Fans pick 100 books like Hypatia of Alexandria

While researching the fifth century for my first novel, I found a trio of powerful women who became the protagonists in my historical novel series. Roman Princess Galla Placidia was taken hostage by the Goths when they sacked Rome in 410. She returned to court to rule during the twilight of the Western Roman Empire. Empress Placidia held the empire together against rebel generals and ravaging hordes of barbarians.

Her long life was filled with romance, danger, political intrigue, and inevitable loss. Her tale is chronicled in this “biographical essay” which is over 300 pages of readable scholarly work. This book is close to my heart because I had to physically go to the New York Public Library and take notes before I found a used print copy. Thank you NYPL!

Who knew that women were such powerful figures during the transition from the Roman Empire to the Byzantine era? Hollum did. He chronicles the lives and contributions of three generations of Theodosian empresses. This book was the major source of information on the main characters in the second and third books in my Theodosian Women series.

Read about the remarkable Empress Pulcheria. Granddaughter of Theodosian the Great, she outwitted a whole court of experienced men to become Augusta and Regent for her minor brother at the age of fifteen! She ruled by his side for most of his life and laid the foundations for the dawn of the Byzantine Empire. What had you accomplished by age fifteen?

I metaphorically danced on the rooftop when I discovered this book. Do you know how likely it is that writing from the wild fifth century comes down to us? Much less writing by a woman? It had to survive barbarian incursions, fires, floods, and ravenous insects as well as “curators” of collections who decide which books get kept and which get used as fuel for the hypocaust.

This one features Empress Aelia Eudocia. Born Athenais, she was a pagan poetess who married the Most Christian Emperor Theodosius II and is the titular Rebel Empress in the third of my Theodosian Women series. Sowers not only provides us with Eudocia’s words translated from Greek, but fills in the history and politics of her life. A real find!

This one is just for fun. I regularly pick up these modern collections of brief biographies of ancient warrior women, doomed queens, she captains, etc. I like to see if “my” characters are included and how they fare with a non-scholarly author. Also, I like to see if any catch my eye for further research and possibly(?) a novel.

Like its sister books, this one is written in a breezy modern style with a certain amount of snark. Leon gives two pages each to about one hundred women who lived from 2500 BC to AD 450 around the Mediterranean and the western Roman provinces. All are real women who made a difference and their names survived, but you’ve probably never heard of most of them. Check it out!

This is one of the best books on life in the ancient Roman world – about life for the 99% rather than kings, queens and aristocrats.

In it, Robert Knapp seeks to rescue the invisible majority of ‘ordinary people’, their activities, beliefs, and dreams, from relative obscurity. The book draws on a huge range of sources and every page reveals something interesting. Women form a large proportion of the Roman invisible, and Knapp explores the lives of all kinds of subaltern women, free and enslaved.

Sometimes, as with prostitutes or the poor, the stories are grim – but they are as valid as any discussion of a Cleopatra or a Livia. I really liked Knapp’s idea of historians making invisible people visible again and it really chimed with my work on ancient women.

I came across this book in the early days of writing my own – and it was inspirational.

It’s massive, with 74 chapters, but taken individually these are not in themselves long or difficult reads. We find women of all stations from prostitutes to queens, wet nurses to dancers, and female gladiators introduced, and range in time from the Bronze Age to the Romans.

The authors draw inclusively on multiple approaches and types of evidence, bodies, material culture, iconography, texts, and more. Apart from the vast coverage, the philosophy of the volume as set out by the editors was compelling: to look at ‘real women’ themselves, not mythical women or goddesses, and to emphasize their bodies and names.

It’s a treasure trove for anyone interested in women in the ancient world.

Sarah B. Pomeroy’s book on women in antiquity was a landmark study when it was first published some fifty-odd years ago in 1975.

It remains important both for its discussion but also because of its place in the history of the study of women in the ancient world. Pomeroy works from literary and archaeological evidence to explore the lives of Greek and Roman women from the Bronze Age to women of the early Roman empire, with a particular focus on classical Athens and Rome.

It is erudite and readable, and, despite its age, deserves a place on any ancient history buff’s bookshelf. It was the first book on the subject that I bought when I was an undergraduate student and has been a great foundation for further study.

Most of us have heard of Alexander the Great, but his mother Olympias (famous for sleeping with snakes) also had a tumultuous and fascinating life.

Undoubtedly, she was a force to be reckoned with and a significant influence on her son, and this comes through in Elizabeth Carney’s book. Carney looks at Olympias from several angles – her origins as a Molossian royal, as the wife of Philip II of Macedon, as mother of Alexander, and in her own right after Alexander’s death.

At that time, her world became even more dangerous as she vied for power and position; she even led an army to assert her status in the new world – ultimately unsuccessfully. Carney also looks at Olympias’ religious life and her mixed legacy in antiquity (including the snake story).

We know that there were women in Ancient Greece who did philosophy like Diotima and Aspasia (Socrates’s teachers) or Hypatia (who was murdered by Christians in Alexandria) or Lasthenia and Axiothea (students at Plato’s Academy).

There are also ancient texts signed with women’s names like Perictione (Plato’s mum), or Theano (Pythagoras’s wife). But we can’t always trust that those texts were written by these actual women.

Do we really think that if Plato’s mother had written philosophy, her work would have turned up a century later with a bunch of fake letters in Alexandria? What Dutsch’s book does is much more exciting than trying to prove that Plato’s mum was a philosopher.

It looks at the texts that these women supposedly wrote, and the stories that were told about them, so that we get to find out what it would have been like to be a woman and a philosopher… show more.

Over the past decade or so, I’ve probably read six or seven biographies of Spinoza, some considerably more helpful than others. Nadler’s study is a striking success of scholarship and biography. Spinoza’s story of being this deft thinker but also being excommunicated in Holland (and we still don’t exactly know why) can make for a great story, but that was not the case before Nadler’s book appeared. I was fortunate to be able to tell the author how I felt about his book in person.