For decades, the story of Rome's civil wars has been told through the deeds of a handful of extraordinary men. Caesar crossing the Rubicon. Pompey fleeing to Egypt. Antony dying in Cleopatra's arms after a botched suicide. But this is only half the story – and not even the most interesting half.

In Uncivil, Joan Smith restores to their rightful place the women who lived through one of the most catastrophic periods in ancient history. They are a remarkable cast: Fulvia, who married two gang bosses and a general, raised her own army and terrified Rome's most powerful men; Cleopatra, the brilliant strategist whose careful political calculations have been buried under centuries of fantasy and misogyny; Servilia, Caesar's great love, who remained a formidable political operator even after her son plunged a knife into the man she had loved for decades; and Cornelia, who watched her husband Pompey beheaded from a ship moored off the coast of Egypt.

But Smith also recovers the unnamed women whose stories have never been told: the wives who hid proscribed husbands in laundry bags and between ceiling joists; the women of Rome who endured five days of mass rape when Marius's troops stormed the city in 87 BC – an atrocity so thoroughly ignored by modern historians that its omission seems deliberate; the slaves and freedwomen prostituted by their owners to the most powerful men in Rome.

Drawing on a lifetime's expertise in both Roman history and the politics of gender, Smith exposes the systematic violence that underpinned Roman society and challenges us to read the ancient sources with fresh eyes. The result is a history of the late Roman Republic that is at once more complete and more disturbing than anything that has come before.