You're Dead to Me - Agrippina the Younger (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: September 16, 2023

Greg Jenner is joined by historian Dr Emma Southon and comedian Cariad Lloyd in first-century Rome to meet Agrippina the Younger.Empress, overbearing mother of the Emperor Nero and murderess, but how much of what has been written about this extraordinary woman is true? What does it really take to survive as a woman at the top of the Roman Empire?For the full-length version of this episode, please look further back in the feed.A Muddy Knees Media production for BBC Radio 4.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I am a public historian, author and broadcaster. And in this podcast, we take a bit of serious and a sliver of silly to serve up a steaming hot slice of history pie. And today, we are popping on our togas and tunics and journeying

all the way back to classical Rome to the first century CE to be exact, to meet Agrippina the Younger, an empress, the mother of Emperor Nero, and one of the most astonishing women of the ancient world. And to help me separate the truth from the tattletales, I'm joined by two very special guests. In History Corner, she has a PhD in ancient history from the University of Birmingham, and is an expert on all things Roman.

She's the author of a magnificent new book called A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women, and she is the biographer of Agrippina the Younger, which is very handy for us. And you will hopefully remember her from our Boudicca episode. It's Dr. Emma Southern. Hello, Emma. How are you? Hello. I'm all right. Thank you. I've also got my cat here who won't get off me. So it's Emma and Livia. Oh, Livia the cat. Goodness me, that's very on brand.

Roman Empress names are good for cats because they're also quite dangerous and aloof. And in Comedy Corner, she's a comedian, writer, actor, podcaster and improv wizard. You'll have seen her on all the telly, including QI, Have I Got News For You, Murder in Successville, Peep Show, Sarah Pascoe's Out Of Her Mind, and she's the creator of the multi-award winning podcast Griefcast, a funny show about death and its spin-off book.

And of course, you will remember her muttering, Malias Maleficarum, on our episode of You're Dead to Me about the European witch craze. It's Cariad Lloyd. Hi, Cariad. How are you? I'm good, thanks, Greg. Yeah, I've survived my witch dunking to go back even further to Roman times. But I mean, I think of you as a kind of 19th century Regency period expert because of Ostentatious, the improvised comedy show you do. So is Rome a bit, is it a bit far away for you? I never did Rome at school.

That's the thing, like if I did anything at school, it's like something's lodged in your brain, isn't it? But I think we really didn't do anything Roman, but I have seen I, Claudius. So I'm probably same level study as Emma. Effectively the same, yeah. So what do you know? All right, that brings us on to the So What Do You Know?

And this is where I have a crack at guessing what you at home might know about today's subject. And if you are familiar with Agrippina the Younger, then chances are it probably is from Barbara Young's rendition of her from the 1976 TV film I, Claudius. More recently, of course, you might have seen Kim Cattrall's simply stunning depiction of Agrippina in the 2019 masterpiece, Horrible Histories of the Movie, Rotten Romance, as an unbiased observer. I'm happy to declare the greatest film of all time. Obviously,

I'm not at all biased. Chances are, if you do know anything about Agrippina, you'll know her as the kind of overprotective helicopter mum of Emperor Nero. You might know she was the sister of Emperor Caligula. You might know she was dangerous, a little bit sexy, quite a lot of scandal. But how much of this is true? Let's find out. OK, first of all, Dr Emma, can we just have a super speedy introduction to Roman politics at the time of her birth? Because we're talking here really early in the empire, aren't we? We are really early. So the first century CE is the very beginning of the imperial system in Rome.

Most of Agrippina's early life is under Tiberius, who is only the second emperor. He's massively unpopular and has come to power with great difficulty because the Romans are very, very against the concept of monarchy. So they're pretending really, really hard that they don't have a monarchy. Cariad, do you know who the Julio-Claudians are? Is that like Julius Caesar's gang? That's what I'm guessing. So you've got two very old, very, very famous families. They go back to the beginning of Rome and they're incredibly rich. Julian's, who is Julius Caesar's side. So that's where Julius comes from. And then you have the Claudians, who are another very, very ancient family.

They're less good because the Julian side now have two gods, basically. They've got Julius Caesar. That's really unfair, isn't it? To have two gods on your team. Yeah. And they also claim descent from Venus. They didn't get a month either, did they? Like, Julius got a month out of it. What's Claudian doing? Yeah. Oh mate, come on. But they have come together in the marriage between Livia and Augustus.

Not your cat. Not my cat. She's never been married, she remains. Like Elizabeth I. Not my cat. She's never been married. She remains. Like Elizabeth I. Yeah, exactly. And so they've come together and the combination of the two of them is basically unstoppable. They have just an immense amount of prestige and authority and divinity that can't really be questioned or overshadowed by anybody else. Was everyone else really annoyed when they got together?

Yeah, yeah, they were. You must have been really like, if you wanted any kind of power, you were like, oh, God, dumb. It helps that it was a big scandal at the time because Augustus stole Livia from her husband while she was already pregnant. Ooh! So, scandal! So Agrippina, in terms

of her heritage, Cariad, she is the great-granddaughter of the first emperor. She's the granddaughter of the second emperor. She is the sister of the third emperor. She's going to be the wife of the fourth emperor and she'll be the mother of the fifth emperor. No, it's become maths. It's not a history anymore. She is like the nexus

point at which all power goes through. So her parents are Germanicus, who is descended from the Claudian side, and Agrippina the Elder, who is the last surviving grandchild of Augustus, so come from the Julian side, and they are married together, and then they have loads of children. It's like the Kanye West, Kim Kardashian marriage. It's like, oh, wow, the two superpowers have united. It's like the Kanye West, Kim Kardashian marriage.

It's like, oh, wow, the two superpowers have united. So Agrippina the Younger is born in Germany to a dad called Germanicus. She's born in the year 15 CE, which is during the life of Christ, I guess, is when he's a teenager and he's playing Xbox. I think he's just shouting at people in temples at that age. Sure. You know, Jesus is in his sort of angry young man. He's constantly having arguments with people, yeah. He's got an acoustic guitar.

He's going round. Everyone's like, oh oh God, he's at the party again. Oh wait, there'll be more wine. Let him in, let him in. So her mother is called Agrippina the Elder. Her siblings, six survive, is that right? Three boys, three girls. Her childhood is complicated. I mean, she's born into an imperial family. So you're thinking power, power, power, you know, but it's a bit like an episode of Succession because actually everyone hates each other. There's rivalry, there's tension. Her dad dies suspiciously, probably killed by someone in power. Agrippina the Elder is convinced that her husband was murdered by the emperor and she comes back to Rome and basically spends a long time telling everybody this, which makes for some interesting dinner parties.

Eventually he gets fed up of her, basically, and has her and her two eldest sons exiled. And then she dies. And Agrippina, her father dies when she's three or four years old. And then her mother dies when she's about 13, and her two eldest brothers as well. That's a lot of drama at 13, isn't it? It is a lot of drama,

but she's distracted almost immediately by being married off. That'll solve it. That'll deal with the trauma, won't it? She's 13. Let's just marry her. Come on, she'll be all right. She's 13 years old.

Her dad is dead. Her mum is dead. Life has already started on pretty ropey terms, but she then has to marry this guy called Lucius Domitius Ohinobarbus. She hasn't married some simpering 13-year-old boy who's singing her Ed Sheeran songs. He is a brutal man.

He kills a slave for being more sober than he was. He tears out a guy's eye in an argument in the middle of the forum. He runs over a child with a chariot for the fun of it. She's done real bad. This is not... Yeah, it's not good. He's also in his 30s. Oh, mate. I've got keen. I'm sorry.

And her cousin, like her second cousin. Oh, yeah, and you're related. So listen, you have to marry him. He's 30. He ran over a child just for, like, jokes. Also, you're related to him. Okay, bye. Have a good day. She gives birth to a son, and this son is going to grow up to be called Nero.

And then something interesting happens in this year as well, in that Tiberius, the emperor, he dies. And that means that Agrippina's brother comes to power. And Agrippina's brother, of course, is the lovely, low-key, very charming Caligula. Oh, he's a great guy. Well, he's great, Agrippina, to be fair. Going from her childhood traumas, suddenly her brother's on the throne. Does that mean that she's suddenly like, OK, cushy?

Caligula is so nice to his sisters. Like a large part of the beginning of his reign is about glorifying and honouring his nuclear family, bringing his mother's memory back. And his sisters are the only people who are left alive. So they're the centre of that. So they're the first living women to be put on coins with their name, given the rights and privileges of Vestal Virgins, which means their bodies are made sacrosanct.

So when they're walking in the street, you're not allowed to touch them because if you touch them, then you're committing a religious offence. Wow. They get all of the best seats in the games. I love it. That's like the second is like, look, no one will ever touch you again. You're safe. Also front row.

But it then goes rather horribly wrong. So Drusilla, one of the sisters, dies tragically young of natural causes. And then Agrippina and Livila, the two remaining sisters, are exiled. Cariad, what do you reckon they've done? It's Caligula, right? So what did they do? Did they say the wrong date? Did they look at him funny?

He did once kill somebody for forgetting his birthday. Oh, well, there you go. They plot against him. Why were they doing that when he was so nice to them? They just wanted power for themselves? He was not a very good emperor. And everybody hated him very much. Succession, it is succession.

It is succession, isn't it? He doesn't execute them, he exiles them. So we have two surviving sisters are shipped off to Asia. While she's in exile, her nasty piece of work husband dies, Ahina Barbas. Can we assume she's involved in that death or is it just sort of natural causes? He dies of dropsy which is a massive swelling of the liver proper disease that yeah yeah but she doesn't seem to be

too cut off about the situation she does seem to have missed nero quite a lot there because he was sent to live with his paternal aunt um and so she was kind of left swinging around on a little island by herself but she's sort of saved from this life of exile because her brother, the emperor, is murdered. So now that means that she is a widow. She has no husband. Her brother is dead. So two things. Who's the new emperor?

And also, is she back in Rome? Yeah, so the new emperor is Uncle Claudius, who is Germanicus's older brother, who has had no public profile because he has some kind of disability. Rome has found that embarrassing. Now I know the actor you're talking about. Yeah, that's us, Derek Jacoby. Thank you. Let's just call him Derek Jacoby.

So Derek Jacoby is on the throne. So he gets to be emperor and he brings Agrippina and Lovilla back to Rome. He could have killed them off but he decided that the best way to deal with it was that they were still members of the family. Everyone had agreed with them now that Caligula was actually bad and that they were right all along and they were really sorry that they agreed when he exiled them all. So she arrives back into Rome and she manages to land a new husband. Do you want to guess who that is, Cariad? Is she related to him? She is.

It's her uncle. Her uncle. Of course, I should have been. It's Romans, it's uncles. It's always an uncle. It's Emperor Uncle Claudius. Oh, Derek Jacoby? Yeah.

So she's, what, 32, give or take at this time, Emma? How old is he at this point? In his late 50s oh okay i thought he was like 90 they really aged him up in that 1970s he is her dad's older brother he's a couple of years older than her dad gross yeah that's real gross the problem is that claudius already has a son called britannicus and that means means that Claudius already has an heir. And so Nero is sort of backup heir, bonus heir. But Agrippina is not keen on that situation.

Presumably she's going to be like, no, no, no, no, no. My son comes first. She's not subtle about it at all. Like she marches in, they get married on like the 1st of January 49. And within a couple of months, Nero has been adopted by Claudius and given the name Nero his daughter has been adopted out of the family so that he can be married to Octavia so he is now immediately both Claudius's nephew great nephew and adopted son and son-in-law. Oh God, that's not a family tree, that's a family circle. That's a straight line. That's a straight line all the way down the page.

He's given his toga of manhood and is dressed up in like little military outfits pretty much straight away. And he's given official positions by the time he's 14. Meanwhile, Britannicus, who's about five years younger, is kept as a child. Agrippina makes sure that he doesn't have any supporters around him. So she tries to keep anyone who would be sympathetic to him or his mother away from him and keep him out of the public eye as much as possible in order to keep Nero at the forefront of everyone's thoughts. So I mean, Agrippina is now surely the most powerful woman in the entire Roman Empire. And yet Roman law doesn't really allow for powerful women. Usually women are dependent on their husbands or their fathers.

But she sort of seems to wield quite a lot of power. So what is she doing that's different? Legally in Roman culture, women are perpetual minors. So they're never allowed to act as adults by themselves they can never sign a contract they can never make a business decision by themselves they can never really it's so confusing i don't know how to do it yeah why does the big tablets don't work technically that is the law and so technically she wouldn't be able to sign something by herself but claudius is basically quite a weak person person and Agrippina is a very strong personality.

But instead of being like, sign this, she's like, I'm going to come with you to sit next to you to this delegation of British prisoners. And I think I'll just sit there because I have the blood of the Julians and I have the divine blood and you don't have anything. So if you could just agree to that, that'd be lovely. And Claudius goes, okay, yeah, thanks. Sorry, sorry. So she basically is able to wield an immense amount of quite active power by appearing in public in these ways. So there's this great bit of Tacitus where it talks about her being the only woman in Roman history to sit in front of the Roman standards. I mean, Claudius is renowned for being a very brilliant and lengthy writer. He wrote these enormous histories.

So he's a bit of a nerd, isn't he? He's sort of just quite happy in the background, just writing his stuff and sort of jotting down his thoughts. He needed a shed, basically. So her son is in pole position now. She's managed to basically shuffle younger Britannicus off to the sidelines. Nero is very much heir to the throne. Things get increasingly complicated.

Other families sort of lurking in the background. Can we hear a little bit about Junius Silenus Torquatus, who Agrippina destroys? He's supposed to marry Octavia, but then Octavia is betrothed to Nero. But in order to get Octavia out of the betrothal, because you can't just say, oh, we've changed our minds. That's like a breach of contract. She has him accused of incest.

Classic. Classic. And he's just twiddling his thumbs, kind of walking around the place. And then all of a sudden he is dragged into court. Yeah, and in the end, he has to kill himself in order to maintain his honour so he's accused of having sex with his sister called Junia Calvina. So Agrippina has destroyed a whole family so her son can move up the ladder and marry Octavia, daughter of the emperor. So she doesn't take prisoners. You've been Agrippina'd basically. She has married the emperor, she has moved her son into pole position, and then she presumably no longer needs the emperor anymore

because everything is in place. So when Claudius is aged 63, he suddenly gets very poorly and he suddenly dies. Now, according to both Cassius Dio and Suetonius, this is because Claudius has realised that Agrippina, his wife, is a wrong-un. He's gone, hang on a minute, I've married an absolute conniving hussy who murders people and bumps them off and I can't trust her.

And so she has to murder him in order to protect herself. And then, of course, there's the other option, which is that he dies of old age or some illness or whatever. But according to the story, Cariad, do you know what the murder weapon supposedly is? Is it his pen or something horrible like that? And they're not far off. It is a poisoning. It's a poisoning, but it's food. It's a poison mushroom.

Oh, of course Claudius loved mushrooms, didn't he? He loves his mushrooms. He loves a stroganoff. At down to the shed, come up for your stroganoff, she thought. Bang, I'll get this done by half past five. Story goes that the doctor is in on it and Claudius eats the poisoned mushrooms,

but it sicks them up. And so the doctor poisons him again with a feather quill, I think, to make him sick and make sure that he gets the poison on the end of a feather tip. I was close with Penn. So Penn is right. What I love about this story, Emma,

is that in order to pull off his poisoning, she hired the most famous poisoner in Rome, Lacusta. In the empire, in fact. She's not even in Rome. I love the idea of a famous poisoner who's got like, everyone's like, oh yeah, Lacusta, I love her work. Oh, she's great.

She poisoned my aunt the other week. It was marvellous. Yeah. Well, the Romans are very into poison as an art form almost. It's kind of related to magic, but they're quite invested in like the ways in which you can poison someone secretly. So you can send them mad or you can kill them so that it looks like a slow disease. Romans, get some therapy.

Yeah, I know. Romans. So Claudius is dead. And of course, that means the empire passes to Agrippina's son, Nero. Emperor Nero, fifth emperor. He's 19, something like that. 18, 19. Yeah.

So he inherits as an adult. So he's ready for power. Yeah. Well, I mean, not emotionally. He's technically been a public official since he was 14. Okay. Which leads rise to the image of people having to go to plead their cases. Like this person stole my horse or this person murdered my grandmother.

And there's Nero, the 15 year old boy, having to make a decision about this. Oh yeah, sounds pretty bad. Yeah, exactly. Maybe you should both die. I don't know. Do you want to hear a song I wrote? Agrippina thinks that she is going to enter this relationship and be the regent to Nero, that she's going to be able to stand beside him as she did with Claudius and that she

this time is going to be the senior partner in the relationship she's going to be the one with the experience she thinks that she is going to be in charge unfortunately for her Nero does not agree with this at all if you poison and murder and use your canary to put someone in place chances are they have not grown up very well adjusted yeah they learned from the best so he now knows how to really screw someone over thanks mom yeah he's very influenced by seneca who is a philosopher who is been who was exiled and then um agrippina had brought him back when she became emperor she installed him as uh as nero's tutor because he's a very famous stoic philosopher she thought he'd be a good influence um and he kind of is, but not in the way that she wants because he's very conservative about the place of women and about what a good ruler is. And the place of women is not sitting next to

the emperor. It is at home wearing a pretty dress. Almost immediately into his reign, Nero says that his mom's not going to be part of that reign anymore and then a delegation comes from Armenia which is always causing a problem and they come in to see Nero to resolve the issue Agrippina enters the room in order to sit next to him as she would have if it was Claudius and Seneca pushes Nero forward and says get rid rid of her. Right. Nero then has this moment where he has to decide whether he says no to Seneca and invites his mum to sit next to him or steps forward and removes Agrippina. And he chooses to side with Seneca and steps forward, says,

hi, mum, lovely to see you here, a bit busy at the moment, and leads her out of the room and basically says to her, you're not going to be an active part of my administration you are going to be my mom at home and then to make it worse in order to say sorry he gives her a dress which is just like a stab in the heart to her because the one thing that everyone says about her is that she's not interested in luxury she wears kind of plain outfits and they find this really disturbing because they think it's natural for women to be luxurious and spend loads of money on gold so they think that this is busy guys running stuff and killing people and they give her a dress oh that's so insulting isn't it so they are falling out the tension is there and she's not going to accept this really but ultimately things get a bit

murdery from nero's point of view because he now hires mum's favourite poisoner, La Costa, to bump off his brother, well, stepbrother, Britannicus. Britannicus, deaded, murdered. You can't have him lurking around, he's too dangerous. So Nero is also turned to poison. I mean, in the end, Nero does decide mummy is too meddlesome, mummy needs to die. It's very Freudian.

And he decides he's going to murder her. Well, initially he's like, I guess I could poison her. But then that doesn't seem to work out. And then he's like, stab her. But that's quite obvious. He's told no one will stab Agrippina. She's the daughter of Germanicus. And no soldier will do it.

Yeah. So because Germanicus is a great warrior, no one's going to harm his daughter. Also, she's still immensely popular because she has that heritage and what he wants is for her to die in an accident he's a heavy inverted commas um so he can maintain her popularity and he can be the right like the morning sun oh yeah that looks good for the brand doesn't it exactly yeah carry on do you want to guess the two absurdly complicated

plans he tries to fake accidents he wants her to fake trying on a poisoned dress. Oh, that's good. That's really good. Not that then. You do well in the Roman world. Thanks. Yeah, yeah. He gets a chariot driver to give her a lift

to her favourite poisoner's hangout, but he gets the chariot driver drunk and then the chariot driver's gonna drive off a cliff this is not as far as off as you think it might be i am a roman guys who knew it i thought it was celtic that the plan initially was that the roof over her bed would collapse on purpose while she was asleep and crush her nice which is a really hard thing to pull off that didn't quite work but if at first you don't succeed, try, try again. So the next plan is a collapsible boat.

Mm-hmm. Oh, okay. She goes on holiday. They're in the Bay of Baye, and she's in a house on one side and Nero's in a house on the other side, because they have so many houses. And so he invites her to dinner, and the easiest way to get from one side of the bay to the other

is to get a boat so she goes over for dinner then he pops her on the boat and the boat is designed in some way that nobody understands where it's going to collapse throw her off the boat um and then everyone's gonna go oh no agrippina fell in the water what a disaster what happens is the boat collapses she's thrown into the water she is an excellent swimmer something so she's never mentioned to nero apparently wow so she basically swims home and then sends the messenger off to nero's house and says been a bit of an accident um but don't worry i'm okay she's like the rasputin of roman times and she's like you are not killing this woman she's like his plans are all so rubbish yeah. She's like, you are not killing this woman. His plans are also rubbish.

Yeah, they sound rubbish, isn't it? So he has a bit of a panic. He throws a dagger on the floor next to the messenger and says, oh my God, she's trying to kill me. And then sends some people around to stab her. And they go around, they turn up at her door and she says, this is all from Tacitus, she says, if you are here to see if I'm all right, I'm fine.

If you're here for my son to kill me, I don't believe that he would try to kill me. And they respond by cracking her on the head with a sword. And she gets back up again and says, Wow! If you're going to kill me, then stab me here and points at her womb. So he does, then she is speared on the sword and that's how she dies. But is that how that's how tastas says it happens right well yeah no one was there yeah but it's a really good story

yeah there are stories that she haunts him in in his sleep and she does she lurks and screeches and he never goes back to the bay of bay because he says he can hear her crying on the wind is that because you murdered your mum there? Yes. Congratulations, dearer. You ruined that holiday destination. Agrippina, she has died in the year 59 CE. She was 44. She's young, she's glamorous, she's beautiful.

She's dead, over, career ended. But obviously she haunts him as a ghost. The Nuance Window! That brings us really to my favourite part of the show, which is called the nuance window. This is where Cariad and I go quiet for a couple of minutes and we allow our experts to tell us what we need to know, what we need to understand about the subject.

Right, OK, the nuance window. We have three major sources for the life of Agrippina. We've got Tacitus, who wrote his Annals in around about 116 CE. We've got Suetonius, who wrote Biographies of the Twelve Emperors in about 120, 121. And we have Cassius Dio's Roman History, which was written about 230. So all of those three sources come between 50 and 200 years after Agrippina lived. We tend to treat them as primary sources, but they are very far away from what they're writing. On top of that, they're both incomplete and fragmentary. Tacitus has massive holes in him. Cassius Dio is a nightmare to work with because we don't really have any of his intact. We just have epitomes. And so we're not dealing with complete sources

and we don't have all the information. All of Caligula's reign is missing from Tacitus, which is heartbreaking. And they are writing Roman history, which is a particular genre with particular genre conventions. And they love to manipulate and distort and misrepresent events in order to fit into their narrative. Particularly Tacitus, who is the main source everyone draws on because he's so good. He has a story that he is telling about an evil woman that she fits into. But one of the most interesting things about Agrippina is that she's very aware that this is going to happen to her, that she is going to be written about.

And she tried to leave her own legacy in the form of an autobiography that she wrote about the tragedies of her family. We only have two extracts from it, one about her experience of childbirth, which is, as far as we know, the only written experience of childbirth from the ancient world. Unfortunately, the other thing is lost. But she did try to write her own record and to write herself into the history books in the way that she wanted to. But unfortunately, all we have been left with is three misogynists trying 50 years later. Thank you so much but that's it from us a huge thank you again to our guests uh in history corner the splendid dr emma southern thank you emma thank you very much for having me it's always

a pleasure and in comedy corner the marvelous carrie ad lloyd thank you carrie oh thank you so much it was so interesting uh and to you lovely listener join me next time as we have a peek around a different corner of the past with another pair of fun pals. Anyway, I'm off to go and wash my mushrooms to make sure they are not covered in poison. Bye! Hear brand new satire on the Friday Night Comedy podcast from BBC Radio 4 with six summer specials.

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