Difficult Women: Agrippina the Younger, part two

Addicted to betrayal, but you're relevant/ You're terrified to look down

Previously on Difficult Women: Agrippina the Younger: Caligula! Poisoning! Murder! Rumoured incest! Read it all here, then read on for part two, which (as promised last time) is even more bananas.

The Emperor’s Wife

Please note that it was just as weird in ancient Rome for an uncle to marry a niece as it is today. Remember, this is a culture where people frequently accused each other of incest because they knew it was the grossest thing you could accuse someone of doing. So what’s the deal? How the fuck did this happen??

Setting aside the very weird and messed-up fact that Agrippina was Claudius’s niece, let’s look at what made her an appealing potential bride for the 59-year-old Emperor. She was a descendant of Augustus and was still super popular as the daughter of Germanicus and Vipsania. She also had a son who, through her, was more directly descended from Augustus than Claudius’s son Britannicus was. She was also rich and intelligent and seemed to have much better diplomatic/people skills than Claudius.

What was in this for Agrippina? Well, for starters, she’d be the wife of the Emperor, making her the most powerful woman in Rome. She’d grown up with a sense she was better than everyone else and destined for great things, and this opportunity may have seemed like her best chance to seize the power she felt was her birthright. It would also cement the future for her son, as once she was the Emperor’s wife, she’d be better able to manipulate things to get her son to supplant Britannicus as heir.

So, lots of great reasons for them to get married, too bad about being uncle and niece. But Claudius was determined to make this happen, and after tricking the Senate into changing the laws for him, the pair were married on January 1, the year 49. In an attempt to spoil the day and remind everyone that this union was fucking gross, Claudius’s former BFF Silanus died by suicide that same day. And not that same day, but pretty quickly, three things happened:

1. Claudius formally adopted Agrippina’s son, changed his name to Nero, made him heir instead of Claudius’s son Britannicus, and married Nero off to Claudius’s daughter Octavia

2. Agrippina demanded that the scholar Seneca be returned from exile to be Nero’s new tutor, and

3. A woman named Lollia Paulina was accused of witchcraft, sent into exile, and died.

A note on Lollia Paulina: Lollia Paulina had been, briefly, one of Caligula’s revolving door of wives. Some Senators had also mentioned her as a potential new wife for Claudius after the death of Messalina. Allegedly, Agrippina set events in motion to ensure Paulina’s death to remove her as a rival for her uncle-husband’s affections. So, just mark that on your scorecards for People Potentially Murdered by Agrippina.

After one year of marriage, Claudius had Agrippina titled Augusta. This was a big fucking deal, as only two women before her had ever been given this title. This title meant that she was on more or less equal standing with Claudius. No woman in Western history had had this much power before, and none would again for another hundred years¹. She wasn’t an old-school Emperor’s wife like her grandmother and great-grandmother had been, wielding their power as influence behind the scenes. Agrippina Augusta was an active figure who sat beside her husband and was involved in acts of state. Her thoughts were considered, and she was permitted to oversee her own projects.

One of these projects was her creation of a Roman colony for retired military personnel in the area of Germany where she’d been born. Initially named Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium (which means Agrippina’s Colony), the colony's name was eventually truncated to just Colonia, and then its current name of Cologne (still a city in Germany!). This wasn’t just a thing where she had it named after her and never thought about it again: Agrippina was the patron of this colony, ensuring that it had infrastructure in place to allow Colonia to thrive and for the people within to live as well as possible, both the Roman veterans as well as the indigenous Ubii people of the area.

And then, as a final statement of just how powerful Agrippina had become, she was placed on a coin alongside Claudius in the year 50. Unlike when she’d shared the reverse of a coin with her sisters during the reign of Caligula, this time, she was pictured on her own on the reverse side of the coin. She also commissioned statues made in her likeness that wore a diadem, a sort of crown-tiara hybrid that looked cool, but, more importantly, no living Roman woman had ever been shown to wear in a piece of art.

Three years later, Emperor Claudius died in the year 54 of mysterious circumstances that seemed to involve eating a dish containing poisoned mushrooms. (Also, less interestingly, Claudius was sixty-three years old and had several health issues and may have just died of natural causes.) Instantly, rumours began to spread that Agrippina had killed him. As usual, these rumours seem to have been one part of people who hated her (because any time a woman acquires a lot of power, many men tend to pop up hating her) and one part of how she behaved after Claudius’s death. She was highly organized, took things into her own hands, and arranged for her son Nero to be named the new Emperor. Essentially, she seemed too capable and not sad enough for some people, which is laughable because if Agrippina had been the sort of person to freak out when someone is murdered in front of her, she’d never have survived this long in this family.

But, if we are to believe the rumours that Agrippina arranged Claudius’s murder, here’s how it allegedly would have happened. There was a famous poisoner in Rome at this time named Locusta, a peasant from Gaul (old-timey France) who was so skilled at herbs that she decided to move to Rome and be a freelance poisoner. She was, obviously, a fascinating person. Locusta’s reputation was such that Agrippina had her freed from jail to work as her go-to poison expert. The trick was that Claudius had a food taster on retainer, which makes sense as everyone was always trying to kill everyone. So, Agrippina and Locusta arranged to serve him mushrooms, his favourite dish, and to lure the food taster away when the mushrooms arrived. The mushrooms were laced with poison, and when a doctor came to try to make Claudius vomit up the poison by shoving a feather down his throat, the feather was also coated with poison, so the Emperor died. I mean, genius. Allegedly.

Oh, and then the part that would make Jessica Fletcher raise her eyebrows is that this time, Agrippina’s husband had died without any will that anyone could find. So, one theory is that Claudius was preparing to cut Agrippina and/or Nero out of his will, and that’s why she had him killed. But of course, maybe Claudius died of natural causes and never wrote a will. Either way, Agrippina was like, “Don’t worry! He told me what he wanted: his adopted stepson Nero to become the next Emperor instead of his biological Britannicus! Trust me!” And everyone gave her a significant side-eye but agreed.

This is how Agrippina, widowed for the third time, was now the Emperor’s mother.

The Emperor’s Mother

Agrippina had spent her whole life since Nero’s birth ruthlessly ensuring he’d become the next Emperor. When he took on the role, she must have been so relieved, but also like… what now? She’d had a great run as Claudius’s wife/the power behind the throne, and presumably, she was planning backseat ruling for her son. The detail she’d neglected to properly plan for (if there is a way to plan for such things) is that Nero was 100% a little shit. It’s very much the Game of Thrones Cersei/Joffrey thing, where the mother is so much smarter and would have been a better leader, but instead, she has to sit and watch her son being an asshole and ruining everything. #spoilers

It started well, though! Nero, aged sixteen, was the youngest ever Emperor of Rome. And unlike Caligula or Claudius, he’d been groomed from a young age to know how to do this job. He had pre-existing responsibilities within the Senate, and valuable alliances with influential people, and the people of Rome knew who he was. They weren’t confused about where he’d come from. BUT ALSO, Nero’s true dream was to be an actor/singer, so although he’d been set up to succeed as Emperor, his heart was never in it. But primarily because of Agrippina’s backseat driving, Nero was stepping into the role of Emperor, who was already quite popular and had several powerful allies supporting him.

Agrippina also seemed to assume that she was effectively Nero’s regent and could now take over even more control of running things. And she did, for the first bit. She’d single-handedly turned things around during Claudius’s reign, with way fewer revolts and treason happening while she was there doing the books; she would have known very well what to do and kept on keeping on now for Nero. Her fatal flaw was perhaps that she wanted to ensure everyone knew it was her doing this stuff, not Nero. She was never one to fade into the background quietly. Agrippina ensured she was always in Nero’s presence, at least publicly, appearing near him just as she’d been with Claudius, so nobody forgot that she had power in this situation as well.

And you knew this was coming: MORE COINS DRAMA!! The latest coins Agrippina had minted put her in her most powerful pose yet, this time on a coin with Nero. On these, she and Nero were both in profile, facing each other, displaying how they were (allegedly) equals.

But then, of course, things started going to shit because that’s the sort of story this is. The first significant blow to Agrippina’s power was when she went, as per usual, to join Nero and others for a meeting with foreign delegates. With Claudius, she used to sit sort of behind him. For this meeting, her first with Nero in these positions, she sat beside him. Nero’s tutor, Seneca (who Agrippina had brought back from exile personally), directed Nero to remove her, and Nero did, escorting her to a separate seat further away from him. After this, she never again joined Nero for a business meeting.

What caught her here is that Agrippina had broken new ground for herself, primarily based on a shared understanding, not law. She hadn’t had laws changed to improve things for other women, or even other emperors’ wives or mothers: she just started doing new stuff herself, and the men in power let her do these things. So when they changed their mind, she had no law or precedent for turning to in her defence. She’d side-stepped the obstacles inherent to being a Roman woman by not behaving as a woman or as a man; she’d been her own person, a quasi-goddess outside of this gender paradigm. But it was all too easy when she fell because all it took was to start treating her like a woman again.

So, Nero was a brat (derogatory; not in the cool Charli XCX way), and everyone around him encouraged him to distance himself from his mother. One example is that, around the year 55, Nero and Agrippina had a huge screaming fight about his new girlfriend, a woman named Acte, who was a freed slave. As a fuck you to Agrippina, Nero had his mother sent some jewels and a dress. This was an insult because Agrippina had never been a woman for whom fashion or luxury was an interest. She prided herself on her frugality and lack of flash and glamour. For Nero to present her with these gifts was like him saying, “Here, you’re a woman, that’s all you are and all you’re good for,” and was mega dismissive of her. In response, she said something like, “I gave him the empire, and he gave me a dress,” which is true. Nero was a sucky son.

He was also a shitty step-brother/cousin, as he had his 14-year-old stepbrother/cousin Britannicus murdered via poison sourced from returning guest star Locusta! Britannicus died in the middle of a big dinner party in front of lots of people, including Agrippina, and Nero made everyone stay and continue the party even around the teenage boy’s corpse. This incident was like a formal announcement that Nero was a psychopath whose thesis statement for life was chaos. This was around one year into his reign, so it all fell apart quickly. Agrippina, always a grounding presence in his life, had to go if Nero was truly going completely feral, so he had his mother exiled to live in a villa far, far away from him.

Word spread that the formerly untouchable Agrippina had lost her powerful ally, so all of her enemies began to step up and voice their grievances against her. Charges were made against her that she’d been scheming against Nero, and Agrippina walked right over to her son’s palace like NERO STOP THIS SHIT and friends; so terrifying was this woman that Emperor Nero, The Boy Tyrant stopped that shit. Somehow, these two reached an understanding behind closed doors such that nothing about Agrippina appeared in the public record for the next four years, meaning that everything was going more or less fine. During these four years, the country seemed to be running pretty well, which suggests that she was allowed back in to run things while Nero spent most of his time putting on plays and forcing people to watch and clap for him.

And then Nero fell in love again, this time with a 29-year-old woman named Poppea Sabina. A bunch happens with Poppea and Nero later (none of it good), but for this story, just note that rumours had it Poppea didn’t like Agrippina and encouraged Nero to murder his mother. Whether or not Poppea directly encouraged Nero to do this, it’s shortly after they began their relationship that Nero started plotting ways to murder Agrippina.

Buckle in.

So, because Agrippina was still very popular with lots of Romans, especially army soldiers with fond memories of her beloved father Germanicus, Nero knew he couldn’t just order a soldier to stab her to death. So, he went with his trusty plan of poisoning her. But guess what: just like in The Princess Bride, Agrippina grew up seeing so many people poisoned to death that she’d long been taking small doses of every known poison to make herself immune to all of them. Even Locusta wasn’t able to make this happen, poison-wise. And so Nero turned to Plan C: make it look like an accident. During his failed acting career, he’d seen a stage prop of a boat with a trick floor and commissioned an actor friend to build a real-life boat like that.

The scene was set! Nero invited his mother to visit him at a villa requiring a long boat trek. Agrippina, understandably and correctly suspicious, refused his offer of a boat and instead came on her own boat. They had dinner together, awkwardly, and at the end of the night, Nero had convinced her enough that he wasn’t trying to kill her that she agreed to take his particular boat back home. Maybe he was a talented actor, after all?

As per the plan, part of the boat collapsed in the middle of open water, and the ship started to sink. Agrippina’s servant Polla figured if she pretended to be Agrippina, then it was more likely she would be saved, so she cried outthat she was the Emperor’s mother and wouldn’t someone help her?? But the ship’s crew, working for Nero, hit Polla in the head with oars to drown her because they were assassins. Along with Polla, numerous crew members died as well. But guess who didn’t die? Agrippina!

Remember when she spent a year on an island in exile? She’d clearly practiced her swimming at that point because she was a strong enough swimmer to get to shore. Everyone cheered her survival because she was still Agrippina The Super Popular, but she was smart enough to know this ridiculous plan was her son’s attempt to kill her. She had a messenger send word to Nero like, “Don’t worry! I’m still alive!” and he commenced freaking out. News of the shipwreck spread around her neighbours, and crowds of people stood around her villa, weeping and praying because their beloved Augusta had nearly died.

But then! Plot twist: A group of soldiers arrived, which is the personification of Nero’s reply to Agrippina’s message about her survival. The soldiers burst into her room and revealed that they’d been sent there to execute her because, Nero claimed, Agrippina had tried to murder him. UGH THAT UNGRATEFUL ASSHOLE!! Agrippina tried to talk them out of it, claiming that NO WAY would her son ever try to have her murdered. But the soldiers were resolute, and her final act and words were to fling open her robe to reveal her stomach, demanding that they stab her in the womb. And they did. And thus was the death of Agrippina the Younger, aged 44.

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VULGAR HISTORY A LA CARTE is a feminist women’s history comedy newsletter. It is the companion publication to the Vulgar History podcast. Click here to hear the latest episode of the podcast.

Ann Foster is a writer and podcaster. She’s currently writing a nonfiction biography of Caroline of Brunswick. Don’t know who that is? You will soon! She’s represented by Amy Bishop-Wycisk at Trellis Literary Management.

References

Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World by Emma Southon

Poison: A History by Jenni Davis

Poison : An Illustrated History by Joel Levy

A Woman of Great Power (BBC History Extra podcast)

Consort Introduction and Agrippina (Rex Factor podcast)

Episode XX – Agrippina the Younger (Emperors of Rome podcast)

1. Agrippina achieved more individual power than any Roman woman before her. It wouldn’t be until a century later, when the 3rd-century Severan women, aka the Syrian Matriarchy, came along, that any Roman noblewoman would ever attain this amount of power. (These women were Julia Domna and her nieces Julia Soaemias and Julia Mamaea; they were awesome).