Agrippina: Empress, Exile, Hustler, Whore

by Emma Southon

For the historian or biographer, though, it is a pissing nightmare, because it means that every fact that Tacitus gives us is twisted and manipulated and carefully presented to tell a story that fits his overall narrative of moral decline and Roman degradation.

Agreed

Suetonius is equally moralising, but in a less sophisticated way. He is simultaneously more and less useful to the biographer than Tacitus because, as one of the emperor Hadrian’s freedmen, he had access to an awful lot of letters and documents and liked to show that off.

It's so important to look critical at your sources of history from antiquity. Suetonius had a 'fun' gossipy style though!!

As a woman, Agrippina exists only when her actions impact on the lives or actions of men in the political or military sphere because in the ancient world, as a woman, she exists only through her relationship to men.

Too true...

There is only a series of stories, drawn from other people’s stories about men.

Typical of the accounts of women

In response, Sejanus fucked Drusus II’s wife and plotted with her to kill him. Allegedly.

Plaintalking. But, Sejanus was an arsehole.

Her chosen husband was Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, most commonly known as Domitius, and was almost 20 years older than his new wife. Domitius’s grandmother was Augustus’s sister Octavia and his father was Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. The Domitian family were as ancient as the Claudians and as distinguished.

But a monster

Domitius’s main house was on the Via Sacra, which wasn’t far away and meant that most of Agrippina the Younger’s walk was through the monumental centre of Rome, past the glorious temples and statues of her ancestors.

To the groom's house

little girl called Messalina,

Another fascinating female character

Tiberius had sequestered Agrippina the Younger’s only surviving brother, Caligula, and Drusus II’s son, Tiberius Gemellus, where he was grooming them for succession in all the wrong ways.

There’s plenty of people who think that Gaius was a true monster who deserves every insult one can throw at him, but I’m not one of them.

It's interesting re Caligula - initially he was 'good', popular - perhaps because he wasn't Tiberius.

There were plenty of detailed rumours that Gaius had killed him in order to take the throne, but I have no real time for them.

Why?

Tiberius was in his seventies when he died and that’s a good long life for a man who lived in a world without antibiotics.

Augustus did too! Perhaps it was because neither over-indulged.

Agrippa, especially as Pliny tells us that people born of breech births were colloquially known as ‘having an Agrippa’.

Here we learn that the midwife would check the child all over for deformities or impairments and then lay the baby on the floor in front of its father. The father would then literally choose whether to pick the child up or not.

Yikes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I would probably kill a puppy to get my hands on the books of Tacitus’s Annals that describe what happened in 39CE because it is so badly recorded that most people have just done a massive shrug rather than think about it and no one can really agree on what is real.

Emma, that is a very funny thing to say - hahahaha - probably true too!!!

Agrippina ever had any best friends, Seneca was one of them.

A good bloke.

The trial was another humiliation. Like forcing her to carry Lepidus’s ashes, Gaius reading Agrippina’s personal (love?) letters aloud in the court was an act designed to publicly shame her as a slut. And it worked. The verdict of exile was only just better than death. Agrippina would be left on a tiny island with just a guard and some slaves for company, essentially erased from Rome and so erased from life. At the age of 24, Agrippina faced a long, long life of nothingness, separated from her son and waiting every day to find out if the emperor had changed his mind about her being alive.

Wow..

Agrippina should have come back to Rome cowed and vulnerable, ready for a quiet life and perhaps chastened by her experience, but instead she came swaggering back like Liam Gallagher.

Love it! How can one not love Agrippina the Younger - what a gal!

The other possibility, and the most likely one from a boringly rational perspective, is that it was good optics to bury Gaius because it’s pretty clear from a bunch of sources that even though the Praetorian Guard and Senate absolutely loathed Gaius to his bones, the people and armies of Rome thought he was quite, quite wonderful.

Even Suetonius allows 20 paragraphs of his biography to record the good things that Gaius did and how popular he was among the plebeians.

Claudius’s major deficiencies seem to have been a stammer, a wobbly head, a limp and an inability to control his emotional responses so that he dribbled when he laughed and foamed at the mouth when he was cross.

Claudius’s three best mates who he used to own as property, the freedmen Pallas, Narcissus and Callistus.

Maybe they actually ran the show?

This brings us back to what we said at the start of this book: 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. She exists exclusively as a part of Claudius:

In a genuinely baffling and extraordinary move, Messalina waited until Claudius went out of town for a night and then bigamously married her boyfriend, Gaius Silius. More than any other crisis of Agrippina’s life, the pseudo-marriage of Messalina and Silius is a headscratcher.

Wow

Women were, medically, perceived to be failed men and a part of their failure was that they were entirely subject to their emotions, passions and desires. That’s why they weren’t allowed to control their own affairs or make their own decisions:

Livia would have had something to say about this

What that meant was that Claudius’s power and stability rested on Agrippina’s diplomacy.

over the centuries became just The Town, so Colonia Agrippinensis became Colonia, which blurred into its modern name: Cologne (Köln).

I wonder if Agrippina is celebrated at all in Cologne?

Before Tiberius – long before Tiberius – Gaius and Lucius were marked as Augustus’s first choices to be his successors. They were his biological grandchildren, the sons of Julia and his best mate Agrippa,

Agrippina had never been a woman who cared about jewels or clothes in a traditional ‘feminine’ way. She was renowned for her austerity and her refusal to spend her money on unnecessary luxuries.

Agrippina was furious about Britannicus’s death and told anyone who would listen, which turned out to be quite a lot of people.

The results of that night were immediate. Agrippina stopped harassing Nero, and Nero stopped harassing her. And that’s how things stayed for a while. Or at least, we assume so because, all of a sudden, Agrippina disappears from the record.

That bastard Nero!

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.

Bill Thayer’s LacusCurtius website hosts public domain translations of these and it’s a brilliant resource if you want to read some good translations of Roman texts.