Vulgar History Podcast
Agrippina the Younger
March 4, 2020
Ann Foster:
Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, Season Two, Episode Two. My name is Ann Foster, and this is a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. I don’t know why I made there be so many words in explaining what it is, but I think I’ve explained it properly in every episode so far. So, in Season One, we were looking at women who made history by “misbehaving,” which is sort of like also not “misbehaving” because several of them did murder people. This season, we’re looking at women leaders and how men complained and were freaked out about it and how it’s not so different from nowadays when women leaders are still much more rare than men leaders, and men and women and just anyone living in the patriarchy still kind of freaks out about women leaders for exactly the same reasons they did 2,000 years ago.
So, in last week’s episode we looked at Cleopatra and this week we’re looking… We’re kind of going chronologically this season. Last season was kind of like random people— Well, not random, like people I chose, but I sort of put them in order of, I don’t know, the order that seemed to work best. But this season, I think what’s going to work best is going chronologically so you can kind of see the development of how women leaders were seen and accepted and treated throughout several centuries of Western history and how so little has changed. It’s all really depressing actually. But what’s not depressing is a scandalicious story and today we’re going to be looking at the story of Agrippina the Younger who is called that because her mother was also called Agrippina, Agrippina the Elder was her mother, and this takes place in Ancient Rome.
So, Agrippina was born November 6th in the year 15, like, plus 15. So, when we were looking at Cleopatra she was in the Before Common Era scenario, Agrippina is a bit later on. So, just to sort of put us in the place in time. So, Cleopatra was fighting against the guy who would become Emperor Augustus AKA Octavian when he was sort of, like, in his teens/early twenties. Agrippina is the granddaughter… granddaughter? Yes. Granddaughter of Augustus. So, he was quite a lot older. So, just, kind of, Agrippina and Cleopatra were never alive at the same time but they’re not so far apart that people in the story wouldn’t have known Cleopatra and been around for that whole situation, which you can hear about in last week’s episode. So, this week we are looking at Agrippina. Her full name was Julia Agrippina Minor because— I have not done a lot of studying and research on Ancient Rome. I kind of did a crash course to prepare for this podcast episode but it seems to me that everyone who is female in ancient Rome had the first name Julia, but no one actually went by the name Julia is kind of how it seems. So, she’s mostly written about as Agrippina.
I also want to mention that the main source I’m using for this podcast is the amazing biography of Agrippina by Emma Southon. It’s got two different titles. In some markets, I think in the UK, the book is called Agrippina: Empress, Exile, Hustler, Whore. In North America has got a much more tame title which is Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World. The book is amazing, it’s very much kind of like, I’ve never before read a history book that so much feels like something I myself could have written, like, in the best possible way. I feel such a kinship to this book, the way that she puts in jokes and asides and, like, makes fun of historically powerful men and just the very casual, conversational way that is written is amazing. It’s also superbly well-researched. So, I’m using this book as my source. She uses as her source, numerous people who are writing in Ancient Roman times and you can read her full bibliography for what all of her sources are.
But basically, just bear in mind, that all of the sources she used, like, all the sources that exist about Agrippina were basically men who really didn’t like her and wanted to make her seem as awful as possible, not unlike Cleopatra. So, some of the stuff in this story probably did happen. Some of it might be exaggerated, some of it might be totally made up but just, like, imagine the word ‘allegedly’ before almost everything I’m about to tell you because we can’t really go back and fact-check. But there’s some… It’s like, we know when she was born, we know when certain events happened but a lot of it, we’re just kind of filling in the gaps based on what these men who hated her claimed had happened. So, other than births and deaths, the dates of, everything is kind of like “Here’s a story,” and you kind of get a sense of who she was and what she was like. The details here or there, no one can ever truly verify, really.
So, okay. Agrippina, Julia Agrippina Minor AKA Agrippina the Younger was born November 6th in the year 15. She was the fourth surviving child and the first daughter born to two extremely important and popular Roman people. Her mother Vipsania Agrippina AKA Agrippina the Elder was the daughter of two really important Roman people. Her father was Agrippa, who was a really popular and important statesman, and her mother was Julia the Elder who was the daughter of Emperor Augustus. So, Agrippina’s mother is descended through her mother to Emperor Augustus which I guess makes our Agrippina the great-granddaughter of Augustus, so that’s the spread of time. Sorry, I said grandfather before. It’s, like, everyone has the same names and are all married to each other; this is not the first mistake I’m going to make regarding how people are related to each other because it’s just, like, the family tree, instead of a tree is just kind of like a bundle of sticks that’s just thrown haphazardly on the ground and then bundled back together. There’s a lot of intermarrying.
But what is important here to know [chuckles] effectively, is that our Agrippina, Agrippina the Younger, was descended very directly through her mother to Emperor Augustus, who was super long-standing emperor of Rome, he was made a god. Like, everybody respected him super a lot. Her father was named Germanicus, and he was the nephew of the person who’s the emperor when the story begins, who is Emperor Tiberius. So, basically, Tiberius is the uncle of our Agrippina. So, she’s the niece of the current emperor and she’s also the great-granddaughter of famous Emperor Augustus, basically. So, she’s descended on both sides from, basically, emperors even though there’s still this thing in Rome where they’re like “We’re technically still a republic. We don’t have one person who’s the emperor it’s more just, like, he’s elected and everyone just agrees to keep him the emperor forever,” this sort of, like, pretend democracy. Again, not my area of expertise but basically, it’s a situation where everybody loved Augustus, everybody loved Germanicus, so our Agrippina and her siblings and group, her whole family, were just sort of beloved, sort of like, when they were little kids like William and Harry were beloved because Diana was beloved. It’s that same sort of thing, like, people just reflect the popular parents onto the younger kids.
Anyway, so her parents, Agrippina the Elder and Germanicus, were the it-couple of Roman history at the time. Agrippina the Elder was doing exactly what a Roman woman was expected and wanted to do and so everybody loved her for that. She was a wife, she was a mother, she was devoted to both duties while Germanicus was super handsome and a very successful military leader to the point that when he was born his name wasn’t Germanicus his name got changed to Germanicus in recognition of how well he did conquering parts of Germany for the Roman Empire. Actually, Agrippina, today’s heroine, was born while the whole family was in Germany for invasion-related reasons. She was born in a Roman outpost located on the Rhine River near modern-day Cologne, Germany. So, she was born amid the battlefield, basically, to these very popular and successful parents. So, the family headed back to Rome a little while later and Germanicus was hailed as a hero in a major triumphant parade/ festival. So, these parades, it’s not just, like, you know, the Thanksgiving parade or whatever. This is, like, a days-long festival, everybody came there, they paraded through everywhere. It was a massive celebration. So, Agrippina would be a little toddler seeing just exactly how much the city loved her whole family.
Germanicus died just a few years later though, seemingly of natural causes but everyone in this story dies of maybe being murdered and he is one of them, basically. So, he died and the city mourned on a massive scale, like, again, sort of like Princess Diana’s death scale. Just mounds of flowers, everybody weeping, everyone was so devastated because he was so popular and so beloved. So, he seemed like he maybe died of diseases because he was, like, travelling around a lot doing battles in a period of time well before antibiotics but his wife Agrippina the Elder was pretty sure that he had probably been murdered by Tiberius who was both Germanicus’s uncle and also adoptive father. So, his uncle-father, Emperor Tiberius. This is entirely possible, who knows? But basically, it also makes sense that Agrippina the Elder would assume murder because basically her entire family had been murdered mostly by each other, like, her brothers, her parents, her aunts and uncles. I mean, it makes sense to her, like, that’s the normal way most people die is from inter-family murder.
So, what happened is that Germanicus died while he was away and Agrippina, our Agrippina, was a little kid, staying in Rome with her other little siblings, and her mother sailed into town from being away with her husband and she did sort of like a grief parade, so it’s sort of like the sad version of the triumph parade that happened before. She reunited with her daughter Agrippina and her other children and everybody in Rome was just, like, freaking out about Germanicus being dead. He was their number one favourite person; they were pushing over statues, smashing dishes, like, screaming and these, like, grief riots, killing themselves. Everybody was really affected by the death of Germanicus. And so, Agrippina, our little Agrippina, who at this point was a little girl, she would have been, again, paraded through town seeing how everybody loved her father so much, how she and her family were sort of special, sort of different from everybody else. And this really doesn’t change too much over the course of this whole story which is like decades and decades. Basically, the people of Rome loved her parents so much, ergo they loved her and her siblings so much, and she kind of saw herself as special and different and better than everybody else. Basically, the way they treated, like, she kind of was… in a way.
So, we move now into the phase of her life where she is a half-orphan. Her father is dead, and she’s being raised by sort of a squad of powerful women, including her mother, Agrippina the Elder, her father’s mother, Antonia Minor and her great-grandmother Livia Drusilla who was the widow of Augustus. And if you watch I, Claudius, the old masterpiece theatre show— And there’s, side note, a new podcast just started called I, Podius where these two men are watching and discussing episodes of I, Claudius and I’m really excited about it because I’m very into Roman history at the moment. Anyway, Livia in I, Claudius is this, just like, ideal Roman woman. Again, she’s a devoted wife and mother, she also seemed to have been really proficient at poisoning people and murdering people and being ambitious and pretty badass. So, basically, Agrippina, this little girl, is being raised by these very powerful women who had basically thrived as best as they could in the wildly murderous patriarchy that they’d all been born into.
Almost immediately, Agrippina got to watch her mother flex her power in a number of different ways. This is also just crucial. So, like, she’s a little girl and these formative events are basically being worshiped by all of Rome and watching these influential women in her life sort of sidestep the fact that in Ancient Rome, women had no rights. They couldn’t own land, they couldn’t have their own money, they couldn’t vote, they were basically property, they couldn’t go outside unless they were escorted by a male relative, they were… I just keep thinking about— I know I read this somewhere and I forget where but basically, landowners would own you know a house and maybe some chickens and maybe some daughters and maybe a wife, and those were all sort of the same to them, basically. But Agrippina was watching these three powerful women find their own way to have power and to be powerful in a situation where that wasn’t expected. So, that was kind of, to her, that became normal. That became what she figured out her life would be like as well.
So, the thing to bear in mind here is that the Emperor, who is her uncle, Tiberius, was awful. Or no, her great… No. Oh my god, this family tree. Great uncle. Great uncle. So, the emperor is the great uncle, his name is Tiberius, he was a really shitty emperor, not in the way that other emperors we’re going to maybe talk about in the story were really shitty emperors, but more in the sense of he just kind of peaced out of the whole thing. He was really serious and really stoic and had sort of hermit-like tendencies to just run away and not want to engage with people and hide and not be emperor a lot of the time, which is a totally, totally fine way for a person to be if that’s what you’re like. But it’s not the best way to be if you were the Roman Emperor at this point in time.
So, if you will recall, Agrippina’s mother and others were pretty sure Tiberius had been responsible for the murder of Germanicus, who might have also just died of, like, you know, getting a cut infected. Anyway, so Agrippina’s mother basically was just, like, she blamed Tiberius for the death of her husband and she just sort of started running around and seizing as much power and influence as she could to try and destroy Tiberius while Tiberius just sort of hid away on an island, not wanting to be emperor, basically. This was the next, sort of, 15 years that this power play went on. So, basically, this comprised much of the childhood and young adolescence of Agrippina the Younger.
So, in the midst of all of this, Agrippina the Younger was married at age 14 to a man named Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, that’s three different words. His last name, Ahenobarbus, means “bronze beard” which means he had red hair, and their son that she’s going to have with him later also has red hair. So, I’m just like, as a red-haired person myself, I’m always excited to encounter red-haired people in stories. Anyway, we’re going to call her husband Domitius because that is what most people called him back then. He was about 20 years older than her which wasn’t weird for that time and/or place, they were also related which wasn’t weird either. They were distantly enough related that it wasn’t a weird thing. Spoiler, she’s going to later have another husband who’s much more closely related and that was treated as weird.
So, Domitius’s mother was Agrippina’s great-grandaunt Octavia, who was the sister of Augustus and the previous wife of Mark Antony, which just like, bunch of important people. He’s an important person, he’s a lot older than Agrippina, and he also is connected through blood relations to the beloved Emperor Augustus. So, basically, they became the new it-couple. Domitius was a high-ranking official, he was extremely rich, and he was also, according to literally every source who ever wrote about him, a really heinous and awful person. For instance, one time he apparently killed a slave because the slave was less drunk than Domitius was and that bothered him. Another time, he ripped out a man’s eye because he felt that the man had been rude to him. He also apparently would seduce and/or assault most women he ever met with or without their consent. So, basically, he was awful. Agrippina was 14 and that is the husband that she landed with. But basically, she’d lived through a pretty chaotic 14 years so far and I’m sure that her mother and her female relatives maybe gave her some advice about how to not be murdered by this horrible person she was married to.
So basically, the feud between her mother and the emperor continued. The whole thing was just, like, over-the-top, melodramatic, wildly interesting and we don’t have time to get into all of it but basically, it culminates with the emperor runs away to Capri the island of Capri and never returns. Agrippina was accused of incest, some people actually maybe had incest. Side note on incest which is basically, it was a thing the people in Ancient Roman times seemed to accuse each other of a lot, not necessarily because it was happening a lot but because it was kind of the grossest, worst thing you could say about a person. So, there’s just, like, a lot of people in the story are going to be accusing a lot of other people of incest. There probably wasn’t actually that much incest happening, I’m guessing, because it seems like it was such a social taboo that it was like accusing someone of it, like, destroyed their whole life, or you wanted it to destroy their whole life. So, probably it wasn’t a thing people were up to.
Anyway, a lot of dramatic things happened; Agrippina’s mother and her two older brothers had all at various points been sent into exile, put in prison, and all three of them, I believe, had all died by suicide to avoid being murdered by Tiberius, basically. The only surviving family members Agrippina had at this point were her brother Gaius, who was off living in exile in Capri with emperor Tiberius because he was maybe sort of his heir, and two other sisters Drusilla and Livilla. And then, everything, the next major plot twist happens in the year 37. Tiberius finally died and Agrippina’s brother Gaius was named the new emperor. Gaius was his birth name, but you might know him better by his nickname which was Little Boots or as it is said in Latin, Caligula! So, Caligula was Agrippina’s younger brother and the oldest/only surviving boy in her particular branch of this very messy family tree.
I guess this is just a little side note on Caligula to explain, kind of, what’s about to happen which is just a lot of interesting things. So, Caligula had spent some time in jail when their mother was sent to jail/exile. When she died, he went to live with Agrippina and his two other sisters, Drusilla and Livilla, in the care of… In the household of just, like, mighty women in this… Oh, what’s the thing called? Just this house of super powerful, badass women, basically. It’s sort of Steel Magnolias but Ancient Rome scenario. So, the thing is that Tiberius saw Caligula as basically the guy who was going to be probably emperor after him, Tiberius was also really paranoid about someone trying to steal the throne away from him because everybody constantly was. So, is that paranoia when it’s true?
Anyway, to keep Caligula from being able to emerge and, like, take over before Tiberius died/kill Tiberius uh Tiberius arranged it so that Caligula would be treated like a little boy way longer than most people were then. So, there’s a whole thing where sort of like a bar mitzvah scenario where a little Roman boy would finally get his toga for the first time, and when you get your toga there’s, like, a toga ceremony, and at that point it’s like, you are a man, I think you could, like, vote at that point. This happened when people were like, I don’t know, 14, 15, 16. But Caligula was not allowed to do this; he was sent to live with Tiberius on his, like, hermit island in Capri where Caligula stayed from ages 19 until 27. Presumably, he got his toga at some point in there but it’s still very embarrassing. So, he was raised away from Rome, away from the Senate, away from learning how to be the emperor, away from learning how to be an adult person. All of which to say, what happened during his reign isn’t entirely his own fault, he’d been kind of set up to fail in a lot of ways.
But at the beginning, everybody in Rome was really excited for Caligula to take over because no one had ever really liked Tiberius because he was not a very good emperor what with the, like, running away and hiding all the time. Caligula was still the son of Germanicus, he was the son of Agrippina the Elder, he was the son from this beloved family that they had had all these parades for. So, everyone was excited to have just, like, a young emperor. Tiberius had been 77 when he died so just, like, this new, young energy from this beloved royal family. So, Rome was super excited, they welcomed him and his three sisters back to Rome basically and everyone thought everything kind of seemed pretty great. But Caligula, even though he hadn’t been raised being groomed to be the emperor or know how to be a politician et cetera, he knew from just growing up in this situation that people could take away your power at any moment and he needed to, sort of, find reasons for people to keep believing in him and for people to not turn on him.
So, knowing how popular his parents were, and his family was, he sort of elevated his three sisters to be like, “Look it’s me and my three sisters! You loved our parents. We’re these young, cool people!” So, Caligula, Agrippina, Drusilla, and Livilla were sort of a reminder of their father who everybody had loved but also of their ancestors Emperor Augustus and even Julius Caesar. So, they were just kind of like, “See, we have this bloodline. Look at us, we’re this family, you love us.” Caligula had not married at this point, he didn’t have his own children so basically, he needed his sisters there with him to present himself as, like, a family man sort of person.
So, he granted his three sisters the same rights as the Vestal Virgins. The Vestal Virgins is a whole other thing I don’t entirely have the ability to explain to you right now, but basically, they were women with they’re the most rights of everybody in Rome, they had rights that other women didn’t have. They were able to make independent decisions about their lives without requiring the permission of a male relative, their bodies were seen as sacred, touching them was punishable with death. So, Caligula gave those same rights to his three sisters. Basically, no Roman women in history, including the wives and mothers of previous emperors, had this amount of autonomy or power. His three sisters were just, like, elevated to this extent that had no precedent, basically. Every day at the start of Senate, or whenever somebody was introducing a new bill or whatever into Senate the men did sort of like the Pledge of Allegiance where they say like, “I promise to honour the Emperor and also I think we should raise minimum wage,” or whatever. So, Caligula changed the wording of this so that every time people said that they had to say, “I promise to honour the emperor and his three beloved sisters.” So, the three sisters, they weren’t present in Senate because women couldn’t be there but they were seen as almost, basically equally as important as the emperor.
Caligula had coins made, there’s a lot of like big moves made vis-à-vis coins in the story. So, he had coins made with his face and name on one side which was, like, the normal thing. Usually on the other side was a picture of, like, a god who the emperor wanted to be like, or a picture of him, like, an action shot or something. But he put on the other side of the coin, his three sisters posing like goddesses. This was the first time that living Roman women had ever been put on coins. Dead Roman women had been, like, peoples’ beloved dead mothers and things. This is the first visual proof that Agrippina herself was a person. So, she was a little, tiny image on the back of a coin shared with her with her siblings.
This is a podcast about Agrippina, not a podcast about Caligula. Perhaps he would be a good topic for a future episode of my Patreon-only spin-off podcast So This Asshole to get into all the messy stuff that he did. But basically, a bunch of stuff happened really quickly and we’re just kind of looking at how it affected Agrippina, basically. So, towards the end of Caligula’s first year as emperor, several important things happened. Firstly, he fell ill of something and retreated from public life for several months. Everybody was really worried he might die, he did not, but he had to retreat for a bit.
Agrippina gave birth to her first child around this time it was a son with red hair who she named basically the same name as her husband, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. A few attempts were made while Caligula was recuperating during his illness, other people tried to take over, and at this point, Caligula began his ongoing habit of murdering people who he thought were trying to take over from him. So, it’s sort of like the PR was flipping. At first, it’s like “Yay! This young man, we love him! We love his sisters because their parents were great. This is awesome.” But then it started to seem like “Oh, this Caligula guy is maybe not quite as awesome as we had thought,” but also people at this point were like “We want to usurp him and have somebody else take over instead.” So, how can they ruin his name? Rumours of incest.
So, rumours started to just spread around the Caligula and was having sex with his sisters and he didn’t help calm these rumours down by behaving increasingly erratically and losing his shit an awful lot. So, he did stuff like smashing pottery, replacing governors of important colonies randomly with random people, running away (like Tiberius) to just, like, meditate by himself on an island, stop shaving his beard, and basically murdering anyone who looked at him funny. So, he became a little bit of a tyrant, tyrant-type issue happening. And for reasons we don’t know — because unfortunately, the records we have that mention Agrippina don’t mention this detail — in the year 39, Caligula exiled his sister Agrippina for conspiring against him along with her other sister Livilla. Note that the third sister Drusilla had died one year before this happened which might be part of what caused Caligula’s psychological breakdown. Anyway, so there’s two sisters left, Agrippina and Livilla, and Caligula just exiled them both because he thought they were scheming against him.
This is a whole complicated thing we don’t need to get into to understand the effect on Agrippina’s life. But basically, the plot was that Agrippina, her sister, and her sister’s husband were… Well, firstly, Caligula was like, “They’re all having sex with each other. Incest!” Also, he accused that they were trying to raise an army to try and remove him from power and at this point, it’s like, who could blame them if they were trying to do that? He was not doing the best of jobs.
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At this point, also Caligula had his own son which, maybe Agrippina was a bit jealous or nervous about that because she had her own son and she really wanted her son to become the next emperor but Caligula’s son would maybe become emperor instead. So, some tension between the two of them. Also, Agrippina was really smart and knew what she was doing; Caligula did not know what he was doing.
So, Agrippina at this point is age 24 and she was sent in exile but it’s not like “Oh no, living in a little prison tent or whatever,” she was living in a luxury villa on the island of Ponza. She had a household of slaves a personal bodyguard and just kind of had a year to, I mean, it would have upset her, obviously, to be away from Rome, unable to scheme, unable to know what people were saying about her, knowing that at any second her brother could change his mind and kill her. But also, she had some time to just, like, make some plans and practice her swimming and I’m not joking because we learned later she was a really good swimmer so I think she’s probably practicing her swimming.
But then in the year 41, so I think she was there for about a year or so, Caligula was assassinated. It seems like that’s how most people stop being emperor, in my limited research at this point. Anyway, Caligula died of murder and their uncle Claudius was named the new Roman emperor. So, Claudius was the brother of their father, Germanicus. So, he basically did a military coup and usurped power and then went back and was like, “Delete from the historical record the events of this past two days,” so that happened. It was kind of like “And one day Claudius was the emperor and Caligula was dead, that’s weird. Who knows what happened?” And what also seemed to happen a lot too is when a new person took over as emperor, especially in this violent sort of way they would undo what their predecessor had done to try and show, like, “Look. I’m different! I’m changing the way things are!” So, one of the first things Claudius did was he released Agrippina from exile and invited her to join him back in Rome. So, she came back to Rome, basically.
What happened next is that… So, she’s 25 years old, she is reunited with her son who hadn’t been in exile with her so I’m sure that was very upsetting for her. So, her son was 4 years old, she was 25. Oh, and her husband also died so she was also a widow as well. And just, quick side note about Claudius. He was 50 years old, had barely held any political positions before, he seemed to have had some sort of, like, quirky personality traits that the people in Rome didn’t much care for, and also might have had some physical disabilities. He apparently had a limp, he would, like, drool sometimes, maybe. So, people, if you watch I, Claudius (which again, it is a great and interesting way to learn all of these crazy rumours) everybody in I, Claudius assumed he was an idiot because he had a stutter and a limp but actually he was the smartest of them all. That’s in I, Claudius. In real life, I don’t know if he was actually secretly super smart but he was definitely underestimated and had some sort of physical things going on with his body that made people not respect him as much as others. But he was the emperor so fuck you, basically.
Claudius was really suspicious of everybody, which makes sense because he himself had just killed his nephew in a military coup and everyone his whole life was always killing each other. So, the only people he trusted were his own freed slaves, like, people who were former enslaved people who he had freed known as ‘freedmen,’ so he sort of elevated them to be his advisors, and his family members were other people he trusted. And then again, he had a new wife who he trusted which is like, oh god, okay. So, his new wife was a teenager named Messalina, and she had had a son named Britannicus who became the emperor’s… Everyone assumed that would be probably the next emperor after Claudius. Which again, Agrippina would be like, “Oh, I wanted my son to be the next emperor,” then Messalina had this son. Oh, and he was named Britannicus because Claudius was the one, he was the emperor at the time that Rome invaded Britain and started colonizing over there. So, the son’s name at first wasn’t Britannicus and was changed to Britannicus sort of like Agrippina’s father’s name was changed to Germanicus after he conquered some areas over there.
Oh, and then also, Claudius, pretty shortly after taking over, executed Agrippina’s only remaining sibling, her sister Livilla, for the usual random reasons basically scheming, potential adultery, who knows at this point? But basically Agrippina, age 26, the only surviving member of her entire family, basically. Both of her parents were dead, all of her brothers were dead, both of her sisters were dead, and she was still alive. I don’t think that’s an accident because she just really knew her shit and she knew what she was doing. So, she took a new husband after she came back to Rome and her new husband had an even longer name than the first husband, he has four names, Gaius Sallustius Crispus Passienus. He was vaguely related to her because everybody is vaguely related to everybody else, it’s sort of like the Kardashian, Jenners, Hadid whole thing, Fosters, in a way.
Anyway, so her new husband will call him Crispus, I’m just choosing one of his four names that’s easiest for me to pronounce. So, he was her former brother-in-law meaning he had been previously married to Agrippina’s first husband’s sister, which I think makes him the least actually related to her out of all of her husbands, spoiler. He sounds like a total upgrade personality-wise from her first husband in the sense of, he was a pretty straight-up guy, he’s known for making jokes, getting along with everybody. The fact that no one had murdered him to this point spoke well of him as a person. He’s not known for ripping out the eyes of people who look at him funny. But he was a step down for Agrippina in the sense of he was not as important as her first husband and he was also friends with Claudius. So, the whole thing was kind of, like, the emperor just giving his friend a gift, which was marriage to his niece. But also, it was sort of like Claudius wanted to use some of Agrippina’s still leftover rockstar popularity. Her whole family had been murdered/killed themselves/the family was still so beloved, and I think that was a lot of what was keeping Agrippina from being murdered at this point. So, Claudius just wanted to hitch himself close to her star but also, he didn’t want her to get too powerful because she could maybe usurp him and maybe her son would take over. Everyone is just suspicious of everybody else for great reasons, murder reasons.
So, Claudius literally got Agrippina out of his way by sending her and her husband off to Asia where they lived for a year while Crispus served as the governor. They returned to Rome and a couple of very suspicious things happened such as, Passienus, sorry Crispus, her husband, wrote a new will that made Agrippina the sole beneficiary of his estate and then he suddenly died. If this was an episode of Murder, She Wrote we’d all be like, eugh! Okay, you change your will to leave it all to your wife and then you die? She probably killed him, I mean, right? Right? But basically, Crispus got a super public funeral, another triumph march et cetera. Agrippina got to be in yet another parade this time but now she’s 28 which is just, like, so young! Quite an eventful life. She’s a double widow, she’s a single mother, she’s the only living descendant of Julius Caesar and Augustus and everybody still just fucking loves her, basically.
Five years pass so there’s rumours that she killed her husband so she could marry someone else but she didn’t marry someone else so that’s where it’s like, did she kill her husband? Unclear. She’s going to maybe kill some other people, so this is where people are tracking back and maybe trying to see where she started practicing murders. But anyway five years pass. During this time, she was maybe hanging out, like, in one of the other villas that she had inherited from her rich, dead husband, maybe practicing her swimming some more. But basically, during these five years Claudius’s wife, Messalina, went from being a teenager to being 20 and she sort of took over as the number one most talked about Roman woman. I can’t avoid talking about Messalina because this affects Agrippina but also it’s just like, oh my god.
So, Messalina was the third wife of Claudius. She was 18 when she married him when he was 50 when he was the emperor. She was also, in some random way, descended from Augustus et cetera which made her a good wife for Claudius because she was more directly descended from them and the whole thing was everybody— Like, you were more beloved the more directly descended you were from Augustus, basically. So, they had a daughter named Octavia, they had their son Britannicus. There hadn’t been… Messalina and Agrippina feuded a lot, I think largely because they both really wanted their own sons to become the emperor next, but also they are just, like, both really opinionated, strong-minded women. They’re both really ruthless, there was a lot of scheming. \
Similar to Agrippina, a lot of stuff written about, almost everything written about Messalina, actually was written after her death and it was sort of defamatory because people saw what happened to her, but also because she had a lot of enemies. So, there’s a lot of sexy scandals about her like that she lived in a whorehouse and, like, was a sex worker, and challenged another sex worker to a contest to see who could have sex with the most men in a row and, like, lots of stuff is included in I, Claudius, the miniseries, if you want to watch that. How much of it is true? I don’t know but the weirdest story about her is the one that is true, which is basically she had a lover who was not her much older husband, and when Claudius was out of town, Messalina decided to marry her lover in a public ceremony. So, it’s not even, like, a secret, sexy marriage, everyone knew about it. Claudius obviously found out about it and had her executed along with eight men suspected of helping her out and, like, why… In the biography of Agrippina, the one by Emma Southon, she sort of theorizes it’s almost like a slow-motion suicide, like, Messalina would have known that this wasn’t going to turn out so what was she doing? I don’t know. But Claudius had her name erased from all historical records and monuments like she’d never existed, sort of like how when he took over in a military coup, he had all records of those two days deleted. Claudius was just all about erasing public record.
Anyway, less than three months later, Claudius took a new wife who was Agrippina who is, yes, his niece. So, that’s what happened. Despite the fact that people in here were marrying their, like, second cousin once removed or, like, someone who they share a great-great-grandmother with, like, for an uncle to marry a niece was basically as fucked up in Ancient Rome as it would be if someone did that now. Everyone thought it was weird, inappropriate, and gross because remember, this is a culture where when you really wanted to say something bad about somebody else you would accuse them of incest. Incest was, like, the worst thing you could accuse somebody of, and this was incest. So, if we set aside the fact that they’re related, let’s just look at like, how does this make sense as a match?
So, Claudius age 59, Agrippina is what? Like 32, I think. So, she was she was a descendant of Augustus which is always a benefit Claudius wanted to ally himself with that family as much as possible. She was also still very popular because of her super-popular parents and everybody remembered that. Her son was also more directly descended from Augustus than Claudius’s son was, so he would… maybe that could be a selling point as well. She’s also rich and smart, very capable and clearly a really cool person. What was in it for her was that, well, she’d be the wife of the emperor which basically elevates her to as much power as she could possibly get. She’d always grown up with a sense that she was better than everyone and destined for great things and this might have seemed like basically her best chance to seize on to that and get the power that she felt like she deserved for who she was. It would also, she would assume, cement the future for her son and she had always been, sort of like Margaret Beaufort was in the Tudor era, just like, she was all about clearing the way so her son could have as much power as possible. Also, Claudius was older than her so she might think, you know, “I’ll be married to him for a bit but then eventually I’ll hopefully be the emperor’s mother,” which was also still a pretty powerful position, or it could be, it had been for other people before her.
So, basically, it wasn’t legal, it was illegal for an uncle and a niece to get married because incest reasons, but Claudius sort of manipulated the Senate to change the law to allow this weird, gross marriage to happen. He did it in such a way that it almost seems like the Senate ended up being like “Please Claudius, won’t you marry her?” And it was… Whatever. They got married on January 1st in the year 49 but even though the law had been changed, everyone… Like, I just want to emphasize, it wasn’t like with the Cleopatra story where it’s just, like, brothers and sisters got married, whatever, that’s just what happened. Like, in Rome, this is really fucking weird. Claudius’s former best friend, Silanus, killed himself the day of the wedding to sort of make a point that this was, like, a really fucking gross thing to do.
But get married they did and then three things happened quite quickly which were that Claudius formerly adopted Agrippina’s son, changed his name to Nero, and married Nero off to Claudius’s daughter Octavia. So, it was like a double marriage; the two parents got married and then their kids got married to each other and it’s just the big old incest bath bomb, I don’t know. Agrippina demanded that a man named Seneca, who is a famous sort of philosopher person, who had been exiled by Caligula, Agrippina demanded that he be returned to be Nero’s new tutor because he was, like, the smartest person and she wasn’t the best tutor for her son. And a woman named Lollia Paulina was accused of witchcraft, sent into exile, and died. This part, I’m going to explain a bit, why does that matter?
So, Lollia Paulina was a woman who had been briefly married to Caligula, he had several wives. He kept getting bored of them and getting new wives. When Claudius was looking for a new wife after the whole Messalina scenario, Lollia Paulina had been suggested as maybe a possible woman that he could marry. But he, of course, married his niece instead. And this is again where it’s, like, allegedly, did Agrippina conspire to kill Lollia Paulina to remove her as a rival for her uncle/husband? Maybe? Basically. But this is sort of another rumoured person that perhaps Agrippina was responsible for killing.
Anyway, after one year of marriage, Claudius had Agrippina, he gave her the title Augusta. So, remember Octavian became Augustus? So, Augusta was a title that kind of meant not quite empress, but basically a huge honour. Agrippina was only the third woman in history to be given this title and it was the first time that the title was given to the living wife of the current emperor. This title had been previously given to the mother of the emperor and a dead mother of another emperor, I think. Basically, this title meant that she was more or less unequal standing with Claudius the emperor. No woman in Western history had ever had this much power before in terms of, like, her role in the empire and how big the empire was.
She also didn’t just… She was involved in things. She was an active figure who sat beside her husband during business meetings. She helped run things, she wasn’t just decorative, like, she was actually in there getting shit done. For instance, in the year 50, she founded a new Roman colony, in the place near where she had been born in Germany. The colony was originally called Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium, which is a long name and so people started calling it Colonia Agrippinensium then later just Colonia, and now it’s called Cologne, and it’s still a city in Germany. So, she was the patron of this colony, and it was a place where, like, retired military people would go to live. She, you know, paid money to improve things there, install, you know, the roman famous sewage systems et cetera. The Romans lived, apparently, pretty multicultural with the indigenous Ubii people who were in the area already, and it was a successful little colony.
And then, more coin-related news, she was placed in a coin opposite her husband in the year 50. So, when she had been in the coin with Caligula on one side, it was her and her sisters on the other side. But this time, it was her and Claudius, it was kind of, like, the two faces both facing the same way; his face was in front and hers was behind but she was on the front of a coin. So, it’s the first time ever a woman had been on a coin like that. She also commissioned statues made in her likeness that were wearing a diadem which is a specific kind of crown/tiara that no living Roman woman had ever been shown to wear in a piece of art. So, she was just, like, ensuring that artistically, culturally, like, in every possible level, people were reminded all the time that she was really fucking important. So, the next three years continued, more of the same, until Caligula died in the year 54, and an awful lot of people suspected that Agrippina had murdered him. Why was that?
So, partially it’s sort of the Messalina thing again where she had enemies and so the enemies liked to spread rumours about her that weren’t true, that made her look bad because they wanted her to have less power, especially her, Agrippina. She had so much power, so much power. No woman had ever had this much power before it really bothered a lot of men so she had a lot of enemies. So, they were spreading rumours about stuff like Agrippina was too masculine, that she was having sex with lots of men, she was a whore, she was scheming too much, she wanted to destroy the Roman Empire et cetera, et cetera, basically. But also, a lot of people were murdering a lot of people, so anytime somebody died, like, if the emperor died it’s sort of like, if your first guess is he was murdered, you’re probably right, basically, looking at statistically.
So, Claudius was 63 years old when he died, and he had been sick, he had various medical conditions, seemingly. But also, it sounds like… So, there’s a woman called Locusta who was a poisoner. She had been in jail, she was a convicted poisoner. Side note on Locusta, she was apparently a woman who was born in present-day France, was a peasant, she became a master botanist and herbalist and quickly deduced that Rome, with all the nefarious deeds being carried out by the aristocracy, was the place to make her fortune as a master poisoner. So, she became so well known for her skill that she was identified as just Locusta the Poisoner. She was arrested twice for poisoning people but she was arrested a third time and Agrippina actually is the one who released her. Agrippina said, like, “I’ll release you but you need to also do me a favour and that favour is you need to help me poison my husband/uncle/the emperor to death.”
So, the problem is that they wanted to poison him to death, Claudius really liked mushrooms, but he had a food taster, obviously, because everybody was trying to kill everybody all the time. So, what they did was Locusta made sure that the personal assistant, the food taster, was busy that day, Agrippina would distract Claudius with lots of wine so he wouldn’t let us that his food taster was not there, and then they served mushrooms which were his most favourite thing to eat. Basically, he started having physical symptoms of poisoning. Allegedly, a doctor was summoned to help out the emperor, to save him, but Locusta… And what they were doing was in a time before, what’s it called? Ipecac? So, they stuck a feather down his throat to make him throw up, but Locusta had already put poison on the feather, and he died and that’s an amazing story. He also could have died of natural causes, who knows? There’s another version of this event that Claudius ate the mushrooms and felt sick so then Agrippina offered him some porridge to try and settle his stomach but there was poison in the porridge as well. One way or another, the emperor had died, and no one could find his will. Again, it’s like an Agrippina-related story where it’s like “What? No one can find the will? That’s not suspicious at all.” But she was like “Don’t worry, he told me what he wants and he wants Nero to become the next emperor instead of Britannicus,” and everyone was like “Okay.” So, she was now three times a widow and now the mother of the emperor and the emperor was Nero.
So, where things get complicated here is that basically, she was amazing, she got everything she ever wanted but the problem is that her son was really shitty. So, it’s very much like Cersei and Joffrey in Game of Thrones in the sense of, like, Agrippina was so smart, so clever that she would have been an amazing emperor on her own but it was a society in which that was not possible. So, instead, she has to sit and watch her son be an asshole and ruin everything, basically.
So, Nero, age 16 was the new emperor and unlike Caligula or even Claudius he’d actually been taught how to do this from a very young age having grown up in Rome, being taught what to do, he had alliances with, like, army people and other people. So, he’s in a pretty good position but the problem is that he actually wanted to be an actor/singer and not emperor. So, personality-wise it was not a great fit. And for the first little while, Agrippina was sort of unofficially, like, his regent. He was 16, you know, he had his toga, he was a man. But she had done a really good job of sort of running things with Claudius. If you look at Claudius’s reign actually, on almost everything you can measure, things just got better once he married Agrippina. So, it seems like she was able to kind of jump in and just handle the books better, her help was really helpful. So, I think she thought she could kind of do the same stuff for Nero who was still just a little kid. For the first little while, they were always together; when he made an appearance somewhere, she’d be with him, just like she’d been with Claudius. So, she also suggested that she be allowed to attend Senate meetings which, not, like, in person, “That’s crazy, she’s a woman!” but she asked, like, if she could stand behind a curtain and listen in on the Senate meetings which was more than any woman had been able to do before. Before this, what she had to do was rely on secondhand information about who had said what, and what went on, but now she could actually like listen in.
And then there was more coin drama. She had some new coins commissioned. She’d shared the one with Claudius where they’re both facing the same way but his face was on top. The new coins that she had done were her and Nero on the front of the coin facing each other, so both of their faces were there in full. So, again, she just kept breaking new ground for, like, women having power. It was all — and I don’t mean this in, like, “She should have done more!” —but it was all very self-serving, like, she wanted herself to have this power. She wasn’t like, “I want to make it so the women who follow me will also have all these advantages.” That wasn’t her deal at all. She wasn’t climbing up a ladder and then helping other women up the ladder. She was just like, “Me. I want this power for me.” And unfortunately, as what turned out is that a lot of the power that she had was based on, like, understandings and people assuming things, not actually having laws written or changed for her, which meant, spoiler, when it all started to come undone, she didn’t have any ground to stand on because it was all just kind of like through her force of will and personality she made some stuff change but like the laws didn’t actually change.
So, she had set herself up as kind of like, she was a wife and a mother, but she never ever presented herself like her mother had been or like Livia had been who was just kind of like “I’m this good Roman woman who just stays at home and loves being a wife and mother, and I’m like secretly scheming in the background.” She was, like, scheming out loud in front of everybody. She presented herself as, kind of like, not traditionally feminine. She didn’t present herself as a man but also not as a woman, she was just kind of like “I am basically a goddess,” and people acted like she was until one day she started being treated like a woman and everything started to fall apart.
So, the first major blow was she went in to join Nero in a meeting with some foreign delegations and she went to sit next to him, which was, like, even a bold move for her. Usually, she should have sat, like, behind Claudius but she went to sit right next to Nero and Nero basically stopped her and made her and walked her over to a different seat further away from him. So, that was, like, humiliating her in front of this foreign delegation and everybody else. It was, through body language, a major statement about her loss of power. Nero fell in love with a woman named Acte and Agrippina wasn’t a fan of the relationship and they had a big fight about it. Nero, as sort of a fuck you to her, sent her a gift of some jewels and a new dress which was kind of like his way of saying “Hey, you’re just a woman. Here are some woman things, mind your own business.” Especially because Agrippina wasn’t a person who was ever interested in, like, dresses or jewels or being flashy or luxury things. So, apparently, in response, she said something like “I gave him the empire and he gave me a dress,” which is like, augh! Put that on a poster. Sons suck. I mean, sometimes sons suck.
So, Nero brought in Locusta again to help him murder his stepbrother/cousin, Britannicus, who was the son of Claudius because Nero saw Britannicus as a threat, as somebody who could maybe become emperor instead of him, which is like, it’s sort of a shitty thing Nero did but also, everyone was killing everyone, it’s not that different. But basically, he was just clearing the way for himself to have ultimate power and part of that was he expelled Agrippina from the palace he made her go live elsewhere. So, they were just sort of back and forth fighting about a bunch of random things and one day Agrippina basically went in, forced her way in to talk to Nero, and we don’t know what happened in this, like, closed-door meeting but at the end of this they clearly reached some sort of understanding. Based on how stable the government went after this it seems like the agreement might have been Agrippina will just, like, secretly run things behind the scenes but she won’t make public appearances or let anyone know that she’s doing that.
The next sort of four years were okay for her. Nero put on plays, made everybody listen to him sing, made everybody clap for him, and was just sort of, like, little, baby Caligula tyrant-type person. Nero fell in love with a woman named Poppaea Sabina who has her own interesting story we can talk about another day. Basically, at around the same time he got involved with her, Nero decided it was time to murder his mother. So, some of the rumours are that Poppaea was jealous of Agrippina because of, like, incest reasons but also, maybe she just kind of saw how smart Agrippina was, or maybe Poppaea didn’t give a shit, we don’t know. But basically, Nero started hanging out with this woman named Poppaea, and around the same time, he decided to try and kill his mother.
So, a couple things. Agrippina was friends with Locusta and knew about poisons herself and so just like that guy in Princess Bride, it turns out she had been secretly dosing herself with small amounts of poison for a really long time just to make herself, like, immune to all of them. So, apparently, Nero tried to poison her but it didn’t work because she was immune to all poisons which is just kind of like, love that for her. Nero knew that he couldn’t just send in the army to stab her because she was still, still so popular as the daughter of Germanicus, and Germanicus had been this great army leader, so the army might not listen to those orders and do that. So, Nero who was also just, like, huge drama queen, literally, drama queen, he had seen a play that had a prop boat with a false floor in it and he was like “What if we build an actual version of that boat with a, like, trap door in it, get Agrippina on the boat, and then she like drowns because the boat trap door opens when she’s like in open water,” which is a ridiculous plan but it’s in every source and so it seems to be that this is what he wanted to do.
So, he invited his mother to come and visit him at a villa where he had to take a boat to get to Agrippina was like “I see what you’re up to” and she refused to take his offer of a boat, instead took her own boat up to meet him and they dinner together and somehow Nero I guess using his, like, acting skills, pretended like he didn’t want to kill her, to the point that at the end of the dinner she agreed to take his special boat back home. As per the plan, part of the boat collapsed when they were in the middle of the water and the ship started to sink but this is where Agrippina being a great swimmer paid off and she was able to swim back to shore, basically. She arrived back at the villa people applauded because they were like “Oh my god, Agrippina! Our beloved Agrippina almost died but she didn’t. Look at her, she’s an amazing swimmer, we love her so much, the daughter of Germanicus.”
So, she had a messenger send a message back to Nero saying that she was still alive. Did she know that he had tried to kill her? I mean, probably, at this point. So, the note was just basically, like, “Guess what? Foiled you again.” People were just, like, weeping and praying all around her house, again, the only comparison I can think of from contemporary anything is, like, Princess Diana’s death. People were just so grateful that she hadn’t died. But what happened is that later that night when she was in bed, soldiers came marching up um and they had, sort of, fake charges from Nero. So, Nero claimed Agrippina had tried to kill him and the soldiers came in to murder her basically. She tried to talk them out of it but they were having none of that and basically, her final act is that she flung open her robe to reveal her womb saying, like, “Stab me here like if you’re really from my son,” and then they did, and then she died, age 44.
So, Agrippina, she achieved more individual power than any Roman woman before her and no other Roman woman would for basically another hundred years when the third-century Syrian matriarchy came along. These were three Roman noblewomen who were pretty awesome people themselves they were called Julia Domna, Julia Soaemias, and Julia Mamaea and they wound up getting similar levels of power. But basically, Agrippina was kind of it for a while shortly after she died. And that’s the story of Agrippina.
So again, I just want to shout out my main source of information about this. The reason I even started learning about Agrippina was because I read this biography which is amazing. It’s the biography of Agrippina by Emma Southon which I recommend heartily. You can read it as a book, you can also read it on Audible.com which is my little sponsor. So, if you go to AudibleTrial.com/VulgarHistory, you can get your free trial and maybe your free trial could be reading Emma Southon’s biography of Agrippina which I read as an audiobook and which is really fun to read in that way. I actually read it as an audiobook/as a book book, I was kind of bouncing back and forth it’s really, really good.
And now it is time for us to score her. So, there are four metrics that we score people on for Vulgar History and the first is Scandaliciousness. So, there are a number of things here for scandal for Agrippina. We’ve got just the whole family situation, that’s not her specifically but she’s growing up in this wild family situation. We’ve got the marrying her uncle. We’ve got the maybe poisoning her husband to death. We’ve got the maybe poisoning her uncle/husband to death. We’ve got the maybe killing of other people, like, the viciousness of her scandals I think is quite high. I’m going to give her I think a 9.
The next category is Scheminess and this is like flat out 10. Like, she schemed behind the scenes then when she got more power she was scheming out in public by, like, making things like the new rules so she could hide behind the curtain and listen in to the Senate. She was, I feel like even in her sleep she was scheming just, like, so much, so much scheming.
The next measure is Significance and this is tricky because she was very significant in her time. She herself didn’t really pave the way for other people, so she didn’t really in that sense. But also, in terms of the significance of her, basically, she’s the reason why Nero became the emperor. He wasn’t a good emperor. In fact, I believe he was the last emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, but the fact that she was basically instrumental in making her son be emperor is pretty significant. This is tricky. I think I’m going to give her… Mmm, I feel like a 6. 6 for Significance.
The final category is Sexism, this is the bonus, basically. How much more could she have achieved if she was a man? Like, how much did her gender affect what she did in life, and I mean in every conceivable way, really. She would have been a great emperor if a woman could be an emperor but she couldn’t be an emperor but she kind of didn’t let that stop her but then it kind of did her in at the end. It’s tricky for her with the sexism. She achieved a lot in spite of sexism so it’s not like sexism held her back. Oh, it’s tricky. I’m going to give her a 6 for Sexism.
So, that’s 31. That is… Agrippina takes the lead. I mean, not that it’s a contest but just in terms of, like, who scores the highest on these four metrics, she’s the first over 31. So, last week we did Cleopatra, she was 28. From Season One, Elizabeth Báthory was 29, but Agrippina, 31. Kind of proud of her. So, that’s Agrippina the Younger, my god.
Okay. So, just a couple of things to say to wrap things up. So again, if you want to support the show and also listen to a cool book, if you go to AudibleTrial.com/VulgarHistory, sign up for a trial with Audible and some of that helps support us financially a little bit. And Emma Southon’s biography of Agrippina is a book that I think would be a great choice to listen to.
You can also, if you want to just straight-up support me, and this podcast, and the other writing I’m doing, Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. You can find us on Instagram @VulgarHistoryPod, Twitter @VulgarHistory. And thank you so much for listening in. Oh, and I mentioned it before, but I’ll mention it again. So, if you do go on the Patreon, I do have a spinoff podcast there that’s Patreon-only, So This Asshole, which is where I look at the stories of some of the men who happen to be involved in the lives of the women that we talk about on Vulgar History. As of the time of this recording, there are two episodes up there, and I think more, I feel like Caligula and possibly Nero also, maybe even Claudius, like, they could each have their own little episode of that as well. But anyway, thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you all next time.
Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Ann Foster, that’s me! The editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. The Vulgar History show image is by Deborah Wong. Transcripts are written by Aveline Malek. Find transcripts of recent episodes at VulgarHistory.com.
References:
Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World by Emma Southon
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