Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World

by Emma Southon

The torrent overflowed and the flood swept everything in its way into near oblivion. Which included Claudius and Agrippina and their dining companions, who were almost drowned.

we mostly see a competent woman getting shit done.

Agrippina as an empress was incredibly hardworking.

she already inspired admiration,

reverence and respect.

she was imbued with a kind of supernatural specialness as a result so that men would struggle to articulate criticism of her without committing treason or blasphemy.

She wanted an equal partnership with her husband and then with her son.

She got to be her husband’s partner, not his consort.

As ruler of the empire, her influence was pretty damn good.

I think it is possible – not likely, but possible – to believe that Lepida wasn’t failing to discipline some rowdy slaves, but was maybe training up a slave army to cause some genuine trouble.

Nero testified in the trial against her.

The narratives now converge into a remarkably consistent ball of inconsistencies.

choose-your-own-regicide.

She spirited away Claudius’s will, and it was never officially read or seen again.

But she didn’t want to hurt the child.

Agrippina almost immediately lost a gamble she had made many years before.

These were Seneca’s words and Seneca’s sentiments,

Seneca certainly couldn’t tolerate it.

she was smart.

The idea of Agrippina having some kind of screaming, crying, terrified tantrum after she had politely and coldly endured everything she had for the past 40 years feels very unlikely.

This image of the two little boys playing in the sun with their pets, giggling in delight,

The death of Britannicus was effectively an announcement that Nero was going to do what he wanted, to who he wanted and in front of everyone and there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could do about it.

kicked her out of the palace and removed her armed guard.

Agrippina was very suddenly bereft of everything she loved.

Burrus tried to calm him down, and

cold anger mixed with overt disgust.

‘I am not surprised that Silana, who hasn’t got children of her own, doesn’t know what it’s like to be a mother or she would know that mothers do not change their children like a whore changes partners.’

Whatever happened between Nero and Agrippina, it was somewhat transformative.

she stopped making official public appearances and he stopped trying to humiliate her.

I am pretty confident in speculating that she was in Rome and actively involved in politics for this entire time for two reasons.

Agrippina’s death comes immediately before Nero’s worst excesses begin.

His outrages were kept in the private sphere during this year, where they were politely overlooked.

all the men who read it and quoted it were implicitly agreeing with her that her life was worth recording.

Poppea Sabina

definitely a victim,

sending Otho to Lusitania (modern Portugal) and not letting Poppea go with him.

Nero decided to kill Agrippina.

This wasn’t a case of a woman forcing him to do something he didn’t want to do.

Nero’s desire to have the murder look like an accident.

Both her immune system and her household were loyal.

‘If you’ve come to visit the sick mother, tell him I’m fine. If you are here to murder me, I refuse to believe that this is my son’s orders. Nero did not order his mother’s death.’

they are equally keen to make sure that Nero comes across as a murdering pervert and emphasise the falseness, in their eyes, of his grief.

It was a partial eclipse, and was seen as disapproval.

Nero decided to celebrate her.

the death of Agrippina meant the end of Nero’s ability to control himself.

When a large part of Rome burned to the ground, he took the opportunity to build himself a palace that spanned an enormous section of the city and was coated in gold on the outside.

marking his symbolic expulsion from the Julio-Claudian family in death.

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

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.