Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit Agrippina the Younger: Rome's Most Notorious Empress About this episode Agrippina the Younger was one of the most powerful players in Roman history: a ruthless political operator who clawed her way to co-rule the empire, only to be murdered by the son she put on the throne. We're joined by historian Dr Emma Southon to unravel the extraordinary, blood-soaked life of Rome's most formidable woman.
Emma's latest book is called "Servus: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire".
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Transcript 10,002 words · 4 speakers
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0:33 Dan Snow? The only Roman colony named after a woman is the Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinaesium. And it's a colony that survived. Today, it is Cologne in modern Germany. It was named after a woman who sat at the very heart of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, that first family that forged the Roman principate, the Rome of the emperors. She was the great granddaughter, the sister, the niece, the wife, the mother of emperors. She took the title Augusta, Empress, and she meant to rule as one. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit.
1:15 Dan Snow? In this episode, we are talking about Agrippina, the woman who fused through her mother and father, the blood of Augustus and Mark Antony, the two successors of Julius Caesar, the woman who may well have killed not just one, but two husbands, the one who plotted against her brother and who eventually came to realise the evil that lay in her son. Agrippina was a formidable politician, power player in her own right. Her influence, her actions shaped the empire. Her fingerprints can be found all over Rome's history of this period. After she married the Emperor Claudius, who was her uncle, she brought a stability and sanity to his reign.
1:57 Dan Snow? She broke alliances, she patronised Seneca to tutor her son Nero. She was a key part in public theatre. She was present, for example, at the submission of Caraticus, the defeated British tribal chief. She was always projecting co-rulership with her husband through ceremony, through imagery, through coinage and carvings. She normalised her presence in power.
2:21 Dan Snow? She was utterly ruthless. She manipulated the line of succession. She made her son Nero over the head of a more deserving candidate. She organised that succession, which went like clockwork, unusual in Roman history in this period. And she then hoped that she would serve as a sort of regent for Nero. But when that relationship soured, he had her murdered in a dramatic plot with plenty of twists. Agrippina's life is a story of intrigue and drama and sensation of a formidable stateswoman who understood how to play the game, but who's long been demonised in the sources. Surprise, surprise, unlike her male counterparts. Well, to put that right, to tell the story of her life and the extraordinary, the dramatic
3:03 Dan Snow? twists and turns, I've got the brilliant ancient historian, the wonderful Dr Emma Southon, author of a book on Agrippina, author on all sorts of other books as well, that you'll hear us talk about at the end. And she's going to give us an insight into this extraordinary period of Roman history and one of the most remarkable Romans that played their part. Enjoy.
3:29 Dan Snow? Emma, great to have you on the podcast.
3:30 Speaker 01 Hello, Dan. It's lovely to be here.
3:32 Dan Snow? It's good to see you. Now, tell me, when was this remarkable woman born?
3:36 Speaker 01 Agrippina the Younger was born in 15 CE in Cologne, in what is now Cologne, but at the time was called Ara Ubiorum, which was outside of the Roman Empire at the time.
3:47 Dan Snow? Well, I was gonna say, hang on a minute, this is all getting a bit tense because my comment is the famous year when Roman power in much of Germany absolutely collapses or is annihilated. So what's going on with her? Why is she born there? And who is she? Why is she not a captive?
4:02 Speaker 01 So she is born as the daughter of the guy who is charged with basically leading revenge against the Germanic peoples who had come together to try and push the Romans out of Germany. And the revenge tour is being at this time led by a guy called Germanicus.
4:19 Dan Snow? Who's the blue eyed boy of the Julia Claudian family. Everyone loved Germanicus.
4:23 Speaker 01 Everyone loved Germanicus, except his adoptive father, Tiberius.
4:26 Dan Snow? Yes, true. And the Germans, ironically.
4:28 Speaker 01 Yes. The Germans hated him very badly because he spent a lot of time setting fire to their villages and enslaving them. So he is her father and her mother is Agrippina the elder, who is a direct descendant of Augustus, the now divine Augustus.
4:45 Dan Snow? Listeners should not be worried. We are not going to really try and take them on a journey through the Julia Claudius family tree because it is just too terrifying and bewildering. But her dad, he's very important because he is genuinely, we think, really popular. And his sort of afterglow, you could still feel it a generation or two later, right?
5:02 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. You could still feel it like well into her adulthood, right up until Agrippina's death, when she's in her 40s. And then long after that, because he dies young and never gets to be the emperor that he is supposed to be. And because he does things like he acts as a public defender for people for free. And he is very charitable and he's very handsome and he's charming. He's kind of the Princess Diana of the early Roman Empire.
5:30 Dan Snow? And he kicks ass as well.
5:31 Speaker 01 Yeah. And he's great at war. The only thing that anyone can ever say about him is that he is bandy legged. That's like the worst thing that anyone can ever pull. And it's, you know, not really his fault.
5:44 Dan Snow? So she's really, she's like a princess in a way, born into this sort of what is effectively a royal family. But it's quite a new thing, this royal family. So what's it mean? What's that mean for her growing up? Would she have had a sense of entitlement?
5:54 Speaker 01 She would have a very strong sense of entitlement, partly because she is the first generation who are born into royalty properly. So everyone before her, her parents were born into the Roman Republic, before Augustus consolidated power around himself, before Augustus created this idea that what we call the emperor and what they called the principate was something that could be inherited. They were creating that. Her parents were part of the generation that created that. And so she is the first person who never knows a republic. She is of the first generation that just has no idea that there is anything other than her family is very special. Augustus, her grandfather is made divine at the same time that she is born, basically. Her whole life, she is part of
6:39 Speaker 01 a family that is worshipped as being more special than everybody else, as being royal, as being blessed by the gods in a way that others aren't. And then her father is the great emperor that never was.
6:50 Dan Snow? One of the great what ifs, yeah.
6:52 Speaker 01 Yes, the very great what if. He dies when she's kind of five or Six years old and her mother Agrippina believes very strongly that he was murdered by Tiberius, who is the emperor at the time, out of jealousy and raises her children to believe that Tiberius has killed their family, basically, and that Tiberius hates them, Tiberius wants them all dead, and that Tiberius has stolen their throne. It should be their throne if their family.
7:22 Dan Snow? Interesting. The Julia Claudians, famously a family who make the Medici's and the Plantagenets and the Mughals of India, look like a sort of really cohesive family unit.
7:31 Speaker 01 Yes.
7:31 Dan Snow? So she's part of this family, but she's very entitled, but she is also angry. Is that an important combination?
7:37 Speaker 01 She is very angry. For her whole life, I think the one thread that runs through is this sense that her family and her descendants deserve the throne more than anybody else, and that everybody else is basically either an obstacle to be overcome or an enemy, and that she has a single-mindedness from quite a young age that her family will rule Rome and nobody else will be allowed to have that chance. That is kind of terrifying in a way. And when you look at the decisions that she made to get there, to make that reality come true, it's impressive, but it is scary.
8:20 Dan Snow? It is impressive and it's also scary, but presumably it's also quite difficult because she is from this family, she is educated, she's exposed to the politicking and the brilliant minds, men and women around her. She's given this sort of apprenticeship, she's raised in this crucible. But then suddenly, presumably she denied some of the tools that men use for their own self-advancement because she's a woman, right? So she can't take part in the formal politics like the Senate, she cannot go and defeat a German army and win renown. That doesn't stop her. Is she as ambitious as male members of the family, but just has to deploy a different set of tools?
8:54 Speaker 01 Basically, yeah. Although there are not that many members of the family that I think of the Julia Claudian family who are as ambitious as she is. All of the men around her. So she's the sister of the Emperor Caligula, who becomes emperor because he is the last of his generation standing, the last boy standing. Tiberius kills both of her brothers, her other brothers, and Caligula becomes emperor pretty much by default. He doesn't have to do any scheming or anything to be there. He's just the only person who's not 12. And then Claudius becomes emperor, not again through any particular scheming of his own, but because he's sort of thrust into the position as the last adult man standing. Nero is the only person who is schemed to the throne, but that's his mother's scheming,
9:39 Speaker 01 not his. He doesn't seem to particularly want it and probably would have been happier without it. So if anything, she is like the most ambitious person in that family. But she has none of the tools of being able to create a political party or being able to be magnificent in war. All she has is what seems to be an unbelievable diplomatic power, just a real ability to persuade people and a total fearlessness that she is able to use. That means that she will do literally anything up to you and including marrying her own uncle and getting the law changed so that she can access power that is denied to her because of her sex.
10:19 Dan Snow? Let's talk about her first marriage. Reasonably typical, is it, that you would marry someone within your wider family network? And how old would she have been? Quite young, presumably?
10:28 Speaker 01 She is quite young. She is a teenager, maybe 16 or 17 years old when she marries him. It's right at the very end of Tiberius's reign and she is married off to a cousin called Domitia Sahina Babas, who is like a too close for comfort cousin.
10:44 Dan Snow? Would she have had any agency there?
10:46 Speaker 01 No, she would have no power over that whatsoever. Also, that happens after Tiberius has tried, exiled and then murdered her mother and two brothers. So I think that any attempt to exercise agency would have ended up with her brutally dead in a cellar somewhere. So she has no agency over who she's going to marry. And Sahina Babas is notoriously a horrible, horrible person. But one thing that she does have agency over and which I think that she does Very clearly used is she has agency over whether she has children or not in Tiberius's reign. And I think it's very notable that she is married for a few years under Tiberius.
11:25 Speaker 01 He dies in fourteen and she has her one and only child about ten months after Tiberius dies. And I think it's very clear that she chooses not to have children while Tiberius is alive. So she cannot choose her husband or the father of her child, but she can choose whether she has children. And I think that it is a very interesting coincidence that that happens.
11:47 Dan Snow? Okay, so she's had a child. What type of child is it?
11:51 Speaker 01 It is a boy flavoured child.
11:53 Dan Snow? Okay, so is that useful for her?
11:55 Speaker 01 It's incredibly useful because we're in dynastic politics here. This is a royal family. Girls are useful for marrying off, but boys can actually do things. And so she has one boy and stops, which I also think is pretty interesting because she has two further husbands. And the boy is christened, is born as Lucius Hina Babus, and we now know him as Nero.
12:18 Dan Snow? Known a little more famously by his later name.
12:21 Speaker 01 By his adoptive name, yeah.
12:23 Dan Snow? So she's got this child who's got useful blood in his veins.
12:26 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
12:27 Dan Snow? And the succession has already been messy, right? It went from Augustus to Tiberius, who is not his blood relative, is a stepchild. It went from Tiberius to Caligula. So it will be clear to her that really all bets are on if you're within this sort of dynastic setup, is possible that her son could end up being emperor.
12:43 Speaker 01 Yes, it's very reasonable because Caligula is pretty young and he's also quite messy. And there is, at the time that he is born, there are no other children in the family. So he is the first of his generation. And so there is a very real possibility that he will be the most prominent member of his generation. And that is what she is probably hoping for, because what she does about two years into Caligula's reign, so really quite early into Caligula's reign, is she has embroiled in a conspiracy to overthrow him with another of her sisters and her sister's husband.
13:21 Dan Snow? So these are two sisters and a brother-in-law conspiring to overthrow their brother.
13:25 Speaker 01 Yes, because for whatever reason, they don't think that Caligula is up to it. The plan seems to be that they're going to put the brother-in-law in charge and they're going to make him the emperor because obviously he's another cousin and that they're going to try to remove Caligula from the throne. And she is caught and there's a great scene in Suetonius where there's a kind of big showdown at a a holiday house that they have and letters between the three of them are read aloud and they're apparently quite erotic. And she is sent off into exile to an island in the Trian Sea.
13:59 Dan Snow? So the suggestion, sorry about the eroticism, is that they're all incestuous together or something?
14:03 Speaker 01 Well, that she was also sleeping with her brother-in-law, yes.
14:06 Dan Snow? Okay.
14:07 Speaker 01 I mean, they're cousins, so it is still kind of incestuous, but yeah.
14:10 Dan Snow? But you know what? In that family, that's not really even... I don't think the ref even bothered getting his notebook out for that one.
14:15 Speaker 01 No, that's basically normal, yeah.
14:17 Dan Snow? Yeah. Okay, so naughty and she's exiled.
14:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:21 Dan Snow? Again, how much are we able to detect agency here? So she did, yes, she was playing a part in this conspiracy. She's been exiled. Does she get herself back in the game? Like, how much can we perceive through the texts?
14:31 Speaker 01 Well, we can see very little of what she's actually doing because all of the texts really are about either her brother or her uncle. They're never about her specifically. She is always a player in their game rather than the game master. So it is always presented as though she is not that agentic at this time, but the fact that she is exiled and interestingly enough, her sister is also exiled and the brother-in-law is executed, but it is Agrippina who is sent with his ashes, which leads me to suspect that she was more involved in the conspiracy and that the affair might have been a bit more
15:13 Speaker 01 problematic than people would like you to believe because he's not sent with his wife, he's sent with Agrippina, basically. There are not that many people punished for this, and they are by far the most high-profile people punished for this. I think that they are the leaders of an attempted rebellion against Caligula.
15:29 Dan Snow? Did they think he's not a very good ruler? Let's do this for the good of Rome? Or did they just think he's weak? No one likes him? Let's get rid.
15:35 Speaker 01 I think they think he doesn't get what being an emperor is, which he doesn't. He doesn't understand what being an emperor is, and he does not at all understand the balance of power in Rome, which is, especially at this time, the balance of power is that you're supposed to pretend that you're not the emperor, you are merely the first citizen. You are the first among equals, and it just so happens that everybody agrees that you have the best opinions and you have a collection of powers which have been given to you because of your fine moral standing.
16:07 Dan Snow? So we're saying, oh no, women can be just as ambitious as men. But actually, I'm not crediting her with actually political views. Like, I mean, why is she not allowed to also, whilst being very ambitious, not have big, interesting strategic thoughts and political thoughts about how the empire ought to be constructed?
16:22 Speaker 01 And later on, you can see that she does, because when she does eventually get to a position where she can make strategic decisions for the empire, she makes pretty good ones, and is very invested in the placement of who is going to be the governor of this place and what are they going to do there, much like Livia before her, in fact, who is also very invested in making political decisions.
16:43 Dan Snow? And well, maybe come on to that, but just because you've mentioned it while we're there, are they just self-interested? Are they just political allies? Or is she trying to put people that she perceives as being good and effective into those positions?
16:55 Speaker 01 Bit of both, to be honest, but partly because of the way the Roman system and the way the whole of Roman culture operates. It operates on the basis of reciprocity and obligation to one another. So if somebody does something for you, you have to do something for them. And so if she didn't give positions to people who were in her inner circle, then she would be massively betraying everything that is Roman culture. So in part, people get jobs under her because they're her friends, and that's the way that Rome works. It would be massively scandalous not to do it that way. But in part, it is She is choosing people and the people that she places generally do a pretty good job.
17:35 Speaker 01 You see, the person that she makes the governor of Egypt, for example, the Praetorian of Egypt, becomes massively important in Egyptian history. His name is Felix. He ends up marrying three queens. He rules there for quite a long time. He becomes quite controversial, but he does a reasonably good job.
17:52 Dan Snow? So she's got decent judgment, we think, as well.
17:54 Speaker 01 She does have pretty good judgment, yeah.
17:56 Dan Snow? She doesn't have to wait very long in exile, does she? Because after two years, is it?
17:59 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
17:59 Dan Snow? In forty one, her brother is in fact assassinated.
18:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, it turns out she was right about Caligula.
18:05 Dan Snow? She was definitely right about Caligula. He was assassinated. Was there a big political machine behind that assassination? Sort of plan for what followed, or was it just a particular bodyguard who just got absolutely bloody sick of him?
18:15 Speaker 01 So there is a big plan and then the plan goes wrong. It's actually quite fun. There's a three day kind of nightmare in Rome. Because the people who assassinate him, which is led by the, a head of the Praetorian Guard called Cassius Coria. Their plan is that they're going to basically try to reinstate senatorial rule. And that they're going to bring back the Republic properly. Unfortunately, the Praetorian Guard and large other groups in the Senate, in fact, don't really want that. And several people put themselves forward as an emperor. And the Praetorian Guard glom onto Claudius, who is the last adult Julio Claudian man starting. And they say, no, this is a hereditary thing now. He's going to be the emperor.
18:59 Speaker 01 And there's kind of three days of going backwards and forwards between the Senate going, okay, well, what if we had this guy as emperor? And the Praetorian Guard saying, no, Claudius has now agreed to give us loads of money. And so how much money are you going to give us? And they're like, no money. And that, well, we like this Claudius guy. He's going to give us lots of money. And it kind of goes backwards and forwards. Eventually the Senate and the assassins back down or are defeated. And Claudius is made the emperor and the system continues.
19:25 Dan Snow? And any Agrippina involvement in that plot?
19:28 Speaker 01 No, she is on a tiny little island called Ponza.
19:33 Dan Snow? But she's recalled.
19:34 Speaker 01 She is recalled. So Claudius has like no family and so he recalls her and he recalls her sister Lavilla as well and brings them back to Rome in these kind of grand, you know, I'm undoing everything that the wicked previous emperor did situation. So he undoes all of the unjust laws and brings back Agrippina. The first thing that she does interestingly is puts on a big, grand, kind of very public funeral for Caligula. He has not been buried and so she does have a big funeral for her brother, which is an interesting thing to do. It is kind of a statement that she is not going to be easily managed by the new regime.
20:14 Dan Snow? Because presiding over a funeral was an opportunity for political advancement, wasn't it?
20:17 Speaker 01 Mm hmm. Yes.
20:19 Dan Snow? Right. So what happens the next few years? Because she suddenly emerges as the wife of, she managed to marry her uncle, marry the Emperor Claudius. So what did she spend those next few years doing?
20:27 Speaker 01 So the next few years, she is basically just the niece of the emperor. So she's still sort of a princess. She is married off to a guy called Passianus, who is a long-term courtier. He is made governor of Asia. So she goes and lives in Asia for a while. She lives in Turkey. He becomes consul. So she's the wife of a consul. So she's just a kind of very high profile woman, but she is raising Nero, who is now 10, 11 years old, is growing up and she is raising him in public and doing everything that she can to increase his visibility, really. Messalina is the empress at this time and the early years of Claudius's reign are quite chaotic. There are a good couple of attempts to kill him. There's a rebellion
21:12 Speaker 01 in Pannonia. There's quite a few people really hate him. He has loads of people executed and Messalina is quite messy in her way. And so Agrippina kind of keeps her head down and is very well behaved, apart from possibly killing her husband.
21:29 Dan Snow? Right. Well, that's, you know, again, that's all right.
21:32 Speaker 01 But that's fine in Roman times.
21:34 Dan Snow? Can't blame a girl for doing that. Does she kill her husband to create a vacancy then? Or because he's annoying?
21:39 Speaker 01 The theory is that she kills her husband because he's very, very rich and she does not have very much money of her own because all of it was confiscated by Cleagler and pretty much all of her wealth is tied up in Nero, it's really Nero's wealth. So she can't control anything herself. But if her husband dies and he happens to have changed his will quite recently to make her his sole heir, which he did, then she then has all of his money and he has something like 200 million sesterces. So he's extremely rich and when he dies, all of that money becomes hers.
22:15 Dan Snow? Okay, well, that makes sense. So she's now got a sort of independent war chest as well, which is important.
22:20 Speaker 01 Yeah. And that is something that people say about her a lot is that being independently wealthy and her having money, she doesn't really spend it on the things that they expected women to spend it on. Like she is notoriously never wears huge jewels or like fancy houses or anything. She's not a luxurious woman. She just wants the security of money that she can use for either political purposes or that she just has money. She just loves to have that security of knowing she has it.
22:50 Dan Snow? Is she anything to do with the rupture that occurs in Claudius's marriage?
22:55 Speaker 01 The Messalina situation. No, Messalina does that to herself. Messalina's utterly bizarre decision to marry somebody else while her husband is on a day trip to Ostia, which is about half an hour away, and have a big public wedding and then start moving stuff into somebody else's house is a genuinely crackers decision that she makes all by herself for her own. We have theories on this. I think it's because she's stupid and Onocagil Martin thinks it's because she's evil. So.
23:26 Dan Snow? Well, they're not mutually exclusive, sadly.
23:28 Speaker 01 They're not mutually exclusive. They might be both.
23:30 Dan Snow? So that marriage comes to a very, very dramatic end.
23:33 Speaker 01 It comes to a very bloody end. So for that, she is executed in a garden. So one of Claudius's freedmen, so one of the members of his household, basically orders her to be executed because Claudius is having a panic attack and can't really bring himself to make any decisions. And it's clear that she just needs to be got out of the way. So she is, has her head cut off in a garden, kind of extrajudicially, leaving Claudius without a wife and leaving her two children, she has a daughter and a son, without a mother in the palace and leaving a big vacancy at the top
24:12 Speaker 01 because Claudius is quite a weak willed man and is very easily led largely by the last person that talked to him.
24:20 Dan Snow? And an emperor needs a wife?
24:22 Speaker 01 An emperor does need a wife. They think that Claudius particularly needs a wife because he just needs something to focus on. He's had four already and it's believed for whatever personal reasons that he just can't really be trusted without a wife, that he just needs that kind of stabilising influence. He has a whole bunch of concubines, but they believe for some reason that he, he requires a woman next to him just to complete him.
24:50 Dan Snow? I mean, he's very eligible. So presumably lots of people had their eye on this. This is obviously one of the key moments. Why does Agrippina manage to get that prize such as it is?
24:59 Speaker 01 So it immediately breaks down into factions within the palace or within the imperial court, which is dramatised really pleasingly by Tacitus as this kind of round table discussion between three freedmen. And there are various arguments for various eligible women, one of whom is a woman that Claudius has already been married to, one of whom is this woman who just keeps being married off to people called Lolliopolina, who's very beautiful, and one of whom is Agrippina, who is put forward because basically the argument is made that he needs to marry somebody within the best family. It has to be somebody from the Julia Claudian family, basically. If he marries somebody from outside of the family, then he will be giving power
25:44 Speaker 01 to another faction. There will be a whole nother family that is raised up to imperial levels and it will cause chaos. But if they marry him off to somebody who's within the Julio-Claudia family, then it keeps everything nice and neat, like the Habsburgs. And she's basically the only woman left standing who is a member of the Julio-Claudians. The argument is made that she has already proved that she's fertile, so she can have more children, that she is of the best family, and the Egyptians did it, so it's probably fine for semi-divine people to do it, which Claudius obviously now is.
26:23 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Snow's History. More on Agrippina later.
26:30 Dan Snow? This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've heard a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what will baffle historians about us: mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.
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28:57 Speaker 03 Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, host of Echoes of History, the podcast that plunges you into the ranks of the Knights Templar across ancient Egypt and behind the barricades of history's great revolutions to explore the worlds recreated in Assassin's Creed. In our new series, Chasing Shadows, we're in feudal Japan alongside samurai warlords and shinobi spies, whether you're gearing up for Assassin's Creed: Shadows or captivated by Japan's rich history. This podcast, brought to you by Ubisoft and History Hit, is a must-listen. Chasing Shadows is out now on the Echoes of History podcast.
29:44 Dan Snow? Do we know if Claudius liked, or has he even loved his niece?
29:48 Speaker 01 Well, there are stories of her using her privileged access because she is a member of the family. She can is one of the few people who can touch him, one of the few people who can hang out with him on a one-on-one basis of her using that access to basically seduce him to kind of sit on his lap, to give him kisses, to stroke his hair and tell him he's handsome, which he is definitely involved in the processes that have to take place to allow him to marry her. So he must have been, if not persuaded that it was a good political idea, then definitely wanted to marry her. He has to have been on board because they literally have to change the law in order to allow it. And he has to be
30:30 Speaker 01 involved in ratifying that, in starting the processes. Whether he fancied her, I think, is just gross.
30:38 Dan Snow? Hey, this is politics. That's not an issue.
30:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's not an issue. It might well be that he did fancy her. Grosser things have happened in history. Whether she fancied him is-
30:48 Dan Snow? Fancying and sexual attraction is for us normies.
30:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
30:50 Dan Snow? The great lords, they've got politics to do. That's what the bedroom's for.
30:53 Speaker 01 Exactly. The story goes that she used sexual attraction in order to persuade him that it was a good idea.
31:01 Dan Snow? It's so hard to know, isn't it? Because that's possible, but it's also such a trope about women and powerful men. So you're like, okay.
31:08 Speaker 01 That's all they've got. Because the other story, the kind of parallel story is that this is all the work of Agrippina and a freedman called Pallas, who is the finance secretary. He's in charge of all of the finances of the emperor. So he's incredibly powerful. And that the two of them are having an affair and that she used her sexual powers, which are apparently immense, to persuade him, to persuade Claudius to change the law and have them married so that they could be the power couple who were really running the emperor.
31:39 Dan Snow? Okay, now, speaking of power couples, so what did she do as empress? Is she different to other empresses? And how is that expressed?
31:45 Speaker 01 So the first thing that she does is she is named Augusta almost immediately, which hasn't really happened before. All of the previous women who have been named Augusta have either been retired or deliberately sidelined. So you have Livia is the main one. She's named Augusta when Augustus dies. Augusta at this time is really a very powerful title that becomes diluted over the Roman period. But to name a woman Augusta is to basically name them as being outside of the realm of normal womanhood, outside of the realm of normal people. And she is the first woman who is under the age of 70, really, to get that name and then
32:29 Speaker 01 be able to use it. We have images of her sitting next to Claudius as his equal on the days when they are receiving delegations. She appears in public, wearing like a military cloak, a military clothing. She is very, very involved in a very public way with making decisions about the empire. So it's very clear that people are coming to her. So as a comparison, for example, when Tiberius became emperor and Livia was named Augusta, Tiberius banned senators from going to her house. So she was not allowed to meet with senators one on one. The only person that she could talk to about politics was him.
33:13 Speaker 01 She could try to persuade him of stuff and he could reject it. Whereas Agrippina is clearly engaging with the Senate, engaging with the wider structures. She is making decisions for the empire effectively on her own, or at least as an equal with Claudius, as the two of them. To the extent that she has, by this time, the wars in Germany have mostly concluded. And so she founds a city, a colony, where she was born, which is called Colonia Agrippanensis, which we now call Cologne.
33:47 Dan Snow? There we go. She also locks in her children into that imperial infrastructure, doesn't she?
33:54 Speaker 01 She does. She manages to persuade Claudius to undergo a series of fairly complicated legal manoeuvres to have his daughter adopted by another family so that she can marry Nero, who becomes Nero because he is adopted by Claudius, thus disinheriting his own biological son Britannicus. So Octavia is adopted out, Nero is adopted in, and Britannicus is kind of shoved off to the sidelines. And this makes Nero, he becomes Nero at this point, Tiberius Claudius Nero, and he is both his son and his son-in-law.
34:37 Dan Snow? Yeah. And how much older is he than Britannicus approximately?
34:39 Speaker 01 He's about five years older than Britannicus.
34:42 Dan Snow? And so now there's this sort of unpleasant ambiguity between them. Okay.
34:45 Speaker 01 Yes. And they're very good at optics. Agrippina is particularly very good at optics. And there's a lot of, whenever they appear in public, they will always make sure that Nero, who is kind of 15 years oldish, is dressed as a full soldier, or in military garb, or as a grown man, and that Britannicus is always presented in the garb of childhood. So he's always wearing a short tunic, and they have this thing called the bulla, this protective necklace that only children wear that you give up when you become a man. So he's always presented as a very much kind of a pathetic child compared to this wonderful, magnificent 15-year-old boy.
35:26 Dan Snow? So she is very prominent. She's taking part. She's making big decisions. She's a sort of co-ruler with Claudius at this point.
35:33 Speaker 01 Pretty much, yeah. For the kind of the second half of his reign, from about 50 onwards, they get married in 50, to the end of his reign, she is the prominent power.
35:45 Dan Snow? And is there pushback? Is that regarded as transgressive?
35:49 Speaker 01 It is by the conservatives. It's an interesting thing that later on, when people are writing about it, so all of the sources that we have are pretty much written under Trajan and later than that. So when the idea of what the emperor is has shifted quite a lot, they find it disgusting, absolutely disgusting that this has happened, which is why Agrippina appears as the great villain of Tacitus's histories. He's writing under Trajan and Nerva. And so she is the real big bad of his histories at this point.
36:22 Dan Snow? Trajan and Nidrian in success. I mean, they were, they were men's men in more ways than one.
36:27 Speaker 01 They're very much men's men, but they also have perfected, more than any other emperor, the image of the princeps, who listens to advisors and is a military hero and is not tyrannical in any possible way. And they really managed to get down this idea that they are the first man, rather than the kind of divine tyrant or a semi-king. And they are beloved by the people who are writing about them, or at least they say they love them while they're writing about them while they're alive. But at the same time, when people are alive during Claudius's reign, like the senatorial decrees and the things that survive from that period, which is not a huge
37:12 Speaker 01 amount, are all talk about them in the most glowing terms. Oh, my God, we love Agrippina so much. And we think that Claudius is so amazing and wonderful in every way. And we're so grateful that palace exists.
37:21 Dan Snow? And these are the best years of Claudius's rule, as such as they are. I mean, it's sort of reasonably stable and, and well managed.
37:28 Speaker 01 It is quite impressive how executions drop off a cliff as soon as Agrippina becomes empress, that he executes something like 30 odd people in the first five years of his reign, and almost nobody afterwards. Because she, I think, is very clear that it's not a very helpful way to deal with things. And interestingly, even when you have crises in the reign, so there's a whole crises with mount centurions who they think are forming a conspiracy around Britannicus. They are not executed. She makes sure, and this is presented as kind of very scandalous by Tacitus, but she puts them in different positions. She basically removes them from the Praetorian Guard
38:09 Speaker 01 and puts them into far away legions where they can't really do any damage. But she doesn't demote them. She doesn't do anything that will cause them to want to get revenge. If she executes them, then you've got families of people who hate you. But if you just shuffle them sideways, then you've kind of neutralized the threat without causing any new ones.
38:30 Dan Snow? Yeah, you're in Britain. I mean, it's bad, but it's not cause for a blood feud.
38:33 Speaker 01 Exactly. And no one is going to join your rebellion because you're like, oh, she sent me to Britain.
38:40 Dan Snow? Lucky them. Now, listen, we've got to come to the great question of Agrippina's life, indeed of the whole of Roman history. Did she kill the emperor, her husband Claudius?
38:52 Speaker 01 I think that she probably did.
38:55 Dan Snow? Oh, my God, that's exciting news. That's brilliant. I love it. Okay.
38:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:00 Dan Snow? Well, she had previous, I suppose.
39:01 Speaker 01 Yeah. And mostly because we do have contemporaneous-ish sources that talk about it. And only one of them is even vaguely skeptical. But people like Pliny the Elder, who is around at the time, and possibly Seneca,
39:20 Speaker 01 they all think that she did it. And Seneca is like one of her best friends for a while, anyway. They are all pretty sure that she probably did kill him.
39:29 Dan Snow? At the same time, I mean, how anyone knows, because everyone's dropping dead all over the bloody place in this point.
39:35 Speaker 01 Everyone is dropping dead. And one of the things about Claudius is that he is a notorious glutton. Like, once he starts eating, he won't stop.
39:42 Dan Snow? And he was getting on a little bit.
39:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, he's well into his 50s.
39:45 Dan Snow? Well into his 50s, having spent his life eating loads of dodgy Roman food, so.
39:48 Speaker 01 Yeah. So at the very least, I think people pretty strongly believed that she did.
39:53 Dan Snow? Yeah. And the timing, we should say to people, the timing was extremely convenient because it was just at the point that this Britannicus, Claudius's other actual son, the sort of ability to portray him as a gallless child was running out. I mean, he was going to start to look like a proper prince, a proper heir, quite, quite soon.
40:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, basically he hits puberty and gets his toga of manhood and then Claudius starts apparently mooning around the palace, talking about how much he loves Britannicus and how he hopes that he's going to be able to give Britannicus lots of good honours and maybe we could make Britannicus the, you know, put him in charge of this legion over there or make him the urban praetor or whatever, which is all stuff that Nero has been doing up to now. And at the very least, it is definitely going to cause factions.
40:42 Dan Snow? Agrippina's got a problem.
40:44 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm. There is no situation where this doesn't cause fighting in the palace?
40:50 Dan Snow? Hereditary systems, there are either too few sons or too many. There's no ideal number of sons. They're such a stupid system.
40:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, Trajan really did get it right with the picking.
40:58 Dan Snow? Yeah, pick them. Pick a good guy in the next generation and then kill everyone else. Right, anyway, let's get Claudius killed. So it's what, it was always said to be mushrooms, but after a feast, he gets ill, basically.
41:09 Speaker 01 Yes, so he gets very ill. There's a lot of detailed information about it because the palace is leaky as a sieve, but basically he eats mushrooms, they don't kill him immediately, they take some time. And so one of the stories is that she recruits the doctor who comes to treat him, who puts poison on the end of a feather and puts it down his throat. But either way, he has some feasting, he reacts badly, he dies quite uncomfortably overnight and Agrippina locks the palace down and gets the Praetorian Guard on board with Nero.
41:48 Speaker 01 She has donatives and promises of financial reward distributed and 19-year-old Nero is hailed as emperor the next morning.
41:57 Dan Snow? So again, she gets the job done.
41:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. She's very efficient.
42:01 Dan Snow? Because succession has been messy as hell in the Roman world so far and it's not going to get a lot better for much of the Roman period. But this is smooth, it's peaceful, no one's, no one's dead yet.
42:11 Speaker 01 No one's dead yet, other than the emperor. And she also recognises, I think quite cleverly, that the real power here is the army, is the Praetorian Guard, several thousand heavily armed men in Rome, and that the senate will follow what the Praetorian Guard does. Like if she'd learnt anything from Claudius's succession, is that the senate has no real power here. They exist to ratify decisions made by other people, really.
42:38 Dan Snow? Then let's just quickly deal with Paul Britannicus, because I'm very fond of Britannicus, and I would think it would have been fun to have Emperor Paul Britannicus. Some of the stories are a bit grim, aren't they?
42:47 Speaker 01 They are. He is poisoned very quickly into the rain because he is almost as old. Now, five years looks like a lot less of a problem when it's 19 and 14, 15, and it's certainly going to become less of a problem when they're 20 and 25. So he's poisoned very quickly. He's poisoned allegedly at a feast where, in full view of everybody, apparently the poison is put into water that is used to cool down wine. So they taste the wine, the wine is fine, they pour the water in, it changes the temperature, and that's where the poison is. He has a kind of terrible fit, and Nero tells everybody, "Oh, did you not know he was epileptic? He's having an epileptic fit", and has him removed,
43:32 Speaker 01 and then forces everybody to continue with the feast.
43:38 Dan Snow? More Agrippina coming up after this, folks.
43:51 Speaker 03 Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, host of Echoes of History, the podcast that plunges you into the ranks of the Knights Templar across ancient Egypt, and behind the barricades of history's great revolutions to explore the worlds recreated in Assassin's Creed. In our new series, Chasing Shadows, we're in feudal Japan alongside samurai warlords and shinobi spies. Whether you're gearing up for Assassin's Creed Shadows or captivated by Japan's rich history, this podcast, brought to you by Ubisoft and History Hit, is a must-listen. Chasing Shadows is out now on the Echoes of History podcast.
44:37 Dan Snow? And that is the end of Britannicus, it's the end of, what is it, the end of the line of Claudius? We'll find out because Nero is married to Claudius's daughter.
44:45 Speaker 01 He is, who he also has killed. Later on, several years later, but basically he does end Claudius's line by killing both of his children. For Agrippina, this is a real moment of crisis because she thinks that by having her quite young son on the throne, by having put into place his advisers, who are Seneca and Burrus, that she will be able to maintain her position as the partner in the empire. He has made it very clear, there is a very humiliating moment where she attempts to sit next to him while he is receiving a delegation from Armenia, and he stands up and escorts her out of the room and basically says, you are not going to be this person.
45:30 Dan Snow? So she spent all her life trying to put her son on the throne, and it turns out that it was actually the worst thing she could have done, in a way.
45:36 Speaker 01 Yeah. On the one hand, she totally achieves what it is, which is that she gets Augustus's direct biological line back on the throne, but she very much thinks that he is going to be a devoted son and let her do what she wants.
45:51 Dan Snow? Care for what you wish for, folks.
45:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, but it turns out that he is, actually thinks that she's quite overbearing and wants to do what he wants.
45:59 Dan Snow? Is that almost straight away?
46:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, immediately. The first speech that he gives in the senate, so like on day two of his reign, he goes to the senate and gives a speech allegedly written by Seneca, where he says, "The palace is not going to be involved in politics anymore." Basically, there's not going to be any more of this kind of family involvement, this is going to be a proper political situation. Yeah.
46:21 Dan Snow? Wow, ungrateful.
46:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. That's true ingratitude. And then she keeps trying to act as she always had been acting, or as act as she had been acting for the past five years, and he keeps putting her away. And so basically, she is making noises that maybe she'll put her efforts into Britannicus instead. Maybe she'll join the Britannicus faction, and so Nero kills Britannicus. And he does it in front of her. It is clear, apparently from her facial expression, that she did not know, and that she knows that this is a message to her, that like it's Nero or nothing, and also she needs to behave herself. She needs to get back into this female space that Livia had carved out that would be considered
47:06 Speaker 01 an appropriate female space, and she really doesn't want to. And so he just kind of keeps killing people until she has to.
47:13 Dan Snow? And then he starts trying to kill her.
47:15 Speaker 01 Yeah. We do have this five year period where she completely disappears. The first kind of year and a half ish of Nero's reign are really defined by him feuding with his mother, and him trying to take away powers from her, of him removing her from the palace, and making her live in her different house, so that she's not near the senate, of preventing people from seeing her. And eventually, they come to a truce kind of situation. There's this brilliant scene where, seeing that she is not very popular anymore, her sister-in-law, so it's from her first marriage, her name is Domicia, who has always hated her apparently, tries to have her killed, and says that she is plotting against Nero, and thinks that they can get Nero while he's drunk, and get him to just execute her. But she gives this
48:00 Speaker 01 massive speech about how Domicia Lepidur is a rubbish woman because she's not a mother, and then talks her way into seeing Nero, and they're alone in a room with nobody there, and nobody knows what they said. But when they come out, she has been completely forgiven. They've met a truce situation, and inexplicably, several members of her faction have now got really good jobs. So she's persuaded him to give like various people in her faction great jobs. They've kind of come to a truce, and then she disappears for like five years. At which point she reappears because Nero decides that he doesn't want to be married to Octavia anymore. He wants to be married to this woman called Papaya. Agrippina won't
48:42 Speaker 01 let him divorce Octavia, so he decides he needs to kill Agrippina.
48:47 Dan Snow? Ah, okay, interesting. She comes out of retirement to just kind of insist on that because she realizes that is a stupid dynastic thing to do. Okay.
48:55 Speaker 01 Yes. Also, I think that she is probably still pretty vocal. She's just not doing stuff that gets you in the sources anymore.
49:03 Dan Snow? But it's curious that, as you've pointed out through this podcast, it's the thing that she's quite attached to is this idea of this family remaining on the throne. So she thinks that that is a suicidally stupid thing to do.
49:12 Speaker 01 Yes, and that they should be having children that will continue their line, which they're not doing. They've been married for ages and they're not because they hate each other quite a lot.
49:21 Dan Snow? Idiots. What's that got to do with anything?
49:23 Speaker 01 Exactly.
49:24 Dan Snow? Right, so just quickly run us through the absurd sequence that leads up to her death.
49:29 Speaker 01 So first he tries to poison her. That's his classic. He's poisoned loads of people at this point, but it turns out that she is taking antidotes. She is habitually taking antidotes against poison, which is very smart of her. Then he apparently tries to rig up her house to collapse on her while she is sleeping. So he tries to like make it so that the bedroom ceiling will fall in on her and crush her while she is sleeping. But she is tipped off by a member of her household that this is going to happen. And so she just doesn't sleep there that night. And he tries various other things. He tries to get the Praetorian Guard to just stab her, which would be the easiest thing. But they say they will not stab the daughter of Germanicus. Like, they won't turn against the daughter of Germanicus. They love the daughter of Germanicus and they won't kill her. So they
50:12 Speaker 01 just straight up say no. Eventually, he comes up with this kind of ludicrous plan, which is that he is going to trick her to get on a boat in the bay down in Naples. He's going to trick her to get on it, but it is a trick boat from the stadiums. It is a boat that collapses somehow, and half of the boat will tip over or collapse and knock everybody that is on the boat into the water, which he does. He manages to get her onto this boat. They're sailing across the bay, it collapses, she's tossed into the water. What he does not know, because he does not know his mother, is she's a very strong swimmer. And so she just swims to shore.
50:56 Speaker 01 Another woman who is in the water with her says, help me, help me, I'm Agrippina, and gets beaten to death with an oar. But she manages to make it to shore and sends him a letter that says, just so you know, I had an accident in the bay, but I made it home okay. And he is like, oh my god, why won't you just die? And so he eventually just sends a friend of his with a sword. He pretends that his mother has sent someone to kill him and sends her with a sword. And just has her stabbed in her bedroom. They just march into her house. Tear away all of her enslaved staff and stab her to death in her bedroom.
51:32 Dan Snow? And is that murder known about?
51:34 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
51:36 Dan Snow? Is her final political act the way in which she was killed?
51:40 Speaker 01 Kind of, because she is very brave about it. She does not kind of hide or cower. She says, her final act is to say, if you have come for my son, I don't believe that he would try to kill me. And they say, well, he has. And so she says, apparently she points to her womb and says, then stab me here, because this is where my death has come from. Which is kind of cool. And then she is genuinely quite loved. And people are horrified by the fact that he has done this. And he is horrified by the fact he's done this. He never goes back to that area. Because he thinks that she haunts it. He forces everybody to pretend that she had tried to kill him. And does a kind of damnatio memoriae and forces them to take down her statues and da, da, da.
52:25 Speaker 01 But eventually, 10 years later, when he is overthrown. The person who leads the rebellion against him says that one of the reasons is that he murdered his mother. And that matricide is the first thing that made him decide that he could not stand to have this man as emperor. And that he had started kind of rebelling at that point. And it is a stain on his reputation that even if he hadn't done anything else. He probably would have struggled to recover from this one among the Romans. To kill a parent is such a. Violation of everything that they hold sacred, both religiously and morally,
53:05 Speaker 01 that it is really profoundly shocking. And then that he makes everybody celebrate it really offends people as well.
53:15 Dan Snow? So she did have her revenge in the end?
53:17 Speaker 01 She does have her revenge. He is eventually killed, which helps.
53:22 Dan Snow? But she does his reputation, his legitimacy, a terror. Well, her murder really reduces him in the eyes of the Romans.
53:29 Speaker 01 It does. It's at that point that his reign really goes off the rails. Anything that he was doing that was in halfway decent, been running the empire, she was clearly doing a lot of the admin work because the admin work stops really being done. He focuses almost entirely on his music career, on his new wife, on his.
53:49 Dan Snow? Pivots to his music career.
53:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, that she would never have let him go on the stage. And going on the stage is what really destroys his reign. But he's let loose to do whatever he wants and he completely runs his entire reign into the ground and makes himself the person that when you say bad Roman emperor, he's usually the first person that people talk about.
54:11 Dan Snow? Yeah, gosh, I don't know if she'd be happy about that in the end.
54:15 Speaker 01 I think she'd be furious about it.
54:17 Dan Snow? She gave him the world and he just completely screwed the whole thing up.
54:21 Speaker 01 He did. Admittedly, she never asked him if he wanted it, but his job was to want it. And his job was to have children and to continue and to keep the family on the throne. And he didn't do any of it.
54:34 Dan Snow? There are no competitors to the Roman power. You're married to someone, you could have kids and you go, he just went and set fire to the entire empire.
54:41 Speaker 01 And possibly the city of Rome.
54:45 Dan Snow? And indeed, that's another podcast which we have talked about, in fact, with a very brilliant Shushma. Thank you so much for coming and telling us about this very remarkable Roman. You've just written a brilliant book. What's it called?
54:53 Speaker 01 So I have just written a book called Service: How Slavery Changed the Roman Empire, which is out next year. My previous book is Agrippina, The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World.
55:02 Dan Snow? Thank you so much for coming on.
55:04 Speaker 01 Thank you so much for having me.
55:09 Dan Snow? Thank you so much to you for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History It. We could not make this podcast without you. That's actually true. So make sure, if you want to keep it going, that is, to hit follow in your podcast player right now. You'll get new episodes dropped into your podcast library automatically by the power of tech. You can listen anywhere you get your pods: Apple, Spotify, even BBC Sounds. Imagine a world, just imagine, where you never miss an episode of this podcast. I mean, it's there. The technology makes that possible. That could be your reality right now if you hit follow. See you next time.
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