Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Agrippina: Rome's Most Powerful Empress?

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

She was a woman of unparalleled power, descended from Julius Caesar and Augustus. But how did she get there, whilst most of the rest of her family were exiled and starved to death? And how, then, did she come to be murdered by her own son, Nero?Today Kate is joined by Emma Southon for an introduction to this very powerful hustler, and to find out why she is so often remembered as a seductress.*WARNING there are adult words and themes in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Anisha Deva.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Blueber twixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am jumping in once again to protect you from yourselves and certainly protect you from me and the smut that me and my producers will insist on pouring into people's ears. This is your fair do's warning.

Fair do's, this is a podcast about adult themes. There will be adults talking about adult themes and talking about sex in adult themes. And you just might not want to listen to that. this might not be for you, you might have wandered in here by mistake and now you're horrified. Well, this is your chance to get out now where you still can, because fair dues, you have been warned. Whether it's the OC, desperate housewives, Dallas, or a big barfire at the Queen Vicky EastEnders, we've all seen our fair share of family drama on TV.

But when it comes to family drama and crazy things happening, none of that has even a patch on the people we are talking about today. From being exiled for going behind her brother's back to marrying her uncle, to, spoiler alert, being murdered by her son. The story of Agrippina the Younger is every bit as mad as you could imagine. And today, betwixt the sheets,

we are going to find out just how mad the life of Agrippina really was. What do you look for a man? Oh, money of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of what. whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing the body. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

Goodness, I feel no done. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello, and welcome back to Betwigs the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. In the first century, BC, Agrippina the Younger became a woman of unparalleled power in ancient Rome. But how did she get herself to the top? in a society where women just weren't supposed to do that. And how did she manage to take her son, a certain Emperor Nero, with her? I am joined by the fantastic Emma Southern to find out. Enjoy!

So, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. I'm only talking to Emma Southern. How are you? I am very well, thank you. Although I went for a run in the rain, so... Actually, I feel extra. I feel like a superwoman today. That is like superwoman.

Yeah. The few times I've been running in the rain, I do feel like Rocky. I just, like, I feel really tough. Yeah, it basically makes me feel incredibly hardcore. Right? Rocky probably didn't come home and have a cake and cry because he got wet, though. That's what I do. But still...

I came home for a towel on the radiator. You never see that bit in the Rocky film. Yeah. They edit those bits out of the montages. Speaking of superwomen, we are speaking about one of the most super... Well, depending on who you're talking to, what could we say about it? we are talking about Agrippina, one of the most notorious women in ancient Rome.

Yeah. And the subject of your book on Agrippina. She's fascinated for so many reasons, and obviously you're fascinated too. But let's start with a real basic question. Who is Agrippina? So Agrippina the Younger, or Agrippina Minor, as she's known, is known pretty much through the men in her life. She is the first kind of proper empress in ancient Rome.

So she lives between about 15 and 60 C.E. And she is the sister of the Emperor Caligula, the wife of the Emperor Claudius, who is also her biological uncle. And the mother... It's getting messy. It gets really messy in the middle. And the mother of the Emperor Nero. This is right at the very beginning of the Roman. imperial system. So they are emperors three, four and five. And she is the first woman to really

attempt to take power as a woman, not just be a kind of backgroundy wife or to have influence, but the first woman who really stands out in front of the world and says, I'm an empress and you are going to have to treat me like one. And I'm going to be involved in politics in a way that Romans found scandalous and appalling and against everything that they stood for, which is that women shouldn't speak in public. I mean, say what you will about her, and we'll get to what people were saying, but that woman was connected. She was married to an emperor, she gave birth to an emperor,

and she was the sister of an emperor. Yeah, and her father should have been emperor, but died young. So her entire upbringing is that her father was going to be emperor. He was in the line of succession from the age of about 19 and he was supposed to be the next guy. But he dies young and then her mother is murdered and she is brought up to believe that then her brothers are going to be emperors

and then they are also murdered. And eventually one of the last guy standing basically but she has this complete belief that her family is the family in the Roman Empire that her siblings and her children are supposed to be ruling everybody and that they have this divine right, basically, because she's descended from Julius Caesar

and from Augustus, who are deified and are gods. And so she is literally worshipped and people worship her family. So she believes that she has this right to rule. And if all of the men around her are too rubbish to get it done, then she will just have to take on the family job, basically, which is ruling the Roman Empire. and all of the men around her kind of are too rubbish to get it done

or just a very, very bad at doing it. But she is spectacularly good at ruling the emperor and it's just a shame that she was a woman and therefore was absolutely not allowed and it was genuinely scandalous. She must have had this absolutely rock-solid belief that this was meant to be, that I am chosen by the gods, this is my destiny.

Because if I had a job and like everyone in my family had the job, but everyone in my family was murdered for doing the job. I would go, maybe this isn't meant to be. Maybe I'll just try something else, but not Agropina. Yeah, and it literally is everyone in her family. So her dad probably dies of natural causes. He's called Germanicus, but there was a murder trial. So there was a strong belief that he had been murdered.

Her mom was exiled and then starved to death by... Thiberius has a weird relationship with her, but he's sort of her step-grandfather. Then her two brothers are both exiled. One is stabbed and the other is starved to death. Then Caligula, who is her youngest brother, is stabbed to death. One of her sisters dies and manages to die of natural causes and the other one is exiled.

And so it comes down to just her as the last remaining member of her family and where I would go, well, maybe I'll retire from this terrible game of nightmares. where there seems to be a 99% chance of horrible, horrible death. Awful death. Yeah, very few people in the Julia Claudian family die in their beds. She goes, well, obviously it was meant by the gods that I would be the one who would take this on. And then my son would be the person who would be the rightful ruler. And so she dedicates her life to basically fixing what she feels like has gone wrong,

which is that she is not the ruler. Another way of looking at it would be, like, it's not. really an opting out situation and just by being born into that family you are a threat to someone even if you said i'm just going to go and live on this little island over here and grow olives and do some sewing people would still probably want to kill you just because of who you were related to so you may as well like go big or go home pretty much there are women who just don't get involved and who just kind of stay at home and live non-public lives. So you get people like her great-grandmother, like the Antonias and Octavia, who basically

they kind of do their marriages, they have their children, and then they stay at home and live lives of immense luxury, lunching and wearing pretty dresses. Every so often they write a letter and everybody's excited. Or her sister, Le Villa, who is exiled for adultery. She sleeps with a stoic philosopher called Seneca. Oh. Which, I mean, doesn't seem worth it to me because Stoic's a It doesn't, does it? I don't know a lot about the Stoics, but they don't sound like they'd be great in bed. No. And Seneca has a real habit of writing letters which praise women for not being like other girls. No. He has all these letters from a Stoic and they're all like, dear Marcella, other women would react to this really badly, but you've reacted brilliantly, almost like a man.

So I feel like his post-quital chat was robbing. Crap, men are still saying that today. Not like other girls. Yeah, exactly. Exactly the worst insult of all. So she could have, and there is this period in her life. So she grows up, her brother becomes the emperor. He adores his sisters in a slightly weird manner, which has led to all the incest. Yeah. And all of the accusations that he was in love with Drusilla.

And they kind of repaid him for this adoration, possibly because he was a creep by plotting against him. And she was involved in a plot to overthrow him. Possibly because he was a very bad emperor. He just did not get that being a Roman emperor is not the same as being a king. It is a really weird space between being an autocratic monarch, which you are, but also you have to pretend that you're not. Like a large part of being an emperor is pretending that everything is somebody else's idea, which is odd.

But he just did not get that. So she tempted to overthrow him. He caught her and exiled her. I think she got away with that quite fucking lightly then. She did and she got sent to a beautiful island near Corsica, where people go on very expensive holidays now. Oh no, please don't do that. By this time she already did have her son, Nero, whose original name is Lucius Domitius Ahina Barbus, which is a really nice name to say. That is. And you do that excellently. Do it one more time.

Lucius Domitius Ahina Barbus. Sexy. But he was a bit of a nutter as well. Where did Nero come? from. So Nero comes. After she marries her uncle, she persuades him to adopt Nero. Right. Because he's then enters her uncle's family. He then gets given his uncle's name and all of the members of that family are called Drusus Claudius Nero, Nero, Claudius Tiberius. Like they've all got the same three names in some combination. So he gets Nero. Now everybody just calls him that, but he's little Lucius for a long time. He's two when she's exiled. And that's kind of the real to you for her, which is that she's separated from her child, who she does love, much as she

shows it in a weird way. And then Caligula gets himself stabbed by being so bad at being an emperor. He was really bad at it, wasn't he? Yeah, bless him. It wasn't really his fault that he was so bad at it, but he was terrible. So she kind of gets brought back from exile and is returned to Rome, is given a nice new husband, is allowed back into polite society. She was I'm not accused of murdering her husband. Whether she did or not is open to interpretation. I don't think she did. I think she only did the one murder.

Which some may say is enough. Don't want to be excessive. He dies leaving her a kind of single woman with a son who's about 10, who everybody loves because she is the daughter of this emperor who never was. So she has this reputation as being the kind of maligned side of the family, which is how she ends up being married to Claude. because Claudius is the unpopular side of the family. He's the uncle, right?

He's the uncle. So tell me how that one works then. How do they have incest laws? Did like people just not mention that at the wedding? Like what was going on there? So it comes about in a really convoluted way. The theory generally is that she kind of persuaded him into it, either by seducing him or by just explaining that he was doing a very, very bad job of being

emperor in the first years of his reign. And he kept murdering people himself. He kept killing people. And then his wife, Messalina, who is also relatively famous for her own antics, she's kind of amazing. She has astonishing. She's either very stupid or very brave because she waited until Claudius went a day trip. He goes to Ostia, which is like 20 miles away from Rome, is not that far,

and married someone else and had a big public wedding, while still married to the emperor. That's a really fine line, is it, just, is it genius, or is it real stupidity that one? That's... Yeah, exactly. And like, some people are, like, try to work out what 4D chess she was playing with this, because it's... Did she know she was married to Claudia. Did she just forget? Yeah, but I think she might have just been dumb. Wow. Because it's basically the same as if Camilla waited for Charles to go to Scotland and then had a wedding in Westminster Cathedral. It's so stupid, isn't it? I've for like so many reasons. Yeah. You can't quite get you. Like there was no way you weren't going to be found out.

You absolute lunatic. And like she was, what could we say in her defence? She wasn't very old, Messalina, was she? She wasn't. She was in her. early 20s. This point she got married when she was about 17. I did stupid stuff in my early 20s. I don't know if I married the emperor, then married someone else while he was away. Yeah. I did stupid stuff. No, I've got nothing. I don't know why she did that, but Messalina's a law unto herself. She is a law unto herself. She does her own thing and that was her thing. So for that, she was executed fairly reasonably. It would be. Yeah, there's not really much you can do with an empress who won't stay married to the

How can we say it? She was extra. That's probably what you could say about Messalina. She was extra and then some. Was Agrippina involved in Messalina's execution? No. I get the real sense with Agrippina. She's kind of like this Machiavellian figure like behind the scenes because she can never, like she can't be the emperor herself. Yeah. Like she shags emperors and she like gives birth to emperors and she's like they're whispering in everyone's ear like this massive power player. Was she friends with Messalina? I like to think of them as being like this insane power duo. They were cousins, so they were definitely at dinner parties together. Could you imagine that family reunion? Christ. Yeah.

So the thing with Agrippina that everybody describes her as is that they can't understand her because she doesn't have what I consider to be traditional feminine flaws. So Romans very deep in their psyche believe that women had inherent, like, psychological flaws. one of which was that they were inherently cruel, and that if you give women any kind of power, like if you give them power over an enslaved household, they will become brutal.

The reason that they can't be allowed to rule is that they will be tyrants and they'll kill everybody. Which is pretty rich, actually, coming from the men of Rome, to be fair. Coming from literally all of them, yeah. And the other is that they are inherently attracted to shiny things like magpies. I can't dispute, I do like a shiny thing. And that all women want in the world is to be covered in gold at all time. And so Agrippina does not like kind of gaudiness or gold.

She's not a luxurious person at all. She's like weirdly frugal and she saves up money to use it for like public projects and bribery and things like that. And so she never spends on shiny things and she's largely always dressed in kind of plain clothing. And so you could imagine her at dinner parties with Messalina who did love shiny gold things. Yes, she did. Yeah. And the other women of the family who did also like shiny gold things with her kind of relatively austere in the centre, kind of disapproving of everybody and watching them to her mind throwing away the power that they had.

Interesting. I have a feeling that if I'd been one of these Roman women, I would have been there with the shiny things as well. I would have been covered in gold and just going to bring me cakes. There's a great story about a woman who covered herself in pearls and she had like pearl earring and pearl headdress and pearl necklaces and they're very expensive because they come from Britain. And so she would carry around the receipt to show that she had paid 40,000 sisters and she would get it out at parties to show people that they were real pearls.

That is wow. baseline behaviour for the Roman aristocracy is that just in case you thought that these weren't incredibly expensive pearls, these are... Jesus. It's the receipt. I love that, just putting the receipt as part of your ensemble, just so people... Just let it fall out of your dress. Oh, what's that? Mine would just be a load of Clana receipt stuff.

Oh, right, okay, so Agrippina is there, like in the middle of all this splendour. So she's there. Messalina Falls and she sees an opportunity. She has access to her uncle because he's her uncle. He's her dad's older brother. He's doing very badly at being an emperor. Nobody likes him. Nobody wants him to be emperor. He's been put there by the army and nobody in town likes him at all. And he keeps executing people on a whim. these two things might be connected. Yeah. So either by seducing him or by persuading him, she convinces him that his best option is not to marry either his former wife or Caligula's former wife or any of these other women who are around. Because the emperor can only really marry someone that he's related to

because anything else would be a downgrade. And they've kind of run out of cousins because they keep exiling them. So there's only two or three there. Some of his kind of courtiers persuade him that. Agrippina is the best option, but it is illegal to marry your niece. Okay. Because the Romans are not completely disgusting. 75% gross.

We've got to have some standards. But not completely. And they do find this to be deeply odd. So Claudius has to persuade the Senate to let him change the law so that he can marry her and make Uncle niece relationships legal. And the way that they do it is he gets somebody to argue in the same. Senate and their parliament that he is the best of men and the best of men requires the best of wives and a wife is effectively a gift from the city to their emperor, their beloved and wonderful

emperor and anybody else would be a downgrade and Agrippina comes from the best heritage and has the best parentage and the only person who has divine Augustine blood in her, she's the only person left. She has a son who is also the only person, like he's the only boy left with Augustus's blood and him. And so she has proven fertility, which is the kind of thing that ancient people like to talk about. Mm. Yeah. Mm. And also the Egyptians marry their sisters, so it's not as bad as that. That's, it's just some weird, that logic seems to be like, look, there really isn't anyone else. The Egyptians did weirdest stuff and she's fertile. Yeah, pretty much. She never did have any children with her for very good reason. But they do agree that she

is the best possible wife. Anybody else would be an insult. And so they let him marry her. And she moves in and pretty much immediately just takes over and sorts everything out in Rome. If you look at the statistics for how many people are executed for various treasons and, like, laissez-majorie before she becomes empress and after, there's like 30-odd people murdered in the whole rain and something like 25 of them are before. Wow.

Before she moves in. And she moves in and is like, no. She basically brings an air of legitimacy that Claudius does not have and also brings an air of being very organised and really good at diplomacy. And she talks him into giving her the title of Augusta, which is really hard to explain, but basically means she gets called Empress for the first time. So she gets to be queen and previously the only women who have been called Augusta, have been either near death or dead.

So they've only been two previously, and they were both, like, Livia and Antonia and they were both very, very old and not involved in anything. She is the first wife of a living emperor to be called Empress. Well played Agrippina. Yeah. And then she does her most impressive thing,

which is she persuades Claudius to adopt Nero and make him Nero. He's about 13 at the time, even though he or had he has a biological thing. son who's a couple of years younger. No. Oh, now that would hurt. Yes, and this is like the most controversial thing that she does, which is that she pushes Britannicus out of the line of succession.

She's really good at displays of propaganda, so she has them displayed together all the time, and Nero has become a man, like, ritually become a man. So he gets to her adult clothes, and they dress him up in little army clothes. all the time. So he's a teenage boy dressed as a soldier and then Britannicus is always next to him dressed as a child. Basically in short shorts and a little

school cap, the Roman equivalent of and so she very much pushes an agenda of Nero is going to be your next emperor from the time that he's very young and from about a year into her reign. She's ruthless isn't she? Yeah and she's so good

at persuasion because she does all of this without anybody really complaining at the time. To be a fly on the wall, what was she saying to these people? Yeah. Like this is her greatest skill, is this ability to persuade. And there's a moment much later on

where she really shows off where she is on the brink of being exiled or executed by Nero after he has become emperor. Soldiers turn up to arrest her. And she says, look, just put me in a room with Nero. I just need to talk to my son. and she goes into the room, no one else is in there, so nobody knows what's said. But by the time she's come out, she has got off of whatever charges,

and she's also managed to get jobs for two of her friends. Fuck. One of whom becomes the prefect of Egypt, which is like the best job. Did she come out of there with one sandal in hand because she'd just been walloping the ungrateful little bastards. She's just, like, incredibly good at acting as though what she's, wants is what the other person wants and you see this in loads of stuff. She doesn't really use violence. She gets portrayed in the sources as killing women that she doesn't like, but she almost never uses

kind of coercion within male spheres. She always uses diplomacy and she never really executes people. So there's this whole big deal about her removing soldiers who she thinks are too loyal to Britannicus and putting in people who were loyal to her and Nero. And in the past, if Claudius was doing this, he would definitely execute them. But she, like, very cleverly kind of shuffles stuff around so that they get to go and be Centurion somewhere else and they don't really lose any prestige or any jobs.

And therefore, nobody can hate her for it. Like, she doesn't create enemies because if you execute people, their sons hate you forever. And their friends hate you forever. And so she's really good at moving, factions around and making it so she doesn't create more enemies for herself and presenting herself as totally the legitimate inheritor of everything that she has. And very quickly she starts appearing next to Claudius in public political spaces. So you get like delegations

will come from other kingdoms and normally they would just be greeted by the emperor. And that's not something that the emperor's wife would ever be involved in. But now they've got two thrones side by side and she is sitting next to him. Oh, she's so smart. How old was she when she married her uncle? How old was she when that happened? Late 20s, early 30s. Christ.

She's very, very smart, clearly. This is not someone that you would want to take on. Like the tactical maneuvers that this woman is capable of are breathtaking. Yeah. And I sort of get the sense that it's almost, she does that thing that very, very cleverly manipulative people do, which is that you don't quite realize it's happening to look. happened and then like everyone kind of looks around and is like oh my god like we seem to have

a woman emperor and and all this stuff how did we let this woman in here how did that happen yeah like suddenly it's just there and she's just done it all i'll be back with emma and agrippina after this short break hi there i'm don wildman the host of the brand new podcast american history hit join me twice a week as i explore the past to help us understand the united states today you'll hear how codebreakers uncovered secret japanese plans for the Battle of Midway. Visit Chief Poetan as he prepares for war with the British. See Walt Disney accuse his former colleagues of being communists and uncover the hidden history that lies beneath Central Park. From pre-colonial America to independence, slavery to civil

rights, the gold rush to the space race. I'll be speaking to leading experts to delve into America's past. New episodes dropping every Monday and Thursday. So join me on American History Hit, A podcast by history hit. So we said that she didn't kill people, but what happened to Claudius? Okay, she did kill Claudius. Her husband, her uncle. She killed him a bit. Like definitely a bit of killing.

A little bit. She allegedly kills a couple of women who she's jealous of. Oh, really? That's interesting. What was she jealous? If she didn't like the shiny things, like what was she jealous of? One is called Lollia Paulina, who was married to her brother and was considered to be the most beautiful woman in Rome.

When people were going through their roller decks of eligible women, she was another one who was on the list to marry Claudius. Competition, right? Yeah, and so, I mean, her life kind of sucks because she just gets kind of parceled around to various horrible men. And then eventually she is executed for something, possibly because Agapina doesn't like her, basically. So she does that.

So she's with Claudius for 10 years. That's quite a while, actually. I mean, you know, I don't think that excuses the murder, but she's put in some work there. She has, and she really puts in work into making Nero, like, his obvious successor, which is all fine until by the time you get to 59, she is in her late 30s, early 40s, and Britannicus is becoming an adult. And he is now appearing in public as an adult. He's got jobs, he has all this stuff, which has become a problem because Claudius, who is,

never a consistent man, starts talking about the possibility of co-emperors or maybe we should let... Oh, that's never going to work, is it? Like there's an imperial court, which is full of courtiers and hundreds of people, and they start discussing the possibility of Britannicus as emperor or maybe near I could have done Britannicus or da-da-da. And Agrippina is just not having any of this, basically. She has worked very hard and she believes totally and utterly and without any shape. of Grey that Nero belongs on this throne, that it is his birthright, that he is the descendant of divine beings, and Claudius absolutely is not, and therefore he deserves this,

and Britannicus can sit in a corner. And so she decides that she just needs to get rid of Claudia, she needs to hurry it along, essentially, and she poisons him with a particularly succulent mushroom. Nice. He was fond of mushrooms, wasn't he? Which is sort of like a double like that's quite a shady way to do it is. It is. Yeah, you know, it's like it's his favourite of food and she just fucked it up. And she fucks up.

He did like eating in general. There's a great story about Claudeus which is that he once interrupted a Senate meeting to describe all of his favourite places to eat in Rome. I was trying to like him. He likes eating so much. Like he just likes food and he's also a big drinker

that one version of the poisoning story says that basically he has, had eaten so much that day and drunk so much alcohol that the poison just wasn't having the effect that it should have. He had slowed down his metabolism so well that he just wasn't dying. So she gets a doctor in who pretends that he is going to tickle his throat with a feather to make him throw up because he's not feeling very well. But the feather is coated with poison.

Wow. Do you think that's true or is that just one of those like apocryphal stories that gets written about someone afterwards? I suspect that is an apocryphal story. It's a good story. It's a damn good story. It is. And it is very much generally believed that Claudius liked food and liked alcohol too much to be easily poisoned,

that it was a long, hard night of poisoning her husband. Do you know what poisoning she used for that? We don't. She used a poisoner who was famous at the time for being so good at poisons called Lecusta, and who apparently had kind of trademarked mixes that, could poison people in the way that you wanted them to be poisoned. So if you wanted it to seem like your husband had gone mad, then she could give you a poison that would make him act rationally. If you wanted a quick death, then she could do that. But if you wanted a slow

death, so it looked like they were dying over like a four months period, then she could do that. So she imports this woman to... That sounds very skilled, but she clearly didn't factor into a fatty, greedy guts husband who gorges all night, did she? Yeah, three points of one. wine was not factored into it. So whatever happens, Claudius checks out. Claudius checks out and at this point Agrippina is completely his equal really in authority. She doesn't have any of the like official political power. But she closes down the palace.

She brings everybody who needs to be brought in in and has them swear to Nero before she tells anybody outside of the palace that Claudius is dead. Smart. So the first time that anybody here. hears about Claudius dying is when Nero enters the Praetorian camp, which is nearby, and they have already been primed to hail him as emperor. So it's very much a, the king is dead, long live the king. Or long live the king, by the way, the king is dead.

Situation. So she, like, this is a long night for her because she poisons her husband and installs her son. And there is this amazing freeze, which is in Turkey, which has her, dressed as the personification of Roma and then Nero and she is standing behind him putting the crown on his head. I mean, they knew, didn't they? They knew he was pulling the strings, really. Yeah.

Oh, what happened to Britannicus? She must have had a plan for him. I'm going to imagine it doesn't end very well. So Britannicus, she doesn't seem to have actually had that much of a problem with Britannicus. She just didn't want him to be emperor. And she wanted her son to be emperor. Nero has a problem with Britannicus, and Nero who has a fragile ego, shall we say.

Everybody knows that his mum put him on the throne. He's like 19 when he becomes emperor, so he's not exactly fully formed. And he's a 19-year-old theatre kid. Oh, no. So he has a massive need for approval, and the fact that everybody knows that his mom put him on the throne and that he is only where he is because of his mom is a problem for him. him and he kind of takes this out on Britannicus. He has these two moments where he shows Agrippina that her role in his reign is not going

to be the same as it was in Claudius's. He's not going to let her be the powerful Augusta who gets to go to meetings. And the first one is when she turns up to meet a delegation from Armenia and she goes to sit on her throne and he stands up and puts his arm around her and goes, oh, Mom, it's so nice to see you. We're just in the middle of a meeting here and ushers her out of the door. Establishing boundaries with parents is very important. He establishes his boundaries in a brutal public way.

And then to make it worse, to apologise for that he sends her a beautiful beaded dress. Which is not something that she appreciates, but it is very much a statement of like, this is your place and you stay here. She must have been raging. Yes, I imagine she was kicking some walls. And so she then starts making noises about how she got him the throne. He kind of owes her, you can't treat me this way. I could have put Britannicus on the throne if I wanted to. So the second step of establishing his boundaries is in public at a dinner party of a lot of people.

He poisons Britannicus with a fast-acting poison. And the story is that he, so everybody has tasters, which is a professional job by this point. So the taster tastes as wine and says it's too hot, but it's fine. And they put water in it to cool it down a little bit and is the water that is poisoned. So he then drinks that. That is clever, though. Yeah. And at dinner, he just stands up, starts choking, drops dead in front of everybody.

Shit. Including Agrippina and everybody has to sit there and basically act as though this hasn't happened. Because Nero says, oh, he's had an epileptic fit. He'll be fine. Everybody just saw him die. but the choice is that you can either put yourself as next on the list for that to happen to you or you just continue eating your lovely dormice as though that didn't happen and everybody chooses and it is a clear message to Agrippina like know your place woman like you may have put me here

but I am now the emperor. From her point of view that would like she has moved heaven and earth and everything in between to get this ungrateful shit on the throne. Yeah. Like that's been a whole thing. thing, like this Machiavellian power moves and shifts and, you know, like makes Game of Thrones look like absolute child's play. And then as soon as it's happened, as soon as she's now mother of the emperor, this little twat just doesn't want anything to do with her. Like, she must

be raging. She is. And it's such a clear message. And he just ices her out of everything. And she just becomes angrier and angrier. And the angrier she is, the less he wants to talk to her, the less anyone else wants to talk to her and she just becomes more and more isolated until you get to this point where people think that they can get her out of the way because she is a power and if they can move her out of the way. So her sister-in-law, weirdly enough, from her first husband, sets up this whole plot to have her exiled for treason. So I suspect there is some kind of like interpersonal dislike happening because they are sisters-in-law. And she's not really done anything to D'emisha. So she sets up this whole plan overnight. She waits until

Nero is drunk at a party and then sends in his favourite actor to tell him that his mother is plotting against him and that she's going to have him killed and put someone else on the throne and she's having affairs with people and plays on all of Nero's little insecurities. He's drunk. It's 2 a.m. His version of Brad Pitt is there telling him these things. So he's immediately flies into a rage and is like arrest her, execute her, have her done before morning, which is what everybody wants. And that is when they go to arrest her and she's like, look, put me in a room with him. Wow. And that being in a room with him means that she is able to talk him down completely, have a conversation with him for the first time in ages, and then

allow her to have a little bit more influence. And that weirdly repairs their relationship slightly. That's interesting. Because it's five years between that. and the point where Nero murders her. Didn't go very well then. I mean, they got five years out of it. So she got five more years of not being murdered, which isn't bad. I don't want to defend like murdering your mother, but she seems like she would be quite an overbearing mum, doesn't she?

She seems that she would be like the mother from hell, like type of situation. Yes, and she is. She's very much an invested parent. in every aspect of his life. She chose his wife for him who he hates. Oh. His wife is also his adopted sister and Claudius's biological daughter

because the Giulio Claudians are horrible. And she is kind of this nice girl called Octavia who no one ever has any bad words to say about and who also dislikes him, but he despises her. And the thing that eventually really prompts Nero to take drastic action and commit matricide is that he falls in love with a woman called Popaya, who is his friend's wife, and Pepaya falls in love with him, or is at least willing to marry him,

but he cannot, or he firmly believes that he cannot divorce Octavia while his mother is alive, that she has so much influence over his life that even though he is the emperor, even though he has removed her publicly from any space, she's no longer appearing, you know, wearing military capes in public. He can't go against her. And whatever the consequences will be, they will be too bad. So he decides that he has to murder her so that he can divorce Octavia so that he can then marry Popaya.

But what he wants is her murder to look like an accident because he wants to keep all of her popularity. He wants to keep all of the, like, kudos of having a cool mom. And so there's all these stories and the sources that are amazing of all the ways he tried to kill her without people noticing. So he tries to poison her, obviously. But it turns out that she has been taking antidotes for her whole life. Clever, clever woman. Yeah.

So she is basically unpoisonable. She has done the methadates thing where she takes a little bit of poison and she has kind of made herself largely immune to most common poison. So he can't poison her. He tries to get people in her household. to kill her and tries to bribe them, but they're all too loyal. They won't do it. He tries to get the army to arrest her, and they won't do it. The army general basically says, look, no one is going to arrest this woman.

They love her too much. Like, if you do that, the only thing that's going to happen is the army are going to turn around and stab you. So he has to give up on that. So he tries to do a thing where he gets people to break into her house, and they rig the ceiling of her bedroom, so that it will collapse while she's sleeping, and she'll be crushed, which it does, but she's not there at the time. She's tipped off and she sleeps somewhere else. So she knew what he was doing then?

She must have known. I think she knew from the moment that Britannicus was poisoned so publicly and so obviously that even if he didn't now, he was going to come for her eventually. And so it wasn't that much of a surprise. And she knows everything, like she's not an idiot. She knows that he wants her gone. He knows that he's not talking. he's not talked to his wife in three years and that he's suddenly spending an awful lot of time

with a concubine who is genuinely a threat, who is a free woman, who is a rich woman, who is an aristocratic woman, like he's spending too much time with this person. And so she knows, which is why it's kind of foolish that his final plan is to invite her for dinner down in bay, which is this kind of beautiful little cove in southern Italy. And she has a villa on one side of the cove and he has a villa on the other side of the cove. And so he invites her for dinner and she goes and then he's very nice to her and he kisses her, he kisses her eyes and he kisses her breasts, which is odd. Right. Yeah.

She then lets him put her on a ship that he has prepared to sail her back to her house on the other side of the cove. And she gets in and the boat has been somehow rigged. The head of the Navy gets this idea from seeing it in a kind of games that you can rig a boat somehow to her. have it collapse or tip in some way, and she will be knocked out of the boat and drown. And then everyone would be like, oh my God, it was a terrible accident. The boat just fell apart. Look what happened. So what happens is that occurs, but he knows so little about his mother.

He does not, for example, know that she spent three years living on an island where pretty much the only thing there is to do is swim around in the beautiful seas. And she's a very strong swimmer. Idiot. Such a rookie error, that one. Yeah. And so she is dumped into the sea. One of her attendants who is dumped in with her shout,

Help me, help me, I'm Agrippina and is beaten to death with an awe. Wow. Oh dear. While Agrippina is swimming to safety, she just swims happily back to her house. At which point she sends a messenger round to near her say, just to let you know I've had a bit of an accident, but I'm okay. I've just hurt my arm a bit and I'm a bit tired. And he sends back a bunch of guys with knives and it's just like...

Just do it. The woman is unkillable. Like I can't pretend that this is anything other than what it is. So these guys turn up at her door. She's in her bedroom and they hit her on the head and then stab her while she's lying on the ground. And that is how she dies. Is it a fitting end? I don't know.

I feel like she sort of bred this monster, didn't she? Yeah. All that scheming and awfulness, and it just turned around and bit her on the ass quite spectacularly. It's kind of hard to know how it could have ended up any other way. She was never going to die of old age, was she? No. I mean, the family history suggests absolutely not. Mm.

And Nero doesn't die of old age either. He doesn't last much longer, does he? He gets another 10 years. 10 years? Me. So she dies. She's in her early 50s. and she's cremated in her garden,

and then one of her attendants is so distraught that he throws herself on her pyre, and then she's buried kind of in an unmarked grave. I can't let you go without asking you the question about Agrippina's rep... Because you called your book, like you titled it, Hort Hustler. She has a reputation as being quite slutty, does Agrippina. And in a lot of the modern, like, film adaptations,

Like she's actually seen having an incestuous relationship with her son. Yeah. And that is a story that is told about her at the time. What do you think about that? Like, is that, I mean, we've established that incest is on the table for these people. Yeah. It's just how much incest is up to debate. Do you think that's what she was doing?

Well, the story about the incest, there's two kind of versions of it. One is that when she realized that Nero was moving away from her and moving towards Pappaya, that her influence was going to wane and that she became so desperate to hold on to her position and so desperate to maintain her connection to her son that she either attempted to seduce him or successfully did seduce him. The most graphic one is a story about them being carried in a litter

together through Rome and then when they got out, there were suspicious stains on Nero's toga. Oh dear. And there is another version of it which says that she basically turned up at his bedroom and was like, look, if this is what it takes, then let's do it. And he was like, ugh.

But the other version is that Nero was actually in love with his mother and that he had a favorite concubine who he chose specifically because she looked so much like his mother. And he would show her off to the army and he would make her parade around naked and be like, look how much she looks like my mom. Oh, it's just a Freudian nightmare, isn't it? Yeah. The story that turns up in Renaissance art loads is after Agrippina was dead. Nero allegedly turned up and stripped her body and then fight like this was his chance to touch his mother.

And you'll get loads of paintings of like Nero boggling the dead naked body of his mother. So there's two versions and they don't really agree with each other because they both are, you know, in one she's desperate and is willing. And in the other it's Nero who wants her and she has nothing to do with it. Incest is a thing that gets thrown around loads in the Roman Empire. Like if you don't like somebody, you accuse them of sleeping with their sister. And it is something which is just like a almost a stock accusation. I don't think that personally that she was doing anything.

But the other accusation, the reason that she gets called a whore is that during her ranger with Claudius and then later with Nero, she has these men around her who basically are her little acolytes. And one of them is one of Claudius's favorite freedmen, like an ex-exam. enslaved person who is still in the household and one of them is a console at the time and they kind of basically do whatever like they're her arms essentially like she can't go into the senate and make a speech but she can get her pet console to go and do it right and she can't access certain spaces but her freedman can and basically it was completely assumed that she was sleeping with both of them what they got out of it was sex not that they got access to her as a powerful woman and they therefore

got stuff but the only thing they got out of it was sex. Seneca is the other one that she was allegedly sleeping on, although he stabbed her right in the back. Anytime you see a woman in power and there are men near her. Epic slut shaming. Yeah, exactly. And it kind of doesn't matter if she was sleeping with it. Because they definitely got something other than sex out of it.

And as long as she didn't seem to have a problem with it, then fine. But she does have this power and she does have this influence that they can use. and it's a reciprocal relationship between all of them, but she's not married to them, she is married to her uncle. All of that is disgusting, and there is no way for Romans to conceive of a woman who has sex that isn't abhorrent.

For women, and particularly for women of her status, sex is for procreation and pretty much nothing else. And if you're doing anything else, then you are unable to control yourself and you're disgusting. And so even the slightest hint that she spent time with men who she was neither related to nor married to was suspicious, a bit sexy and a bit illegal actually. But also, you know, it's just classic start shaming. Like if you have sex for fun, you have sex with somebody who's not your husband,

then you must be doing it for some reason and you must be a whore. Final question. What do you think Agrippina's legacy is? Does you have a legacy? don't marry your uncle. It's just retire from the family business. It's not worth it. What do you think her legacy is?

Her legacy is very bad parenting. Terrible parenting. Don't do that. Certainly in the Roman world, she becomes very much a kind of what not to do for imperial women. Like how to behave as a woman who is, however much you believe you have the right to be ruling,

she is the only woman who ever tries to do what she does, like to actually rule and to put her son on the throne and to manipulate the family around her. And she writes her own autobiography as well. She writes this memoir. I'm great by Agrippina. Yeah. Apparently it is like a lament of the agonies of her family. Fair.

So it's like all of the horrible things that happen to her family. And she's the only woman as far as we know in the entire ancient world who wrote her own autobiography. But she is punished for it so severely that no one ever tries it again. until like the 220-ish C.A. So 250 years later, somebody has another go at doing what she does and with largely the same consequences. But no one tries to be a woman in power. They realize that there is a place that is allowed

and it is not in public. And the kind of ideals of chastity and chastity and fecundity, those two kind of sides of the same coin, all come very hard back into fashion as soon as she's gone. So she becomes a cautionary tale for imperial women pretty much for the rest of time. Emma, you have just been amazing to talk to today. Thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your work and about Agrippina,

where can they find you? I'm off Twitter at the moment because I have a deadline, but normally I'm there at Nuclear Teeth. And they can find me at emma southern.com. And the book is called Agrippina Empress Exile Hossela Ho. Thank you so much. for talking to me to say about this incredible and mad woman. Yeah, don't do what she did.

Don't. Thank you so much. You've been wonderful. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for listening. And thank you to Emma for joining me. I had so much fun talking to you. And if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if there's something you desperately want us to look into, if you just want to say hello to the Betwixt the Sheets team, you can now even email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. Join me again Betwix the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by epidemic sounds.