In Our Time - Agrippina the Younger

Episode Date: March 31, 2016

Agrippina the Younger was one of the most notorious and influential of the Roman empresses in the 1st century AD. She was the sister of the Emperor Caligula, a wife of the Emperor Claudius and mother of the Emperor Nero. Through careful political manoeuvres, she acquired a dominant position for herself in Rome. In 39 AD she was exiled for allegedly participating in a plot against Caligula and later it was widely thought that she killed Claudius with poison. When Nero came to the throne, he was only 16 so Agrippina took on the role of regent until he began to exert his authority. After relations between Agrippina and Nero soured, he had her murdered.With:Catharine Edwards Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck, University of LondonAlice König Lecturer in Latin and Classical Studies at the University of St AndrewsMatthew Nicholls Associate Professor of Classics at the University of ReadingProducer: Victoria Brignell.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uket-Rour. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Agrippina the Younger was for a time one of the most powerful women in the Roman world. Born in the early 1st century AD, she was a member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty

that ruled the Roman Empire for many decades. When her brother Caligula became emperor, she exercised at first considerable influence. After she married the Emperor Claudia, she enjoyed high status as Empress and secured that position through complex political manoeuvres. When her teenage son Nero came to power, she effectively acted as his regent. Her life was full of tremendous drama and intrigue. In 39 AD she allegedly took part in a plot against Caligula, her brother, and he sent her into exile. It was said that she poisoned

her husband Claudius. Nero eventually turned against his mother and had her killed. With me to discuss the dark, operatic and contested life of Agripeen of the younger, are Catherine Edwards, Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck University of London, Alice Kernig, lecturer in Latin and classical studies at the University of St Andrews, and Matthew Nichols, Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Reading. Catherine Edwards, Agrippina the Younger was born in about 15 AD. What changes had taken place in Rome, in Rome's political situation in the decades so leading to her birth? Well, Agrippina was born into what was really Rome's first family,

you like. Rome had previously been a republic, but in the tumultuous years of the first century BC, long periods of civil war were succeeded by an autocracy that was established by Agrippina's great-grandfather, the Emperor Augustus. Augustus had then ruled Rome for about 40-odd years. He died in the year 14 just before Agrippina was born and was succeeded by his stepson, Tiberius, who was the son of his wife, Livia. But we're talking about Augustus being a quite remarkable man. I mean, to be the first emperor after the machinations of a republic and the efforts of a republic is one thing.

But to stay there for such a long time is another, to turn himself into a semi-god is another. But then he introduced dynastic politics. From now on, somehow other people had to be related to previous empires, i.e. to his family. He was the founding family. That's right. But it was a very sort of, in a way,

informal setup because it wasn't the case that he designated an heir in an official way, but there were various signs that, first of all, that his grandsons were marked out to be his he didn't actually have a son, he had a daughter, Julia. So her sons were marked out as his heirs, but they died before him. And then later he was obliged to adopt Tiberius, his stepson, to take over his powers. The idea of adoption was very strong then, wasn't it, and was very positive. adopted somebody and that was that they were your son to all intents and purposes. People didn't challenge that. That's right.

Adoption had traditionally been used by the Roman aristocracy in a family where there wasn't a male, a male heir particularly. You would adopt someone who would take on your family name, take on your family of religious obligations and inherit your family's prestige. And that became all the more important under the Principate with emperors, many of whom didn't actually have a son who survived to adulthood. and they would then adopt someone who was a plausible-looking candidate to take over to inherit their property and their in due course. So can we take up Agrippina from her birth over the first few years? What did she experience?

The first family, was it massive wealth? Mathisacus. You tell me. Well, Agrippina's father was Germanicus, who was a tremendously glamorous and popular character. He was, in fact, the grandson of Augustus 1. wife, Livia. He was a very successful general and he'd had military successes in Germany particularly, and indeed it was in Germany that Agrippina was born in what is modern Cologne. Now her mother,

Agrippina, the elder, was actually the granddaughter of Augustus himself. So she was descended both from Augustus and from his wife, Livia. Her mother, Agrippina, had a very powerful, had a very sort of powerful character and is described with some ambivalence by ancient historians, particularly Tacitus, who in some ways admires her courage. I mean, she stood up to mutineing soldiers when they were in the camp in the Rhine.

I didn't quite get that. She stood up to them how and when, who were they? Well, she made the Roman soldiers ashamed of having mutinied because they were posing a threat to her and her young family. So when there was the suggestion that there was too much trouble in the camp and that Agrippina and her young children would have to leave, the soldiers were so ashamed that Augustus's granddaughter was going to be leaving them, that that sort of calmed them down.

And then there's another occasion when she intervenes to stop a bridge being destroyed. And again, these are seen as in a way brave acts, but also ones that are not entirely appropriate to a woman. And so she brought up in an almost entirely Marshall family, which is also a family of supreme power. And what was expected of her, Akabina the Younger? Agarpena the Younger. Well, we don't know very much about her early education. In fact, her father died when she was very young.

In again, as always in this story, mysterious circumstances. Very mysterious circumstances, yes. There are lots of stories that he was poisoned and suspicion fell on a, on another leading Roman, at this stage, Germanicus was in the east, in Syria. Suspicion fell on Pizzo, and the idea was that Pizzo had been put up to this by Tiberius on the grounds that Tiberius was jealous of Germanicus.

So there's a very sort of complicated intrigue within the imperial family. But Germanicus dies when Agrippina is really very young, and that leaves her quite vulnerable because there's a lot of tension between her mother, Agrippina, the Elder and Tiberius, and also between Agrippina and Livia, who's powerful because she's Tiberius's mother. Just finally, before I move on, how far does she, do we feel, do we know anything about her feeling

of how far she was from the centre of power at this stage as a young girl, as a, not even yet what we now call a teenager? We don't know very much about how she felt, and it's a bit tantalizing because, We do know that she actually wrote her own memoirs. Much later, when her son Nero was emperor, Agrippina wrote her memoirs, which recorded her life and the fortunes of her family. So they would have been very gripping reading.

Those memoirs were known to the historian Tacitus, and he has one episode which he explicitly says he's taken from those memoirs, but he may well have taken all sorts of other things as well. But we never find out what she really felt when she was a teenager in Rome. Because they're otherwise lost? Yes, I'm afraid so. Well, there you go. Alec Kernick, how tumultuous was her younger child? Can we develop this younger child?

Was she brought up in, I said, her father died in mysterious circumstances. That seems to be, mysterious circumstances seem to be in the order of the day. Yes, absolutely. Agrippina, the younger, spent much of her childhood watching various members of her family disappear in mysterious or unpleasant circumstances. So she must have had a very unsettled childhood. She lost her father when she was about four or five. She then, the loss of her father pitched her mother, Agrippina the Elder and Tiberius, into a very hostile relationship.

Agrippina the Elder came back from Syria with the ashes of her husband, Germanicus, and was met by Germanicus's brother Claudius, but conspicuously not met by Tiberius or Livia. and she proceeded then to try and bring Tiberius and Livia to account for the death of her husband. And it precipitated a great crisis in Tiberius's reign. He was forced in the end to put on trial, Paiso, who was supposed to have been instrumental in poisoning Germanicus. In fact, Paiso and his wife, Plansina were put on trial. Plansini was a great friend of Livia's and Livia managed to get her off the charges.

but Piso was eventually dealt with. But Agrippina the Elder continued to be a thorn in Tiberius's side, and she became a great rallying, someone around whom Antipathy for the Emperor Tiberius gathered. And so Agrippina the younger grew up while that relationship was breaking down, and it culminated eventually in Agrippina the Elder being arrested, steered being exiled and eventually being done to death. Horribly done to death.

Horribly done to death. Flogged until so bad as you'd lost an eye and then starved to death. Yes, absolutely. And in the meantime, also two of Agrippina's brothers were imprisoned and killed. And starved to death, eating stuffing from mattresses. Absolutely. That's the story that one of them was so hungry he ended up eating the stuffing from inside his mattress while in prison. So you've surrounded by, oh, this is her mother, these are her brothers.

And there was another brother, of course. Mr. Feature? Absolutely. The one brother who survives becomes the Emperor Caligula. So she grew up with the incredible example of her formidable mother, who

as Catherine has just said, managed to was almost a more effective military commander at times than her husband Germanicus in quelling mutinies, but who also was incredibly ill-advised in her hostility to the emperor. But she also

grew up, she ended up, once her mother was exiled, she ended up going to live with her great grandmother, Livia. And so she grew up under the influence of a very different, powerful, subtly powerful woman there. And she married Domitius Ahenobabas. Absolutely. When she was 13, and he would have been about 30. And, you know, that's... How did that work out? They were married for about 12 years. We don't know a great deal about the marriage. We're told by Suetonius that he was a very shady character. So there are various stories that he deliberately ran over a child playing in a village street because he was in his way.

And so he seems to have been a very unsolubris character, although those stories might have come about because he produced one child, the marriage produced just one child, about nine years in, the boy who was to become the Emperor Nero. And his father didn't give him a very good Kaiser reference, did he, from the start? No, apparently, Demetius had said. said that any offspring of himself and Agrippina was bound to be a monstrosity. Again, who knows how much that story is based in truth

or is a colourful way of preparing the ground. Was it a significant marriage or was it just a sort of sideways shunt for our younger daughter? It was like many of the marriages that were arranged for Agrippina and members of the imperial family. She was faintly related to Mitya Sennababas. He was descended via Octavia, Augustus's sister. So it wasn't a sideways shunt. It was a prestigious marriage.

And it was always going to be the case that any offspring of that marriage, if it was going to be male, would be a potential heir in the Giulio-Claudian family. And this is one thing that happens again and again and again. Producing male airs is massively important. And they're the sort of kings on the chest. Kings in waiting on the chessboard, aren't they? Yes, if Agrippina had had had daughters or had had had no children at all, she would not have gone on to have the career that she had.

Because she gave birth to Nero, the boy who would become Nero, she went on to have an extraordinary time. Matthew, Matthew Nichols, in 37 AD, Agrippina's brother, Caligula, became emperor. And what kind of status did that give Agrippina? It gave her enormous status very quickly, and she was caught up in the glamour and excitement of the change from the decrepit old, rather disliked emperor Tiberius,

to someone who appeared at that stage should be a promising young prince. He was full of the glamour of Germanicus that we've heard about. His name, Caligula, is a nickname. His real name is Gaius. Caligula is a name that means little boots from the little army boots that soldiers in the camp would dress him up in.

So he was full of this military promise. He finally followed his father on campaigns, yeah. That's right. So he was seen as a great hope, and his story is one of astonishingly quick decline from promise to complete dissolution, and his sisters are caught up in that. but initially she was given very positive status.

She was promoted, she and her two sisters. She was given the rights that the Vestal Virgins had, for example, which means that she got to sit in the front seats at public spectacles. And that's not a trivial on her. It puts her right in centre stage, right in front of the Roman people, as a princess of the blood. She was commemorated on coin issues. So there's an extraordinary sistercius that shows her and her two sisters

dressed up as goddesses of security and prosperity and concord, as if they are somehow underpinning the happiness of the times. And her name is included in the loyalty oaths that the Roman army and the Senate and the governors will swear to the Emperor. And that's the first time that's happened to have imperial women right there in the core of the loyalty of the soldiers to the emperor. So early on she's given great status. That turns down fairly fast.

Is it at this time that can we talk about the reputation? I suppose I'm talking about sexual excess here well I am on what we would call moral depravity or some people would some people wouldn't there you go but this reputation attached itself to Caligil and to Agrippina and previously Massalina and so on but let's stick with who we know Agrippina and Caligula. Well Caligula was accused of incest with his sisters and the charge of incest comes up fairly frequently and attaches to all sorts of people it seems to be a way of blackening people's names quickly in a fairly unprovable way. Is it completely unprovable? Is it one of those?

things that we have to say, it was said it was reported and that's as far as we can ever go. It's reported by authors later on. It's not always there, as far as we can tell right at the time, but the Caligida was making a great deal of his sisters, and you could see how rumours might start. He was using his sisters in a way that sisters hadn't quite been used before. Such as? Well, in his promotion of them as part of his regime. He is saying that he is a lineal descendant of Augustus, which Tiberius wasn't. And so the bloodline is very important. The previous emperors, right?

With whom Caligua had gone to stay for about six years in Capri? That's right. And according to, I think, more fact than fiction this time, Tiberius had blackened him. I'm, what did you say? Nursing of viper in the clear. I'm nursing of viper for the Roman people. The idea that this awful child brought up by his awful great-uncle was a kind of punishment for the Roman people. By this stage, Tiberius was in self-imposed exile on Capri and was very degenerate and strange.

So we're back to Caligula and Agripp. You've described, as it were, two good years. He was welcomed. He gave the Roman people what they wanted. He was this young man and she was backing. Then what? The mood starts to change. Caligula is ill in the summer of 37, and when he recovers,

somehow the glamour has worn off and things are starting to become difficult. His favourite sister, Drusilla, dies in 38, leaving the other two sisters a little bit exposed, perhaps. Caligula remarries, which means he's starting to look to establish his own line. So now Agrippina and her son Nero are possibly a threat to that future dynastic line. And then there's a conspiracy brought up or caught up with a possible military conspiracy on the German frontier, where there are a lot of powerful legions. And the commander of those legions, Gaitulicus, seems to be in some sort of rebellion. Caligula is on his way to put this down

and at a place called Mavonia where he and his party are on the road there's then an accusation that Drusilla's widower, Lepidus, has been sleeping with both sisters, both remaining sisters simultaneously, Agrippina and Lovila, and that this is somehow not just

yet more adultery and sleeping around but is also a conspiracy against the emperor and so he moves against them, exiles them, confiscates their goods, lepidus is killed and we're told that the wagon trains to take their confiscated goods to auction were so many, it interrupted the food supply for the whole city.

Right, so we've got a long way to go still. I mean, it's quite a plot. It's hold on tight at the back, isn't it? Sit up. Right, Catherine. Let's generalise for a second to give ourselves a breather. Give us some idea of the influence, maybe even power, that Roman women could have in that beginning of the first century,

reach of first century AD. I think it is interesting to think about a change from the Republican period where political decisions were made very much in the Senate or in the public spaces of the city from which women were really excluded. But with the move to imperial power, autocratic power, decisions are made within the imperial household and of course women have an acknowledged place in the household so they have an influence, they can intervene with the emperor if they're close to the emperor. So there's that level of political power.

But I think nevertheless, it's also true that in Roman society generally, women as property holders have more power than perhaps in some other ancient societies. And women are expected to participate in the social lives of the elite, in the way that they weren't, for instance, in classical Athens. And we do find women, particularly under the emperors, we find women visible in public in terms of statues. So we've got statues of Libya around the place. And even in a town like Pompeii, we find women as patrons. So there's Yemakia who builds a portico, which has a statue of herself in it, as well as a statue of Livius, as a sense of women of the imperial family as role models. But the power shifted from the Senate, men only, to what we could call the palace, lots of women there.

That's right. And I think that's one of the things that makes traditionally minded Roman senators like Tacitus, who's one of our main sources for this period, very suspicious of the new system. They don't like the fact that decisions are being made behind closed doors. And so we get a lot of anxiety and suspicion about the influence of women on those decisions. And these are real decisions, aren't they? It's not it is reported, it was said. It's people getting being favoured.

It's people getting let off stuff. The women, not only, I could repeat, others, are being very effective and getting favours, influence for their friends just to start with, and others. Yes, I mean, there are lots of stories about, for instance, Livia doing favours for her friend, Ergelanilla, or when Agrippina's married to Claudius, that she seems to intervene to get the brother of her favourite Friedman palace put into a position of power in Judea.

So really women's influence appears to be extending to the provinces of the empire. We're getting to Claudius. Thanks for the coup. And collegial is assassinated. Claudius comes into power and with his bad health, his limp, his stammer, his unlikelyness to be an emperor.

Can you tell us more about him, Alice? About Claudius? Yes, well, from very early on in his teenage years, it was decided by Augustus and also Claudius' mother Antonia and Livia, together that Claudius should never really have a public role. You've mentioned the fact that he had some kind of nervous disorder. People speculate about exactly what it was, but it involved him stammering and limping.

And we have Suetonius reports letters from Augustus to, to Livia, talking about how, you know, this would, if Claudius became too visible, it would make people laugh about the imperial family. So there was a decision made very early on that while his brother Jimannicus was being promoted and given all sorts of public appointments, that Claudia should be kept behind the scenes. That's not how history turned out, because when Caligula was assassinated, there was no... Can we just quickly tell the listeners who assassinated him and why? Why?

Well, Caligula's unpopularity had been growing, and we hear of a number of potential conspiracies and plots against him following the one that Matthew mentioned earlier. Eventually, in early in January 41, members of the Praetorian Guard, the military force that stationed in Rome, possibly with some support from members of the Senate and with support of Imperial Freedmen, managed to concoct a plot that actually worked. Caligula had been and watching some games was making his way back from the games to the palace down a corridor he was suddenly stranded without any bodyguards and at least three characters came along and stabbed him 30 times

and then they raced back to the palace managed to kill his wife, his baby daughter and then the accounts of the assassination and what follows differ so it's hard to piece together the jigsaw I think we've got enough to be going on with let's go back there so Claude just became Emperor in a most unlikely fashion as well.

Well, absolutely. One story is that he was found in the palace by members of the Praetorian Guard cowering behind a curtain, afraid that he was also going to be done to death, and that he was marched off to the barracks and proclaimed emperor. And as Sue Tonius says, he was proclaimed emperor by some dreadful accident.

Why do they want him? These tough guys are the Praetorian Guard. Why do they want him? The Praetorian Guard want an emperor for a start. They don't want to return to the Republic. their power relies on, their being an emperor. And Claudius perhaps was seen as someone who might be malleable. He is an obvious, he's not obvious in terms of his personality,

but in terms of his descent from Tiberius, not Tiberius, but from Livia. He's a member of the dynasty. So he's still in the clan, and he becomes a remarkably effective emperor in a lot of ways, doesn't he, Matthew Nichols. But his wife, when he mind was Messalina. He was about 40ish, she was about 18-ish. Now, how much of a threat was Mussolene to Agrippina, the younger? I think they were threats to each other, and it's because of this business of the importance of the bloodline

and maneuvering airs who might still be infants into a position where in 10, 15, 20 years time, they might one day become emperor. So there is a core bloodline. We've seen it's not straightforward, but there are people actually descended from Augustus. And then orbiting around them, like electrons around a nuclear, so these outer shells of cousins and cousins of cousins,

all of whom might have a claim or a distant stake to power. Messalina is in one of those lateral branches. Her descent is not from Augustus. It's from Augustus's sister. Whereas Agrippina is descended from Augustus, and therefore her baby son Nero is descended from Augustus. So that's an obvious threat to any lineage that Messalina might be trying to establish.

So they're threats to each other. They need to manoeuvre around each other to secure the prosperity of their own particular line. And they seem to circle round each other menacingly for the first few years of the reign. And how does Claudius cope? Well, Claudius, we're told in the sources, is the dupe of his wives and his freedmen.

We've heard about the soft power of women at the imperial court from Catherine. And alongside the women, there are these freedmen, ex-slaves who can rise very high in terms of wealth and personal influence over the emperor, but they can never prosper politically. Freed men, ex-slaves, often Greeks. And they're useful to the emperor

because they can have no real ambition. Everything, like the Praetorians. Like everything to them. They're thought of that. Yes. That's right. So at the court, women and freedmen, we are told, by our sources, make Claudius their dupe and their puppet for a time, whether we believe their sources who are reaching for cliché and stereotype. I don't know, but that's the story. But he gets on with being an emperor, very effectively. He comes here and conquers Britain and becomes a man who's conquered a country. The effort can be a real emperor with a military success.

He builds good aqueducts, which is always a mark in his favour. He builds a new port to ensure Rome's grain supply. He's a practical capable emperor who rules for quite some time. various pet obsessions, he tries to reform Latin spelling and that never catches on. But I think the record is broadly favourable to him. Catherine, Catherine Andrews, Messalina Downfall, what brought that about? Well, I think Messalina probably was not as cautious as she might have been about protecting her own position. The stories are that she was absolutely obsessed with perceiving her sexual desires, And indeed that she... Satiata said non-satisfactor, that was one of the phrases.

I think Robert Graves used that. Mm, yes. I mean, there are some very lurid stories that she kind of... Well, she competed with... We're a grown-a programme. I mean, one of them, we can speak in proper language, so it doesn't offend younger listeners. I mean, she is said to have competed with prostitutes through the night. And won, and won.

She won against Rome to Chief Prostitute. And the Satra's Juvenal has this picture of how it's sort of gilded nipples and exposing the benes. that bore Germanicus, sorry, Britannicus. So this sort of sense that he calls her, in fact, Meritrix Augusta. So she's the Augusta. In fact, that wasn't a title she had at that time. But she's the emperor's wife, and she's also a prostitute, Meritrix.

So she is absolutely, she's a public figure in the worst possible way. So there are stories about her love affairs with actors like Manistair, but when things become really problematic, is when she has a relationship with Gaius Silius, who is another Roman senator, because at that point, an alliance with Silius could potentially threaten Claudius' position. There are stories that she wants to marry Silius,

have Silius adopt Britannicus, and then, of course, he would be a stepfather to the male heir. So that's, in a sense, the story that makes it possible for the freedmen in Claudius' course, to persuade Claudius that he should get rid of Messalina. So the stammeringly effective Claudius moves in, and he suggests that she kill herself.

That's right, yes. So the soldiers said... Or rather, he orders her to kill herself. Yes, she's given orders to kill herself. She finds it, despite her mother's encouragement, she finds it difficult to carry these orders out, and Taster says that's because her soul had been corrupted by lust. There's this sort of sense that kind of...

her erotic interests, a kind of, in a way, a sort of an extreme feminine vice that's not compatible with the bravery that you need to commit suicide in a proper Roman way. How did she take her own life in the end? With a dagger, but, you know, it was, in fact, I think she didn't even, I think others helped her in the end,

so she didn't even succeed in doing that. Right, on we go. Now, what's Acropina doing at this time, Alice? Well, Really, Agrippina has been maneuvering Nero into prominence. So while Messalina was still married to Claudius and still very much alive, Agrippina has been getting Nero to shine and be applauded massively. How old is Nero about this time?

So Nero, I'm thinking particularly about the games that Claudius put on to celebrate the 8th 100 anniversary of the Foundation of Rome. At this time, Nero is nine, Britannicus's real son, with Messalina is six. And the story goes that Messalina actually maybe even provided clacks of people to applaud Nero. And at this point, Messalina started to worry

that maybe Nero and Agrippina were praising a real threat. And some of the sources suggest that that's why she started to establish this relationship with Silius and maybe try and oust Claudius. So already, long before her marriage to Claudius, Agrippina, is perhaps maneuvering behind the scenes. What we're then told is that on Messalina's death, it becomes important for Claudius to marry again. One reason is that it's important for him to start to re-establish confidence in the imperial family.

We're told that a number of names are put forward, and Agrippina is one of them, and she's the one who finds favour because of her descent from Augustus, and because she has Nero, who's also descended from Augustus. She and Claudius together can unite the two lines of the Giulio-Claudean dynasty. So what then emerges is really a joint PR campaign up to a point. One thing that's important not to overlook is that the marriage between Claudius and his niece, Agrippina, is incest. It's offending against divine and human law, as Tacitus tells us. And it requires a special dispensation from the Senate to get it approved.

And that's one reason why there's then quite a big PR campaign from both of them. Agrippina starts to feature very prominently on coin. at the start of Claudius's reign the first time ever that a Roman empress has been featured on the same coin as her living husband while he's still emperor she's afforded all sorts of honours

and titles far more than any of his other wives and indeed than any other imperial women have been given. So it's not just Agrippina who starts to manoeuvre her way in it's Claudius who's got a vested interest in that too. And Matthew, from what I've read from what you've written and from her, that's stuff. She's a good influence.

on him, it seems, but she is not without moral depravity, who must keep that in the ring. I mean, it isn't Messalina, from reports, it is said, but Messalina doesn't have the monopoly. So can you give us a rounder picture of Agrippina

when she extraordinarily marries Claudius? Well, if we zoom right out and look at the bigger picture, it has been said that the last years of Claudius's reign when Agrippina was his wife and the first years of Nero's reign when Agrippina, Nero was 16 when you Kewa. She's a big influence over her teenage son, that these years are relatively, and this is

by low standards, admittedly, calm, free of extrajudicial murder and all the horrors that we hear of in the Julia Claudian court. So as a political operator, she may, could be said, have brought some stability in. We heard about Messalina being sexually lus. So is Agrippina. She sleeps with a lot of people, according to the sources, but there's a difference. Messalina does it for her own pleasure. Agrippina does it always spade dominationis, Tacitus, says, in the hope of power and hope of control. So she's a manipulator. You can read a lot of bad on the surface in the literary sources who wanted to be a sort of pantomime villain, an arch mother and manipulating behind the scenes, but you can perhaps under the surface see some sense in which she was quite a

canny political operator. This might be a good time to chat to look at this pantomime villain thing, this representation of the women as morally depraved. These are from writers who could be called misogynous without stress you. If you're nodding, I'm pleased to see. Thank you very much. And also it throws the men into rather fine relief, having these terrible women, Harrodin's rather. What, I mean, what value do you give to that representation of them in the sources you've studied? I think we can say that it throws into an interesting relief the obsessions and fears of male elite writers in the early second century when Sputonius and Tacitus are writing many decades after the event. Whether it gives us a true picture of the human being Agrippina, when it's

filtered through so many layers of hearsay and rumour and literary crafting, I don't know, but we can see that they're afraid of female soft power suborning what they see as the proper political exercise of power in the open. And as Matthew mentioned earlier, while Agrippina is married to Claudius and in the early years of near his reign, there's an awful lot of successful foreign policy, an awful lot of things that are going well at Rome. But Tacitus gives a disproportionate amount of narrative to these episodes where Agrippina is doing away with a potential rival or managing to persuade Nero to, managing persuade Claudius to adopt Nero. It doesn't seem much doubt though, or he said that she did away with Claudius.

Yes. She poisoned him. The sources are pretty unanimous on this. Josephus and philosophers cast a little doubt. Why don't you do that? Well, the moment seems to be right for it. It's October 54. Claudius, let us remember, is 64 years old.

and it's been a hot summer, he might just have died of natural causes of fever, but all the sources suggest it was poisoning. So in 53, Agrippina and Nero's starrybin pretty high. He was, Nero was named as a successor when Claudius fell ill temporarily. It looks like Nero is going to inherit. So she does poison him, we think, so Catherine, Nero takes over. He is the emperor in waiting. She's renewed him ahead of, uh, retanicus.

This is real son, Britannicus, named after this place. And so. Well, that's true. I mean, we have to remember, there's a three-year-aged, difference between Nero and Britannicus. So Nero is only 16. Britannicus is only 13. So Nero is kind of a more plausible candidate to succeed Claudius at this point. I mean, I do think we need to be quite sceptical about the stories of poisoning. We find similar stories told about Libya in relation to Augustus. And it is very much a trope of the manipulative, you know,

evil emperor's wife who is scheming to get her son into power because, of course, it was Livius, San Tiberius. Do you believe them? Or do you think, I'm intrigued. I've read all this stuff. It's really exciting. It's very operatic, very dark, very, what it is, sort of, Game of Thrones issue, except plus, right.

Do you believe it? I don't think I do believe it, to be honest. I think it is, I think it is a, it becomes a kind of running theme. So, when there, Messina, there wasn't a prostitute and, and, well, no, I don't, no, I don't believe. No, I don't believe. No, I don't believe, I don't believe. as a prostitute either. I think that's another way

in which these aristocratic male writers make sense of women in public. They've got to have found their way there by some evil means or other. So none of it's true. So what we've been talking about is just a lot of Bosch. I think it represents the stories that were circulating at the time and those in themselves are interesting

because they give us an insight into how people... But do you have proof that the proof is not right? I don't have proof, of course not. But some of the historians themselves, so Diacassius, writing a good 150 years later, he talks about, in particular in relation to Nero and Agrippina, he talks about the fact that there was nothing that went on behind the palace that didn't become public,

but also loads of other things were said of them that couldn't possibly be verified or true. So there's a grain of truth in some of it, presumably. But to go back to Messalina, had Messalina been as sexually promiscuous as that source's claim, surely someone would have said Britannicus wasn't, fathered by Claudius and no one actually said that. So there must have been some assumption that she was a virtuous wife to Claudius. Well, maybe just up until Britannicus. Perhaps up until then,

but it would have been entirely... I'm seeking the truth here from this chair. Absolutely. Okay, in this strange and story, Alan, Nero and Agrippina, the relationship between them, he came to power and as Matthews said, the first two years of his power, 16 to 18, were applauded. He was welcomed by the Roman people. He did things that they wanted him to do, and then he degenerated. How come on? What happened? Well, one of the things we're dealing with is a teenage boy who is starting to become frustrated by the interference and criticism of his mother. And as Suetonius tells the story, it starts in as petty way as that, that he's frustrated by constantly criticizing him. It is clear from the coinage that from about 55 onwards,

Agrippina stops being represented alongside Nero on the coins, and he starts to break out from behind her shadow. We're told that he starts to make friends of his own, of whom she disapproves heartily, and we're also told that those friends are terribly disruptable characters who lead him into all sorts of vice. He's someone who's interested in painting and singing. That doesn't necessarily lead to the fact that you want to,

and you succeed in, assassinating your mother. No, indeed. Right, how did that come about? Well, one episode is Nero begins an affair with a freedwoman Acty. And we're told by Tassadus that this astute woman, Agrippina, suddenly becomes incredibly jealous and silly and very worried about the fact that she's losing her grip over her son. And she starts trying to put a stop to the affair, and then she starts trying to facilitate it when that doesn't work.

But this drives Nero into the arms of his other advisors, Seneca and Burris, as the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, Seneca, his former tutor. And he ends up asking his mother to move out of the palace. She becomes isolated. He also, we're told, murders Britannicus, which is something that shocks Agrippina and further destabilizes her sense of power. And eventually...

And then he sends in a gang to kill her. Eventually, he decides that he must do away with her. And this is partly inspired by a new love of his, Poppaia, who wants nearer. to divorce his fourth. The number of it is that he sends half a dozen people or whatever it is. She's isolated in this place and they're killer and she's given

Matthew a sort of noble Roman death in the record. There's all sorts of shenanigans before that with a collapsing boat and people beating them. We can bypass those. Too many assassination attempts. The one that did it is all it. It's all part of the same one in it. And she's alone in her villa. She hears crashes in the corridor, a party

of not particularly high-ranking officers that has to be said come and and kill her and she does get a noble death speech where she bears her belly that bore Nero and says, strike here, Ferry Ventrum, kill me here where the trouble started. And Tacitus says this fulfills a prophecy that when

Nero was born, it was foretold he would rule as emperor but would kill her. And she said, Oki D'Umpirat, let him kill me as long as he gets to be emperor. So she had her wish in a way and at the moment of her death she was reminded of that. There's a sense in which in the records it is said

I love these records. that this redeemed her in many ways. She had a noble death. That right, God. You're nodding vigorously, Catherine. I am, yes. Well, I think the things that Tastus is very, very ambivalent about Agrippina. There are things that he finds actually quite admirable about her. She's the great survivor. She's made it through the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and into the reign of Nero.

And finally, she falls victim. And he does talk about how ultimately vulnerable she is, because it's never her own power. it's always the power that she has through somebody else. Is that her a reckoning that you would give? We're summing up her now. How would you place her? Well, I think that's right. I mean, it's always soft power,

and that means she doesn't command the legions. She's got people in the Praetorian Guard who are quite loyal to her, but ultimately it's her son who gives them their orders. So, you know, that really means that eventually she kind of runs out of options when her son has decided that she's got to go.

I mean, you admire her for the manoeuvring between five, as it worked with playing games, five different emperors, but she gets there to have her own son as emperor. Well, she might have been, I mean, perhaps if she'd been the ruler, she would have done a better job without having to do all that manipulating.

But, I mean, as Matthew was saying earlier, if we look at kind of what happened in the reigns of Claudius and Nero, that the number of execution, that happen in the first part of Claudius's reign is much higher than the second part of the reign. It looks as though there's a real attempt for Claudius to cooperate with the Senate, that we tend to get ideas being developed first in the Senate and then... So she has a good influence.

I think. Annes, how far do you think that the dark side, the sort of, you know, the dark side of Agrippina, which is poisoning, murdering, all that. How far do you think that is the real Agrippina? I think it's very much a construct of Tacitus, the historian. There's a play that was written called The Octavia before Tacitus wrote his histories and in that Agrippina appears as a ghost

who's full of remorse and self-pity. Tacitus is largely responsible for the image that we subsequently get this very colourful picture and he categorises her with these cliches. She's a wicked stepmother, she's a murderess, she usurps male forms of power. And you think that's not really what really happened? What do you think, Matthew, finally?

I think there's no one around to defend her after she dies. Nero rules for another nine years. There's no one to give a positive image. So she slips into history with her murder at the hands of her son being her last great act on the stage. And that colours what comes after. Well, I don't know about you, but I'm quite exhausted after that.

Thank you very much. Matthew Nichols, Alice Cunning and Catherine Edwards. Next week, we'll be talking about the Sikh Empire. Thanks very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. It usually begins by what did I leave out? We rushed through the collapsing boat, which is a great story.

Well, I know it's a great story. We didn't have time. I could see you revving up of the collapsing boat, Matthew. With the lead in the roof and the maid servant who said, I am, Agrippian. She used to get off and they realized, so she got killed with an awning. Agrippina swam to the shore, to cheering crowds. You know the story?

Well, I saw it on all I would film. It's all Merent Cucetus. It's a great story, but we didn't have time. Yeah. I think a couple of very interesting. episodes that typify the accusation that she's usurping male power. One, in the reign of Claudius, when the British chieftain Caratarchus comes to Rome and he's made to pay homage to Claudius. And he also pays homage to Agrippina, he's sitting on another dais. So that's a very important

moment. And the idea that there's this woman sitting in front of the standards of the Roman people, and this is a complete novelty. And then that's kind of superseded by an episode in the reign of Nero, a delegation comes from Armenia and Nero is sitting on his dais waiting to receive them and Agrippina comes in and it looks like she's going to come and sit next to him and this is such a shocking idea that Seneca sort of whispers in Nero's era. Nere has to go down and carefully meet his mother and steer her off in another direction so that she doesn't kind of take over this what's seen as an absolutely male prerogative of interacting with foreign dignitaries. How far is the fact that you are women?

How far does it affect your skepticism about the sources? I find it very interesting reading the way in which lots of male 20th century historians have talked about Agrippina the Younger. They'll read Tacitus and they'll say, well, we have to take a lot of what Tacitus and Suetonis say with a pinch of salt because one of the things they're doing is expressing their male concern about the dreadful influence that women can have in public life. and then they will use vocabulary and analogies of their own that they haven't got franticitous

that are very revealing of their 20th century anxieties about powerful women. Conversely, there's a fantastic book by Judith Ginsburg which doesn't rehabilitate Agrippina, but which actually looks hard at the visual evidence and at the literary evidence and looks at the inconsistencies and the variety of ways in which Agrippina was represented

because in the visual evidence, she's portrayed as often as the goddess series, a woman who symbolises Roman bounty, Roman motherhood. And yes, so it is interesting. I think I probably do respond to her as a woman myself. I wouldn't want to take tea with her. I wouldn't want to take tea with her either. You'd be rather interesting to take tea with her. You'd be very careful what you ate.

Well, you wouldn't eat the mushrooms. Yes, you'd taste it carefully first. Our source is also a writing later It's not just a fact that they're They're men in a men's world That's of course important But they're also writing after an interval of time When Rome is looking back with horror

At this dynastic mess The Giulio Claudians got the city into For the Empire into for half a century And at a period when there's been an emperor Who came in with two adult sons That was part of the bargain So the succession was secure Up until AD96

And then it moved to a system of succession By adoption Where you could choose an adult heir Who was right for the role So they're looking back in a slightly more stable time at the sheer tangle of dynastic politics, men and women caused that.

One thing that's very interesting about the period afterwards is that in the Flavian dynasty, which followed the Julia Claudians, and then afterwards as well, you don't get very prominent women. So Agrippina may have been one reason, the notoriety of Agrippina may have been one

reason why Imperial Women after that were kept very much under wraps. And here's Victoria. You've been presented. Thank you. That was great. I'm not Epipina. There are many more history and discussion programs from Radio 4 to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.com.uk slash radio 4.