I enjoyed reading this book, particularly because it is very heartening to see research conducted on such elemental and crucial features of Roman society as motherhood, pregnancy and childbirth. As someone who has worked extensively on earliest childhood in the Roman world, I was gratified to see Freidin making it clear how intrinsic childbearing was to the social and even economic value of women. Fertility certainly extended to the highest levels of Roman society and power. The book aims to tell Rome’s story through a ‘history of childbearing and its challenges at nesting and overlapping scales, including through narratives of individual lives’ (5).

One way in which F. succeeds in bringing those narratives to us is through the use of specific funerary inscriptions of women whose lives and deaths were focused on reproduction, some of whom successfully birthed children, others not. The epitaph of a young woman named Veturia from Aquincum (Hungary), for example, is introduced in ch. 1 and woven in and out of the following chapters, shedding light on the ‘relentless cycle of childbearing, rearing, and mourning’ (21). Veturia is a very good example of the trials and tribulations of marriage and motherhood. Dying at 27, she had been married for 16 years and given birth to six children, only one of whom survived. F. successfully situates her in community and status, drawing on various types of evidence (legal, medical, literary, visual) from Rome, Italy and elsewhere, and integrating Roman women from broadly different social, ethnic and economic backgrounds. A rough idea of the risks of pregnancy and childbirth and the magnitude of loss some families experienced is laid out clearly.

Those risks could be controlled only in part by a woman’s constitution and access to care, networks, medical attention and nourishment. The treatise Gynecology by the elite male doctor Soranus provides us with a catalogue of risk-reducing therapeutics and bodily regimes to deal with generative health. Soranus was only too aware of the potential harm of procreation to women’s bodies, especially if they became pregnant at a young age or were repeatedly pregnant. That this knowledge or stance did not filter down to or influence all women is exemplified by the case of Veturia, who was worn out by pregnancies and births by the age of 27. But, as the author argues in ch. 3, this medical manual expands into a larger project of social regulation and the quest for better babies. Gynecology is a case study in risk management among cosmopolitan elites who sought to ensure fertility, order and control.

Ch. 4 focuses on ‘technologies of hope’, on pessaries, potions and amulets whose sympathetic properties were designed to nurture the birthing woman, give her comfort and ease her distress. With regard to uterine amulets, however, F. argues that not all of them were birthing amulets or explicitly designed for birthing, but were thought to assist in a wide range of health problems involving the uterus. This versatility in use and efficacy casts light on the role that the uterus (and thereby women) played in the overall health and wellbeing of Roman society.

Ch. 5 focuses on Latin epigraphy, votive dedications and funerary art to explore uncertainty and to understand loss of mother and child. Not always having recourse to doctors and medical professionals, most parents relied on appeals to the divine, with both male and female deities believed to be able to help in reproductive and bodily matters. F. draws on recent research on votive religion and the reciprocal nature of divine and human interaction: help was requested and the suppliant vowed to make an offering of thanksgiving if the outcome was positive. Already before the imperial period, in the last centuries of the first millennium b.c., terracotta body parts, such as breasts and wombs, and stone statuettes of breastfeeding mothers with multiple infants, were dedicated in sanctuaries in Latium and Campania (most notably in Capua) as thank-offerings to the gods for successful reproduction. Cited physical evidence for divine interaction in matters of childbirth and child health in the first centuries a.d. ranges from the inscribed votive altars to Jupiter Optimus Maximus in and around Aquincum to altars to the Nutrices Augustae around Poetovio (Slovenia), the latter providing a case study in local cult practices. Although both parents thanked the goddesses in the inscriptions for the positive result of a healthy child, only women are depicted in the reliefs on those altars: mortal women and attendants carrying or walking their young offspring into the sanctuary and the divine nurses breastfeeding infants in their care. Mortal nurses also played a vital role in giving the newborn the first bath and caring for the infant in its first years of life, as Roman funerary reliefs on marble sarcophagi illustrate.

In conclusion, F. succeeds in demonstrating that the risks of birth in the Roman world were met by communities of human and divine actors, diffusing responsibility and blame and sharing in networks that facilitated one’s entrance and exit from the world. The book is well written and referenced, and the illustrations provided are relevant to selected points of discussion. Birthing Romans will be a useful exploration of many aspects of women’s lives and childbearing to scholars and students of ancient history and classical studies alike.