MARGARET CAVENDISH'S LIVELY interest in ancient Rome may have been partly stirred up by her having been born in St. John's Abbey, just outside Colchester's town walls. Known by the Romans as Camulodunum, Colchester was possibly the first recorded town in Britain—being mentioned in Pliny the Elder's Natural History (77 CE)—as well as the first capital of the Roman province. As the ruins of a Roman town wall are still visible today, it is conceivable that Roman ruins were an even more tangible presence in Colchester in Margaret's times. In addition, Colchester Castle, where Margaret's brother Charles was executed in 1648, was built on the foundations of the Temple of Claudius, which had been burnt down by Boudica in 60/61 CE. Finally, the town charter, issued by King Henry V—in whom Margaret also had a passionate interest—also mentions the Roman past of Colchester. Such a local context pervasively filled with Roman ruins, memories, and impressions makes the abundance of allusions to ancient Rome in Margaret's writings quite unsurprising.

Yet Margaret's engagement with Roman history and personalities has not been subjected to as wide a range of critical takes as other topics of interest in her oeuvre, possibly by dint of her lack of formal classical training, coupled with her unceasing (and rather eccentric in the golden age of imitatio) effort to foreground the originality and idiosyncrasy of her own fancy and writings, which resulted in a (perhaps programmatic) lack of interest in seeking legitimization from ancient authorities: among her favourite images of herself was that of a spider spinning a web from its own insides. Moreover, one ought not to forget that, as Lara Dodds poignantly suggests, "The painful experience of war and exile [led Margaret] to doubt classical models of virtue as well as the authority of the classical auctor."

Only a handful of scholars have significantly explored Margaret's appropriation of Roman antiquity.