Ancient Rome's Biggest Sex Scandal

Is this the story of a sex crazed empress? Or just some good (really) old-fashioned gossip? Was Messalina, wife of Emperor Claudius, really a sex worker by night? And did she really marry another man whilst her very powerful husband was still alive? This episode of Betwixt contains possibly the biggest scandal to take place in Ancient Rome, brought to us by the wonderful Alexander Meddings. This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Subscribe to the new Betwixt The Sheets YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@BetwixtTheSheetsPodcast Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:35Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back once again to another episode of Betwixt the Sheets. Well, fancy seeing you round here, aren't you? A sight for sore eyes, or sore ears in this case. But before we go any further together, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast booked by adults to tell the adults about adulty things and adulty way of coming around. Some subjects need to be adult too. Oh, my God. Thank God, we've got that in there, otherwise you might not have known that this is a rude podcast, right? Let's crack on with it.

• 1:04Kate Lister?

  I just love it when we come to ancient Rome, betwixters. There always seems to be a party going on, and today is no exception. But it's a wedding taking place at the Imperial Palace. Oh, I love a wedding. And it's banquet time. Guests recline around low tables, propped upon their elbows and luxurious cushions. There is so much food here, although not a lot of choice for vegetarians. I guess wine and pudding it is.

• 1:31Kate Lister?

  Actually, maybe I've had enough already. The bride has just appeared, and I might be seeing things, but she looks a lot like the Emperor's wife, Messalina, who is already married, obviously, so it can't be her. It can't be. That can't be right, is it? Is it?

• 2:08Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. We've all heard some wedding horror stories, but today I'm bringing you one that might just take the cake. We have asked the wonderful Alexander Meddings back for a chat and have asked him to bring the biggest scandal of ancient Rome with him. And as you can imagine, that is up against some pretty stiff competition. So, everybody, today we are hearing all about Messalina. Was she really a sex-mad diva who just couldn't get enough and bankrupted the country and ruined her husband? Or is that just all a load of lies? Well, shall we find out? I think we shall.

• 2:51Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Alexander Meddings. How are you doing?

• 2:59Speaker 01

  I am great, thanks, Kate. How are you doing?

• 3:01Kate Lister?

  I'm doing wonderfully. It's always great to have you on to talk about naughtiness in the Romans, because they did do naughty pretty well, it has to be said.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  They did indeed, yeah. They're pretty outrageous. And today we're looking at sexual scandals of the Imperial period.

• 3:15Kate Lister?

  And one of the scandalous. Scandalous? That's not a word.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  The scandaliest scandal of them all.

• 3:21Kate Lister?

  Scandaliest scandals.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're looking at Messalina.

• 3:27Kate Lister?

  Messalina. The name itself conjures all kinds of images. And I think for the longest time, it was a byword for the most debauched a woman could be. There's loads of examples. People go, oh, she's just a Messalina. And everybody knew what that meant. It meant that you're an absolute goer, is what it meant, and not in a good way.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  And I guess today we'll see whether that reputation is deserved.

• 3:51Kate Lister?

  I think we will, won't we? All right, so we'll start with the absolute basics, the page one. Who's Messalina?

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Messalina is the third wife of the Emperor Claudius. And Claudius is the fourth of the Roman emperors. He's the fourth in a dynasty we know as the Julio-Claudians.

• 4:11Kate Lister?

  That's handy.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  And she is the mother of two of Claudius's children. We have Octavia, and more importantly, for the macho masculine Roman mind, you have Britannicus, a boy, a male heir. And we know pretty much nothing else about her early biography, because as is pretty much always the case with Roman women, especially even the imperial household.

• 4:33Kate Lister?

  Who cares?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, they only become important when they start orbiting around powerful men. So, there you go.

• 4:39Kate Lister?

  So shit. Right, Claudius, all right, I'm trying to recall all of my Roman history. Was he a good emperor? I mean, I know that they were all kind of wild and a bit mad, but like, what kind of emperor was he?

• 4:51Speaker 01

  It depends who you ask. I mean, he's going through a bit of a rehabilitation, or he has been rehabilitated as of late.

• 4:57Kate Lister?

  I've read that. A lot of people go, like, he wasn't that bad. He was doing all right at empering.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's pretty effective. He's a good administrator. He conquered Britain, so, you know, not so great for us, or maybe actually quite good for us, it's hard to say. He built lots of aqueducts. He was a historian. He wrote lots of histories.

• 5:15Kate Lister?

  He kind of reminds me in a weird way of Keir Starmer.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:18Kate Lister?

  Like, that kind of, like, he didn't have, like, the razzle-dazzle personality, but he was actually a pretty good administrator, and he was pretty good at doing what he was doing, and he was getting on. But it's like, but we don't want that, do we? We want fireworks, we want personality.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Exactly. You want kind of a Nero and Johnson, don't you? I kind of see him as like a Gordon Brown-type figure as well.

• 5:39Kate Lister?

  Oh, yes, I can see that. Same thing.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Effective, maybe a little dour, but quite good at the economy.

• 5:44Kate Lister?

  No one's going to put him on their top 10 dinner party list. But actually, as a politician, like, I'm sick to the back teeth of eccentric, mad politicians.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Entertainer politicians.

• 5:56Kate Lister?

  Right? Give me boring, give me an emperor that understands a spreadsheet. Fine with me.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  And that is very much Claudius. He does also, he kills a lot of people as well. I mean, Gordon Brown. But they're able to pretty much pawn this off on his freedmen and his wives. So they tend to take the fall for the kind of civil war that he rages supposedly on the Senate.

• 6:19Kate Lister?

  If anyone had blamed the woman on their bingo card, I think we've just played that one very early.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Exactly. Five minutes in, exactly. And so the early sources in particular, Roman sources, they depict him as very much kind of a cuck. So he's very much in tow to his women. They depict him as very weak and ineffectual, also quite stupid, especially earlier on in his reign. And a lot of this comes from the fact that we are told that he suffered from various mental and physical disabilities from a very young age.

• 6:49Kate Lister?

  Does anyone say what?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  They say that he had a limp. They say that he kind of dribbled when he spoke.

• 6:56Kate Lister?

  Oh, well, then, I don't need to hear anything else, quite frankly. He was shit.

• 7:01Kate Lister?

  They're so mean. They are so mean.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  I feel for him. His mum called him an abomination that nature started and never finished.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  So.

• 7:10Kate Lister?

  These people.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Not the best upbringing. And his grandmother, Livia, communicated with him pretty much exclusively through intermediaries and written kind of missives.

• 7:19Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Tough upbringing. But he, I mean, he had plenty of wives, not that it's difficult at the time, but it doesn't seem to have held him back.

• 7:26Kate Lister?

  You're the emperor. It's not that difficult to get a wife, is it? Let's be honest.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  This one in particular, Messalina, is his third wife already. He's 48 or so when they get married.

• 7:36Kate Lister?

  How old is she?

• 7:37Speaker 01

  We don't know. We think either 14 or 18. So it's not great either way.

• 7:41Kate Lister?

  Okay, wow. Okay.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Poor thing.

• 7:44Kate Lister?

  Mind you, for the standards of the time, I've heard, have I heard worse? I mean, but I can, though, even at the time, if she was 14 and is 48, that would have raised a few eyebrows.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's bad. And also, she's just cousin first removed, so then again.

• 7:59Kate Lister?

  Well, they wouldn't care about that.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  No, they really don't. And in fact, I mean, spoiler alert, he will remarry after Messalina. And then he goes on to marry his niece, I believe, Agrippina.

• 8:08Kate Lister?

  See, it got worse. It got worse.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  And then passes a law, because, you know, good emperor, good at passing laws. He then passes a law legalising marrying your nieces.

• 8:17Kate Lister?

  Brilliant. Brilliant. Yeah, Gordon Brown didn't do that.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  No, he did not do.

• 8:25Kate Lister?

  That would have got a few headlines. We'd have remembered that if that was, you know, that he's saved the banks and also legalized marrying your niece.

• 8:34Kate Lister?

  All right, so we don't know anything about where Messalina comes from, like how she ended up marrying Claudius.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Oh, she's very blue-blooded.

• 8:42Kate Lister?

  Oh, okay, so we know a bit.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, we know kind of her family tree.

• 8:46Kate Lister?

  Right, give me a sample.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Oh, something like Augustus is like her great grandfather or great-great-grandfather or something like that. So she's got the blood of Augustus coursing admittedly quite weakly through her veins, but it's there nonetheless. Precisely.

• 9:05Kate Lister?

  So it's not like he's just picked a random person off the street.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no. We'll save that for his mistresses and assorted others. So, yes, they marry in the midst of Caligula's reign. So Caligula is Claudius's nephew and his predecessor. Caligula runs-

• 9:28Kate Lister?

  So does that mean that he's, Melicena's, I'm trying to think what that family tree is.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Gosh.

• 9:33Kate Lister?

  We'd need to write that down, we'd need a diagram.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:36Kate Lister?

  If Messalina and Claudius are cousins, what's Messalina to-

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Cousins removed, hence the age gap. And I'll admit, I had to look that up, what that actually meant before, while prepping for this podcast.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, family trees are not-

• 9:50Kate Lister?

  First cousin once removed.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Exactly, but first cousin's still in there, so we'll lay the charge of incest nonetheless. Caligula presides over quite a wild court, a very theatrical court. And does a lot of humiliating and persecuting of various senators and praetorian guards, the emperor's bodyguard. And this ultimately gets him murdered, assassinated up on the palace.

• 10:16Kate Lister?

  And no one was very sad about that. We've had you on before to talk to us about Caligula, and nobody was really upset about that one, I don't know.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Not really. I mean, some of the populace, because they missed the games and they missed the spectacle and they probably missed seeing the emperor kind of lord it over the aristocratic elite who had previously lorded it over them. But no, none of the people who actually matter for us, the ones who are writing the history, miss him remotely.

• 10:40Kate Lister?

  Yeah, they're just like, oh no, oh, that's so sad.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Exactly. In fact, I think we mentioned that they're accused of eating his flesh after murdering him, such as their disdain towards him. And it's not just Caligula that gets himself killed. During the time in which the praetorians are rampaging through the palace, they also managed to find his wife, a woman called Melonia Caesonia, and they kill her too. And they also find his infant baby and bash her head against a wall. And so his entire bloodline is wiped in the space of about 30 minutes.

• 11:13Kate Lister?

  I think that that went too far then. If I'd been in charge of that particular assassination, that would have been a debriefing session of like, right, where do we think we went wrong with this? What can we learn?

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, for next time, what are we going to do differently? Absolutely. It's always good to do a debrief.

• 11:30Kate Lister?

  Yeah, right. There were some excellent points and I have some great feedback for you, but there's also things that we could definitely improve.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Very strong thrusting, Cassius, but maybe less head bashing next time, yeah.

• 11:43Kate Lister?

  It's not good optics, it's not good optics.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  I do, however, think that the treatment that's meted out to Caligula's family in particular goes some way into explaining what Messalina is accused of doing at the beginning of her reign, so at the beginning of Claudius's reign. And Claudius is found, we're told, cowering behind a curtain while these praetorians are rampaging through the palace. He's found by a praetorian, bodyguard of the emperor's. He's put on a litter and he's carried to the praetorian camp in Rome. Everybody thinks for execution, but actually the praetorians need a paymaster. Their whole raison d'etre is serving an emperor. And without an emperor, what are they going to do?

• 12:24Kate Lister?

  You've told me this before, is like, this is why so many of these assassination attempts, like, they just don't work long term, because they kill the emperor and then they're suddenly going, well, who's in charge? And nobody can quite work that about, so well, we need another emperor then. All right, get that one. And then it's the same thing all over again. There's no long-term game plan here at all.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  That's it, usually they head straight to the briefing, forgetting to actually grab someone who might be the next emperor instead. Meanwhile, while all this is happening, the Senate have converged up on one of Rome's seven hills, and I think it might be the Aventine, and they're discussing who they might want to put on the throne instead, but without any military backing behind them, it's all totally a moot point.

• 13:05Kate Lister?

  So it's Claudius?

• 13:06Speaker 01

  It's Claudius.

• 13:07Kate Lister?

  The eeny meeny miny moody.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he's of an older generation, right? Caligula dies when he's in his late twenties, Claudius is in his late forties. I think the army see him as somebody that they can quite easily control.

• 13:22Kate Lister?

  Yep, okay.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  This theme of kind of Claudius being controlled really does run throughout his principate, throughout his reign. And yeah, so he's thrust into the limelight, he becomes emperor, and Messalina, by dint of being his wife, becomes empress, although this is not really a title that carries any political public weight behind it, really.

• 13:42Kate Lister?

  Was she married to him before he became the emperor?

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, a couple of years.

• 13:47Kate Lister?

  Interesting.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  And they already had a child together, Octavia, who will go on to be murdered, spoiler alert, by Nero. And soon after becoming emperor, she'll give birth to another child, Britannicus, a boy who will also, spoiler alert, go on to be murdered by Nero. And what Messalina does, we're told, at the very beginning of Claudius's reign, is she has several people put to death, really in following in the tradition of Julio Claudian women.

• 14:15Kate Lister?

  I mean, you'd like to think you wouldn't, but if you were suddenly catapulted from, you know, the sidelines into the main event, it would take a very strong person not to go, actually, all of those bitches who've got on my nerves over the years, right, we'll see about that, will we, Sharon, okay?

• 14:32Speaker 01

  And it's-

• 14:33Kate Lister?

  Who should murder him?

• 14:34Speaker 01

  She's murdering, for a start, she murders one of Caligula's sisters. And you can, I mean, it's horrible, it's brutal, but you can sort of see the logic there, because this woman would have posed some kind of threat to the bloodline and to her own position. And if, you know, you subscribe to the belief that she maybe witnessed or was very much aware of the assassination of Caligula's wife, and more importantly, baby, and she has a baby of her own, then maybe she would kind of do whatever it takes to protect that baby from following a similar fate. And so she has Caligula's sister, a woman called Julia Livilla, accused of adultery with a guy called Seneca.

• 15:14Kate Lister?

  Does she go live on an island?

• 15:15Speaker 01

  She does! How did you know?

• 15:20Speaker 01

  She does, I forget which one.

• 15:22Kate Lister?

  So many islands with adulterous women just sat there, just fucking hell.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  I know, and there are so many to choose from. And some of them are lovely, actually. This summer I went to a Ponza on a little sailboat, that's where they often ended up, lovely place these days.

• 15:35Kate Lister?

  Was it lovely at the time?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  I reckon it probably was, it would have been nice and unspoilt and you'd have got to enjoy beaches for a while before being kind of run through by a gladius, so, I don't know, get a couple of weeks out of it, a couple of weeks vacation.

• 15:47Kate Lister?

  Did they normally starve to death on these islands? Was that-

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, sometimes, some of them did. And, you know, you're told that they kind of are found having eaten the straw that makes up their mattresses and stuff. We don't actually know what happened to Julia Livilla, just said that she died, so I think we can safely assume that she's brutally murdered.

• 16:06Kate Lister?

  Off on an island somewhere, right, okay, so Messalina's off to a strong start then. What else is she up to early doors?

• 16:11Speaker 01

  She kills another woman called Julia Livia this time, who, again, ostensibly she murders because she might have posed Messalina's position some kind of threat, but also maybe just because she has such a similar name to Julia Livilla, might have just been a kind of case of confusion.

• 16:25Kate Lister?

  Not that one, the other one, right.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Oh, never mind, it's done now, debrief.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  And she also has her father-in-law murdered, a bloke called Appius Selenus.

• 16:38Kate Lister?

  Interesting.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  And the way that she does this is really, really quite brutal, but also kind of low-key quite funny. She conspires with one of Claudius's former slaves, freedmen, kind of civil servants, a guy called Narcissus, that they're going to tell Claudius they both had the same dream in which this Appius figure is planning to murder the emperor. And they go running to Claudius and they say, yeah, we both dreamt this, and so you better have him taken care of.

• 17:03Kate Lister?

  Fucking hell, wow.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Now, if not sooner, yep.

• 17:06Kate Lister?

  Okay, CSI Ancient Rome, it's a lot to be desired. We both had a dream, oh my god, and that was it.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  And again, this is kind of part of the whole criticism that these senatorial sources level the emperors. It's the fact that these people are not really having trials per se, you know, they don't really get their day in court, it's more just if you've got the emperor's ear and you can get him to sign off on their murder, then murder they are.

• 17:34Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Alex and Messalina after this short break.

• 17:51Kate Lister?

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• 18:35Kate Lister?

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• 19:17Kate Lister?

  You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget.

• 19:24Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that.

• 19:53Kate Lister?

  Right, let's get on with it.

• 20:06Kate Lister?

  Do you think that this stuff is true? Or do you think, because a lot of the time when you're talking about women in Ancient Rome, especially women who were wives of various emperors, like the stories that surround them, they're horrendous, but you can sort of make the argument, they're not really the target of it, is it's the husband that's the target of it? Because it's like, well, why would you be so stupid as to have fallen for that particular plot, Claudius?

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, especially in Claudius's case, you do get the idea that the women and former slaves are taking the fall for his decisions. I do think that these people were taken out and murdered quite early days. The Julius Vercingetorians are very, very ruthless. I have no reason to suspect that it's only Messalina's decision exclusively. If she's able to couch it in terms of this is a threat to your heir, this is a threat to your son, because, you know, the daughter doesn't matter too much. But if this is a threat to your son, then you've got to take care of this, you've got to have this person taken care of. And that's going to happen.

• 21:02Kate Lister?

  So if she just restricted herself to a few murders, I bet that we probably, I don't, we would know who she was because she was the wife of Claudius. But when do we get these insane stories about Messalina cropping up? Because she goes way beyond bumping off in-laws.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  She does. And this is kind of the big problem that we have when trying to reconstruct her life. We know a little about her early reign, that's empress, reigning beside Claudius. And then we have this enormous gap in our sources. And so our main writer, a guy called Tacitus, who's a kind of very good historian, he writes a chronological history, you know, he's kind of a good political commentator, he's kind of like the guardians of Raphael Bear of the day type figure, but far more misogynistic. His account is lost for the years up to 47 AD. So we're about six, seven years into the Claudian principate by this stage. And so we don't really know what she's doing in the interim.

• 22:01Kate Lister?

  It's like lost as in it was there and now it's not, like we've literally lost it?

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Yes, and it hasn't been copied over by medieval scribes for the most part. And we haven't found any papyri from which we can reconstruct those events. So we're reliant on other, much weaker sources, which tend to write in terms of kind of rubrics. They're not chronological, but they might write about themes and people's actions fall into themes.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  So we kind of don't really know what she's doing in the interim period between kind of 40, 41 AD and 47. We get the odd glimpse. We know that when Claudius conquers Britain in 43, the year later, when he's celebrating a triumphal procession, a military parade through Rome, she rides in a chariot besides him, which is quite an unusual honour for a woman to be taking part in these military processions. And then the next thing we hear, we hear of her chronologically comes from when Tacitus's book starts up again. And she's trying another guy called Valerius Atticus in her husband's bedroom, which again is not great, he's not having a fair trial, but he's being tried in the bedroom.

• 23:00Kate Lister?

  That doesn't sound right, no.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  No.

• 23:04Kate Lister?

  Having trials in your bedroom.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, behind closed doors, which senators are very unhappy about. But it's in this period when we don't have Tacitus's history, that all of these kind of scandalous stories associated with her visiting brothels and all of this starts to crop up.

• 23:20Kate Lister?

  Was Tacitus a contemporary of Messalina?

• 23:22Speaker 01

  No, he's writing about 50, 60 years later. So he's just over a generation away.

• 23:28Kate Lister?

  Okay, okay.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  And I think maybe we'll talk about him a little more at the end when, if we're trying to look at her kind of reputation. But he's a really problematic source for many reasons, not least because he's a raving misogynist, but also he's trying to compare the good emperor of his day to bad emperors of the past. And so whenever you're looking at figures like Claudius or Messalina, you always have to look at it through the prism of the emperor under whom Tacitus is writing, Trajan, who's generally seen as a really good one, and he had a really good wife in the sense that she was kind of silent, submissive, modest. So whenever he's colouring previous empresses, they're going to be the opposite, right?

• 24:03Kate Lister?

  Right, so this is like a sort of a process of othering, basically, right? Look how great you are because like, look how awful they were. All right, so let's, some of the stories then, let's get into it. What was Messalina supposed to be up to?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Right, there are two main scandalous stories associated with Messalina. And the first one involves her visiting brothels, not for the money, but for the love of the game.

• 24:26Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah, I've heard this one. This is, this is juvenile, isn't it? This is the writer, or is it?

• 24:34Speaker 01

  It's both juvenile and Pliny, and then a later source, a bloke called Aurelius Victor, who is a super interesting, but writing about 250 years later. Our first one chronologically would be Pliny, who's writing about 30 years after her death. And he talks about, Pliny is an encyclopedist, he's a man of science. He's writing this giant encyclopedia, mostly to do with rock types and minerals and stuff like that. But he does a chapter on the mating patterns of humans. And she kind of falls into this chapter. And he talks about kind of the insatiable appetite of women. And to illustrate this chapter, he talks about a sexual competition she took part in with the leading prostitute of the age.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  And they have a competition to see how many men they can sleep with in 24 hours. And Messalina wins with a score of 25.

• 25:27Kate Lister?

  I could do more.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  It's not great. Right.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Kind of rookie numbers, aren't they?

• 25:33Kate Lister?

  Exactly, come on, girl, what are you doing? You can tell a man wrote that.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Right, it's so much projecting.

• 25:39Kate Lister?

  A woman had wrote that, I mean, entirely different story, quite frankly.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we don't need to go to like Bonnie Blue, but I did, I did look at the numbers earlier. And you know, this sounds more, with an efficient queuing system and effective advertising, this sounds more like the kind of numbers that you're going to get up to, 25?

• 25:57Kate Lister?

  25 in a 24-hour period?

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it must have been kind of a modern Italian queuing system.

• 26:06Kate Lister?

  But these are the stories, see, that's our first clue then, that this is complete cobblers. So the story is that she goes to the brothel, she challenges the local sex worker, the best sex worker, to a shagging competition. That's our other clue, really, I think, is just, it's just not going to happen, that's, no.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely not.

• 26:24Kate Lister?

  That's a very male fantasy of like, just sex with those is so good that a woman would just totter off down to a brothel to have sex with a load of men that she didn't know off the street, because they would be that good at it.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  And then it gets kind of even worse when we get Juvenal's account.

• 26:42Kate Lister?

  What does he say?

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Juvenal, writing kind of 50, 60 years after her death, talks about how she waits until Claudius is asleep. And then she skulks off to the dingiest city brothel in Rome, so presumably one that's maybe in the Subura and a modern day Monty neighbourhood. And there she sets herself up in her own cubicle, so she's got her own room by this point, she's a regular. She takes the mat in the corner, doesn't even need a bed, why would you? She gilds her breasts, she puts on a blonde wig, so she looks more like a kind of barbarian and less like a kind of dark-haired Latin Roman. And then she gets cracking and she kind of has a long night, sleeping with lots of clients, accepting their money, of course, because she's greedy as well, that's how she's very

• 27:27Speaker 01

  much characterised, but going through right until sunrise. And eventually kind of the pimps pass through and they say, all right, girls, your time is done, you've got to leave now. And she leaves kind of reluctantly because she still hasn't got her fill. Juvenal talks about her stiff and inflamed clitoris.

• 27:47Kate Lister?

  Oh, does he? Interesting, because the clitoris doesn't get a lot of reference in Ancient Rome. That's, that's interesting, that's showed up there. Landica, that's, I think that was the ancient Latin for clitoris and regarded as quite an obscene word.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Right, there you go.

• 28:01Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I kind of wonder who's fantasising about that. I mean, presumably, imagine most Romans.

• 28:07Kate Lister?

  Possibly, because I've done a bit of research on the history of the clitoris. And one of the things that you get shown up in Ancient Greek texts and Latin texts when it's there, is this idea of an enlarged clitoris that is basically becoming a penis. And it's this sort of inversion.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  It's an erection.

• 28:20Kate Lister?

  An erection, it's like this woman's becoming a man, like in the same, and it's all about gender transgression and this idea that a woman is, like, she's basically threatening masculinity because she's growing a penis. I wonder if that's what it was?

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Probably, yeah, because the Romans would be kind of, you know, worried about that, she's able to penetrate.

• 28:37Kate Lister?

  Very upset, very concerned.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Very concerned.

• 28:41Kate Lister?

  So I think we could probably say that that's red flag number three in this story, because none of that happened, that's just... Like even on a practical level, even if like you can conceive of, all right, maybe this woman did just want to, for some reason, go like the lowest of the most scuziest brothel at all and just have sex with random men on the floor until daybreak. Maybe, you know, you do you. Let's not yuck anyone's yum wherever you get your kinks. But like the logistics of it, of like, the empress is going to sneak out of the palace.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then bring the smell back with her. Juvenal also talks about that. So she's bringing that kind of muster back with her to kind of wave around the imperial bedrooms, you know what I mean? And the kind of ash on her buttocks from the, from the oil lamps. And yeah, it's, it's, yeah, I mean, it's all. But then I don't think Romans would have been expected to believe this because Juvenal's writing a genre known as satire and people very much do take this as-

• 29:34Kate Lister?

  See, there's your clue.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're, they're not looking at this as historical fact. They're looking at this more as kind of satirical illustration of transgression.

• 29:44Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Alex and Messalina after this short break.

• 30:03Speaker 01

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• 31:11Kate Lister?

  We still do this with political figures, don't we? Like recently, Mr. Donald Trump visited Ireland and the Irish showed up in force spectacularly well. And one of the things that they had was a huge balloon of, I think it was Putin having anal sex with Donald Trump. And it's, and I was like, looking, like, we still do that. We still have, like, when we're talking about political figures, when we dislike them, we still invent or talk about them in sexual, submissive or dominating terms. We still create events that almost certainly didn't ever happen, but it makes us laugh and we think it's funny.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, submissions everywhere. And if it's not sexual, everything's like bootlicker or something like that.

• 31:52Kate Lister?

  Yep, arselicker, bootlicker, getting fucked up the arse, all of that stuff.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I, I kind of think this is a tradition into which Juvenal's writing falls. Not so much for even like for, for the later sources that talk about her visiting brothels, but they get confused because they're so far away from the events they described. They confuse themselves, the poor souls. And so they write about her establishing a brothel on the Palatine Hill. So in the Imperial Palace.

• 32:16Kate Lister?

  I don't think that happened either. That's, like, someone would have noticed that.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  And why you definitely know this didn't happen is because our source for this, a bloke called Aurelius Victor, says that she compels men to attend this brothel, which is being serviced by elite Roman women and maidens. And I think if it learns anything from especially recent history, like Giselle Pellicle and the Cornell Seven, it's that men, given half an invitation, do not need compelling to take advantage of female bodies.

• 32:42Kate Lister?

  There we go. Is there any evidence that this happened? Like, what's your thoughts as a Roman scholar?

• 32:47Speaker 01

  No, not at all. No, no, no, no, no. I think here what you have is kind of men projecting onto women what men would do themselves if they were kind of free from all of the moral constraints under which their, their culture operated, I think. So when, then they accuse women of sexual violence, it's basically a fess.

• 33:05Kate Lister?

  Interesting. So the brothel story, I think that, yeah, that's just not, that's just not true. Do we know anything about it that is true? Because the stories don't just stop there about Messalina.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  No. And the next one, so the next big scandal, we really don't know if this is true or not, but Tacitus is our main source for it. And interestingly, before telling us about it, he assures us, the reader, he addresses us directly and he says, you're not going to believe this, but I've done my homework. I've read my sources and this is true. This actually happened. And the scandal, the accusation, is that while Claudius is away in Ostia, which is Rome's port city, just down the road, either checking the construction of a port he's working on or checking the grain supply, Messalina marries another guy in plain view.

• 33:54Kate Lister?

  Sloppy work, Messalina.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  It's very poor, isn't it?

• 33:57Kate Lister?

  That's just, it's just lazy and stupid, that. Because that's not going to go over well.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Not at all. And the guy she marries, I mean, yeah, to her credit, he's the most handsome man in Rome. He's a consul designate.

• 34:12Kate Lister?

  Well, fair enough, like, but I mean, even so.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Unfortunate name. He's called Gaius Silius.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  The plural of which is silly. So she marries into the silly family. Very, very much so.

• 34:27Kate Lister?

  But she doesn't really though, does she? Because like, if this is, she, you can't get married, someone should have sat down, Messalina, no.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Please don't do this.

• 34:34Kate Lister?

  No, just behave yourself. At the point where the priest said, does anyone object? There should have been lots of hands going up there. Quite frankly, she isn't married, but what she, the stories that she's running around saying that she is?

• 34:47Speaker 01

  So she's been seeing Silius for quite a long time and she's been seeing several lovers for quite a long time. In fact, one of our sources, Cassius Dio, tells us that she wanted to marry all of her lovers, like some kind of crazed lovers blind contestant from an early episode. With Silius, we're told that they start seeing each other in about the year 47. And come the year 48, which is the year in which Messalina will eventually fall, be brought down and perish, she kind of got bored of simply just having an adulterous affair with him in secret. She wanted something a bit more extreme to get her, her kicks. And that is marriage, which again, doesn't really, doesn't really work as a kind of logical thread.

• 35:31Kate Lister?

  No, like, surely the affair is the frisson. Although, although getting married to someone while you're already married to the emperor, like, that, that is dramatic.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  That is an adrenaline rush. Give you that.

• 35:42Kate Lister?

  You just have to give her that.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, Tacitus, he has to do quite a lot of kind of logical acrobatics here to make it work. But he says that she was pursuing above all else, infamy, or infamia, as they call it in Latin. And infamia is this really interesting kind of legal, social concept that I know you've spoken a lot about with Emma Southern. And it was associated with adulterous women, and it was also associated with various professions, which are seen as, as kind of very base professions, like-

• 36:12Kate Lister?

  Gladiators.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Sex worker, gladiators, charioteers, actors, weirdly enough. And we're told that Messalina was pursuing this. So she really wanted this kind of legal, social disability, in a sense, which is, again, mad. It would be like us pursuing kind of a, being in the centre of a Twitter storm and having a criminal record these days.

• 36:32Kate Lister?

  Yes. It's an odd thing. Because, because infamy, like, they were barred from certain public roles and offices and like, they, they couldn't, well, I was going to say they couldn't-

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Couldn't marry, couldn't-

• 36:42Kate Lister?

  Yeah, they couldn't marry.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Couldn't make a will.

• 36:44Kate Lister?

  Like, they couldn't vote. I don't know if, like, how many Romans could vote, but they couldn't.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Not going to matter so much for women, but absolutely. So like, there's no way you would want this label. And so again, this is just something that's done to illustrate her, her depravity. And I think we can be fairly sure it doesn't represent anything of the truth. But the whole thing about her marrying Silius, I don't know.

• 37:06Kate Lister?

  Ooh.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  I kind of, I kind of don't know.

• 37:08Kate Lister?

  Is this because Tacitus went, look, I promise I'm telling the truth?

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, there is a weight of evidence to it. I think-

• 37:16Kate Lister?

  What is it that, that makes you think about this, that this could be true, that she, that she married somebody else? Or at least was having a relationship with somebody else?

• 37:25Speaker 01

  That's it. I think that, that's, that's more accurate. It's having a relationship with him. I, I think this may have, this may have been the case. I think, given her age and given Claudius's age and given the fact that he was absolutely having it off with his own mistresses and whatnot, I, I kind of hope for her sake that she was also seeing a few other people.

• 37:43Kate Lister?

  Getting some.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Getting some, especially with the most handsome man in Rome. And, you know, kind of exercising power in one of the very few ways that was available to women of the Imperial Court, which is through sex. The marriage, I don't think this happened per se, but I think something may have happened that was later able to be spun into a marriage.

• 38:01Kate Lister?

  Like she got caught?

• 38:02Speaker 01

  She may have got caught, or she may have been celebrating a kind of Bacchanalia-type festival or something like this alongside Silius. And people were later able to take that and say that this is evidence of them celebrating-

• 38:16Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  A marriage or something like this. It's kind of them being seen a party together and this being used as evidence. But it's very tough because we have to really try and look through layers and layers of scandal, invective.

• 38:27Kate Lister?

  It just seems so implausible that the wife of an emperor would go and marry somebody else. It feels like it's so ludicrous that that has been done for shock value. But then again, I will say this, is like, you often, when you, when you're looking throughout history, is don't confuse the fact that you think it's ridiculous with the fact that it didn't happen. Like, just because you wouldn't have done it, you were smart enough not to have done it, doesn't mean that somebody else wouldn't have done it.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're quite right. Modern historians, a lot of them, have also kind of followed the, the line of thought that this may have happened. And they try and rationalise it in terms of a coup, but a, a really incompetent attempted coup or a conspiracy.

• 39:06Kate Lister?

  Now, this sounds quite plausible.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  It does. But then when you drill down into it and you think about the people involved in the coup, yeah, it's super tricky. Because from the list of those who were executed in the immediate aftermath of this marriage and Claudius' discovery of it, we have a, a doctor involved, we have a gladiator owner, a former one-night-stand of Messalina's, a couple of knights, the head of the city's firefighters, and a pantomime actor called Minester.

• 39:34Kate Lister?

  Oh, no. This is like the worst Avengers ever.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  It's terrible. Yeah. Yeah, it's not really the stuff to affect regime change, is it? Yeah.

• 39:44Kate Lister?

  But she gets busted then, whatever happens.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  She does. And so word reaches Claudius while he's down in Ostia that she's gone and married this bloke, Gaius Silius. The freedmen find out about it and not wanting to address Claudius directly, they get a couple of his mistresses to tell him. So a woman called Cleopatra and another called Calpurnia, they're sent to talk to Claudius and say, look- I hate to break this to you, but your wife has just married another man in public. And more than this, she's also moved half of your household possessions into his house, including your family heirlooms, some of your staff, your paperwork.

• 40:24Kate Lister?

  That's not good.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  No, not ideal. And so Claudius is kind of left scrambling, asking these mistresses and asking his freedman if he is still in fact the emperor and if he's still is in charge and if Silas is merely a private citizen or he is now emperor. And so they kind of hurry back to Rome to shore up his position with the army in the Praetorian camp and try all of these conspirators or try all of these people who were implicated in this, this potential plot, but not before stopping by Silas's house and going to have a look for themselves and indeed confirming the fact that loads of Claudius's family heirlooms are now kind of arranged neatly on Silas's mantelpiece.

• 41:05Kate Lister?

  Awkward.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very awkward.

• 41:07Kate Lister?

  So they, so they get back to Rome and then the story is that like everybody involved in this is arrested.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're arrested. There's a quick trial summary executions in the Praetorian camp.

• 41:17Kate Lister?

  In somebody's bedroom, probably.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Precisely. This time in the camp, in the Praetorian camp, it's the Praetorians who are, who are charged with doing away with the conspirators this time.

• 41:26Kate Lister?

  And what happens to Messalina then? So like her weird little ensemble of gladiators, circus people and exes don't affect this coup and they, they all get bumped off. What about her?

• 41:39Speaker 01

  We're lucky that Tacitus is an excellent writer and he, he writes this account from two perspectives, firstly from hers and from Claudius's. So we can also track exactly what's happening with Messalina. When she finds out that Claudius has learnt of this, of her marriage, she rallies her two children to her side, Octavian Britannicus and a vestal virgin. And she immediately sets out from the gardens where she's celebrating this marriage and the kind of aperitivo afterwards. She sets off to the Port of Ostiense, the Ostian gate, where she's looking for some transport to take her out the city so she can encounter Claudius on the, on the way, on his way back into the city. She finds

• 42:20Speaker 01

  nothing but a kind of cart used to take various garden waste out of the city. So she goes, that'll do. She gets into this garden waste cart and makes her way to bump into him on the Ostian, the Ostian road.

• 42:33Kate Lister?

  Oh, she's, she's going to find him then?

• 42:35Speaker 01

  She goes to find him, which is incidentally where we are now, actually, on the Via Ostiense. It's where I live. She does find him. She encounters him at some crossroads and she tries to address him, but his freedman, his, his civil service, if you like, they literally shout over her and they throw some paperwork in his face attesting to her various misdeeds. And so she doesn't get her moment in court with him.

• 42:59Kate Lister?

  Do they just kill her there and then?

• 43:01Speaker 01

  She, we're then told she makes her way back to these gardens. And the next we hear, she's kind of lying down in these gardens on her back, kind of wailing and kind of feeling sorry for herself. Kind of geographically, this doesn't really make much sense because these gardens would be situated up in the north of Rome, kind of around Villa Borghese these days. So to go from there, all the way through the city, out through the Via Ostiense to try and encounter Claudius and then back up, doesn't really make any sense.

• 43:28Kate Lister?

  For a good cry.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  For a good cry. Yeah. And these gardens, the gardens of Lucullus, as they're called, she's inherited from that bloke, Asiaticus, who she had put to death. And so kind of the gardens serve, I think, to illustrate her greed, right? The kind of, the place where she will now be executed are a place that she acquired through accusing a man of adultery and greed and all of this kind of thing. But yeah, her mother, who is there at her side at the end in these gardens, tells her to do the honorable thing and commit suicide. Tacitus tells us that she had no honor in her and so she couldn't even bring herself to do this. And then some Praetorians barge down the gate and then they, they,

• 44:14Speaker 01

  they drive a gladius through her chest and that's the end of Messalina.

• 44:18Kate Lister?

  And that's the end of Messalina.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Nor was it Claudius who gave the order in the end. It was his freedman. Claudius couldn't quite bring himself to do it. He did actually want to give her the chance to explain herself the morning after, but his freedman decided to act quickly and to.

• 44:34Kate Lister?

  He was prepared then to just get Messalina in and just be like, what the fuck?

• 44:40Speaker 01

  It's gone too, it's gone too far.

• 44:41Kate Lister?

  What the hell? What the hell have you been doing? She'd be there going, I think we can get through it. We just have some counselling.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  I'm working on myself, Ben.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:55Kate Lister?

  So the guards get in first.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  The guards get in first.

• 44:58Kate Lister?

  The hell you will. And they just hack her down. What about the kids?

• 45:02Speaker 01

  I mean, we don't hear anything about how they react to this.

• 45:06Kate Lister?

  Are they're not, they're not wiped out at this point as well?

• 45:08Speaker 01

  No, they're not wiped out. No, absolutely not. I mean, their only involvement in this is that Britannicus was supposed to. There was an idea that when Silas married Messalina, Silas would adopt Britannicus, which again, makes absolutely no sense.

• 45:21Kate Lister?

  Makes no sense. That's not how any of that works at all.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  I think his actual father would have nothing to say about that.

• 45:27Kate Lister?

  So she's dead and gone. God rest her wee bum, like, but like, what is the immediate aftermath of this? Is this, is hers a name that sort of looms large in ancient Roman history or were they rather quiet about it?

• 45:40Speaker 01

  They, they do their best to erase it from Roman history. So she's subject to what we call damnatio memoriae, which is kind of the, the erasure of one's memory or the cancelling of one's, one's kind of public image. We're told that the Senate passed this measure essentially to have her statues taken down or hidden or kind of re-carved to resemble other figures. Perhaps her coinage is recalled and melted down so that you don't have a kind of image circulating around on people's coins. Her name is removed from various inscriptions. Yeah, the, the, the regime do their best to cancel her. And they, they say that they do this to help Claudius forget because I think he is quite troubled

• 46:25Speaker 01

  by her death. We're told when he learns of it, he just immediately retires to his room to drink or rather he asks for a, a drink. And then in the kind of days and weeks to follow, he repeatedly asks where Messalina is. So bit of a mental breakdown, if we're going to diagnose, which is always fraught and tricky for ancient figures. But yeah, she's cancelled. And perhaps it's this kind of void that this cancelling leaves into which all of these stories fall. It's, it's kind of, these stories are able to kind of blossom because one moment she's a big public figure. She's an emperor. She's everywhere. Her image is everywhere. Her statue's everywhere. And the next moment they're not and people need answers as to why she's been cancelled.

• 47:09Kate Lister?

  See, it sounds, it sounds more and more like the extreme stories about her. They're just trash talk. They're just propaganda that's covering up something, something happens, but we just don't know what, for your money. Like, I know, I know that we can never know and I know that we, I know that. But like, for your money, what happened?

• 47:29Speaker 01

  I hope that she was sleeping around for her sake, because otherwise it's a pretty rough life, isn't it?

• 47:36Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  I hope she was having a little bit of fun. Maybe she was involved with this guy, Silas. Maybe she was involved with people from all different ranks. Maybe she got sloppy or maybe not. But whatever happened, I, I think that her enemies within court, so Claudius's freedman, his kind of civil service, his imperial administration, they decided that she was now their enemy. And they spun this story to paint her in the worst possible light. And it's worked, to be honest, because we, as we talked about at the beginning, we associate her name with all of these things. We associate it with debauchery and insatiableity.

• 48:16Kate Lister?

  So as a final question then, is anyone attempting to rehabilitate Messalina? Is that process going on? Or maybe it's just that we just don't have the sources there to be able.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's.

• 48:25Kate Lister?

  To do it. Like, you can sort of look at this stuff and go, look, none of this happened. It's obviously nonsense. But you just don't have the evidence there to go, this is what happened instead.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  That's the big problem. We don't have the evidence. I mean, we, whenever we are reading Roman women, especially of this kind of Geloclodian period, we're always doing so through the lens of, through, through men, through male authors. And we have to try and read through layers of rhetoric and these men are kind of trying to paint these women in a particular light to make points of their own, usually about the nature of political power or the danger of allowing women too close to the nucleus of government. So we can never really get to know her. And so the best that we can do is we can look at what these men have written to kind of trash talk her and to blacken her name. And we can try and make sense of it. And the only way we can do that is to paint her

• 49:16Speaker 01

  as a political player. Maybe she's not that much. Maybe she's actually just looking out for herself and her kids and then just gets caught up in a, in a horrible plot against her.

• 49:26Kate Lister?

  Oh dear Messalina. Never mind, love.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Poor thing.

• 49:31Kate Lister?

  Alexander, you have been phenomenal. Once again, thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 49:39Speaker 01

  The best place to start might be my website, so alexandermeddings.com, where I list all of the tours that I do around Rome, including down at Ostia, where, where Claudius was when he was busy getting cuckolded back in Rome.

• 49:53Kate Lister?

  Will you come back again and tell us more fabulous things and more mad things about the Romans?

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely. With pleasure. Anything.

• 50:01Kate Lister?

  Absolute treat. Thank you so much.

• 50:07Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Alex for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And don't forget that we're now available on YouTube. If you wanted to hop over there and give us a like and a follow. But if you wanted us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, you can also email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt, a sheet, history of sex scandal and society, a podcast by History It. This podcast contains music from Epidemics.