review -- Agrapinna: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World

Since her death in 59 CE, historians have not rushed to praise the empress Agrappina. Her promiscuity, often used as leverage for power, as well as her penchant for incest, first with her brother, then her brother-in-law, possibly a ménage with her two sisters and brother and the brother’s friend, then sex with her uncle, then sex with her son, alone would have made most commentators hesitate; but in the end no one dared to portray her sympathetically because of her ten (or so) murders. Thus, for two thousand years she has been universally depicted as a monster, degenerate, ambitious, cold-hearted, cruel, the ultimate femme fatale who made legendary figures like Salome, Clytemnestra, and Lady Macbeth seem small-minded.

Character aside, her life was remarkably eventful: by the age of 44 she had been, in turn, sister, niece, wife, and mother of Roman emperors. Born with a distinguished pedigree, daughter of the  wildly popular Roman general, Germanicus, descendant of Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus, thus in Roman eyes a descendent of Aeneas and Venus, Agrapinna’s fate was always to be near the centre of power and to know in her bones, virtually from birth, both the opportunities and dangers of her position. While she was only four, the emperor Tiberius murdered her father. This sparked a feud his widow, Agrapinna’s mother, who Tiberius had imprisoned and beaten, after which she starved herself to death. Agrapinna’s grandmother was also killed by Tiberius, as were two of her brothers. All this by her sixteenth year. When Tiberius finally died, Agrapinna’s one remaining brother, Caligula, became emperor. At the time Agrapinna had a son, Nero, to whose advancement she was fiercely dedicated. Plotting with her brother-in-law —who was also her lover — to murder Caligula, she was caught but only exiled, saved by her pedigree. However, within a few years Caligula was murdered (not by Agrapinna), and her uncle Claudius inherited the throne. After the death of her first husband, Agrapinna tried to seduce the future emperor Galba. Unsuccessful there, she married a rich man whom she soon poisoned. After seducing a freed slave who served as an adviser to the emperor Claudius, she advanced to a sexual relationship with the emperor himself, her uncle (who once referred to her as "my daughter and foster child, born and bred, in my lap, so to speak"). With the laws against incest altered for the occasion, they married and Agrapinna became empress. A rival for Claudius’s affections appeared, and Agrapinna ordered her to commit suicide. For several years she co-ruled the empire with Claudius, all the while scheming to make Nero seem the inevitable successor. Then she killed Claudius with a poisoned mushroom, and Nero became emperor. But the teenage Nero bridled at his mother telling him she didn’t like his mistresses, and at her uppity behavior, acting as if she were his equal (“I gave you the empire!” she cried). After a year or two of their being at loggerheads, he had her killed.

In Agrapinna: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World Emma Southon drastically downplays Agrapinna’s  lasciviousness (she showed “agency,” “took proactive action,” was “taking control of her own body”) and her murders (“I don’t want her to be a woman who murdered her husband”), focusing instead on her achieving power. She revels in Agrapinna’s victories, her appearance on coins, her image on a single relief sculpture found in Turkey showing her crowning Nero emperor, the founding of a city in her honour (now Cologne), her sitting on a dais next to and on a level with Claudius’s, receiving the title Augusta, parading through the streets on a litter with a gaudy retinue, her appearance at a public spectacle wearing a cloak of gold thread, “grandeur leaking out of her every pore.”

Even more, Southon reveals an Agrapinna who does not show up, at least not directly, in any of the Latin sources. Neither Tacitus, Suetonius, nor Cassius Dio noticed the “amazing diplomat and negotiator,” the “incredibly hardworking” woman, the master administrator who effectively ran the empire not only during Claudius’s reign but for a time under Nero. And far from being the wicked stepmother depicted by historians, when her stepson inadvertently used a name that slighted Nero, she didn’t even have him executed. Seen in the right light, her murders paving the way for Nero’s ascent were simply a dutiful Roman mother looking out for her son. Or they were deeds done for the good of the empire. Selfish interests, we are assured, played no part in them.

How did writers over two millennia miss this admirable side of Agrapinna? According to Southon, they failed to question the misogyny of the Roman sources. Romans were adamant that women belonged in the home; they found a woman exercising power abhorrent, and for them a woman aggressively seeking power could only be a monster. On Agripinna, therefore, they heaped all the easy, negative, female stereotypes. It never occurred to Roman historians to portray her as a person in her own right, as proud, competent, powerful, and sympathetic.

Southon constantly undercuts and argues with her sources, so much that she has to admit, “This story is as much mine as it is Agrippina's.” What Gibbon in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire put into an elegant, ironic footnote, Southon places front and centre, at length, in the text. This often obscures the thread of the biography, but overall the effect is offset by the author’s zest for her material. The book reads as a recording of a light-hearted, free-spirited university lecturer who embroiders her narrative with opinions, speculation, flights of fancy, and expostulations, often using the language of her students. In the first chapter, for example, she makes much of Agrapinna’s mother becoming pregnant nine times, referring again and again to the parents’ “bonking” and “shagging” (“they were constantly at it”). She finds her Latin sources so full of contradictions and biases that they are “a pissing nightmare.” Agrapinna “got shit done,” her mother “had no time for gendered bullshit,” the family of Claudius’s first wife was “a horrible clusterfuck,” she “fucked up really badly,” and many Roman men were “dicks.” It’s entertaining, if a little exploitive, but while some readers may squirm at times, others will find it a hoot.

review -- Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare? by Robin Williams

For 250 years no one doubted that William Shakespeare wrote the plays and sonnets published under his name, until a controversy about the Bible in 1848 changed everything. Incensed at the attacks on scripture made by disciples of the “Higher Criticism” and, most egregious of all, the suggestion that Jesus might not have been a historical personage, Samuel Mosheim Schmucker of Philadelphia, Lutheran minister turned popular biographer, decided to set the world straight. His 500-page Historic Doubts Respecting Shakespeare, Illustrating Infidel Objections Against the Bible was, he believed, a work of such withering satire that the infidels would never dare raise their heads again. How horrified he must have been to see the Bible ignored, his “absurdities” against Shakespeare taken seriously, and an entire anti-Shakespeare industry arise from what he thought were the ashes of his pyre.

To date eighty-seven names have been proposed as the true author of the Shakespearean canon. Some have not met the highest standards of plausibility: Anne Hathaway, Queen Elizabeth I, King Edward VI, King James VI, Mary Queen of Scots, and the Rosicrucians have been suggested — even Cervantes was proposed by Carlos Fuentes. The candidates with the strongest support have been Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and the Earl of Oxford, but there are very few writers — one might almost say very few prominent people — of the Elizabethan era whose names have not been added to the list at one time or another.

Today a party of anti-Shakespeareans are gathering in support of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. As countess and sister of the glittering courtier and writer, Philip Sidney, she certainly had the social credentials to know what the plays reveal about the royal court. As poet and translator, and as leader of the Wilton Circle, a group of writers dedicated to raising the level of English literature to that of Italy and France, her literary credentials were excellent. And it’s entirely reasonable to believe that, as a woman of the aristocracy, in order to make her contribution in the male-only, rather disreputable area of playwriting — especially bawdy, anti-establishment plays — she might publish under the name of someone else, perhaps a member of an acting company.

In Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare? Robin Williams presents the case against William Shakespeare and for Mary Sidney. Typically, much of the anti-Shakespeare argument is based on the social class of the bumpkin from Stratford. How could the son of a mere glove maker, who might or might not have attended the local grammar school, know so much about matters far above his station, such as court life, diplomacy, medicine, Greek and Roman literature? And isn’t it mysterious that there is so little documentation about his life, only the smallest scraps that by no means establish him as the writer of the sonnets and plays? In fact, those scraps taken on their own, according to Williams, reveal a cad who abandoned his wife and children, a shady businessman who hoarded grain during a shortage, a tax cheat, a thug who threatened someone with death, possibly a criminal who became rich by mysterious means, and an undistinguished actor, quite possibly illiterate.

Mary Sidney, on the other hand, was a paragon of Renaissance virtue. Fluent in languages modern and ancient, she wrote, translated, and at her country estate gave direction to other distinguished writers of the Wilton Circle. She was wealthy, well connected, well travelled, and had once been a lady-in-waiting at Elizabeth’s court — in short, the perfect fit for the author of Shakespeare’s plays.

Bursting at the seams with arguments on behalf of Mary, the book offers every conceivable bit of evidence, both strong and otherwise: telling details (there are many), suggestions, hints,  coincidences, interpretation, speculation, innuendo, rhetorical questions — every possible connection that can be yanked into service. The quantity of material is overwhelming, but that superabundance cuts two ways. For scholars and conspiracy buffs Williams offers a lifetime of clues to chase down and disputes to settle; the general reader, though, is more likely to find the truly cogent points near-buried under such a mountain of implausibilities, assorted maybes and what-ifs, that they may be inclined just to abandon the effort to reach a considered judgement and simply accept or reject the Mary Sidney thesis holus-bolus. There is undoubtedly a great deal to be said for Mary Sidney, but not so much as Ms. Williams thinks.

(Incidentally, as reported in a recent article in The Atlantic, Mary is not alone. Waiting in the wings is another female Elizabethan proposed as the real Shakespeare, also a well educated writer with an intriguing biography, one Emilia Bassano.)

One major objection to the book’s thesis remains hard to explain: How could this momentous secret be kept so airtight by so many people in the literary community, in the theatrical community, in the public, perhaps even at court, with not a word ever appearing in any book, any poem, nothing in letters, diaries, or family papers? It would have taken a very effective conspiracy to enable Mary Sidney to publish as William Shakspeare.

An especially interesting chapter of Sweet Swan of Avon discusses the sonnets. Passionately addressed to a younger man, they have long been problematic, for, while they appear to be an early, shocking example of gay literature, they are hardly erotic, and many of them are concerned solely with urging the young man to get married and have children — not the usual tack of a lover. However, when Mary Sidney is posited as the author, anomalies disappear. Her older brother, Philip, filled the role precisely of the handsome fellow of sonnets nearing the end of his youth without marrying. Nothing could be more natural than for his adoring younger sister to nag him to marry. And the “Dark Lady” sonnets align even better with Mary Sidney's biography. Like the writer, Mary was in love with a younger man and was deeply hurt and jealous when she believed (mistakenly) that he had fallen in love with her younger, dark-eyed, dark-haired niece.

One way to assess the claims for Mary’s authorship is to search through her published works — or indeed the works of any other candidate — looking for passages that match Shakespeare’s genius, the denseness of imagery, the ceaseless wordplay, the natural, instinctive way with metaphorical language, the breathtakingly original way of wrenching together divergent experiences, not to mention characters wonderfully drawn from life and superb dramatic skills.  But you always search in vain. If someone other than the man from Stratford wrote the works of Shakespeare, he or she did so after undergoing a truly miraculous transformation.

Review -- The Burning Sky and the Untold Story of the Cold War Nuclear Tests in Outer Space

On October 4, 1957 the little beep-beep-beep of Sputnik 1announced the opening of the space era and put the Soviets undeniably ahead of the U.S. in the race. Only a month later Sputnik 2 carried a dog named Laika into orbit. Caught flat-footed, the U.S. responded with several attempted launches that either exploded on the launch pad or fizzled after lift-off. Finally, on January 31, 1958 the first American satellite, Explorer I, went into orbit, carrying a small, three-pound package of scientific instruments designed and built by James Van Allen. Explorer II followed two months later. Although the American satellites were belated and small, they yielded serious scientific data. They revealed a new phenomenon, the existence of radiation trapped high above the Earth forming what were sometimes described as bands (sometimes as belts or shells) following the lines of Earth’s magnetic fields. “Van Allen belts” immediately became common parlance and opened entirely new fields of research for the scientists around the world who were currently participating in the International Geophysical Year (IGY), a concerted, global effort to expand knowledge in a wide range of earth sciences.

But the dawn of the space era was not greeted with cheers and applause by everyone. Sputnik 1 showed that the Soviets had advanced technologically far beyond what anyone had suspected; Sputnik 2 showed that they could launch car-sized payloads, which implied that they would soon be capable of launching missiles carrying nuclear weapons. The American military went into a panic, desperately looking for protection. One suggested countermeasure came from a scientist named Nicholas Christofilos, a brilliant but eccentric character who, after being trained as an engineer, worked as an elevator repairman in Athens. In his spare time he taught himself state of the art physics until, after much effort, he earned recognition among more conventional scientists — “the mad Greek,” they called him — and found a position in an American research lab. His life story makes a fascinating chapter in The Burning Sky. According to Christofilos’s calculations, it should be possible to create an artificial band of radiation that could interfere with the electronics of missiles, disrupting or destroying them in mid-flight. All that had to be done was to release a massive quantity of charged particles several hundreds of miles above the Earth. Following the Earth’s magnetic lines, the particles should quickly race north and south of the equator, all the while shifting eastward until they create a shell around the globe. Releasing the particles was easy — you simply detonated a small (1-2 kiloton) nuclear bomb high in the atmosphere. Would it work? Would the belt form? Would the radiation be strong enough to destroy missiles? Would it also destroy satellites? Would it kill humans who might be in orbit? Would it interfere with communication and radar signals? How long would it last? Could the planet’s natural radiation belts be altered or destroyed inadvertently? Could the planet as a whole be damaged? Years later one scientist marveled, “Imagine suggesting something like that today!” But it was the Cold War, and nothing was considered off-limits when thinking about a possible nuclear strike.

In deepest secrecy and with no outside consultation, a small circle of U.S. decision-makers approved Christofilo’s proposal, and the planning of Operation Argus was immediately begun. Described later as the largest scientific project in history, it now seems certainly the most hubristic. To keep its military aspects secret, it was billed simply as geophysical research, an accurate description as far as it went, and perfectly in keeping with IGY.

Everything proceeded under intense pressure. Not only did secrecy have to be maintained, despite its involving many thousands of people in dozens of public and private institutions, but what would normally take several years of preparation and execution had to be done in a matter of months, before IGY came to a close at the end of 1958. Politics added even more time pressure, as world leaders were beginning to grope their way toward a moratorium on atmospheric nuclear testing and eventually a (limited) nuclear test ban treaty.

Three nuclear weapons would be launched from the back of a ship — the first time this had ever been attempted — in a remote part of the South Atlantic near the British-owned island of Tristan da Cunha. The X-17a was selected as the right missile, and testing began off California. Half of the four tests failed; however, after the fourth engineers believed they had fixed the problem. Everyone hoped they were right, because the warheads would be detonated automatically by an onboard timer with no kill switch. A failed launch could wipe out the entire flotilla, which consisted of 4,500 personnel on nine Navy ships, including an aircraft carrier. Unaware of their peril, sailors trained rigorously during transit, practising launch procedures over and over. Because winter in the South Atlantic was notorious for bad weather, drills and test launches received top priority on the coldest and stormiest days. It was decided that launches could be successfully completed in winds up to 74 km/hr and swells up to 5 meters. The practice missiles, unfortunately, were not X-17a’s.

In the end, the mission was successful, and important conclusions were reached. The “Christofolis effect” or “Argus effect” was not, after all, strong enough to serve as an anti-missile shield. Also, it was short-lived, lasting only a few weeks. On a more positive note, it would not kill cosmonauts or astronauts. Positive, too, were the esthetics: where the magnetic lines bent close to the Earth, beautiful auroral displays appeared. As for disrupting radar and communication signals, that question was settled shortly before Argus when in Operation Hardtack 75 km above Johnston Island in the South Pacific several H-bombs were exploded. One of the Hardtack shots knocked out most radio communications across the Pacific, cutting off Hawaii, 1,300 km away, for two hours and Australia, over 7,000 km away, for nine hours. The seriousness of EMPs (electromagnetic pulses) was also a significant discovery.

All of this makes for an exciting story, and science writer Wolverton tells it well. Many passages read with the drama and vividness of a novel. Strictly speaking it is not an “untold” story as the subtitle claims, since the New York Times broke the story in April of 1958 and it stayed in the headlines for some time afterward. But Burning the Sky is certainly the fullest, most accessible version of what happened. As a fascinating supplement to the book, one might check the U.S. military’s official 45-minute film report, available on YouTube. The official written report of the operation is also available online.