Messalina by Honor Cargill-Martin

Author:Honor Cargill-Martin [Cargill-Martin, Honor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781801102612
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

*

Before Claudius had sailed to Britain, and before she had ridden in his triumph, Messalina was said to have opened AD 42 – her first full year as empress – with an unprecedentedly audacious intrigue. The removal of Julia Livilla and Seneca had been successful, but the Julio-Claudians had been around long enough that accusing an imperial woman of adultery was beginning to look a little trite. Messalina’s next project – if we believe the sources – was to be more theatrical.

Her adversary in this instance was Appius Junius Silanus.5 A distinguished man in his mid-fifties – of old family, long public service, and honoured position at court – Silanus had been married off, just the year before, to Messalina’s mother Domitia Lepida as part of Messalina and Claudius’ programme of stabilisation. It had not taken long for the step-daughter/step-father relationship to sour quite spectacularly. Dio claims, dubiously, that Messalina developed a sexual infatuation with her step-father, and when he repulsed her advances the empress naturally began to plot his total destruction.

Silanus was a trickier target than Julia Livilla had been: a woman might be taken down with the merest implication of adultery, but Silanus was well respected and, remarkably, there seem to have hovered around him no pre-existing rumours of misconduct which Messalina might exploit. The empress, aided by Narcissus, would have to think outside the box.

The scripts were written and the parts divvied up: it was Narcissus who was to begin the charade. Before dawn had broken on the appointed day he rushed, headlong and visibly panicked, into the emperor’s bedroom. When Claudius – still in bed and trying to shake himself from the hazy edges of sleep – asked him what the matter was, Narcissus, now visibly trembling, told the emperor that he had been racked that night with the most terrible dreams. He claimed to have seen a vision of Silanus stalking the corridors of the palace in the early morning light, approaching Claudius and unleashing a brutal attack on his emperor.

It was now that Messalina – appearing from the corridor to her own apartments or emerging bed-headed from beneath her husband’s sheets – cut in. She also looked sincerely shaken. She had seen it too, she said – the same horrible vision had been visited upon her night after night for days now. She had assumed it was just a nightmare and had felt it would be foolish to say anything, but now she heard Narcissus describe her dream word for word she was beginning to feel that it had a new significance, that it might have been less a dream than a premonition.

Suddenly there was a noise heard outside the bedroom door, the guards parted, and in walked Silanus. Silanus’ ‘fortuitous’ appearance was, of course, carefully choreographed. Messalina and Narcissus had sent him word the night before, notifying him that the emperor required his presence first thing the next morning. To Claudius, however, Silanus’ early-morning appearance was proof positive that the visions of the previous night were coming to fruition.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.