The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (26 page)

With only a few blurry reproductions of her profile available from provincial coins, the only clue otherwise left as to Messalina’s physical appearance is the record of her black hair disappearing under her blonde wig in Juvenal’s satirical poem about her nocturnal exploits. Graves’s novel
I, Claudius
appropriates the detail in his description of Messalina as ‘an extremely beautiful girl, slim and quick moving, with eyes as black as jet and masses of curly black hair’.
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Unlike her Julio-Claudian predecessors Livia, Antonia and the elder Agrippina, no relatives came to Messalina’s posthumous rescue with pledges, restoring her good name, producing new statues of her, or giving her a dignified burial. Instead, her obituary was written solely by the literary stalwarts of later dynasties who earned their stripes by lambasting
the Julio-Claudian regimes of Claudius and his successor Nero, in infelicitous contrast to the rulers of their own day.

Not all ancient accounts of Messalina’s downfall were completely unsympathetic. No more than twenty years after her demise, an anonymously authored tragedy called the
Octavia
, which focused on the outcome of the ill-fated marriage between Nero and Messalina’s daughter Claudia Octavia, described its eponymous heroine blaming Venus, the goddess of love, for her mother’s mad conduct in marrying Silius, and for stirring Claudius to a fury that resulted in the murder of his ‘unhappy’ wife: ‘by her death she engulfed me in everlasting grief ’.
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Another contemporary work, the
Apocolocyntosis
, or ‘Pumpkinification’ – a satirical sketch which may have been circulated at the court of his successor and which imagined the scene of the buffoonish Claudius arriving amongst the gods seeking to have his deification ratified – reserves its vitriol not for Messalina but for the emperor, lampooning his forgetfulness on the subject of whether or not he had killed his young wife.
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This perspective of Messalina as more hapless victim than villain has percolated through to some modern reimaginings of her, such as an 1876 play
Messalina
by Italian dramatist Pietro Cossa, which portrays its female protagonist as a vulgar vamp yet one who was also motivated by devotion to her son and who was tragically betrayed by the man she was foolish enough to fall in love with.
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These versions nonetheless all have one thing in common – they conceive of Messalina’s promiscuity as central to her downfall. The picture of Claudius’s teenaged third wife as the girl who just could not get enough served a darker purpose than mere titillation. In the Roman moral imagination, any sexually promiscuous woman whose body was available to all comers represented at the very least a temporary failure of control on the part of her husband or father. But if she, like Messalina or Augustus’s daughter Julia before her, was also a member of the family who held the keys to the Roman Empire, the repercussions were even more serious. At stake was not just humiliation for her cuckolded husband, but the security of his regime, and of Rome itself. For if a man could not keep his own house in order, how could he ensure the inviolability of the empire whose political heart beat within that very household? This was a conundrum that would continue to obsess the Roman imperial establishment.

In the fallout from Messalina’s death, a conundrum of another kind now occupied the imperial household: who should succeed her as
Claudius’s wife? The question was settled, according to Tacitus, in a political beauty contest judged by a panel of Claudius’s freedmen, a comic charade that served to underscore the emperor’s impotency in the face of his own courtiers.
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Petitions were heard in support of various candidates, including Narcissus’s proposal of Claudius’s former wife Aelia Paetina and Callistus’s suggestion of Caligula’s wealthy ex-wife Lollia Paulina, but the choice eventually fell upon Pallas’s nomination of the thirty-two-year-old Agrippina Minor. Recently widowed by the death of Passienus Crispus, the daughter of the great Germanicus and the mother of Nero – who had recently been hailed with such enthusiasm by the audience at the Saecular Games – her credentials were impeccable, better even than Messalina’s, and she was endowed with wealth and beauty to boot. There was just one problem. Agrippina was Claudius’s niece, and Roman law clearly prohibited incestuous unions. Nevertheless, the marriage was seen as too good a chance to unify the family and the Senate was persuaded by Claudius’s fixer Vitellius to waive the restrictions forbidding a man to marry his brother’s child. On 1 January 48, less than three months after the death of Messalina, Agrippina became Claudius’s fourth wife.
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Given the legal manoeuvring that had been required to sanction the marriage and the fact that even as the wedding took place, the name and portrait of Claudius’s last wife were still being hastily scrubbed away from public view, careful thought went into the question of how to sell this new empress to the Roman public. As usual, coinage was the primary medium, and Agrippina became the latest imperial woman to set a new precedent here, with both hers and her husband’s head featured together on the same coin.
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Under her brother Caligula’s aegis, Agrippina’s coin images had been too small-scale to give any sense of her appearance but these new official issues allowed her profile to be seen in greater close-up. They showed a woman with the strong facial features that often characterised portraits of her Claudian relatives, including a slight overbite and heavy jaw, an orthodontic contour that might be connected with a rumour that she had an extra canine tooth on the right-hand side of her mouth, thought to be a sign of good luck.

Provincial mints in cities across the empire played along with the new mood, showing the newly married couple in ‘jugate’ or ‘joined’ pose, their overlapping profiles juxtaposed side by side. Claudius was wreathed in laurel as befitted the successful military ruler and Agrippina wore the corn-ear crown associated with the goddess of
fecundity and maternal love, Ceres. As attributes seen previously on portraits of Augustus and Livia, the message was forced home that here were the inheritors of that perfect imperial partnership.
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Other items donated by private patrons helped to reinforce the message of dynastic continuity and bountiful promise, seen to de luxe effect in a piece known as the Gemma Claudia, a sardonyx cameo about the size of an ostrich egg which is thought to have been a wedding gift to the couple. It shows the laurelled jugate heads of Claudius and Agrippina Minor facing mirror images of the bride’s parents Germanicus and Agrippina Maior. Each pair of busts billows out from the opposite ends of two fruit-laden cornucopias, while an eagle carved in between stares up at the new figureheads of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
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By giving Agrippina more honours than either his previous wife or any Roman woman before her had been afforded, Claudius and his acolytes had a clear strategy. They wanted to underline the idea that both this marriage and the regime were starting afresh – people’s memories of Messalina’s downfall could not be erased by
damnatio memoriae
alone. Yet elevating Agrippina in this way came with attendant risks. For in visual terms, it placed the emperor’s wife on a form approaching equality with the emperor. As in Livia’s case, the spectre of Agrippina sharing the spotlight with the ruling emperor was to become a particularly touchy subject over the next decade.

In providing a departure from the memory of Messalina at least, the strategy worked. From the very start, both supporters and enemies of Claudius’s regime could agree on one thing, namely that Agrippina was a fundamentally different character to Messalina. Where Messalina was savage, passionate and profligate, Agrippina was hard-headed, analytical and, like her great-grandmother Livia, self-disciplined. No sooner was her marriage to Claudius consecrated than the seeds of her longing to exercise political power on her own behalf began to germinate:

From this moment the country was transformed. Complete obedience was accorded to a woman – and not a woman like Messalina who toyed with national affairs to satisfy her appetites. This was a rigorous, almost masculine despotism. In public, Agrippina was austere and often arrogant. Her private life was chaste – unless power was to be gained. Her passion to acquire money was unbounded. She wanted it as a stepping-stone to supremacy.
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No one doubted that Agrippina was deeply ambitious for her adolescent son Nero from the start. Hers was the hand behind the recall from Corsica of her sister Julia Livilla’s exiled paramour Seneca, who was promptly given the prestigious rank of
praetor
and placed in charge of the young Nero’s education, a key role in the coaching set-up of any emperor-in-the-making and traditionally the appointment of the boy’s mother. On 25 February 50, Agrippina’s hopes were given a boost when Claudius adopted Nero as his own son and changed the boy’s name from Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus to the more Julio-Claudian denomination of Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus Caesar. This effectively put the emperor’s natural and adopted sons in head-to-head competition in the succession stakes and within three years of his mother’s marriage, Nero had been fast-tracked ahead of his younger rival, depicted alongside his mother on imperial coins while Britannicus remained completely invisible in the dynastic portraiture of his father’s principate. In 53, the marriage of fifteen-year-old Nero and the only other child of Claudius’s ill-fated union with Messalina, thirteen-year-old Claudia Octavia, made his coronation look inevitable.

As Nero’s star rose, so too did his mother’s. She was endowed with the usual seating privileges at the theatre, the right to ride in her own mule-drawn carriage and other distinctions that had by now become fairly commonplace for leading imperial women, but the
coup de grâce
was the conferral upon her in 50 of Livia’s old
cognomen Augusta
, the title that Claudius had vetoed for Messalina. Although Livia had been called
Augusta
after her husband’s death and Antonia had been awarded the title posthumously, no woman before Agrippina had received it while she was the consort of the reigning emperor, and, for good measure, the mother of the likely emperor-in-waiting. It marked the start of a sea-change in how the title of
Augusta
would be awarded in future. Instead of its just being the honorific privilege of mature women whose husbands were dead and whose childbearing years were behind them, regimes increasingly bestowed it on younger women of the imperial family, sometimes not even the wives of the ruling emperor but those who nonetheless might be able to provide the dynasty with future heirs. In addition, it sent out a clear message that Britannicus’s hopes of succeeding to the throne now were slim at best.
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That same year, all across the empire, the memory of her illustrious parents and the growing fame of her son earned Agrippina glowing endorsements from the provinces. A veterans’ colony for
retired soldiers was established in her name on the site of her birthplace in Germany and named Colonia Agrippinensis (now the city of Cologne). Its residents would henceforth call themselves
Agrippinenses
.
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Like her role model Livia, she had political and personal ties to a number of other provincial client-cities. Their subjects could appeal to her as a benefactor, and preserved inscriptions prove that she gave her financial backing to games in the Asian provinces of Adalia and Mytilene.
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Statues of her proliferated throughout the empire, portraying her with a strong facial likeness to her father Germanicus and with a curly hairstyle similar to her mother, though the younger Agrippina’s locks were crimped closer around her head. All in all, it was an auspicious beginning.
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Yet some of Agrippina Minor’s actions soon began to court controversy. In 51, at an audience to mark the public unveiling of a triumphal arch celebrating Claudius’s victory over the Britons eight years previously, eyebrows were raised when the defeated and captured leader of the British resistance, Caratacus, was paraded with his family in front of Claudius and Agrippina and then led in chains to ask for mercy first of the emperor, and then his wife, seated on her own platform nearby. The sight of an empress sitting in state before the military standards of the Roman army and personally receiving the homage of foreign captives was a novelty, and Agrippina’s habit of attending this and other public functions at Claudius’s side was remarked on by some who saw it as proof of her desire to be an equal partner in the running of the empire.
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It insidiously conjured up the controversial spectres of other women who had breached the cordon surrounding the male sphere of the military – Plancina, who had attended cavalry drills while her husband Piso was governor of Syria; Fulvia, who had marshalled troops on the plains of Perusia on her husband Antony’s behalf; and Caesonia, whom Caligula was said to have taken with him when he rode out to inspect the troops, clothing her in a helmet, cloak and shield.
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Even Agrippina’s own respected mother had provoked the ire of Tiberius when she routed the German army at the bridge over the Rhine. For some ancient observers, such women epitomised an aberrant category of female described in Roman literature as a
dux femina
(a ‘woman general’), an oxymoron of a title that implied an unnatural combination of male and female characteristics. Agrippina Minor’s reception of Caratacus was just the first of many incidents that tarred her with the reputation of acting too much the man.
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