Eventually the local consul got involved and set up an investigation into this Bacchanalian scandal, with Hispala reluctantly testifying about what she knew of the "obscene rites" from her younger days as a sex slave. Deeming it a religious conspiracy, the Senate issued a formal decree prohibiting the Bacchanalia throughout Italy—all because a lowly freedwoman wanted to protect her lover.
Chances are you've never heard Hispala's story (she is only mentioned in Livy's History of Rome), but historian Emma Southon is out to change that with her new book, A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire. Southon earned a PhD in ancient history from the University of Birmingham and is also the author of the wittily irreverent 2021 book, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome, discussing how the people of ancient Rome viewed life, death, and what it means to be human. She brings that same sensibility—combining solid scholarship with a breezy conversational tone—to her female-centric revisionist history of the Roman Empire.
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The difference might be that Hispala was a child sex SLAVE who gained her freedom, while Maxwell was raised in wealth (by a sick pervert, yes) and became a major figure in the business of recruiting young girls INTO sex slavery for the purpose of blackmail and, of course, big money.
But either way -- whether Hispala was an evil bitch with selfish motives, or a kind and decent human being -- her actions triggered a backlash against (and the downfall of) what sounds like an Epstein-like group of child sex slavers.