Roman women | Alison Morton's Thrillers

A tale of another Aurelia – the mother of Julius Caesar

(Possibly) Aurelia Cotta, unattributed

Many of you will be familiar with Aurelia Mitela, the elder stateswoman of INCEPTIO, CARINA, PERFIDITAS and SUCCESSIO. We discover her career as a younger woman in her own trilogy set in the late 1960s to early 1980s – AURELIA, NEXUS, INSURRECTIO and RETALIO. Although an honourable name in […]

Roman women in late antiquity - a slippery fish to catch

Helena, mother of Constantine the Great (author photo, Naples Museum)

I set out to write a piece about women in the late Roman period – ambitious for a blog post I know, but I thought I could pull some threads out of a big subject and produce a digest. Not that easy, as […]

Roman doesn't mean one thing

Traditionally, ancient Rome was founded in 753 BC. It grew into one of the largest empires in the ancient world with roughly 20% of the world’s population and an area of 6.5 million square kilometres at its height.

Plagued by internal instability and attacked by various migrating peoples, the western part of the empire broke […]