Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World

by Emma Southon

who deserves her own place in history. It is about a woman so important that men do everything they can to hurt her by accusing her of incest, adultery, murder and child abuse. It is about a woman who ran the Roman Empire for longer than a lot of male emperors, and about how the men who controlled the world reacted to that. It is about, at the centre of it all, power.

Tarquinius Superbus (if you’re going to be an evil king, you may as well have an evil king name).

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.

When they are held up to be looked at, they always mean something. That’s our most important lesson as we turn to look at Agrippina, who is missing from most of the beginning of her own life.

Indeed, he was ‘in danger of being mobbed to death whenever he arrived at Rome’.4 Basically, Germanicus was the Beatles. And much like the Beatles, he insisted upon being a real-life, quite disappointing person rather than the cipher that teenage girls and grown historians want him to be.

His first approach to dealing with the mutiny began with a long and tedious speech about loyalty, went through some weeping and ended with him faking a suicide attempt in front of everyone in the hope that they’d stop him. Except one soldier offered him a sharper sword, so Germanicus went off in a huff.

Stories are told and retold again and again, and reputations are rarely dented by something as prosaic as mortality.

Agrippina the Younger grew up with a mother who scorned tradition, was furiously proud of her lineage and was a stubbornly public figure in a constant battle with an emperor who was stubbornly traditional, grumpily smug and painfully private. Naturally, and even without the belief that Tiberius murdered Germanicus, the pair loathed each other.

The most formative years of Gaius’s adult, male life as a Roman citizen, when he should have been learning how to deal with the Senate and people of Rome, making friends, leading armies and having adventures, were spent trapped on a tiny island with a bitter old man. This explains a lot about Gaius and his reign.

Suetonius tells us that Nero was born just as the sun rose and that, as he lay on the floor waiting for Domitius to pick him up, while Agrippina lay in her own blood, the sun’s first beams burst through the window and touched him. As Domitius looked at his tiny new son, the first great-great-grandchild of Augustus, that ray of light must have felt like a powerful omen. Of course, he lifted the baby and accepted him.

Suetonius, being not very smart, claims that Gaius made Drusilla his heir, which is just unlikely given that women weren’t allowed to speak in a public setting.

Maiestas was essentially whatever the emperor wanted it to be in order to get rid of a troublesome senator.