The First Ladies of Rome

by Annelise Freisenbruch

  The party went on a long time. They talked about various things; Nero was boyish and intimate – or confidentially serious. When she left, he saw her off, gazing into her eyes and clinging to her. This may have been a final piece of shamming – or perhaps even Nero’s brutal heart was affected by his last sight of his mother, going to her death.96

  Nero had considered and discarded various options for the disposal of his mother, including poison (which had to be ruled out as Agrippina had built up an immunity to such an ambush by regularly imbibing antidotes), and death by the sword. But in the end it was a strategy concocted by Anicetus, a former tutor of Nero’s, that was adopted. Nero had provided a new luxury craft for his mother’s return journey to her Bauli villa across the bay. But this was no ordinary boat. In accordance with Anicetus’s instructions, it had been designed to collapse and break up during the crossing, crushing the Augusta and dumping her out to sea. Nero escorted his mother to the shore, saw her into the vessel, and watched as she set sail.

  The sky was filled with stars as the convoy set out across the calm harbour. Accompanying Agrippina was her maid Acerronia, who was leaning over her mistress’s couch, chatting with her about Nero’s surprising conduct, and Crepereius Gallus, one of her household retainers, who had stationed himself near the tiller. At a given signal, the canopy over the empress’s party, heavily weighted down by lead, suddenly caved in. Crepereius was instantly crushed to death, but the high sides of the couch on which they were sprawled protected Agrippina and Acerronia. In the ensuing confusion, the boat slowly ditched into the water. Acerronia panicked, trying to get rescuers’ attention by shouting out that she was Agrippina. But her fatal error only drew the fire of the boat’s crew, who clubbed her to death with their oars and pikes. Agrippina meanwhile kept her mouth shut and swam silently away into the gloom, escaping with only a glancing wound to her shoulder. She was picked up by one of a batch of small boats, which conveyed her back to her villa, where, applying dressings and ointments to her wound, she grimly surmised who was behind the attempt on her life.

  When Nero heard that the plot had failed, he feared his mother’s vengeance. In a panic, he summoned Seneca and Burrus. The latter advised him that the praetorian guard of which he was commander would never agree to harm the daughter of the great Germanicus. Instead, Anicetus should finish what he started. Nero agreed to the plan. When an envoy arrived from Agrippina, carrying a carefully worded letter which she had composed to try to buy herself time, hiding her suspicions of her son’s involvement, Nero even went so far as to distract attention from his own scheme by claiming that the messenger was an assassin. As Anicetus’s death squad neared the shores of Baiae, the beach and shallow waters near her house filled with crowds who had heard rumours of Agrippina’s narrow escape, and wanted to offer congratulations on her safe return. But they scattered as the armed men stormed her property, muscling aside slaves who tried to stand in their path, until they reached the bedroom where she had taken up sanctuary.

  In sharp contrast to Messalina’s cringeing terror in the face of her own death, though in faint reminiscence of Caesonia’s end, Agrippina’s final moments were of eloquent defiance. In the dim light cast by one lamp, she looked into the faces of her assassins, led by Anicetus, and remarked that if this was a social call, they might take back news of her recovery, but if it was not, then she would never believe that her son had ordered her death. Yet as she was surrounded and the blows began to fall on her head, she summoned up the presence of mind to issue what must go down as one of the great last lines in history. Baring her belly to the centurion preparing to run her through with his sword, she cried out ‘Strike here!’, pointing to the womb that had spawned her treacherous son. Her executioners cut her down. For a woman so often accused of acting too much the man, it was an appropriately masculine sort of death – a violent assassination rather than the cold-blooded exile and starvation that had become the pattern for many of her ill-fated female predecessors.97

  Apocryphal coda or faithfully recorded epitaph, Agrippina’s famous last words resonated for a long time, inspiring the following rather grotesque reworking in the fourteenth century:

  Nero … ordered his mother to be brought before him, for he was living in concubinage with her, and he also sent for his doctors and ordered them to kill his mother, for the desire and the will had come to him to see the secrets of his mother’s belly and how a child was formed in the womb … And when they opened her belly, the emperor looked at the inside of the womb and saw in it seven little compartments each adapted for a human form and prepared for a seventh child. Then he was filled with great indignation and said, ‘I came out of such a place!’ And he let down his breeches and relieved himself into the belly of his mother …98

  Nero’s actual behaviour in the aftermath of his mother’s death was rather more muted. Some authorities had it that he went to examine his mother’s corpse, commenting on its perfections and imperfections in between drinks to slake his parched throat, before ordering her cremation. Agrippina was burned while lying on a banqueting couch, in a nondescript funeral ceremony, and no grave marker was provided for her ashes. Retreating to Naples, Nero swiftly exculpated himself for ordering his mother’s death by sending a letter to the Senate which accused Agrippina of plotting against him and reminded the public of her frequent attempts to usurp traditional male authority. The Senate responded in placatory fashion, deciding that annual games should be held to accompany the festival of the goddess Minerva in specific recognition of the foiled plot against the emperor’s life. Agrippina’s birthday, formerly included on the calendar as a day of celebration, was reclassified as a day of ill-omen.99

  Verse graffiti on city walls at the time nevertheless responded impudently to the emperor’s self-justifying rhetoric, showing that not everyone was willing to swallow the party line. The first example given here rhymes Nero with two characters in Greek myth who committed matricide; the second explains a formula whereby the numerical equivalent of the letters that spelled Nero’s name in Greek was the same as for the phrase that described his crime:

  Alcmaeon, Orestes, and Nero are brothers,

  Why? Because all of them murdered their mothers.

  Count the numerical values

  Of the letters in Nero’s name,

  And in ‘murdered his own mother’:

  You will find their sum is the same.100

  At the same time as these lampoons did the rounds, persistent rumours circulated that Nero was afflicted with guilt. Such was his jittery preoccupation with the magnitude of his crime that he had even convinced himself that his mother’s ghost had returned to haunt him.101 This was an image that evidently caught the popular imagination, as illustrated in the doom-laden tragic play the Octavia, set three years after Agrippina’s death, in 62, and probably written no more than a decade later. In the play’s third act, the ghostly shade of Agrippina herself makes a melodramatic entrance, confessing her own crimes to the audience, ruing aloud her own shipwrecked fate and predicting a violent end for Nero and Poppaea:

  … there will come a day and time when he will pay for his crimes with his guilty spirit and pay his enemies with his throat, deserted and thrown down and utterly destitute. Oh, how far my labours and prayers have fallen! … I wish that before I brought you into the light as a tiny baby and suckled you, wild beasts had ripped apart my womb! … why am I slow to hide my fate in Tartarus, I who blight my kin as a stepmother, wife and mother?102

  Until recently, the Octavia was actually suspected to be the work of Nero’s most trusted but later disillusioned aide and counsellor, Seneca, who appears as a character in the play and whose admiration by poets and playwrights in medieval Europe – and especially those of the Renaissance – made the Octavia extremely popular in that era, inspiring Monteverdi’s opera L’incoronazione di Poppea (1642), and many other works. Though it is now thought that Seneca – who was implicated in an unsuccessful conspiracy against Nero in 65, and committed suicid
e as a result, three years before the end of Nero’s reign – was probably not the author, whoever wrote the play left behind an extremely valuable clue of the mood at court in the weeks and months following Agrippina’s assassination. During her soliloquy in the play’s fourth act, Agrippina’s blood-stained wraith recalls that after her death, her son ‘throws down the statues and inscriptions that bear my memory throughout the world – the world that my ill-starred love gave him as a boy to rule, to my own harm’.103

  Archaeological evidence uncovered in recent years validates the Octavia‘s suggestion that, like Livilla’s and Messalina’s before her, a purge of Agrippina’s images was carried out following her death. During the 1990s, an excavated area between the Arch of Constantine and the Colosseum disclosed the remnants of a first-century monument that had once carried a statue of the emperor’s mother alongside other members of her family. Signs remained that not long after Agrippina’s demise, her statue had been removed from her position next to Claudius on the monument’s plinth, and the other figures reshuffled to cover up her absence.104

  However, whereas no certain replica of the disgraced Messalina’s portrait has been identified from antiquity, sculptures of Agrippina do survive in respectable numbers, despite Nero’s prohibition. Dedicatory inscriptions to her have also turned up unscathed, and although Agrippina’s preserved sculptural legacy cannot match Livia’s in terms of numbers, at least thirty-five portraits of her have managed to squeeze through the bottleneck of history, depicting her at various stages of her life – as first sister, wife and then mother to successive Roman emperors.105 In one of the most recent discoveries, scholars from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen established in 1994 that a dark green basalt head of Agrippina, acquired by the museum from a Lithuanian count in the late nineteenth century, was the missing partner of a hitherto anonymous female torso in a storeroom of the Capitoline Museum in Rome. The torso itself had been found during the construction of a military hospital in 1885, split into large pieces and used as building material in a foundation wall probably cemented in the medieval period, when many classical sculptures were broken up and recycled for scrap.106

  As with other imperial women before her, making sense of Agrippina’s life is in itself an attempt to fit fragmented pieces together like a jigsaw. She did not attract the same attention as a Messalina or a Poppaea among writers and artists post-antiquity looking for a Pygmalion-esque mannequin of intoxicating sexual allure, but the fascination she has exerted has been just as enduring. As the historical epitome of conniving female kingmaker and overbearing mother, she has almost no equal, a guise in which she appeared with increasing frequency in later culture, in works including Handel’s four-hour opera Agrippina, first performed on 26 November 1709, with a libretto by diplomat and cardinal Vincenzo Grimani.107

  Handel’s and Grimani’s reworked portrait of Agrippina as a devious but comical character, who confesses to her sins but pleads that she did it all for Rome, may not qualify as an attempt at rehabilitation. But her incarnation as a remorseful if self-pitying ghost in the anonymously written Octavia, coupled with evidence that sculptures of her were erected in public building works commissioned by later emperors such as Trajan, suggests that Agrippina was remembered with at least some degree of respect and pity by her subjects.108 This is acknowledged even by Tacitus, who reports that after her gruesome murder, some of her household staff clubbed together to build her a memorial near Bauli, with views over the bay. It seems that there were some who did indeed mourn Agrippina.109 It is an impression also articulated by the infuriated response of one of the architects of the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre, to the flawed strategy of journalist Jacques Hébert at the trial of the French queen Marie Antoinette. When Hébert’s false claim that the queen had committed incest with her son was successfully refuted, Robespierre was scathing in his exasperation:

  That blockhead Hébert! – as if it were not enough that she was really a Messalina, he must make her an Agrippina also, and furnish her with the triumph of exciting the sympathy of the public in her last moments.110

  * * *

  There is one last reason for the endurance of Agrippina’s memory long after her death. For this enigma of a woman attempted to leave behind something more tangible and personal than rumour or sculpture for posterity to remember her by. She wrote and published a set of memoirs, an accomplishment now expected almost as a matter of form from modern first ladies, but which no other Roman woman is known to have emulated. Their one-time existence is testified to by Pliny the Elder and Tacitus, authors of the first and second centuries respectively, each of whom cites Agrippina’s own writings as one of his research sources.111

  The date of the memoirs’ composition and the original contents are both unclear, though Tacitus describes them as taking the form of ‘commentarii’, a factual, plain-prose genre of writing that emerged during the republican era and was exclusively dominated by men wanting to publish accounts of their political careers – Agrippina’s Julio-Claudian male forebears Augustus, Tiberius and Claudius all produced such documents. Since Tacitus tells us that he used Agrippina’s memoirs to piece together his account of the argument between her mother and Tiberius over the elder Agrippina’s desire to remarry, it has been suggested that they were more like a gossipy diary than the kind of dignified commentarii expected of career politicians. But as a woman’s, Agrippina’s ‘career’ of course revolved around different concerns to a man’s. Her public role was defined in terms of being a wife and mother, and the fact that the only other snippet of the memoirs’ contents we have is Agrippina’s testimony that Nero was born feet first, in a breech birth, may indicate that she intended her own commentarii to be a female take on this very male literary genre.112

  Like her tomb, no copy of Agrippina’s writings has ever been found, and, barring a papyrological miracle, it is now lost for ever. The fascination that this document nevertheless exerts over the imagination is eloquently expressed in a poem by the American William Wetmore Story – the author of a separate drama, The Tragedy of Nero, written in 1875:

  Stern Agrippina’s diary and life

  Writ by herself, recording all her thoughts

  Deeds, passions, – all the doings of old Rome

  swarming around her, rife with scandals,

  crimes, joys, struggles, triumphs –

  all the portraits sharp of men and women

  as they lived, talked, loved – Not as in History’s limbo

  they appear, mere names and ghostlike shadows,

  but alive, fierce, restless, human – what a book to find! 113

  Agrippina’s career had triggered the most anxious soul-searching yet within the Roman elite about the encroachment of women on to the political field. It may be no coincidence that over the course of the next century and a half, the women of empire seem to become almost invisible.

  5

  Little Cleopatra: A Jewish Princess and the First Ladies of the Flavian Dynasty1

  Oh Rome! Oh Berenice! Wretched me!

  Must I be emperor, and love?

  The Emperor Titus, in Jean Racine’s Bérénice2

  On 21 November 1670, at the company of the Hôtel de Bourgogne on the rue Mauconseil in Paris, French playwright Jean Racine awaited the premiere of his latest tragedy, Bérénice, in some trepidation. In precisely one week’s time at the rival company of the Palais-Royal on the rue Montpensier, Pierre Corneille, the doyen of French tragic theatre, would unveil his own work, Tite et Bérénice, on exactly the same subject matter, the doomed first-century love affair between Julia Berenice, a daughter of the Herodian royal family of Judaea, and the Roman emperor-in-waiting Titus, a scion of the Flavian dynasty that succeeded the Julio-Claudians in the year 69.

  This tale of Titus and Berenice, two star-crossed lovers forced to part reluctantly in deference to a sense of patriotic duty inspired a number of revisitations during the seventeenth century both in Britain and in France, where the history of
Rome was a much-mined source of characters and situations perceived as relevant case studies for the moral and political progression of the age.3 The circumstances under which Racine and Corneille both came to stage new productions based on precisely the same material within one week of each other are nonetheless murky. According to Voltaire, their competitive efforts were responses to a commission by Henrietta, Duchess of Orléans, who was moved by the echoes she perceived between Titus’s and Berenice’s doomed passion and her own noble renunciation of her love affair with her brother-in-law the Sun King Louis XIV, though others have found a closer parallel with Louis’ severance of his relationship with Marie Mancini. At any rate, much pride was riding on this dramatic head-to-head, though in the end Racine need not have worried. It was his play that achieved a triumphant run while Corneille’s effort was a relative flop.4

  While Berenice’s story captivated seventeenth-century dramatists, it is even more intriguing for the historian of the Roman first ladies. Though the mistress, not the wife, of an emperor-in-waiting, and a member of the Jewish rather than the Roman ruling family, she is an important link in the chain connecting Rome’s imperial consorts. She entered the scene at a time when, thanks to the choice of Titus’s father Vespasian – and later Titus himself – the emperor would rule without an empress. This was a decision that theoretically promised a cessation of the accusations that had all too frequently attached themselves to the Flavians’ Julio-Claudian predecessors, namely of being ‘petticoat governments’, infiltrated by females. Yet, as Berenice’s story and others demonstrate, women still loomed large in the orbit of the Flavian emperors, women who in different ways both abetted and threatened to derail the Flavians’ project to present themselves as revolutionaries who would sweep aside the tainted memory of Messalina, Agrippina Minor, and the rest of the ancien régime.