Agrippina: Empress, Exile, Hustler, Whore

by Emma Southon

As a result, we have just three major literary sources that mention Agrippina with any detail, and a total of seven literary sources from the entire corpus of Latin literature that think she was interesting or significant enough to deserve a single line; one of which is a play.

Finally, we learn that things that happened to women that were out of the ordinary could cause massive social and political upheaval. Women drove historical narratives, but ideally by dying.

What Octavian, who was a very smart young man, learned from his adoptive father was that when men made their power explicit, other Romans got stabby. What he did instead was continually insist, until the day he died, that the Republic was fine, that he wasn’t in charge, that everyone could do exactly what they wanted. He just happened to have the best ideas and everyone agreed and stop looking at that sword over there.

Behind them marched captives and any spoils that he brought back with him. It was to avoid this spectacle that Cleopatra and Antony killed themselves when they were defeated by Augustus.

His last words to his wife were widely reported and highly dramatic. He demanded, ‘Even strangers shall mourn Germanicus. But if it was I that you loved and not just my status, you must avenge me! Show Rome my wife, the daughter of the divine Augustus!’ And then he passed on.

The thing about the Roman obsession with family, though, is that no one ever really dies. Death masks are made, and famous ancestors loom large centuries after they die. Stories are told and retold again and again, and reputations are rarely dented by something as prosaic as mortality.

Agrippina the Younger saw this, her mother becoming so ill and sad and desperate that she showed her most feminine and vulnerable need to her greatest enemy.

This picture of Agrippina the Elder is an image of a woman old beyond her years, tired by the constant fight that is Roman politics, exhausted by being a Roman woman in public, lonely and pitiful. This is not a common image of her. She is presented almost exclusively as an arrogant lioness, roaring at the slightest provocation. This was Agrippina the Younger’s attempt to humanise her mother and perhaps even herself.

But did she write like Cicero, the broken-hearted family man, or Ovid, the grovelling urbanite, or Seneca, the Stoic? Of course, she wrote like none of them. She wrote like an imperial woman of a royal bloodline. And we have no idea what that might sound like.

women don’t exist in political narratives unless they are telling us something about the men they represent. Messalina doesn’t really exist anymore in her own right as I exist or you exist.

In the same way, the freedmen don’t really exist as individuals in their own right; they were not citizens of Rome; they used to be the literal property of the imperial household and they remained wholly dependent on Claudius for their livelihoods.

The first quote I wrote down when I began this book was one from Tacitus. He wrote, ‘influence is rarely lasting, such is its fate’. It relies on someone else doing the thing itself. This is why Agrippina wanted potestas. Potestas was the ability to act. It was the power to do things in public.

Slaves, wives and children all lived under the patria potestas of the head of their family. This potestas included the ability to kill anyone under it, if the reason was good enough, without any form of legal or social repercussions.

There was, however, an incident in 51CE, shortly after Nero was adopted by Claudius and got his new name, when Britannicus called him by his old name, Domitius. Remember that Britannicus was about nine here so it was probably an accident. The story goes that Agrippina heard about this, because there were no secrets in the palace, and was incensed.

Can you imagine her appearance there? Her back straight and her cloak falling across her shoulders. Can you hear the gasps and the ripples of conversation that became a hum when thousands were whispering all at once? All those eyes directly on Agrippina. Do you think she smiled and waved and said hi to her pals in the good seats? Or did she sit cold and regal and intimidating, radiating majesty? I think the latter. I think she sat cool and calm and unsmiling, grandeur leaking out of her every pore. As imperial as a mint. Like Jadis in The Magician’s Nephew, she gave no one a second to doubt her place on the throne.

While the actions of the men listed in the previous pages cause Roman power to spread and leaders to fall, the actions of Agrippina merely take down other women for ridiculous reasons. The sneer is Tacitus’s voice as he relays this to us is almost palpable. But when we actually look at Agrippina’s role in the running of the empire and try to dodge the repulsed misogyny that fuelled our sources, we mostly see a competent woman getting shit done.

When you sit down and read Tacitus or Dio or even Pliny the Elder, and look at what she actually did in public, you get the impression that Agrippina as an empress was incredibly hardworking. She was involved in every aspect of domestic and foreign affairs, popping up all over the place to be disapproved of.

The unlikeliness of Tiberius being Augustus’s heir, lacking as he was charm, charisma and any desire to hang out with senators, led to ongoing accusations that Livia had poisoned all the other heirs so her son would be the only one left. And then poisoned Augustus for good measure. Livia then became a thorn in Tiberius’s side, forever telling him off, reading aloud to him from letters Augustus wrote to her about how much of a dick Tiberius was, getting her mates off murder charges and generally being a pain. She was also richer, more popular, more experienced and better connected than her son, and had, on top of it all, been adopted posthumously by her husband, making her her own husband’s daughter and also a Julian (because apparently the relationships in this family weren’t gross and complicated enough already for Augustus). In short, she thought she’d be a bit of a backseat driver in the Principate.

One work that is ascribed to Seneca, and I do so hope he wrote it because it is so very mean, and so very funny, is the Apocolocyntosis (roughly translates as the pumpkinification, a play on the word apotheosis) of Claudius, which is a parody of Claudius arriving in heaven and the reactions of the other gods and it is one of the strangest and most cruel things to come out of Roman literature. It begins with Claudius dying and his last words being ‘oh no, I’ve shit myself!’ to which the author replies, ‘I don’t know if he really did, but then he did always shit everything up.’ He then appears in heaven and is immediately mocked for his limp and his speech impediment and called a monster that frightens all the gods.

So here, in this book, that’s what we’re going to say. Other books can and will say other things and I won’t pretend this is any kind of iron-clad argument because it is absolutely speculation. But I think Agrippina and Nero reached an agreement after the crisis with Silana and Lepida and I think that agreement was that she was to back the hell off from the limelight and, in public, accept her proper place as a woman and as the mother of the emperor and stop telling him what to do. In return he wouldn’t worry too hard about what she was doing chatting to senators in the Forum.

A Roman woman writing a memoir was a woman saying that her life, her actions, were worth remembering and that was a punch in the face to the Roman establishment.

They were a genre of writing that was about war and politics and the deeds of exceptional men. And Agrippina wrote herself one. This wasn’t a ‘musings on my life’ memoir; it wasn’t an extremely political act. By writing and publishing them, she was telling the world that she was just as important as any man.

Like any woman, Poppea was a bad influence in Tacitus’s eyes and he saw her as encouraging Nero’s worst excesses and impulses. That bad times were coming is obvious to Tacitus, who recounts the most terrifying portent so far. Opposite the Senate house there stood an 830-year-old tree, the tree which was believed to have sheltered Romulus and Remus as infants suckling on the wolf. It was a symbol of the city’s foundation, of its divine roots and its antiquity. As 58CE came to an end, that tree withered and died.

The sources all agree that on the dock Nero clasped his mother to him tight and kissed her eyes gently. He knew that this would be the last time he would see her alive. This woman who had dedicated half her life to him, who had swaddled him and cared for him, who had taught him and watched him train birds to speak and learn to act and sing, who named him Domitius and then made him Nero, who gave him an empire of his own. It is impossible to think of this final moment between them without knowing that this is the last time they will be together, and that Nero knows this, and not wonder how he does it. He must have truly hated her.

She drew herself back up, blood on her face, locked eyes with Obaritus as he drew his sword, and tore away her dress to reveal her stomach. Then she spoke her last words, defiant and fighting and Nero’s mother to the last breath. Gesturing to her womb she demanded ‘strike here’. Obaritus obeyed and the other blades followed. Julia Agrippina Augusta died at the point of a centurion’s sword as dawn broke on 20 March 59CE. She was 43.

His death marked the end of the first and longest dynasty of Roman emperors. The Julio-Claudians had managed to wipe themselves out. The year of brutal civil war that followed is known as the Year of the Four Emperors, which is a story for another book.

Agrippina was born one year after her great-grandfather Augustus died. She lived through the reigns of Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius and Nero. As the daughter of an Imperator, the sister, niece, wife and mother of emperors, she was never paralleled. She pioneered a new role for an imperial woman, an active, powerful role that stepped outside of the boundaries of acceptable female behaviour.

In return for her moment in the light of history, she was abused, humiliated and eventually hacked to death.

And 40 years after she died, after the civil wars that followed her son’s rule, after his golden house was torn down, his statues were destroyed and the Colosseum was built where Nero once built a golden statue of himself, a new colossal statue was erected by Trajan in his new forum. It was of Agrippina. She lived again to oversee Rome. The first empress of Rome.