[pvg]

that they apparently didn't even bother to write down anything about them.

That doesn't sound at all right and it might be just a quirk of your sources? Just cracking open Tacitus

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Tacitus/A...

Don't need to get farther than 3 paragraphs in and a Roman woman is politicking in high Roman politics:

Adopted as son, as colleague in the empire, as consort of the tribunician power, he was paraded through all the armies, not as before by the secret diplomacy of his mother, but openly at her injunction. For so firmly had she riveted her chains upon the aged Augustus that he banished to the isle of Planasia

[glitchc]

Was there a name? It wasn't mentioned in the quote. Was it revealed later? If not, I suspect the OP's point stands. The only woman I could think of was Helena, mother of Constantine, of course that's the Eastern Roman Empire in Byzantine, not the seven hills people often think of when they say Rome.

[labster]

And I could add Anna Komneme, who was definitely Roman, but not in the Classical period nor the city of Rome. Boudicca and Zenobia were more famous for disagreeing about being Roman, and leading revolts.

Oddly the most famous women of the Roman Empire were commoners in Roman Judea: Mary, Anne, and Mary Magdalene.

[ffgjgf1]

Well Irene managed to usurp the throne in a similar way to most male emperors (by scheming and murdering her opponents, even if one of them happened to be her own son…) and even managed to rule on her own right for a while. Which was extremely unique historically, even by modern standards (how many female dictators are there?).

[rlupi]

Livia. She's named in the phrase just before that. The full quote is:

"When Agrippa gave up the ghost, untimely fate, or the treachery of their stepmother Livia, cut off both Lucius and Caiusº Caesar, Lucius on his road to the Spanish armies, Caiusº — wounded and sick — on his return from Armenia. Drusus had long been dead, and of the stepsons Nero survived alone. On him all centred. Adopted as son, as colleague in the empire, as consort of the tribunician power, he was paraded through all the armies, not as before by the secret diplomacy of his mother, but openly at her injunction"

That's Livia Drusilla, also Iulia Augusta, wife of Emperor Augustus and mother of Emperor Tiberius.

Augusta was the honorific title of Roman Empresses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Augustae

An Empress is kind of a special case :-)

[glitchc]

Thanks for the clarification. I remember reading Mary Beard's Women and Power, and her lament regarding Greek literature was related to this point. She used examples from the Iliad, Odyssey and other works to illustrate how in the history of humanity, soft power that women frequently exert (politics) has minimized in favour of hard power (violence) that men tend to norm towards.

[pvg]

If not, I suspect the OP's point stands.

The point that I'm replying to and that I quoted is 'Romans didn't write about women'. I don't see how it stands when you can open a Roman chronicler and right away he's writing about women.

The only woman I could think of

I mean, you have 'suspect' and 'think of', I've got a link to a big pile of Roman writing. It's not hard to check if women are in fact represented in Roman writing.