The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Agrippina

Empress, Exile, Hustler, Whore

Agrippina the Younger was a most remarkable woman, and not only because she managed to produce her own autobiography in a time and culture where a woman's place was either behind the scenes or else dead and moral. She was reviled by Tacitus, gossiped about by Suetonius and libellously caricatured by Dio Cassius, Robert Graves and the British Broadcasting Corporation. She was the daughter of a man who had a month named after him; she founded a city which remains a major European centre; she was the wife of an Emperor and the mother of his successor. Unfortunately for Agrippina, for the Empire and possibly for the Roman stage, the successor turned out to be Nero.

Since the history of Rome according to the Romans was produced exclusively by and for Roman senatorial males, the business of writing a life of Agrippina must have been rather like reconstructing a portrait from which some vandal has cut out the subject's face: there isn't much to go on except the shape of the hole. Even without the astounding details of her life and the sweary verve of Emma Southon's often hilarious account, the process of reconstruction is fascinating in itself, and Southon makes clear at every point what is deduction and what is informed speculation, and how each detail is sourced from what other people say about Agrippina or (more often) from what they don't.

Along the way, there is much information about the culture and customs of the Roman Empire in the first century CE; there are numerous illuminating analogies drawn from recent history, popular culture and the author's mum; there are assorted and well-deserved imprecations against the Romans for not having enough names between them; and various ancient and contemporary sources are favoured with various pungent sarcasms. The supporting characters in Agrippina's story are trenchantly and memorably sketched, and the spectacular, shunned heroine emerges in convincing detail.

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