Did you notice that...

..at a recent meeting at the White House, all bar one of the twenty-plus CEO's of the worlds' most powerful Tech and AI companies were men?

Where are the really powerful women?

If the president had selected an all-male oligarchy, as a well-known mysogynist I could understand this, but he didnt so where are the really powerful women? Given that these men now own and run the world - governments and dictatorships are now subservient to these oligarchs - I expected a few more women. There are certainly powerful women in the world of business, but it seems not at the very top.

This was true in Republican Rome too - with one exception. Had Fulvia Flacca Bambula been alive today, she would certainly have appeared in this photograph with the most powerful men in the world today. Born around 77 BCE, Fulvia spent her entire life determined to break through the patriarchy that chacterised pre-Imperial Rome - she was ambitious, dangerous, outrageous and unconventional.

This coin, minted in Phrygia (Central Turkey) is the only image we have of Fulvia - small in stature, sharp in features.

Fulvia knew that her route to power was through marriage and so she had three husbands - all of whom were powerful and controversial and all three loved her controlling ambitions. Publius Clodius Pulcher was her first husband and I came across their relationship whilst writing my biography of Marcus Tullius Cicero. I wrote that Fulvia seems to have gained her first foothold amongst the high society of Rome by building a freindship with Cicero's first wife Terentia. In the developing hatred between Pulcher - the ambitious, wealthy and well-connected rabble-rouser - and the great orator Cicero, Fulvia collected gossip behind the scenes for her husband. Cicero would never forget or forgive her and would excoriate Fulvia in his speeches in the battles with her third husband, the more famous Mark Anthony.

The restored Senate House or Curia in the Forum in Rome may not have been the building Fulvia recognised, but the columned Fulvia Basilica was where she would have walked, talked, acknowledged her followers and ensured she was seen.

By the time of her third marriage, this time to Mark Anthony, Fulvia was recognised as a force of nature, a dangerous women with links across Rome - her network of female contacts would have been formidable and she would easily have outwitted her male counterparts - maybe this is why the Tech companies do not have women at the very top. Fulvia could and did caused a war and when she was crossed, Fulvia's revenge was terrible - demanding the head of Cicero so she could pull out her hairpins and stab them into the tongue of the man whose speeches had caused her so much embarassment.