The Ancients - Divorced, Murdered, Survived: Nero's Wives

Episode Date: June 30, 2021

In the long tradition of categorising famous wives as the good or the bad, Nero’s partners are no exception. These women are regularly reduced to simple characters within the final Julio-Claudian Emperor’s orbit, but what of their own experiences and personalities? Lauren Ginsberg from Duke University speaks to Tristan in this episode to shine a light on the lives of Octavia, Poppaea and Statilia Messalina, and their fates at the hands of their husband.This episode contains references to domestic abuse.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, well, we are wrapping up our small mini-series on the Emperor Nero, the British Museum exhibition on this infamous emperor from ancient Rome. Well, it's now in full swing. And today's episode,

we're not going to be focusing in on Nero himself, as it were. We're going to be looking at certain women that surrounded this emperor, in particular his three wives. Now to talk through these three wives and what we know about them and more, I was delighted to get on the show the wonderful speaker, the brilliant professor, that is Lauren Ginsberg from Duke University in the United States. Lauren has done a lot of work on the women that surrounded the Emperor Nero and in particular a lot of work on Nero's first wife Octavia. We sometimes overlook Octavia with more focus put on Nero's second wife Poppaea but Octavia, as you're about to hear in this podcast, was extremely popular with the

Roman people. She has an extraordinary story. So without further ado, here's Lauren. Lauren, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast. Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. Now, we're talking about Nero, another topic on Nero, but this time we're really focusing in on Nero's wives because, Lauren, I think it's fair to say that Nero's relationships with women, they've become infamous. And this is no less true when focusing in on his wives in particular. Yeah, I think that that's absolutely true. What's interesting is so many people are interested

in his mother, Agrippina. And that's fair. She was an extraordinary woman, perhaps one of the most extraordinary women to come out of ancient Rome. But Nero was married three times, and that's getting towards Henry VIII territory, we could say. And each time he was married to women who were no less interesting and no less extraordinary, but in pop culture, we just don't really talk about them. And so for the most part, history passes them over in silence, except of course, Poppea, who gets the anne boleyn edit i love that you mentioned henry the eighth and anne boleyn there because quite popular quite timely at the moment with the new series released on anne boleyn i believe and we will be going back to those henry

the eighth comparisons and his wives don't you worry as this podcast goes on but let's focus first of all on the background to this whole chat and let's say neronian era women and royal women in particular imperial women because by this time in the Julio-Claudian period it's a time where we've already seen shall we say precedence for wives of emperors gaining significant power in the regime. Absolutely so the history of Rome's transformation from republic to empire I like to tell my students can also be seen as the history of women moving to the centre of Roman politics and power. Even if they're still technically disenfranchised, they have access to influence that they just weren't able to have before on such a large scale. So if we go back, Augustus's wife, Livia,

was clearly enormously influential in his policymaking, and not just where it concerned household matters. We have lots of evidence for this. And she also now has a whole TV series about her domina, which I'm looking forward to watching. Nero's mother, as we already mentioned, Agrippina, was the sister of one emperor, the wife of another emperor, the great-granddaughter of the first emperor, and the mother of the last Julio-Claudian emperor, Nero. And she was heavily promoted by each of these men in their public relations campaigns as a center of power and legitimacy. So we shouldn't be surprised to see Nero's wives holding similar positions or tapping into similar aspects of

this sort of new dynamic for imperial women. Well, then let's focus on wife number one. I know one of particular interest to yourself, Lauren. Yes. Octavia. First of all, what do we know about Octavia's background? So Octavia is interesting because she was born as a royal daughter who was marked with great significance from her birth. Within a year of her birth, her father Claudius had become emperor under sort of dubious circumstances. She was the daughter of this emperor and his wife Messalina. Messalina herself was a descendant of Augustus, so Octavia was always going to be important. She was raised as a princess with the expectation that she would play

a really key role in the dynasty building and the political alliances of her father. So we have several early portraits of her as roughly a 10 to 11 year old girl. And you can already tell from the size, from the care, from the iconography of these portraits, just how much hope and promise was built into this young woman. But all of a sudden, her mother's executed for adultery and treason. Her father is suddenly remarrying an equally prominent woman, Agrippina, and that woman comes with a nearly adult son. So it's no exaggeration to say that Octavia's world, set up to believe that it was going to be a sort of standard trajectory, entirely changed, and in her eyes, likely not for the better. So it entirely changed but with this whole new family in the Julio Claudian family at

this period in time I mean Lauren does it seem like it was quite obvious for those looking at Octavia looking at Nero at that time that it seemed like a good match for them to wed? Absolutely so the historical sources are a little biased here They get into their misogyny and that they tell us that there's this sneaky, devious Agrippina who dupes Claudius into promoting her son Nero over his own Britannicus. But that can't be true. All of the evidence suggests that Claudius married Agrippina largely for Nero. He needed an heir like Nero, who was extremely popular, whose mother was very famous, and frankly, whose mother had not just been executed for adultery. So part of Claudius' marking Nero out as his heir was breaking off his daughter's high-profile engagement to another imperial family member and then marrying her to Nero. It's clear that Claudius thought that that was an excellent idea, not just Agrippina.

We actually have a lovely cameo image that lives in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that seems to celebrate this wedding. It shows the imperial couple as a young man and a young woman. And that suggests that there was a wider PR imagery campaign around this it couple of the 50s BCE. So I think to the Roman world, it would have seemed like an entirely natural thing for Claudius to have done. Because through Octavia, Nero's path to the throne becomes assured,

but through Nero, Claudius's reign becomes stabilized after a period of crisis. So Octavia has this role to play where she's the hub of it all. She mattered very much to all of the men involved in these power plays. And I think that her marriage to Nero would have been a surprise to no one as soon as Claudius picked Agrippina. I mean, that is so interesting. So you say in the hustle and bustle of that huge change, it's almost as if they cut off Octavia from a previous intended marriage to marry Nero. Yes. And unfortunately, her ex-fiancé winds up dead, as so many in Octavia's life, in order to clear the way for Nero. Unclear entirely who was the schemer behind that,

probably Claudius was heavily involved. But yes, it was not an easy removal of that betrothal in the end that fiancé was dispatched with in order to clear the way for Nero. And Lauren, you mentioned that earlier, our main sources, and you mentioned our sources who talk about Octavia at this time. What are our sources for the life of Octavia if we're going to be focusing in on this particular figure? It's a good question because she appears in all major historians. And for Roman historians of this period, that means Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio. But surprisingly, all of them are not interested in her. They're less interested than you would expect. So Tacitus goes into the most detail. He's our best source. And he tends to

describe her as quiet, sad, a traumatized young woman who sits silently by as those she loves are executed or removed from her life. And to him, she's sort of this quintessential patient wife. That's the image that he has of her. But I have to say, Tacitus is far more interested in women that he perceives to be movers and shakers. So he doesn't give her a lot of agency. And that's true of the other historians that treat her too. But we do have other sources. And I know one of which you're going to talk about in a little bit. But we also have inscriptions and documents about her household.

Texts that suggest that she's a powerful woman whose household is devoted to her, who enfranchised many people to climb Rome's social ladder, and who remember themselves as being enfranchised by her even after her death. And so they don't really provide a history of her life in the same way that Tacitus might, but they do challenge the history of these big three historians that only want to talk about a meek, quiet, and powerless girl. They give another side to the story that maybe some historian could have told. Now, Lauren, I think we've foreshadowed this already from what you've mentioned about witnessing loved ones dying in front of her eyes, but it sounds therefore like Octavia's marriage to Nero right from the start, shall we say, it's not a happy one.

No, there is no source that suggests that the marriage was happy. We have to remember that all of our sources date to after Nero's fall, but we also have to know that in Rome, marriage, especially among elite family, was often as much about power and alliances as it was about affection. to being imperial heir came at the cost of her brother being the heir apparent. And Nero becoming emperor meant, of course, that her father was dead. So even if we don't totally buy into the idea that Nero murdered Claudius and Britannicus, and there are plenty of people that don't, Octavia's early marriage to Nero coincided with the death of her final support networks. And so that alone can't have been easy on her, let alone the fact that the marriage itself doesn't seem to have been anything more than an alliance for either of the two that were involved. Now, we recently talked to Sushma Malik about theatricality. And one key thing that we did mention there was this incredible, horrific scene that seems to involve Octavia, Nero and Octavia's brother, Britannicus.

And this is the end of Britannicus. What is this story, Lauren? So this is a story that's told by Tacitus most compellingly and then is picked up in Nero's reception quite frequently, especially in drama. And so it's the scene in which Britannicus is, according to Tacitus, murdered by Nero. And it's a scene in which the women are the ones who are looking and who are telling us how we're supposed to understand this scene. So first of all, Nero's mother Agrippina is clearly unaware that this was going to happen. And that's a surprise to her, because Tacitus

has written her as sort of the complicit mastermind behind most of Nero's crimes. But for one of the only times in his history, he focuses our attention on Octavia, who sits there looking on in horror. But what's extra chilling is that Tacitus says that this is a young woman who, from her earliest age, has learned to suppress all emotion from her face, to be able to stare with almost indifference at any horrible thing that's happening in front of her because she knows that her own safety is at stake.

So he tells us that inside she's quite traumatized by this experience of seeing her brother die in front of her, but that she knows enough at the age of 20 at that point, 19, that she can't say anything. That's a horrible situation to imagine. And of course, with the sources as well, this horrific treatment of Octavia by Nero. I know it doesn't get any easier as the time goes on because Nero, he also has affairs, doesn't he? And do we think this might have affected Octavia at all? So he seems to have been unfaithful through most of his marriages, but I'll say that that wasn't particularly unexpected for a man in his position. He did have a series of relationships and women to whom he was more attached. His second wife, Poppea, comes out of an affair. His third wife, Statilia, also comes out of an affair. But I actually suspect that Octavia was not particularly

bothered by this. This wasn't supposed to be a love match. There's no real indication that this was a source of irritation for Octavia. What we do have is that Nero's mother was quite bothered, as she saw this as an insult to the dynastic marriage that she'd created for her son. But Octavia would probably have had less of a cause to be upset as long as her position as imperial wife was secure. And so it's when Nero challenges that position by wanting to marry one of these mistresses that things probably got rough and that Octavia probably started to have an opinion.

And keeping on the theme for a bit longer, because it's another key aspect in the whole Octavia story that we have in our sources that survive. And of course, we can debunk those sources. We can dismantle them in a bit. But there's also this suggestion that Nero possibly abused Octavia. Is there this suggestion in the sources that survive? It's an interesting question and also a tricky one. And that's because ancient tolerance for domestic violence and psychological abuse was much higher than ours. So often sources can either omit details like that because they're not interested in them, or they can write them in a way that we can misunderstand them. So I want to say that with that caveat. And also that it's a historical trope that tyrants are sexually abusive. And Nero certainly gets stories like

that attached to him, actually about Britannicus in some cases, which many modern historians are skeptical of because these are the exact stories down to idiosyncratic details that have been told, say, about Greek tyrants living centuries before in famous works of history. because these are the exact stories down to idiosyncratic details that have been told, say, about Greek tyrants living centuries before in famous works of history. But with all that said, physical violence in their relationship isn't a dominant thread in the ancient sources. And the ancient sources wouldn't particularly have a reason to downplay that. What they do suggest is a depressed woman whose husband hates her openly and whose protective circle keeps winding up prematurely dead. So instead of physical abuse, when we talk about domestic violence, we might want to talk about psychological abuse and perhaps even modern concepts like gaslighting.

We also can't forget that in the end, Nero does have her executed on trumped up charges. So by modern definitions, I think we would certainly call this an unhealthy, damaging, and abusive marriage. But if it involved what we would certainly call this an unhealthy damaging and abusive marriage but if it involved what we would call physical domestic violence the ancient sources don't pick up on that as something that's important to the story that they want to tell about octavia they're much more interested in her interiority in her psychology well despite this unhappy marriage with nero from what it seems to suggest, she seems to have been very, very popular with the people. Absolutely. She was easily one of the most popular female figures of her generation.

And that's one of the things that makes it challenging for Nero. Partly this must be due to her celebration as a key figure from birth in her father's PR. But partly it must also be due to her, to something about her that we're not necessarily aware of today. I mentioned before that there are various documents and inscriptions from those in her household from her lifetime and after that celebrate her as a patron. We also learn by proxy from some anecdotes that her statues are all over the city and that they are objects of popular adoration. And this becomes quite contentious when Nero decides to divorce her. Classicist Peter Wiseman has called her the people's princess, in a clear allusion to Princess Diana. And I think that's a really helpful lens, because it has us ask, why did

she capture the popular imagination so well? And it's hard to quantify, actually, but she clearly did. They loved her passionately. And that became a real problem for Nero. So that's interesting, Lauren. Do we not have enough information, at least at the moment, to really realise why Octavia was so popular? But we just know that she was. We just know that she was at that point and that to the common people of Rome, Nero's marriage to her was a central part of their happiness with Nero. Well, there you go. Well, you have mentioned that Nero does ultimately decide to divorce Octavia. I mean, the key question I need to ask now is why? It's a good question. And the simplest answer is that he wished to marry Papea,

with whom he'd been having an affair of some length. We might then ask, was it for love? Maybe. But Papea was also pregnant and Nero had no heir from his marriage with Octavia. And so it likely was also quite strategic. We should also note that the Romans were absolutely fine with divorce. That wasn't something that was stigmatized in the way that we might imagine. So Augustus, for example, had divorced the mother of his only child to marry Livia, his more famous wife, and that Livia had divorced her husband to marry him. Emperor Claudius had divorced a woman in order to marry Messalina. her husband to marry him. Emperor Claudius had divorced a woman in order to marry Messalina. So that wasn't an issue. The issue was that the woman he wanted to divorce was so beloved by the Roman people that it became a PR crisis of epic proportions that it's clear Nero had not

anticipated. Well, exactly. So it kind of feels like if she's so popular, a messy divorce, shall we say, what happens next in the story, Lauren? It takes an even worse turn. It does. He ends up deciding to have her executed. And likely Octavia's popularity is what led to that, which is not to victim blame. Nero is obviously to blame. But it's clear that the PR crisis that was unleashed by his attempt to do a simple, legally accessible thing, such as divorcing her, led to her demise, and especially her reputation for being an unblemished, virtuous woman.

So we're told that when Nero decided to divorce her, the people would not have it. While the sequence of events gets portrayed differently in different sources, we know that the people took to the streets in mass protest. They tore down or attacked the statues of Nero's new bride, Papeia, which were going up. They put back up the statues of Octavia, which were being taken down. They carried smaller versions of Octavia's statues on their shoulders, garlanded as if for a wedding. And the message they were sending was clear. You take back our people's princess or there will be consequences. And to understand why this event was so important, you have to know that Nero was very popular with the Roman people.

We hear in our modern sources, our modern interpretations of ancient sources that the Senate disliked him, but we don't often take seriously enough how beloved he was by everyone else in Rome. And so this mass protest is actually the only such event that we have any evidence for at Rome and Nero's reign. Other emperors experienced

frequent types of resistance, but not Nero. And so this showed that Octavia was someone they would take a stand for. And that shocked Nero clearly. So he trumps up a charge of treason and adultery, clearly in an effort to diminish her reputation, and then horrifically sends her to her death. She was at most 22 years old when she died. And it's a really gruesome end to a sad life. I mean, Lauren, that's absolutely incredible. Yes, keeping on that popularity of Nero with the common people a bit further, because of course, you think of Nero's theatricality, how he wanted the love of the crowd, right? And this is almost completely contradicting that image. So it does seem this extraordinary event. But it seems that for this divorce period,

we do have some interesting contemporary evidence from Pompeii. We do, exactly. So people often think of Tacitus for our sources about this, and of course he gives a full account. But Tacitus is writing with a particular narrative agenda that's significantly later than Nero. Beyond these sort of full texts that we have, we have a haphazard piece of evidence that comes from Pompeii in the form of a piece of graffiti that's written on one of the entrances to what we know as the House of the Menander, a luxury home that you can still visit today. And someone, we don't know who, perhaps the owner of the house, perhaps a passerby, perhaps a guest, wrote a short elegy to Octavia in the

months of her banishment in Campania, the region where Pompeii is, and possibly before her execution, or at least before her execution was widely known. And this reads, Octavia, dear wife of the emperor, goodbye. May you encounter propitious gods and better luck. So what's even more interesting about this is that many think Pompeii's family was connected with Pompeii. We have inscriptions and graffiti that celebrate Nero and Pompeii's visits to the city as if she's their homegrown empress and their pride and joy. So to have someone writing this sympathetic poem about Octavia on the walls of this city is a sort of countercultural move that speaks to her popularity. Because what it tells us is that someone in that moment felt sorry for her. Someone wanted to remind others that she was Nero's wife.

And someone felt so strongly about that, that they scrawled this into the wall of a fancy house at a particular moment in time. And that speaks, I think, to a very complicated attachment between Rome's citizens and the people's princess that sources like Tacitus just don't capture for us. Absolutely. I love those sources like that. And I think we'll go back to some more of those contemporary sources in due time. But Lauren, just keeping on that a bit further. So Octavia, she is executed, but even after her death, Nero inflicts even more damage on her. He does. Yeah, there seems to have been, it seems likely that there were memory sanctions against her public images. And this shouldn't surprise us, given the role that those statues played in the riots around the city and in the protests against Nero. So it's not particularly surprising. It's also not surprising because the same thing happened to her mother,

who was executed for treason and adultery. Her statues were also destroyed. So even though the charges against Octavia were clearly trumped up, the result of those charges had already a system in the Roman Empire where a woman's statues would be removed at best and attacked at worst. And this may be why we don't actually have any securely attested statues of Octavia from these years. I mentioned that we have some from her youth as a princess under Claudius, and what seems to be a cameo celebrating her marriage. And there are numerous statue heads that have survived of imperial women from the time of Nero, but it's nearly impossible to assign them a name because for whatever reason,

Nero didn't feature his wives on his coinage. And so we don't have a basis to know what their portraits look like. Many museums will claim that they have statues of Octavia, but all of these statues wear crowns. And that suggests that they're not really Octavia, but Papea. The crown is a usual symbol for being named an Augusta, which you only get for being a mother. And Octavia never had children. So while it's likely that she did feature in Nero's public imagery during the first part of her marriage, that trace is gone, probably because of the memory sanctions against her image that came after. That's so interesting. If we don't have much art of her surviving or that we

can 100% associate saying this was Octavia, my next question was going to be that, well, there's a silver lining. It seems like there's a revival of Octavia in public art following Nero's death. Is this true? Yeah, there seems to have been a general move, especially in the year immediately after Nero's death, to put the ashes of his imperial victims back in the mausoleum of Augustus. So victims that were exiled and that died abroad to bring back the remains of these people and put them in this large dynastic tomb. And some have suggested quite plausibly, I think, that there could have been quite a big deal made of bringing Octavia's ashes back from the island where she was executed and then presumably

buried in the year after Nero's death. What we don't have is new portraits of Octavia being cut. But in terms of her memory, it seems like there was an active attempt to revive her status as the perfect victim in the months after Nero's fall. And the fact that Nero was thought to have committed suicide on the exact anniversary of the day on which Octavia was executed bound them together for the future. So as he fell, we could say her star started to rise again. Although frankly, I think that would be cold comfort for Octavia. I think you're completely right there. So that anniversary, is that around the June time? Is this around this time of year? Yes, precisely. There's the link Lincoln right there. eyes? And do you want to know about chin-chucking and thigh sex? Of course you do. I'm Susanna Lipscomb, and my new podcast, Not Just the Tudors, is a deep dive into what I like to think of as the

long 16th century. We'll be talking about everything from Aztecs to witches, Velazquez to Shakespeare, Mughal India to the Mayflower. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. so we've covered then the story of octavia now let's focus in on one of the sources one of the particular sources that we said we would because for the final days of octavia lauren we do have surviving this incredible really interesting source that focuses in on this end of Octavia's life. Yeah, we have a tragedy that's written about a historical period called the Octavia, or at least we call it the Octavia. We don't have a lot of those from antiquity. We usually have mythological tragedies, but this was a play that was written in the form of a tragedy

about the year 62 AD, which is the year in which Nero divorces Octavia to marry Papea. And all the famous people from Neronian Rome get to be characters, either as living people or as ghosts. And it's quite the bedroom drama. There are lots of imperial women getting center stage, talking about their lives and their feelings and their fears, all from the privacy of their bedrooms with their closest confidants. And it's a play that's deeply interested in psychologically probing what it would be like to be an imperial woman in Nero's orbit, to be Octavia in those final days, but also to be Poppaea in the early days of her marriage with all of this happening. It's a play that really takes the experience of being a woman

seriously and stages it for presumably all of Rome. I mean, Lauren, do you think that could have possibly been one of the key reasons why it was written for someone to try and get an idea of what it could have been like for a woman within the court of Nero? I think certainly. And it's important to know that there's a consensus that this play is likely part of the very early post-Neronian anti-Nero PR campaigns. So this sort of character assassination,

that's a common trope of the years immediately after Nero's fall, when everyone who's trying to claim that they have a legitimate role as being emperor needs to make sure that the last guy that held the throne is not particularly remembered well. So it seems that this moment, this moment of recognizing that Nero had a number of female victims in his wake, and that those victims all had particularly interesting stories to tell, gave rise to someone, we don't know who wrote this play, using the stage in order to rewrite the history of Neronian Rome from the perspective of the women, the women who lived beside him. And this is where I think there's a great tie-in with your earlier podcast about theatricality, as we obviously know that Nero liked to rewrite his own life on stage by performing different mythological

characters. And so how clever is that for this anonymous playwright to pick drama, to pick the stage as the way to teach the Roman people that Nero had been against them the entire time? It's so ironic. That's absolutely brilliant there. Focusing in then on this play, how does it depict these last days of Octavia? So it correlates more or less with the events of our other sources, but the difference is that it's just so interested in her psychological interiority. The events that happen in the play are less interesting or less prominent than the psychological reactions that the play wants us to understand.

So it's constantly probing her trauma and her motivations. The whole play opens with Octavia reliving in her mind, seeing her mother executed before her eyes. She shares with us that she has routine nightmares, that she has her brother's ghost is seeking her protection. So she is, to put it in modern terms, a character that is overwhelmingly portrayed as in the throes of PTSD.

But unlike Tacitus, she's not powerless. She is vengeful. She's angry. And she's bent on controlling her own narrative and not allowing Nero to rewrite her story, even in these last days where she knows that her days are numbered. So the Octavia of this play is quite empowering. And the fact that some anonymous playwright decided to write her this way

also speaks to this legacy, the people's perception of her from her own life that we don't otherwise have access to. This Octavia is not going to go quietly into the dark night. She was going to rage. She rages against Nero. She rages against her father who handed her to Nero. And as a result, she rages against the whole imperial system that's built out of female labour and exploitation. So it's a play that feels to me very modern in the way that it centres female anger over the events that happen to women. I could actually see this getting its own sort of musical

along the lines of Six that would tell this version of the story. I think that would be really great. I mean, absolutely. It's so interesting how this play, as you said, it has this different portrayal of Octavia. And is it such an interesting source for someone like yourself, Lauren, when looking at it, when looking at the whole character of Octavia, to understand which one I guess is either more likely or to look at the Roman historians themselves and then see how these different portrayals of Octavia can compare, can align with certain biases of the time? Absolutely. So you can see that even though the facts are more or less the same, the events that happened to Octavia, the charges, the timeline is compressed

because it's a play. But you can see that really what we would call the genre of the text influences how the story is told. So Roman history, Roman historians believe, is largely the story of deeds, deeds and the men who are at the center of those deeds. Whereas tragedy inherited from the Greeks has always had a role for powerful women, not necessarily making them heroes, but for women's experiences and for women's reactions. And I think the fact that whoever this playwright was decided not to write a history, not to write a pamphlet, not to write in any other genre, but to pick something where women could really be at the centre of history and get to tell their story was quite innovative and also

quite influential. I mean, Lauren, this whole portrayal of the empowering Octavia, does it also in this play portray Octavia as also this very popular figure? Absolutely. So the central chorus of the play is a group of Roman citizens, and they are horrified that Octavia could be divorced. And they do riot against Nero. They actually destroy Papea's statues on stage, which is incredibly impressive. They compare her to a legendary female victim of an abusive tyrant whose name is Lucretia. And she's the woman whose assault gave rise to the Roman Republic. So they view this assault against Octavia as iconic in the way it will change the world. She's their icon. She's their symbol of imperial power.

She's the only woman that they will tolerate in the imperial marriage chamber. And as the play makes very clear, unfortunately, that popularity becomes the catalyst for Nero's execution of her, because he views their attachment to her as a political threat that might actually harm his reign. So it's a very political, intriguing sort of play of a face-off between two powerful people, Octavia and Nero, but also it's about the citizens who love one of them and will love them to death. It's about the citizens who love one of them and will love them to death. You're absolutely right how this could definitely be a very interesting play in more modern times. I mean, Lauren, this whole story of Octavia and Octavia herself, have we seen it redone, revived in more recent times in any way, shape or form? Fairly rarely, actually. She gets very little attention in post-Noronian history. This play, the Octavia, for example, was one of Monteverdi's big sources for Incoronazione di Papea. But of course, the viewpoint there is switched to Papea's, and Octavia is minimized. And she features in some other dramatizations of Nero's reign from

the early modern period, but otherwise not much. I can pull out a couple, though, that I think are interesting. Perhaps most amusing to me is that about 10 years ago pop star duncan chic wrote a musical version of these events and in an early version leah michelle played octavia but for some reason they made her character mute which must be a reaction against the historical tradition i also hear that there's a new rock musical about nero that's coming to this year's fringe festival in edinburgh in which she plays a big character so i hope to hear more about that and hope that maybe she gets some songs that do her justice. But perhaps most interesting is how her good girl image meshed with the idea of Nero as a persecutor of the Christians. So in some 19th century novels,

Octavia is actually imagined to be a proto-Christian sympathizer whose death prefigures the idea of Nero Antichrist. So there's a lot of room out there for some complicated Octavia receptions, especially with our interest in women's history these days. But since so few people know anything about her, she just doesn't get that much attention. And I think that's a real shame. I think she could tell some interesting stories. Well, as you mentioned, we've got Domino, we've got Livia coming up. So maybe there'll be a sequel of Octavia and Agrippina in due course. All very interesting indeed. And in that response, Lauren, you did mention Poppea. We've talked about Poppea quite a few times already today,

so let's go on to Poppea now. Do we know much about her background? We only know a little about Poppea's background before she comes into Nero's orbit because she wasn't thought to matter, right? No one was paying attention to her. But then she appears, a minor level aristocrat, her family likely from the area around Pompeii, already married at least once, if not twice. She was perhaps even married to Nero's friend Otho when they met, although even Tacitus contradicts himself there. And she captures Nero's attention to such a degree that he wants to marry her and wants to create his dynastic bloodline together with her, almost out of nowhere.

And so how is she depicted in the sources that survive? The sources do a real number on Papea. While they're uninterested in Octavia, they're very interested in Papea, but they turn her into a temptress, a schemer, a sexually deviant woman with no moral compass who seduces herself into royal power. It's really ugly stuff, I have to say, and clearly stereotypical. And it lasts. When you see her in Hollywood, she's one of the few Neronian wives who shows up in his movies. She's always in skimpy outfits. She's always plotting murder. But what we do know about her from antiquity is actually much more interesting than this portrayal that these masculine historians have left us.

So what is that portrayal? So people often ask if she was sort of ambitious or driven, and maybe she was, she could have been. But what's important to know, regardless of her motivations, is that she was at the centre of power, as Agrippina was before her. So our sources casually say she's mentioned as being in political meanings, that there's no reason a wife should have been it. She's the only imperial wife that Nero puts on his Roman minted coins. And so she's marked as being quite special and publicly prominent. And we see them go on progress together in Italy. But I think the best anecdote to my mind, and the one my students always find so interesting, is a story that is told by a Jewish

historian, Josephus, who's an ally of the later Flavian dynasty, and that dynasty hated Nero. So it's important to know Josephus has no reason to flatter Nero. And he preserves in his history of the Jewish wars, a story that Poppea intervened on behalf of the Jewish people when Nero was making decisions, and that she did so more than once, and that Nero listened. Josephus also calls her very pious, which is something that for a while people took to mean that maybe she was overly interested in Judaism herself, but more likely he's expressing admiration for what we would call intercultural awareness. And he's also expressing admiration for her soft influence on Nero on behalf of his people. And that's a very different image of Papea than we get in Tacitus. And yet it was written by someone no less hostile to Nero.

Papea than we get in Tacitus. And yet it was written by someone no less hostile to Nero. And it was written at a time when Papea and Nero are dead. So there's no reason to flatter them. There's no reason to give Papea a portrait she doesn't deserve. Instead, we get a glimpse of a woman who was there the whole time, sometimes helping Nero be merciful with foreign communities under his power. There at the centre of power, it's really interesting that it's Josephus of all sources which says that, Lauren, because we then get these sources which then say, Poppea, well, she's at the centre of Nero's court. She's really influential. She's a powerful, driven figure, but she seems to suffer quite a horrible, a violent end. Yeah, it's a sad story, but one I also think the historical tradition has probably quite distorted.

So Poppea's marriage to Nero, for all the fanfare with which it started, ends up being quite brief. Before we get to her death, they have one living child, a daughter Claudia, who dies within months. And Tacitus says that Nero grieved for that lost daughter excessively, which seems pretty harsh if you ask me. Papea then dies when she's pregnant for a second time, and the unborn baby dies with her. Now, Tacitus and our other sources suggest that Nero physically assaulted her, perhaps by accident, and as a result murdered her. But I have to say that even Tacitus seems to not necessarily buy this rumor. He distances himself from it. And modern historians have been pretty skeptical of this death because it fits a very well-known stereotype of how tyrants are. Tyrants kill their

pregnant wives with a violent blow. That's one of the stereotypical behaviors that we've seen attached to rulers for centuries at this point. And so many today believe that it's quite possible she died of a miscarriage. It's a less dramatic story, sure, but it's one that shines a spotlight on the dangers of being a pregnant woman in antiquity, even one who seems all-powerful. And this would make Nero's grief for her not some supernatural guilt complex, as is often delightfully attributed to him, but actually just real grief for the loss of a woman and a child who clearly meant the world for him. Because Nero's grief, it sounds like it was pretty significant, pretty substantial. It was. He gave her a wildly expensive funeral. We're told that in foreign ways, he spent the rest of his life grieving for her in ways that the sources present as over the top

and simply unacceptable. He embalms her in an Egyptian manner. He has her deified as a goddess. She's not the first imperial woman to be deified, of course, but this was viewed as extreme. We have evidence of cult worship of her in priestly records held at Rome. And he's even said to have performed roles on stage in a mask of her as if trying to bring her back. So whatever happened to cause her death, and I'm not looking to excuse Nero of his crimes, he has many. It seems Nero never got over this in his remaining few years in power, that her death haunted him forever. I have got in my notes here at this moment, Lauren, ask about the new papyrus.

What is this new papyrus? Yeah, so this is a newly discovered papyrus fragment of what appears to be a substantial poem about the death and apotheosis, meaning the becoming a goddess process of Papea. It's largely seen from her perspective and from the perspective of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and it's modeled quite clearly on a famous poem of a Hellenistic queen from centuries before that the Romans happened to love. So in this poem, Papea dies in childbirth, and her one regret is that she leaves Nero weak and exposed, without an heir, but also without her love to protect him.

So again, this is a very different image of Papea than in our later historical sources. I'm not saying we should take this as the truth. It was clearly written to flatter and to please Nero in the wake of her death. But it does show a different side to the contemporary takes on their marriage and what her death meant to Rome. And it shows that there was an alternative cultural memory to what Poppea could have meant to the story of Neronian Rome than the one that we have that lasts to us today. It's very interesting that having that, as we mentioned earlier, the graffiti from Pompeii, and now we focused on this papyrus, which seems to offer this alternate or provide more information about this period in the immediate aftermath of Poppea's death this morning period because it's important it seemed

to mention how this morning this remembering of poppea it seems to be only temporary because following nero's death poppea she has an unfortunate legacy shall we say she has an unfortunate fate yeah she is she's a woman who can't win. We could say that. It's weird. She dies in 65 AD. Nero reigns for three more years. He remarries another woman who tours Greece with him and outlives him. And yet after his death, it seems that there were more, yet more assaults on Papea's memory. We have evidence of her statues being destroyed again, of what scholar Eric Varner has called

a collateral damnatio. And that's when a ruling woman is subject to memory sanctions, not because of any actions of herself, but because of the man that she's attached to. But Papeo was dead for some years at that point. And if we listen to the sources, some thought she was a victim of Nero. So it seems especially unfair that she would be the subject of this collateral damnatio. But there we go. It seems to have happened that somehow she was remembered as the wife who mattered, and

thus she was the one who should be assaulted alongside the memory attacks against Nero. And we can see this lasting image into Hollywood, where she's always the greatest evil, the greatest persecutor, even more than Nero. She really can't catch a break. So while Octavia's star sort of rises again after Nero's death, and she's brought back into the forefront as a Neronian victim, Poppea's plunges even further and stays there until today. Yes, this direct contrast now between Octavia and Poppea. Let's focus more in on that,

because there seems to be something of how the whole characters of Octavia and Poppea, they have in the past, and topea, they have in the past and to this day, they have been contrasted, differing characteristics. I mean, what's the whole story behind good girl Octavia and bad girl Poppea, Lauren? Yeah, whenever you see the story of Nero's wives, we have the good girl Octavia, the bad girl Poppea. And it's a really easy story to tell because it's so stereotypical. And it asks us to see women as only one thing. And we're really good at seeing women only as one thing. So there are parallels all over history about this. We can think of Catherine of Aragon versus Anne Boleyn.

We can think of Princess Diana and Camilla Parker Bowles. One woman is demonized so that the other can be canonized. And one woman is canonized at the expense of the other woman being demonized. History loves to do this again and again. But I'm more interested in all the recent takes on all of these women that allows them to be, I don't know, more human, more multidimensional, that uses this evidence that we have that I've mentioned that few people talk about to tell a more complicated story about the lives of these women and the way that their lives intersected. And so I think for Octavia and Poppea, history, both ancient history, but also modern history, has flattened what were two extraordinary female lives at a time when women had never been so

powerful in the history of Rome. And so those are the stories I want to help tell to get away from this idea that one has to be the good girl who can do no wrong so that the other can be the evil woman who can do no right. And what is it like trying to approach that, Lauren, considering the evidence that we have surviving, to do what you've suggested just there to shine more of a light on these figures? It's challenging because what I can't offer and what I don't think anyone can offer, although perhaps they can try, is say a biography of one of these women, especially for Octavia, because we know so little, because the ancient sources were uninterested. But what I think we can do is we can poke holes in the way the ancient historians tell that story. We can point out that while

Tacitus says she's powerless and quiet and emotionless, we can say, no, no, there are plenty of ancient stories that tell us, or at least that visualize, a passion and an anger and an emotional interiority for her. We can see that she doesn't have to be meek in order to be powerful. She doesn't have to be quiet in order to be a victim. So too with Papea, we can say, yes, her rise to power came at the tragic, gruesome expense of another woman, and we shouldn't wash over that. But we can also show that Papea is not this scheming seductress, or that antiquity had room for other versions of Papea. And I think by showing the multiple versions of these two women's lives that existed in antiquity, even if they only exist in fragments, we can start to understand the role of stereotypes

in how ancient history tells stories of powerful women. And if we can do that, we can start to understand the role of stereotypes in how ancient history tells stories of powerful women. And if we can do that, we can also poke holes in how modern history and modern media tells stories through stereotypes about women. And I think that's going to have to be good enough, but I think it's a pretty important project. That is very interesting, Lauren. I mean, we're focusing on these women from the Julio-Claudian period. It's interesting that you say looking more forward to modern times. I'd go further back to Hellenistic times. You'd look at Alexander the Great's mother Olympias or someone like that

when you have that similar kind of feeling, don't you? You look at Cleopatra. Cleopatra, there you go. See, many examples throughout history and they're all very interesting in their own right. We have mentioned two wives of Nero, but Nero doesn't just have two wives. There is a third. Who is this wife number three,

Lauren? Yes, Statilia Messalina. She remains something of a mystery, and that's largely due to an accident of transmission. We're missing Tacitus's account of the final years of Nero's reign, and Tacitus is the historian that's the most interested in giving us these kind of details, although as we've seen, he's less interested than we might imagine him to be. What we do know is that she came from a noble family with a history of people who were close to the throne. She was married and was Nero's mistress. Her husband is sidelined and actually executed in a conspiracy against Nero's throne, although who knows if he was just getting rid of him in order to have access to her. And then a year after Papea's death, she moves from being mistress to wife, simply as Papea did. She clearly toured Greece with him on his infamous trip. We have

evidence of that. She appears in some Eastern communities coins as the wife of Nero, and she outlives him. That's actually probably the most interesting thing about her. Her son from her previous marriage lives for 20 more years, but we never hear much from her at all. I couldn't tell you when she died or how she died, and she seems to have lived a rather quiet life after Nero. That's so interesting because we've already mentioned Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, but it sounds like this third wife, she always has comparisons with the wife which outlives Henry VIII, Catherine Parr. Yes, I think so. It's while all of Rome is sort of resurrecting Octavia to celebrate her and resurrecting Poppaea to damn her memory, Statilia Messalina just gets to live her life.

Although I think she had a significantly less dramatic end than Catherine Parr did. She was less involved in the chaos after Nero's death. Fair enough. Now, just to finish off, we'll continue on Messalina, Statilia Messalina for a bit longer, because can we say, in your opinion, can we say that she's Nero's one successful female relationship? I don't know about that. Mostly because they were married for such a short time. We don't know that much about her. And so to say that she's successful, she's successful in that she outlives Nero and manages to not be part of the collateral

attacks against him. I would actually pick a different candidate. That if Nero had one successful female relationship, and I say if, it would have been his former mistress. And it's curious that the one constant of the women in Nero's orbit is this early mistress from when he was 17 years old, Actae, who's a former enslaved person to whom over the course of Nero's reign, he gives her villas. He gives her a lot of wealth. We have a lot of documentary evidence about this. And she goes on to live a

prosperous life after Nero. We have lots of incidental evidence about chains of influence that she had on others. But she was also with Nero when he committed suicide. Statilia Messalina was not. Acti was one of the few who didn't abandon him as he lost power, but chose to stay with him until the end. And it's unclear if they were still having a sexual relationship. We would say the sources suggested that that stopped with Papea. Instead, it may simply have been that they had a deep history and perhaps even a deep affection for each other. They'd known each other since he was 17. And she's the one who ensures that he has a proper burial and proper funeral rites.

and she's the one who ensures that he has a proper burial and proper funeral rights. So it was her to the end that was apparently concerned about him as a person rather than simply as an emperor. And I think for Nero, that may have been quite a unique relationship. That's really interesting. So possibly, if he did have one, the one successful female relationship that Nero has is actually with none of his wives. It's with this freed woman who we see throughout much of his adult life, if not all of his adult life. That's really interesting in itself. I think so, especially a low status person who would have had no access to the type of power channels that we see his wives harnessing in various ways. She was just there. Lauren, this has been an absolutely brilliant chat. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast to talk all about this. Last of all, you have written a book,

in particular, all about Octavia and the play The Octavia, which is called? I have, yes. It's called Staging Memory, Staging Strife, Empire and Civil War in the Octavia. Lauren, that sounds fantastic. And thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast. Thank you so much. And I hope this will make people more interested in the women that were around Nero throughout his life. Thank you.