Biography, Women and Power

Julia Hillner's life of Helena, mother of Constantine, is the twentieth volume published in OUP's ‘Women in Antiquity’ series, launched in 2010 with Duane Roller's biography of Cleopatra. An earlier and overlapping series on the same theme — Routledge's ‘Women of the Ancient World’ — began in 2006 and adds a further half-dozen titles to the portfolio, from Olympias: Mother of Alexander the Great by Elizbeth Carney to The Women of Pliny's Letters by Jo-Ann Shelton.1 The pace of publication picked up in 2018 and two lives from the later Roman empire — of Melania the Younger by Elizabeth Clark and Sosipatra of Pergamum by Heidi Marx — appeared alongside Celia Schultz's account of Fulvia in 2021, for example. Late republican and late antique women dominate the catalogue overall, with some empresses and exotic leaders in between, and alongside a smaller set of Hellenistic royalty.2