Agrippina by Unknown

Agrippina by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Pegasus Books


1. Tacitus, Annals, 12.7.3.

2. Barrett, 1996: 108.

3. Tacitus, Annals, 12.65.

4. Dio, Roman History, 61.3.

Agrippina Augusta

In 49CE, Agrippina got stuff done. She consolidated her place. But the things she got done were all essentially private, small-scale acts. Things to do with the family or her friends. None were particularly outside of the realms of expectation for an imperial woman. There’s some evidence, though, that she was working hard behind the scenes, and, for all her reputation as the wickedest woman in history, Agrippina seems mostly to have been an amazing diplomat and negotiator. One of the best ways to see this is to compare the ‘pre-Agrippina years’ of Claudius’s reign against the ‘Agrippina years’. The latter are by far the more stable, prosperous and pleasant for the whole of Rome. Let’s look at executions, for example. We know that over the 13 years of Claudius’s reign he executed 35 named senators and between two and three hundred equestrians, and yet only about four of those executions can be dated to the Agrippina years after 49CE. This is despite the fact that our best and most detailed source has a big hole where almost all the pre-Agrippina years should be, so restoration of that source could only increase the number of known pre-Agrippina executions. Another metric is revolts. In the early years of Claudius’s reign, the Senate first tried to prevent his becoming emperor and then factions initiated two large-scale attempts to overthrow him. The Agrippina years, in contrast, are characterised by a complete lack of political agitation, no significant coup attempts and a good, strong, productive relationship between Claudius and the Senate. The only thing that changed was Agrippina. The first year of her marriage to Claudius, in my mind, was spent building the bridges and relationships that would make Claudius a stable ruler and Rome a stable empire. What that meant was that Claudius’s power and stability rested on Agrippina’s diplomacy. And that was power in itself. So she took that power as it came to her and then, mostly, used it to ensure that Rome was a stable state with a strong emperor, a peaceful empire and that everyone was generally pretty happy.

By 50CE, Agrippina had, in public, spent the previous year standing behind Claudius as his good wife and building her base of support. Now she felt confident enough to step out of the shadows and stand beside him as his partner. She appointed herself the partner in his labours and started smashing expectations.

The first major act was Claudius’s adoption of Nero. This was actually the moment where Nero was given the name Nero, losing his original name of Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus pretty much forever. The adoption of a son who doesn’t have a living father is not an easy process in Rome, despite how frequently it happened with emperors. Like Tiberius, Claudius had a biological son and had not yet reached the age considered to be too old to have more sons, so his adoption of a stepson was extremely not okay.



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