This open-access book is a cohesive, interdisciplinary and transnational study which considers the extent of imaginative power that screen media has to shape our perception of the women who lived in ancient Rome. It challenges key assumptions about reception by showing how modern media and film subvert and critique their sources to inspire new perspectives on Roman women.

Drawing on the contributors' expertise in Classics, Classical Reception, Comparative Literature, Translation, Film Studies, Popular Culture, and Media practice, the volume covers over 100 years and key interrelated examples from film, television and computer games that give life to ancient Roman women through a multisensory experience of history as image, movement, and sound. Together the chapters explore how screen media often manifest a drive to break through the constraining narratives of our primary sources, to disregard the 'truths' of traditional historiography, and to shape a new tradition for Roman women more suited to twentieth- and twenty-first century sensibilities.

These audio-visual Roman women, the contributors argue, are designed to speak to the lives of modern women, celebrating women's capacity to operate socially and politically even under the most extreme circumstances, and even offering a form of antagonistic commentary on the misogyny of primary sources or past receptions and, by doing so, raising larger issues about the gendering of history and the nature of classical reception.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by University College London.