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Osgood ( J. ) Turia. A Roman Woman's Civil War . Pp. xvi + 215, ills, map. New York : Oxford University Press , 2014. Paper, £18.99, US$27.95 (Cased, £64, US$99). ISBN: 978-0-19-983235-4 (978-0-19-983234-7 hbk).
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O.'s new book on the so-called Laudatio Turiae is part of a series entitled Women in Antiquity. The laudatio is a lengthy inscription that only survives in fragmentary condition and records the life of a Roman woman as related in the eulogy her husband gave at her funeral. The laudatio originally appeared in two columns and its length may be comparable to that of the Res Gestae of Augustus. The inscription offers a fascinating insight into the life of an upper-class woman during the time of civil war. It presents a unique perspective on the period of an unnamed wife and husband, rather than from that of Young Caesar, Antony or Lepidus. A prologue introduces the history of the inscription (today in the Villa Albani in Rome), from Theodor Mommsen onwards. According to O. the inscription provides a vivid picture of the stamina of a woman and of her willingness to fight the couple's enemies (p. 7). Such inscriptions of course never focus on the negative qualities of the honorand - this is a husband's story about his beloved wife. However, this is a book about so much more. The subtitle is telling for the story that O. unfolds. He has already admirably shown us the enormous impact of civil war on Roman society during the period after the murder of Caesar (Caesar's Legacy: Civil War and the Emergence of the Roman Empire [2006]). The psychological legacy of the civil war period of the Late Roman Republic was both immense and extreme.
O. unfolds the story more or less chronologically. Chapter 1 tells the story of the killing of the wife's father and stepmother, opponents of Caesar, on the eve of her wedding. O. masterly describes the historical context in support of his reading of the inscription (superior to Flach's otherwise very good German edition, Die Sogennante Laudatio Turiae [1991]). He thus succeeds in reconstructing...