Ah, Emma Southon. So irreverant, so terminally online in her language habits and allusions, so generous in leaving the reader in no doubt as to her likes and dislikes about ancient Rome. Anti-popes, disembodied penises rising from fireplaces, bureaucracy of Bacchinalea, Julia Augusti Filia's sexual exploits---these are most excellent. By contrast, Tacitus, Lucius Tarquinius, and Roman attempts at humour all sucked, each in their own special way.

Yet underneath this gleeful explosion of evaluative, entertaining judgments, there is also a deep sympathy for the parts of Roman history that demand it. Southon's discussion of the Laudatio Turiae, a heartbreaking eulogy given by a grieving widower describing in unusual detail the life and gests of his beloved wife, was one of the most eye-opening parts of the book. This kind of first-hand account of lives lived, unfiltered by political or poetic agenda, is incredibly rare, it seems, and Southon's description of it was very moving. It's clear that she is as taken by Turia as her husband was, and her respect and affection for this couple is apparent in the way she holds her sharp-edged wit in check as she tells their story.

Yet the book is most fun when Southon lets her rapiers loose. She never lets the reader forget that the reliability of the sources is profoundly poor and most of the traditional tales come to us from incredibly biased sources, who themselves were telling tales from centuries before their own time. But this does not mean Southon can't do history. Indeed, when the sources are lacking is when Southon has the most fun, because she engages with her sources like for like. When it's clear that the Roman historians are making things up for reasons ranging from the political, artistic, misogynistic, or simply frivolous, Southon also lets her fancy fly free. For example, when Augustus's daughter Julia was forced to marry Tiberius, contemporary sources make it clear that, although Tiberius disliked Julia, nobody knows what Julia thought about it, and because Southon has very little respect for Suetonius or Tacitus as reliable recorders of history (or, indeed, as people---she really, really dislikes them as misogynistic pricks), she simply reports what they said, and then reports what she thinks they're leaving out. Thus: 'Acccording to Suetonius, Tiberius thought that Julia fancied him too much and made it too obvious while she had been married to Agrippa, and that made him uncomfortable. It is a real challenge for me to imagine any woman fancying Tiberius, who comes across in both literary sources and statuary as being as sexy as frozen chicken, but who am I to kink-shame. Maybe Julia did fancy him. Maybe she was delighted to get her little princess hands on him. Maybe he had a great butt. I don't know. That's the story.' You can just feel the disdain and irritation at their unreliability oozing from every sentence.

This approach to history is what we need more of. It's so common to see Suetonius and Tacitus revered as these majestic sages who are our only links to this mighty history, but Southon isn't letting us have any of that. She knows what people are like; she can see what Suetonius and Tacitus were like (kind of assholes), and she makes it clear how much she trusts them, while also holding her nose and picking up what they put down because that's all that she has. And she never loses sight of the context in which they were putting it down in the first place. The story of Boudicca is brilliantly contrasted with the story of Cartimandua, for example, as Southon lays out how each was used by Tacitus to serve as a metaphor in his morality lesson about the decline of traditional Roman values (as he saw it)---which, naturally, makes what he says about historical events he purports to relate extremely suspect.

So, in sum, this book was entertaining, naughty, informative, funny, and at times very moving. Of all approaches to history, I find Southon's the most effective.