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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Emma Southon
Read between
October 17, 2024 - July 3, 2025
Her suicide was an act of masculine moral strength because she knew that her honour as a woman could never be restored.
he did his best to wiggle his way into Tiberius’s affections, cut him off from his family, make Tiberius reliant on him and then become his heir.
Tiberius’s abusive boyfriend.
Sejanus fucked Drusus II’s wife and plotted with her to kill him.
Tiberius said no.
Like an abusive boyfriend.
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.
the divine blood of Augustus did not flow in mute statues.
Tiberius, unaware of this, believing wholeheartedly that Sejanus was his loyal and beloved friend,
she would have cut her son’s bollocks off if he had made any official moves against his own family.
The exile of Agrippina the Elder and her sons apparently infuriated Germanicus’s mother Antonia the Younger,
this was a royal wedding arranged by Agrippina the Elder, a woman who would never skip a chance to make something dramatic.
she was the descendant of divinity and she deserved to rule.
there were no good gossips around.
Gaius had no understanding of how to be emperor or what it would entail, and his reign was short and terrible, and he must have known that he would have no idea what he was doing.
The first six chapters of Suetonius’s biography of Gaius are about how brilliant his dad was and how beloved he was, and that appears to be representative of how people thought of Gaius in 37CE
All this means that Gaius returned to Rome with the ghost of his father on one side of him and the loyalty of a private army on the other.
A large part of Gaius’s first few months as emperor was dedicated almost exclusively to rehabilitating his immediate family, making a massive show of how great they were and how dedicated to them he was.
That he did this in about April, when the seas were dangerous and sailing wasn’t really recommended, echoed his own mother’s dangerous trip to bring her husband’s ashes home and really highlighted how dedicated and great he was as a son.
Agrippina the Elder was Gaius’s real legitimacy because she was his blood connection to Augustus.
First, they were given the privileges of the Vestal Virgins, which was a lot of privilege.
they got to be free of a male guardian which meant they could make their own legal decisions, do their own business and make their own wills. This
forms the basis of the word fascism and represented military power and the right to exercise state violence.
Finally, their bodies were sacrosanct.
But Gaius wasn’t even close to finished. His
Gaius kept going.
Gaius’s little innovation was to add his sisters to that bit so that all consular propositions were completed with the line ‘Favour and good fortune attend Gaius Caesar and his sisters’.
Then, they were added to the oath of loyalty to the emperor sworn by every citizen at the beginning of a new reign and during times of crisis.
His last quietly dramatic act of filial piety was to put their names on coins, too.
the celebration ended up being a dual party for the god Augustus and his great-grandson Gaius.
No other person with a claim to the throne as strong as Gemellus’s lasted as long as six months into a new reign ever again.
Oddly, we know more about this birth than we do about most because Pliny the Elder recorded it as an example of a breech birth in his Natural History
great-grandfather Agrippa,
As soon as Agrippina became a mother, she was defined by it almost entirely.
they were formally and legally accepted into the father’s family. This is the moment when a man becomes a father.
instituted a period of public mourning for Drusilla.
being in love with a tree.
Passienus developed a fancy for a particularly nice tree in a particularly nice grove sacred to the goddess Diana, so much so that he spent time passionately kissing and embracing it and pouring wine over its roots.
Claudius was the emperor of the Western world; he had many problems but getting his dick wet wasn’t one of them.
My favorite quote from this book. It's so irreverent 🔥
That’s why they weren’t allowed to control their own affairs or make their own decisions: they just weren’t logical or controlled enough not to accidentally spend all their money on shoes or something.
To be so cross about someone that you literally kill yourself to make your point is a fantastically Roman thing to do and I’m almost impressed by it as an act of defiance.
personally accused and prosecuted Lollia.
This story has everything you need for a classic ‘Roman woman in power’ anecdote: she was driven by feminine jealousy and rage, she particularly persecuted women for personal reasons and she was unnecessarily violent and cruel in her heartless desecration of the dead.
A classic story goes that Fulvia had Cicero’s head and hands removed, put one of her hairpins through the tongue that had spoken against her husband and then nailed the hands that wrote his speeches to the door of the Senate house.
The prosecution of Lollia was obviously just public business as usual given a nefarious but fictional Agrippina twist in order to make a political point about women in general.
Within a matter of months, everything had fallen into line neatly for Agrippina.
the freedmen and the Senate wanted to avoid the possibility of Britannicus avenging his mother.
Even Tacitus lets slip that many feared Britannicus’s future vengeance.
no one could see the future and no one could have known at that moment how much of Claudius’s power Agrippina would end up sharing.
At the same time, both were canny sycophants who were able to see that Agrippina’s power and influence were not going to be limited to the private sphere of female jealousies and hot actors.
