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.
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