and the act itself were regarded by ordinary people. Inside Ancient Rome's darkly fascinating history, we see how the Romans viewed life, death, and what it means to be human.

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Anyone who wants to explore Roman history needs to be reading Emma Southon (Agrippina). She tells it like it is (in her view), gleefully abuses sources she finds unreliable but tells you why she finds them unreliable (where they writing 500 years after the events or just trying to make the emperor happy about what his grandfather did?), and analyzes where the truth behind the good stories probably lies. And the good stories in ancient Rome usually revolve around murder. So what does that tell us about the people in Rome?

First, remember that the people writing at the time were men, rich men, Roman men, and Citizens. When you remember that and what it meant at the time (Forum covers the Republic to the High Empire) you know that what these writers would have considered murder and what we in the twenty-first century Western world consider murder are actually very much not the same. Then add in that Romans didn't actually have a law against murder (as we today would consider it), that they expected any killings that were done in the home to be dealt with in the home and absolutely not to be the state's problem and you have a concept of how different things were. Then think about what you do know about ancient Rome (Gladiator anyone?) and how gladiator fights were their version of live streaming TV and in no way considered murder and where are you? 

A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum covers everything from murdering your spouse and why this may or may not have been a problem (hint: if you were a woman this was terrible but if you were a man this was considered usually a good way of getting a richer wife- unless you were really stupid about it and your wife's family got Tiberius' attention, in which case you had a problem); murdering your parents/family (Romans really freaked out over that); murdering the enslaved (only worth talking about if it was a spectacle and technically not actually murder); to murdering emperors (how politics got done and kind of a Roman hobby). Southon takes a more Western twenty-first century approach to human beings and explores the lives of the enslaved and women as well as the upper 1% men, searching for the lives behind the stories, sympathizing with them and using this book to show the dark underbelly of the "classical" marble brilliance that is the Roman we all think we know.

Southon's well researched, well written, tongue in cheek, dry British humor should appeal to pretty much everyone. These are the stories we think we know, the ones we don't know, and the ones we can't wait to tell others. From knives to poison, swords to lampreys, this is a book that shows us that as different a world as we think ancient Roman and its people might have been, perhaps the people aren't so different from us after all.  Murder is still a truly universal fact of life.  

Agrippina

Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman in the Roman World- Emma Southon
Pegasus Books
Release Date: August 6, 2019

Rating:
📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: Sister of Caligula. Wife of Claudius. Mother of Nero. The story of Agrippina, at the center of imperial power for three generations, is the story of the Julio-Claudia dynasty―and of Rome itself, at its bloody, extravagant, chaotic, ruthless, and political zenith.

In her own time, she was recognized as a woman of unparalleled power. Beautiful and intelligent, she was portrayed as alternately a ruthless murderer and helpless victim, the most loving mother and the most powerful woman of the Roman empire, using sex, motherhood, manipulation, and violence to get her way, and single-minded in her pursuit of power for herself and her son, Nero.

This book follows Agrippina as a daughter, born in Cologne, to the expected heir to Augustus’s throne; as a sister to Caligula who raped his sisters and showered them with honors until they attempted rebellion against him and were exiled; as a seductive niece and then wife to Claudius who gave her access to near unlimited power; and then as a mother to Nero―who adored her until he had  her assassinated.

Through senatorial political intrigue, assassination attempts, and exile to a small island, to the heights of imperial power, thrones, and golden cloaks and games and adoration, Agrippina scaled the absolute limits of female power in Rome. Her biography is also the story of the first Roman imperial family―the Julio-Claudians―and of the glory and corruption of the empire itself.

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Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman in the Roman World gives readers something that is hard to find: a biography of a Roman woman.  Agrippina: sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius, mother of Nero.  She was loved and reviled, praised and curse- both today and during her lifetime. Agrippina created new roles for imperial women, and pushed (or outright broke) the accepted role of women in Roman life.

 Emma Southon looks at Agrippina's life as it can be pieced together from ancient sources, but she also gives readers perfect examples of why those sources can't necessarily be trusted.  She immerses the reader in the culture of the Roman world so we can see how our modern views on women, politics, and life in general were not those of Tacitus, Seutonius, and the histories they wrote.That True History can't always be discovered and sometimes the historian has to make their best assumptions- but should also be willing to admit that they are assumptions.

It is clear that Southon is an expert in all things Aggripina and ancient Rome and has done her research.  But her writing style isn't designed to overwhelm the reader with how much she knows or how amazingly academic she is.  Instead, Southon writes as if she is a friend trying to describe Agrippina's life to you over a pint at the local pub.  She is in full casual, brilliant,  story-telling mode; she shreds her original sources for their clear prejudices and unreliability; and presents it all with sparkling English humor, wit, and occasional vulgarity that left me laughing at many of her opinions and insights.  Southon reconstructs Agrippina's life through ancient sources, gives her views on what was mostly likely to happen when Agrippina wasn't being written about, and does a wonderful job of explaining why she thinks that way while reminding the reader when something is only herl speculation or opinion.     

If you only read one book in your life on Agrippina, or the Roman Empire as a whole, it needs to be Emma Southon's Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman in the Roman World. It is a book for people who love history and are looking for a more feminist light to be shone on ancient sources, for those who love history and want to celebrate powerful women the Romans tried to hide in the shadows.  It is also a book for people who think they don't like history and that history is boring.  Just a few pages into Agrippina will convert even the most hardened "history isn't for me" believers. 

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review