Turia: A Roman Woman's Civil War

Women in Antiquity

by Josiah Osgood

The civil wars that brought down the Roman Republic were fought on more than battlefields. Armed gangs infested the Italian countryside, mansions were besieged in the city, 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 in the late first century BC. While her future husband fought overseas, she staved off a run on her father's estate and raised money to help her fiancé in exile. Further, when 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. In this book, Josiah Osgood reconstructs the life of Turia, as the wife is commonly known, 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 how the wife's story sheds rare light on the more hidden problems of everyday life for Romans, including a high number of childless marriages. This unique narrative is more than a biography of one it is a portrait of a vivid period in Roman history and a tribute to married love which, though from another world, speaks to us today.

Genres: History, Roman History, Ancient History, Nonfiction

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Josiah Osgood is Professor of Classics at Georgetown University. His teaching and research cover many areas of Roman history and Latin literature, with a special focus on the fall of the Roman Republic.

Reviews

[Colin Cloutus]

Osgood's 'Turia' uses an anonymous epitaph from a Roman woman's tomb (traditionally named Turia) as the centrepiece of a study on women in the late Civil War and Augustan periods. This study would also serve as a sufficient casual introduction to the historiography on Roman marriage and funerary traditions.
Osgood provides a very well written translation of the epitaph, itself a beautiful piece on the devotion of a wife to her husband and family.