The life of Agrippina
Agrippina the Younger is remembered as the tyrannical mother of Nero. It’s time to re-evaluate her legacy
We welcome Dr Emma Southon, author of Agrippina: Empress, Exile, Hustler, Whore to introduce us to Rome’s most powerful woman
In 51 CE, Rome saw a sight it had never seen before. The sight came at the end of a grand parade through the streets of Rome designed to humiliate a captured enemy of the empire. The British rebel Caratacus had finally been caught and had been displayed with great pomp and circumstance to the Roman people and then, finally, he was to be presented at the feet of the emperor himself. But this time, for the first time in Rome’s 800-year history as a kingdom, then a republic, then an imperial centre, a woman sat beside the emperor. Agrippina Augusta sat on a dais beside her husband, Claudius, with the standards of the Roman army swaying in the breeze behind her. She was the first and only woman to sit as the empress of Rome, as her husband’s equal.
Julia Agrippina Augusta, more commonly remembered as Agrippina the Younger, was 36 years old on that day. She was twice widowed. She had been orphaned before she turned 16 and all five of her siblings had been murdered. Her third and final husband was the emperor Claudius and he was her father’s older brother. Just a decade
previously, Agrippina had been living in exile. Her life was a rollercoaster of highs and lows but, in 51 CE, it was at its height. Agrippina was ruling the empire, as she knew she deserved to.
Agrippina was the daughter of Vipsania Agrippina and Germanicus, and claimed both the emperor Augustus as a great-grandparent through her mother and the ancient aristocratic lineage of the Claudian family through her father. Her parents were Rome’s darlings, adored by everyone, and they fulfilled their promise by having six children. Agrippina seemed to be born into a charmed life, but her childhood turned out to be hard. Germanicus died, under mysterious circumstances, when Agrippina was a toddler. A decade later, after a long-running feud with the emperor Tiberius, her mother and two oldest brothers were exiled and then executed. At 13, Agrippina was married off to her cousin, the notoriously violent Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, 20 years her senior. The early years of Agrippina’s life were full of violence and pain and fear, but they forged her into a woman of incredible strength and ambition.
In 37 CE, when Agrippina was 22, her fortunes changed. Her great-uncle Tiberius died and her remaining brother Gaius — better known as Caligula — became emperor. Agrippina knew safety for the first time in her life, and she celebrated by immediately becoming pregnant.
She gave birth to her only child, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, ten months after Gaius ascended to the throne. During those ten months, she and
“The early years of Agrippina’s life were full of violence and pain and fear, but they forged her into a woman of incredible strength and ambition”
her two sisters enjoyed unprecedented privilege and luxury. They were included in oaths of loyalty alongside their brother and were the first named women to ever appear on a Roman coin. Again, it seemed that Agrippina was settling in for a life of privilege and luxury as an imperial woman. Again, it wasn’t to be. First, their middle sister Drusilla, died, sending Gaius into deep grieving. And then, Agrippina and her youngest sister Livilla were caught plotting against him.
The details of this plot are deeply obscure. Agrippina, Livilla and Drusilla’s widower Lepidus (also Gaius’s best friend) were tried, and humiliating love letters between Agrippina and Lepidus were read out in court. Whatever the details, it’s apparent that a life of passive luxury did not satisfy Agrippina. She wanted more, and it could have killed her. Gaius was generous, though, and rather than execute them, he sent his sisters to exile on separate islands. Agrippina’s punishment was to be condemned to a life of solitary boredom. As she arrived on the island of Ponza, Agrippina was facing decades of life in exile with her brother as emperor.
Fortune had other ideas. Just a year later Gaius was assassinated and replaced by his doddering academic uncle Claudius. As all new emperors did, Claudius immediately reversed all his predecessors’ policies and that included pardoning political prisoners. Agrippina was allowed to return to Rome. She returned to a strange situation. Claudius was in his fifties and had been deliberately kept out of politics by Augustus and Tiberius. Gaius had brought him into political life but his experience was poor and the senate had no respect for him. They had even less respect for his wife, Messalina, who was in her early twenties. Rome was in constant turmoil, with regular treason trials and occasional rebellions. Claudius responded with frequent executions.
Agrippina’s response was to keep herself safe. Her son was the only living male descendant of the Divine Augustus and she was the sole remaining child of the adored Germanicus. They were a powerful threat to the emperor and his own son, who were from the lesser side of the Julio-claudian family. So, Agrippina stayed away from Rome for five years. She re-appeared only when Messalina signed her own death warrant by bizarrely getting married to someone else while Claudius was on a day-trip. Messalina was executed within hours.
Weeks after Messalina’s execution, Agrippina burst back into the spotlight when it was announced that the laws concerning incest were being changed so that Claudius could marry her. He was also going to adopt her son, changing his name to Nero, and betroth his new son to his daughter Octavia. Agrippina had travelled from princess, to exile, to minor royal, to the incestuous wife of the emperor, all by the age of 30.
For most women in the Roman world, a world in which women were considered to be
“Agrippina had travelled from princess, to exile, to minor royal, to the incestuous wife of the emperor, all by the age of 30”
perpetual minors and were not legally allowed to even sign contacts, this would be the height of their ambition. To be the wife of a powerful and aristocratic man and to have a clear pathway to power for their children was the very best that a woman could hope for. Agrippina was different to other Roman women. She was not content with the impotent influence that was a perk of being the emperor’s wife. She wanted real power. She wanted to rule.
Agrippina got lucky with her husband. Claudius was bad at politics and bad at ruling, and he was happy to accept help, even from his wife. Agrippina stabilised his reign and the executions and rebellions almost immediately ceased. Within a year, she had taken the honorific Augusta, making her Claudius’s equal in name. She celebrated by founding a city in the place of her birth. We now know it as Cologne.
Agrippina became intimately involved in the running and administering of the empire. She was her husband’s partner in rule in every way. She broke every rule of appropriate female behaviour by refusing to be a quiet, passive wife. In 52 CE, she caused an immense stir by appearing at a spectacular event, the draining of the Fucine lake, in a man’s military cloak made of gold thread. She glittered and dazzled the crowds of spectators and appalled them. In the same year, she sat in state to receive the captured British rebel Caractacus alongside Claudius. She was a clear, public presence and a part of the Roman state.
She even appeared on her husband’s coinage, her face overlaid by his. She was everything a Roman woman was not supposed to be.
This is one reason why she appears in the Roman sources as a monster. She was a woman who dared to speak and act in public and she did it well. A good Roman woman was silent, modest, fertile, and domestic. Agrippina was none of these things. She did not act like a good woman should act, and so she was a villain.
There is, however, a second reason that Agrippina is remembered as a monster. Agrippina’s greatest ambition was to have her son, now called Nero, succeed her husband as emperor. After five years of ruling alongside Claudius, his biological son Britannicus was about to come of age and enter public life, threatening Nero’s succession. Although Nero was just 19, Agrippina took a risk. She murdered her husband. Although there are multiple versions of how Claudius died, and the wife wielding poison is a classic trope of Roman literature, sources are unanimous that Agrippina killed her husband to save her son’s career.
This murder was monstrous in itself, and it ushered in a monstrous age. Nero’s reign lasted for almost 14 years and they were remembered by those who survived them and those who heard about them from their parents as a time of unparalleled horrors. Nero was capricious, cruel and tyrannical. He ran the Roman empire as his personal theatre troupe, and murdered everyone who upset him, starting with his own family.
Nero became emperor because Agrippina made it so. For many, she was as much to blame for the crimes of his reign as the emperor himself.
Agrippina, however, could not have predicted how Nero’s reign would turn out. It certainly was not how she planned. When the teenage emperor took the throne, Agrippina assumed that she would be regent, and, for the first few months, that’s how it seemed to go. In Aphrodisias in Turkey, there survives an extraordinary sculpture depicting Agrippina dressed as the goddess Roma placing a crown upon Nero’s head. She holds the power of the empire, and she grants it to her son. This was the pinnacle of Agrippina’s status; she seemed to have transcended the limits placed upon her as a result of her gender and attained true power. It was an illusion, and it did not last.
It took only a few months for Nero to realise that his imperial power had no limits and that he did not have to be beholden to his mother. She had granted him the empire, but now the empire was his. She thought she had given him a gift he would freely share with her. What she had really given him was a weapon he could wield against everyone, including her. He was supported in this conclusion by his tutor, the Stoic philosopher and playwright Seneca, who actively opposed the participation of women in politics. Despite owing Agrippina his life and career, Seneca worked with Nero to remove Agrippina from all public and political spaces and, in doing so, he exposed how unprotected she was as a woman.
The first crisis for Agrippina’s power occurred when a delegation from the troubled province of Armenia came to Rome. Nero received them formally, and Agrippina arrived at the reception expecting the same treatment her husband had given her. She stepped onto the imperial dais to take her seat as the emperor’s equal. Seneca and Nero acted swiftly. Nero kissed his mother and then firmly guided her off the dais and out of the room. He humiliated her and destroyed her fragile appearance of power in just a few seconds.
For five years, their relationship continued to deteriorate. There were frequent arguments and threats, and Agrippina’s role became less and less public. Although she was still a presence in Nero’s reign, she vanishes from the sources, but the empire continued to run smoothly, despite Nero’s lack of interest or ability. These years are the most difficult for biographers of Agrippina, but it appears that during this time she wrote her autobiography; the only woman in Roman history to have done so. Our main evidence that she was still an active participant in running the empire is that, in 59CE, Nero decided to kill his mother. It was not easy. Attempts to poison her were thwarted by her habit of taking antidotes and the loyalty of her household. Attempts to stab her were undermined by her popularity with the army and people of Rome and the fear that an overt assassination would end in a revolt.
Eventually, Nero resorted to the bizarre theatrics of a collapsing boat to disguise her death as an accident. He was, apparently, unaware that she was a strong swimmer and she survived this too. In terror and despair, and concerned Agrippina would turn the army against him, Nero persuaded a loyal ally to butcher her in her own house. At the age of just 43, Agrippina died in her bedroom, rebellious and furious to the last moment, directing her murderers where to stab her, demanding to be stabbed in her womb. She was buried in an unmarked grave outside of Rome and for years Nero refused to mention her. She was denied the public funeral and honours she deserved. This matricide was seen as one of the greatest crimes of Nero’s reign.
Agrippina’s life was one of extraordinary lows and exceptional highs. More than any other woman in Roman history, she tried to transcend the legal and social limits that were placed on her in Rome because of her gender. She refused to be put into the easy boxes of wife and mother and instead created the role of Augusta, a partner in the empire. She created her own path, which took her to ruling Rome peacefully for almost a decade and which placed Nero, the destruction of the Julio-claudian dynasty, on the throne. She was a diplomat and a murderer. She was the sister, niece, wife and mother of emperors. She was an exile and an empress. She was the most extraordinary woman that Rome ever saw.
“She tried to transcend the legal and social limits that were placed on her in Rome because of her gender”