The story of the fall of the Roman republic involves dysfunctional government, political selfishness, and constitutional collapse, played by the usual actors in togas, famously among them Cicero and Caesar. It also, unexpectedly, offers an overlooked but important lesson about how women’s history affects everyone’s history in ways that deserve to be remembered.

When the first emperor of Rome, Caesar Augustus, rose to power, sweeping away legal norms and enacting the “Law of Three Children,” sometime between 18 B.C. and 9 A.D., the legislation prevented all wealthy, free-born women from claiming their rightful inheritances unless they had given birth three times. Fiercely independent women who had begun to find a voice in public life, thanks to the generous dowries or the estates they inhe

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