Augenti presents a highly moralistic view of the lives of Roman women in forty-two short chapters divided into three sections: the girl, the matron, and ‘la femmina’ — the transgressive woman. A picture which does not conform to any particular period is created using a range of sources, primarily literary, but also material. In several chapters the narrative is fictionalized by seeing events through the eyes of an individual, often anonymous, woman. Ch. 13, for example, starts with a nine-year-old girl who finds her house full of priests about to take her away to become a Vestal Virgin and ends with her condemnation for unchastity and descent into the chamber where she is to die. Cicero's wife Terentia is represented as a shrewd woman with a husband who is constantly trying to get his hands on her money because of his own debts.

The book as a whole is structured to emphasize its heavy-handed moral message. A. seems to approve of the traditional rôle of the Roman matron: his Roman girl is eager to embrace her destiny of marriage, and his true matron to comply with society's view that she should remain in the house, working wool, abstaining from wine and other activities that might lead to adultery, and rearing her children herself. She does not approve of women who are too well-educated and flaunt their knowledge in public. In fact at times A.'s matron sounds like a modern middle-class Italian man's Stepford-wife fantasy. In ch. 24 a couple are represented quarrelling (an episode based on the disharmony between Pomponia and Q. Cicero), but are reconciled after visiting the Temple of Venus Viriplaca — a reconciliation which involves the wife recognizing that she was wrong and resolving to please and obey her husband in future.

The third section presents women who deliberately (and ultimately unhappily) transgress the matronly ideal. The rot starts when women seek power both in the political world and within marriage: but it is sexual licence particularly that bothers A. Flawed matrons practise contraception and abortion, take up with gladiators and actors, and are overly concerned with hairstyles, dress, jewels and cosmetics. They beat their maids, get drunk, and go to the public baths to see men naked and meet lovers. Finally the fictionalized femmina finds freedom (as she thinks) in divorce, but loving luxury she ends up in debt, and has to sell herself as a prostitute. The penultimate chapter takes as its theme Seneca's suggestion that ‘there was never an adulteress who was not also a poisoner’ — the ultimate solution to the husband problem. The final chapter, however, presents us with the Christian woman, who returns with relief to the strictly controlled behaviour of the traditional matron, and submits to her husband, gladly accepting his dominance over her.

Clearly this is not a conventional academic book on Roman women. The notes reveal the wide range of sources used, but they are used uncritically: sketches in Martial, Juvenal and Plautus, for example, are treated as straightforward accounts of daily life; writings and events from different periods are brought together with little acknowledgement that practices and attitudes changed over time. The account deals primarily with the lives of élite women in Rome, though the pictures include several artworks from the provinces presented as unproblematic illustrations of the same society. Only one chapter discusses working women, slaves and freedwomen: much of the evidence consists of funerary inscriptions and reliefs. Despite an approach which begins by tracing a Roman woman's life history from birth there is nothing on the older woman, or her death. The book is well-illustrated, but some images seem oddly chosen for the chapters they are in, and are generally not given captions that identify them but instead a section of the text (not always an appropriate bit) is repeated under the picture.

The main difficulty I have with this book is its moralistic tone. But whose morality? A. has chosen and organized his material to emphasize the moral message, but is that message his or is he merely reflecting the views of Roman men? And is he right to represent these views as internalized by Roman matrons? If so, he (unwittingly?) reveals an important mechanism of social control in Roman society. Is A. really advocating (as at times he seems to be) that modern society should embrace the attitudes of Cato and John Chrysostom?