Emma Southon - Agrippina

AGRIPPINA

THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY WOMAN
OF THE ROMAN WORLD

EMMA SOUTHON

PEGASUS BOOKS

NEW YORK LONDON

A GRIPPINA

Pegasus Books Ltd.
148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2019 by Emma Southon

First Pegasus Books hardcover edition August 2019

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

ISBN: 978-1-64313-078-1

ISBN: 978-1-64313-182-5 (eBook)

Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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Contents

This is the story of an extraordinary woman. She is extraordinary because she saw the limits placed upon her by her world as a result of her gender and simply decided that they didnt apply to her. She saw clearly the spaces where women could not go, stormed into them anyway and was murdered as a result. This is the story of an empress, who was the sister, niece, wife and mother of emperors. It has incest and murder, wars and conquest, plots and prayers. It has a little of everything a good story should have because it is, importantly, a story.

Agrippina the Younger was born Julia Agrippina and lived from November 15CE to March 59CE. Her life spanned, and was intimately bound up in, the reigns of four of the first five Roman emperors Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero known as the Julio-Claudians. Which all sounds great for source material on her; after all, the Julio-Claudians appear to be pretty well covered in sources. Theyre the emperors everyone can name. Except that well covered in Roman terms generally just means more than one fragmentary source, and Agrippina is a woman in a world where women are considered to be staggeringly uninteresting, if not totally irrelevant. As a result, we have just three major literary sources that mention Agrippina with any detail, and a total of seven literary sources from the entire corpus of Latin literature that think she was interesting or significant enough to deserve a single line; one of which is a play.

The three big sources, with which you will become familiar over the course of the book, are Tacituss Annals, which is doomed to be defaced by sniggering Latin students for the rest of time, written around 116CE; Suetoniuss biographies of the emperors from Julius Caesar to Domitian, collectively known as The Twelve Caesars, from just a little later, about 121CE; and Cassius Dios Greek language, but culturally Roman, Roman History, from about 230CE. Conveniently, each of these slips into a different genre of Roman literature, but each has its own glaring, crippling problems when it comes to reconstructing the life of Agrippina. As you will have noticed for a start, each is published between 50 and 180 years after Agrippina died. Reading Tacitus therefore is, to us, essentially the same as reading a recently published history of the Second World War, while reading Dio is like reading a new history of the Georgians: they may be excellent but they are describing different times. Secondly, two of the sources are incomplete. Tacitus is a great read but was not very popular in his time so he survives in just two fragmentary manuscripts, the fragments of which do not overlap, so there are some big chunks missing, including the whole of Caligulas reign. This is a loss I shall never get over. The relevant books of Dio, on the other hand, are lost entirely and all that we have left are epitomes made by the much later writers Zonoaras and Xiphilinus, who cut down, paraphrased and supplemented Dios words for their own purposes. These are, in essence, fragments of Dios work and they are more fragmentary and confused than they appear when bound in a pretty translation. This leaves just Suetoniuss biographies, which would be fine if they were biographies of Agrippina; but theyre not. They are the biographies of the men that Agrippina was attached to. Suetonius is interested only in the motivations and actions of the subjects of his biographies and so the women in their lives, like our Agrippina, slip silently into the background to be brought out only when her presence could tell the reader something interesting about the more important man.

Trying to pry a Roman person, let alone a Roman woman, out of these fragmented, scattered sources is hard enough but, on top of the holes, the bits we do have are moralising in the extreme. Virtually the first thing that Tacitus tells us in his Annals is that he will write without malice or partisanship, a sweet promise this his history is merely the dispassionate recitation of objective facts. At the same time, though, he also tells us that he picks and chooses what to tell us about any given year because he believes that the historian has a duty to tell history that is moral and instructive: a historian should actively praise good behaviour and condemn wickedness. In the same sentence he tells us that the Julio-Claudian period of which he writes was a tainted and wicked age, which, although I strongly suspect that he did indeed believe this was a dispassionate and objective fact, is an opinion. Of course, the reader of Tacitus will have noticed that hes For the general reader, this is all the better as Tacitus is hilariously catty and tells a brilliant anecdote, as we shall see. For the historian or biographer, though, it is a pissing nightmare, because it means that every fact that Tacitus gives us is twisted and manipulated and carefully presented to tell a story that fits his overall narrative of moral decline and Roman degradation. And quite often, Tacituss narrative includes mind reading to make his story work. Within that narrative, Agrippina looms large as a symbol of everything that is wrong with the imperial system.