The civil wars that brought down the Roman Republic were fought on
more than battlefields. Armed gangs infested the Italian
countryside, in the city of Rome mansions were besieged, and
bounty-hunters searched the streets for "public enemies." Among the
astonishing stories to survive from these years is that of a young
woman whose parents were killed, on the eve of her wedding, in the
violence engulfing Italy. While her future husband fought overseas,
she staved off a run on her father's estate. Despite an acute
currency shortage, she raised money to help her fiance in exile.
And when several years later, her husband, back in Rome, was
declared an outlaw, she successfully hid him, worked for his
pardon, and joined other Roman women in staging a public protest.
The wife's tale is known only because her husband had inscribed on
large slabs of marble the elaborate eulogy he gave at her funeral.
Though no name is given on the inscriptions, starting as early as
the seventeenth century, scholars saw saw similarities between the
contents of the inscription and the story, preserved in literary
sources, of one Turia, the wife of Quintus Lucretius. Although the
identification remains uncertain, and in spite of the other
substantial gaps in the text of the speech, the "Funeral Speech for
Turia" (Laudatio Turiae), as it is still conventionally called,
offers an extraordinary window into the life of a high-ranking
woman at a critical moment of Roman history. In this book Josiah
Osgood reconstructs the wife's life more fully than it has been
before by bringing in alongside the eulogy stories of other Roman
women who also contributed to their families' survival while
working to end civil war. He shows too how Turia's story sheds rare
light on the more hidden problems of everyday life for Romans,
including a high number of childless marriages. Written with a
general audience in mind, Turia: A Roman Woman's Civil War will
appeal to those interested in Roman history as well as war, and the
ways that war upsets society's power structures. Not only does the
study come to terms with the distinctive experience of a larger
group of Roman women, including the prudence they had to show to
succeed , but also introduces readers to an extraordinary tribute
to married love which, though from another world, speaks to us
today.
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