The First Ladies of Rome

by Annelise Freisenbruch

  Preferring a mat to her bedroom in the Palace, she had the nerve to put on a nighttime hood, the whore-empress. Like that, with a blonde wig hiding her black hair, she went inside a brothel reeking of ancient blankets to an empty cubicle – her very own. Then she stood there, naked and for sale, with her nipples gilded, under the trade name of ‘She-Wolf’, putting on display the belly you came from, noble-born Britannicus. She welcomed her customers seductively as they came in and asked for their money. Later, when the pimp was already dismissing his girls, she left reluctantly, waiting till the last possible moment to shut her cubicle, still burning with her clitoris inflamed and stiff. She went away, exhausted by the men but not yet satisfied, and, a disgusting creature, with her cheeks filthy, dirty from the smoke of the lamp, she took back to the emperor’s couch the stench of the brothel.30

  Other sources claimed that Messalina compelled other noble women to follow her into adultery, forcing them to have sex in the palace while their husbands watched – a mirror of one of Caligula’s favourite pastimes – and fobbing off the suspicions of Claudius by providing him with housemaids to sleep with.31 So consuming was her own sex drive that she was said once to have challenged a professional prostitute to see which of them could last longest in a sex marathon, a contest the empress won after servicing her twenty-fifth client in non-stop succession, earning her a place in a recently compiled volume of ‘world records’ from the ancient world.32

  Despite successes such as the conquest of Britain, the years following Claudius’s peremptory and turbulent accession were characterised by an atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion in his court, stage-managed, it was alleged, by the empress herself. Witch-hunts and political trials against rivals were commonplace and a sense of competition for places was keenly felt among the imperial family itself. Both Messalina and her husband shared a similar Achilles heel, namely that there were others with potentially better claims to stand in their shoes. Direct descendants of Augustus and Germanicus still survived, like the recently recalled sisters Agrippina Minor and Julia Livilla, whose husbands might make plausible alternatives to Claudius as emperor while the women themselves could be seen as more attractive candidates for the role of empress.

  Julia Livilla was particularly vulnerable in this equation. At the time of Caligula’s death, some had considered her husband, the one-time consul Marcus Vinicius, to be a worthy pretender to the crown bestowed by the praetorians on Claudius, and despite the fanfare of her recall from exile, it was not long before she fell foul of her uncle’s regime and was sent back to her island on charges which were generally agreed by later commentators to have been fabricated. The order for her banishment was credited to Claudius, but some claimed that Messalina’s was the hand behind the move. Driven by jealousy of Julia Livilla’s beauty and closeness to her uncle, Messalina was believed to have invented a charge of adultery with the wealthy intellectual Seneca, who was also sent into exile. Julia Livilla met her death through starvation, just like her grandmother Julia, putting an end to any hopes her husband might have had of usurping Claudius. Her ashes were later brought back to Rome – the alabaster funerary urn which contained them is now housed in the Vatican Museums.33

  The downfall of Julia Livilla on unsubstantiated charges of sexual misconduct underlines how interchangeable transgressions of a sexual or political nature were in Roman societal discourse. Adultery was a convenient excuse to get rid of opponents. Meanwhile, the young empress’s sexual jealousies were said to have led to the deaths of a long and illustrious list of other victims of the regime between 42 and 47. They included Julia Livilla’s widowed husband Marcus Vinicius and Messalina’s own stepfather and governor of eastern Spain, Appius Silanus – both of whom were condemned after rejecting the empress’s advances; and a granddaughter of Antonia’s named Julia, who, like her cousin Julia Livilla, was seen as a potential rival to the empress.34

  While there was a chance of rehabilitation, in the eyes of the Julio-Claudian regime’s ancient critics, for a husband whose wife or daughter was behaving badly, as long as he took the proper steps to punish her – as Augustus had done in banishing his own daughter Julia – Claudius did nothing to stop Messalina’s charge-sheet of crimes from mounting up. This was a fundamental aspect of his characterisation in antiquity as a weak and emasculated ruler, the puppet of not just his profligate wife but his ex-slave advisers. Indeed, the clique of household freedmen who formed the nucleus of the Roman emperor’s confidential inner circle and managed the reins of imperial bureaucracy were charged with aiding Messalina in her exploits. Within this close circle, there were three key players: Narcissus (secretary to the emperor), Pallas (treasurer) and Callistus (in charge of petitions). Their recognisably Greek names would have acted as a further signifier of untrustworthiness to a Roman audience.35 Narcissus was the most powerful of the three, and, alongside the opportunistic public prosecutor Publius Suillius, regularly acted as the empress’s partner-in-crime. Together, they used a foiled conspiracy against Claudius in the aftermath of Appius Silanus’s death in 42 as an excuse to crack down viciously on their enemies, forcing slaves and freedmen to inform against their innocent masters and sending men and women to the scaffold, whilst pocketing bribes to spare the guilty.36

  The fact that Messalina was seen acting hand-in-glove with a freedman was yet another important mark against both her and her husband. A society where the wife of the emperor hobnobbed with foreign ex-slaves and cavorted with a roll-call of lovers who included actors and other members of the lower social order, as Messalina is said to have done, was a society turned upside down, an imperial household in disorder.37 In short, Claudius’s wife was a lightning conductor for everything that was iniquitous about his regime in the eyes of his critics.

  Agrippina Minor meanwhile had continued to remain in the shadows, managing to avoid the same fate as her sister perhaps simply by staying well out of sight, on her own or her husband Passienus’s estates.38 Then, in 47, five years after Julia Livilla’s second exile, she made a prominent return to public life, putting in an appearance at the Saecular Games, last held in the capital during the era of Augustus. Traditionally, one of the most important events at this occasion was the parade of young Roman boys on horseback in an obscure equestrian drill known as the Troy Game, commemorating the legendary Trojan conflict which Romans saw as a pivotal part of their foundation story. Among those taking part this time were Claudius’s now six-year-old son Britannicus and Agrippina’s nine-year-old son Nero. The agreed feedback from the day was that of the two boys, the crowd had applauded young Nero the more warmly, a fact later touted as a prophecy of his future power but thought at the time to have been prompted both by goodwill towards his mother Agrippina as the daughter of the popular Germanicus and his much-pitied wife, and antipathy towards the current empress.39

  Messalina now knew for certain that she faced a serious potential rival in the young Agrippina, the mother of another credible male heir and the possessor of the direct lineage from Augustus that Messalina lacked. The empress moreover had already made a series of fatal mistakes that year, beginning with the targeting of a provincial plutocrat named Valerius Asiaticus. A former brother-in-law of Caligula – Asiaticus’s spouse Lollia Saturnina was the sister of Caligula’s third wife, Lollia Paulina – as well as an accomplice in that emperor’s assassination, Asiaticus was a well-connected man of immense wealth, who had been the first man from Gaul to attain the consulship. He had used some of his fortune to acquire and redevelop one of Rome’s most magnificent private properties, the pleasure gardens of Lucullus, a famous general, politician and glutton of the first century BC.

  The circumstances of Asiaticus’s death in 47, as described by Tacitus, make for bizarre reading. Envious of his acquisition of the gardens which she had designs on for herself and jealous of his lover Poppaea Sabina, her rival for the attentions of the celebrated Greek actor Mnester, Messalina put her legal henchman Publius Suillius to work. Asiaticus was arrested while vacation
ing in Baiae and subjected to a private inquisition in Claudius’s bedroom. Here, Messalina and Suillius accused him of adultery with Poppaea Sabina, of trying to corrupt the army and of being ‘too soft’, in other words, of being sexually effeminate – a deeply insulting attack on a Roman opponent’s masculinity. Asiaticus’s spirited defence seems to have produced a moment of teary-eyed vulnerability from Messalina, but having mastered herself she set another of her agents, Vitellius, to the task of persuading Claudius that death was the only punishment available to Asiaticus, though the condemned man should be allowed the dignity of administering it himself, an option which Asiaticus accepted and carried through, lamenting that his demise should come as a result of fraus muliebris – ‘womanly trickery’. Poppaea Sabina was similarly pressured into committing suicide.40

  Asiaticus’s elimination was agreed to have been a costly error by Messalina. There was resentment against the bullyboy tactics employed by Publius Suillius, who was accumulating vast wealth by bringing a wave of lucrative prosecutions against powerful defendants, and the failure to grant ex-consul Asiaticus a fair trial in front of the Senate surely antagonised its members. The execution around the same time of the powerful freedman Polybius, one of Claudius’s secretaries who was also named as one of Messalina’s lovers, was said to have further weakened her position, alienating the other palace bureaucrats like Narcissus who had been such a key support to her, and in the end it was these freedmen allies who wrote Messalina’s death warrant.

  One autumn day in 48, while Claudius was away performing a public engagement at Ostia, 16 miles (over 25 kilometres) outside of the city, a strange rumour spread through Rome. The word on the street was that Messalina had publicly ‘divorced’ the emperor by going through a marriage ceremony with a consul-in-waiting named Gaius Silius, complete with bridal costume, witnesses and wedding breakfast near the modern Piazza del Popolo. The empress had conceived a love ‘which bordered on madness’ for Silius, the best-looking man in Rome, a passion so intense it had driven all possible schemes of revenge against Agrippina Minor out of her mind. Silius, having been forced by Messalina to divorce his wife Junia Silana, had reconciled himself to the agreeable life of a kept man as his mistress showered him with gifts and honours, and even moved some of her slaves, freedmen and furnishings from the imperial palace into his house. All the while Claudius, ever the gullible cuckold, remained unaware of his wife’s affair.

  As the wedding party drank and danced like bacchants, the freedmen who had once helped Messalina do her dirty work betrayed her. Disillusioned by her persecution of Polybius, and fearing for their own positions if her new alliance heralded a coup d’état, they sent a warning to Claudius who, it was said, could only repeat anxiously, ‘Am I still emperor?’ Learning of her exposure, a panicking Messalina left her new ‘husband’ and hitchhiked out of Rome on a garden waste disposal vehicle to try and intercept Claudius on his return journey, watched in amused mockery by clusters of her subjects. As soon as she came in sight of her husband’s convoy, she began to shout for his forgiveness, reminding him that she was the mother of their children. Her freedmen accusers tried to drown her out, handing the emperor a list of her conquests. After hearing his wife in silence, Claudius eventually sent Messalina back home to the garden property she had stolen from Asiaticus, promising her an audience in the morning.

  But there was to be no reckoning for Messalina. Her executioners came to call in the night, sent by her former collaborator Narcissus. Having earlier failed to heed the pleas of her mother Domitia Lepida Minor, who had had little affection for her daughter during her life but now urged her to take the only honourable way out and kill herself, Messalina tried hopelessly to pluck up the courage to cut her own throat as her execution squad closed in on her. But she could not force herself to do it. Instead, she was slaughtered there in the luxury of the gardens she had once coveted so much.41 Tacitus concludes his account of the affair:

  Claudius was still at table when news came that Messalina had died: whether by her own hand or another’s was unspecified. Claudius did not inquire. He called for more wine, and went on with his party as usual.42

  Even Tacitus, the most vociferous scourge of the Julio-Claudians, had to admit that elements of this melodramatic episode sounded too fantastical to be true, though he insisted he was just passing on what others had written before him.43 Many have asked themselves the same questions – why on earth would Messalina have gone through with such an insane plan as to ‘marry’ another man? Was she simply thrill-seeking, as Tacitus himself would have it? Was the plan really a risky attempt at a coup d’état that banked on Silius’s promise to adopt Britannicus to make his usurpation of Claudius palatable to a Roman audience? Was it a reaction to the arrival on the scene of Agrippina and her son Nero? All of these theories have been suggested, and are possible, though none is truly satisfactory. The only firm conclusion we can draw from her fall from grace was that it was indeed sudden and violent.44

  For the deep scars left by Messalina’s disgrace are still there for all to see. Like another woman to whom she has often been compared, the French queen Marie Antoinette, of whom it was said ‘may her loathsome memory perish for ever’, the very memory of Messalina was to come under attack.45 After her death, Messalina became only the second woman after Livilla to be subjected by the Senate to a damnatio memoriae, which mandated the removal of all portraits and all inscriptions bearing her name from public and private spaces. Brutal traces of this attempt to wipe Messalina’s memory from the face of history can be seen in the gaping lacunae left in stone inscriptions which originally testified to the presence of her sculptures. On a marble base discovered in Rome in the sixteenth century, once the support for a golden dedication to Claudius’s family donated by a Roman prefect of Egypt, the section of the inscription that named Messalina as mother of the emperor’s children has been obliterated by a deliberate gouge. The scars of similar surgical deletions can be seen on inscriptions from Verona in Italy, Lepcis Magna in North Africa, and Arneae in Turkey. Obedient subjects from south-western Turkey even had Messalina’s name chiselled off their coin faces.46

  The Senate’s orders were carried out to the letter. No certain sculptural portrait of Messalina survives, a repeat of Julia’s fate. However, three vandalised portraits from collections in Dresden, Paris and the Vatican of what looks to be the same rather baby-faced woman have recently been plausibly identified as her. The first shows a clearly important woman with a turret crown and laurel wreath perched over locks fashionably crimped into the pattern of soft waves and tight curls commonly sported by wealthy women of the 30s and 40s. On the face, a long scar snakes down from her scalp across the bridge of her nose and cuts across the left-hand corner of her full-lipped mouth, the fissure left by a heavy blow to her skull. No such blemish mars the complexion of the second, a life-sized statue of a similarly chubby-featured veiled woman supporting on her left hip a small boy, presumably her son Britannicus, who reaches out with his pudgy hand to the folds of drapery at her neck. But her torso was originally discovered smashed into heavy fragments which have since been pieced together. The elaborate crown of the third bust is similarly badly battered and chipped, as though with a chisel. None of this damage need of course automatically signify foul play, but the severity, similarity and pattern of the damage looks suspiciously deliberate, as though someone had taken violent revenge on all three.47

  With only a few blurry reproductions of her profile available from provincial coins, the only clue otherwise left as to Messalina’s physical appearance is the record of her black hair disappearing under her blonde wig in Juvenal’s satirical poem about her nocturnal exploits. Graves’s novel I, Claudius appropriates the detail in his description of Messalina as ‘an extremely beautiful girl, slim and quick moving, with eyes as black as jet and masses of curly black hair’.48 Unlike her Julio-Claudian predecessors Livia, Antonia and the elder Agrippina, no relatives came to Messalina’s posthumous rescue with pledges, resto
ring her good name, producing new statues of her, or giving her a dignified burial. Instead, her obituary was written solely by the literary stalwarts of later dynasties who earned their stripes by lambasting the Julio-Claudian regimes of Claudius and his successor Nero, in infelicitous contrast to the rulers of their own day.

  Not all ancient accounts of Messalina’s downfall were completely unsympathetic. No more than twenty years after her demise, an anonymously authored tragedy called the Octavia, which focused on the outcome of the ill-fated marriage between Nero and Messalina’s daughter Claudia Octavia, described its eponymous heroine blaming Venus, the goddess of love, for her mother’s mad conduct in marrying Silius, and for stirring Claudius to a fury that resulted in the murder of his ‘unhappy’ wife: ‘by her death she engulfed me in everlasting grief ’.49 Another contemporary work, the Apocolocyntosis, or ‘Pumpkinification’ – a satirical sketch which may have been circulated at the court of his successor and which imagined the scene of the buffoonish Claudius arriving amongst the gods seeking to have his deification ratified – reserves its vitriol not for Messalina but for the emperor, lampooning his forgetfulness on the subject of whether or not he had killed his young wife.50 This perspective of Messalina as more hapless victim than villain has percolated through to some modern reimaginings of her, such as an 1876 play Messalina by Italian dramatist Pietro Cossa, which portrays its female protagonist as a vulgar vamp yet one who was also motivated by devotion to her son and who was tragically betrayed by the man she was foolish enough to fall in love with.51

  These versions nonetheless all have one thing in common – they conceive of Messalina’s promiscuity as central to her downfall. The picture of Claudius’s teenaged third wife as the girl who just could not get enough served a darker purpose than mere titillation. In the Roman moral imagination, any sexually promiscuous woman whose body was available to all comers represented at the very least a temporary failure of control on the part of her husband or father. But if she, like Messalina or Augustus’s daughter Julia before her, was also a member of the family who held the keys to the Roman Empire, the repercussions were even more serious. At stake was not just humiliation for her cuckolded husband, but the security of his regime, and of Rome itself. For if a man could not keep his own house in order, how could he ensure the inviolability of the empire whose political heart beat within that very household? This was a conundrum that would continue to obsess the Roman imperial establishment.