In ad 272, the Roman emperor Aurelian defeated his eastern enemy, the empress Zenobia of Palmyra (Figure 28). As befitting a victorious Roman general, he celebrated an immense triumph in Rome, which is recorded in the Historia Augusta as a ‘most brilliant spectacle’.1 In the procession, there were three richly bejewelled chariots from the east, two from Palmyra, one a gift from the king of Persia, and Aurelian’s own chariot, drawn by four stags, which had once belonged to the king of the Goths. There were elephants, tigers, giraffes, elk, and two hundred other ‘tamed beasts … from Libya and Palestine’. There were 800 pairs of gladiators, bound prisoners from sixteen different peoples, northern, eastern, and southern, including some ‘Amazons’ – Gothic women who had fought against Rome. The various peoples held placards identifying their nations for the watching crowd. And of course, there were the political prisoners – Tetricus, a Roman who had set up his son, also present, as emperor in Gaul, wearing outlandish Gallic trousers. Then there were some of the great and good of Palmyra, ‘and there came Zenobia … decked with jewels and in golden chains, the weight of which was borne by others’. The people of Rome and the senators also took part in the procession and days of games and shows followed.

Late Bronze Age Greece was a partly literate place. The Minoans had used a hieroglyphic script and a type of writing we call Linear A, which remain undeciphered, but the Mycenaeans, or at least the authorities associated with some of the palaces, wrote on clay tablets in Greek using the Linear B script. These Linear B tablets, accidentally preserved in fires, were first translated by Michael Ventris in 1952 and then published as a corpus in co-operation with John Chadwick.1 Tablets continue to be found even now, extending our knowledge of Mycenaean Greece. None of them record history, literature or poetry, nor are there any lists of kings, but the information they do contain is nevertheless precious.

Atossa was in every sense a Persian royal woman. She was a daughter of Cyrus the Great, who ruled the Persian Empire from 559 to 530 bc, a wife of her brother Cambyses, king from 530–522 bc, one of the many wives of Darius I, king from 522 to 486 bc, and the mother of Xerxes I, 486–465 BC (Figure 15).1 But her lasting fame in the western tradition comes from her appearances in two of the most well-known texts from ancient Greece, Aeschylus’ Persians and Herodotus’ Histories. Both of these works, one a tragedy play the other combining history and anthropology, present the war between the Greeks and Persians in the early fifth century bc – the wars marked by the famous battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea. Atossa is portrayed as a powerful woman with great influence over the men in her life.

When we think of ancient medicine, we might think first of the Greek tradition beginning with Hippocrates and probably then of Galen in Roman times. Hippocrates stands at the beginning of the western medical tradition and we have a collection of texts attributed to him known as the Hippocratic Corpus.1 The Hippocratic Oath, a statement of professionalism, was still regularly taken by newly qualified doctors until fairly recently, albeit in a modified form. Galen achieved fame in Roman times as an extraordinarily learned and intellectual doctor, a collector and editor of medical texts, a public performer of medicine and sometimes gruesome experiments, and doctor to the rich and famous.2 His influence was felt deep into medieval times. Yet these are only two men in a very long tradition, and the world of health and medicine was a world in which women too played a vital, if not always so visible, role.

Ancient Egypt has fascinated the modern west since Napoleon’s campaigns took soldiers and scholars to the land of the Nile in 1798; the French and British came to blows there and many French discoveries were delivered into British possession – perhaps most notably the bilingual Rosetta Stone, which was key to the decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. This rather small black stone tablet can still be seen in the British Museum. The story of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb by Howard Carter in the early twentieth century remains a television and publishing favourite, and there have been various tours of authentic objects, including to London’s Saatchi Gallery in 2019–2020; pyramids and mummies are more than ever objects of fascination and fantasy – and everyone knows the name Cleopatra.1 But the line of pharaohs stretched back far longer than Cleopatra and King Tut – it is sobering to recall that we are closer in time to Cleopatra than she was to the first pharaohs – and there have been many other intriguing and much more ancient discoveries in Egypt.

In ad 203, a young mother was killed by animals in the amphitheatre of Carthage in North Africa on the orders of the local Roman authorities.1 She died alongside other members of her small religious group, men and women, apparently confident in the knowledge that she was about to enter heaven. This woman was called Vibia Perpetua and she was a Christian; she left us part of her story in a text called The Passions of Perpetua and Felicity (Figure 27). The text gives us a fascinating insight into the mind of a young Roman woman caught up in the power of her beliefs. It also reveals much about the workings of Roman society, especially those times in which people came up against the system. Here we will explore who Perpetua was and how she ended up dying in this terrible way.

It is a warm dark night in the great city of Rome. You are squeezed with your friends into the terraces of one of the most impressive buildings of the Roman empire, the Colosseum, lit by the flickering light of hundreds of torches, part of a crowd of thousands of city-dwellers eager and ready to be entertained. Everyone knows the emperor Domitian (ruled ad 81–96) always puts on a good show, but there is to be nothing ordinary about tonight’s bloody spectacle, for the emperor has laid on not only a performance of gladiators but this time female gladiators.1 As the women troop out, sword-arms clad in armour, shields at the ready, and bare-chested, a thrill runs through the massed ranks of the shouting crowd. Tonight would be a night to remember.

Olympias, born around 373 bc, was the daughter of Neoptolemus the king of Molossia, a rural, inland, and not-so-important place in Epirus in north-western Greece. The region lacked the old established city-state culture of other parts of Greece, but the oracle of Zeus at Dodona, by tradition the oldest oracle in Greece, did give it some cachet and ensured ongoing contact with the rest of the Hellenic world.1 The royal house, the Aeacids, claimed descent from the Greek hero Aeacus and from his more famous grandson Achilles – a family connection that Olympias’ son Alexander (the Great) certainly took seriously.2 Despite her origins on the periphery of the Greek world, Olympias occupied a central place in the history of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean – and farther afield – in the second half of the fourth century bc because of her marriage to Philip II of Macedonia and her son Alexander the Great.

In the first few hours of a new digging season in Athens, 14 June 1967, archaeologists started to excavate the area to the north of the Areopagus, the Hill of Ares, which lies to the northwest of the Acropolis.1 Just 15 cm down, Evelyn Lord Smithson wrote shortly afterwards in an article in the journal Hesperia, the earth began to reveal a new burial – the upper rims of several pots appearing through the dirt. As the archaeologists explored further, they uncovered the whole burial pit with a large belly-handled amphora some 71 cm in height with various other smaller items of pottery in it. The type of amphora indicated that the burial was that of a woman, designated AA 302, who had been cremated around 850 bc. She has become known to archaeologists as the ‘Rich Athenian Lady’.

Some of the best-known images from Bronze Age Greece are of Minoan women and goddesses portrayed on palace frescoes and on gold rings that often show religious scenes. The enigmatic Isopata gold ring, for example, shows a number of female figures in flounced skirts, with bare breasts, who appear to be dancing outside amongst the flowers – their arms gesticulating and bodies swaying.1 Other evidence certainly suggests the importance of dance for Minoan women – terracotta models from Palaikastro, for example, show women dancing in circles accompanied by a lyre player.2 These images conjure up a vivid picture of life on Crete, beliefs, and practices.