When Agrippina (15–59) decided to assassinate the Roman emperor Claudius (10 BC–AD 54), she had no problem getting close to her target. After all, they were married. In the year 54, she served the emperor a plate of poisoned mushrooms—killing her husband and setting in motion one of the most disastrous periods in Roman history.
Among the most powerful women of ancient Rome, Agrippina was a descendant of the emperor Augustus (63 BC–AD 14) and a member of an influential political dynasty. Her brother, Caligula (12–41), was emperor between 37 and 41. She married Claudius, her third husband, in 49. Agrippina had one son from her first marriage, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (37–68)—who later became the emperor Nero.
Known as a ruthless political schemer, at the time of her marriage to Claudius she had already been implicated in an assassination plot against her brother and spent time in exile on an island in the Mediterranean. Her family remained powerful in Rome; in fact, Claudius was her uncle. For Agrippina, the marriage was purely political and offered an opportunity to maneuver Nero into the line of imperial succession.
Claudius, however, began to have second thoughts after 53 and considered putting his own biological son, Britannicus (41–55), next in line for the throne. Agrippina’s motive for the assassination was seemingly to prevent the emperor from removing Nero as his heir.
Nero’s rule was legendary for its tyranny and incompetence. He launched the first major persecution of the Christians; executed thousands of opponents, including his stepbrother Britannicus; and famously “fiddled while Rome burned” during a huge fire in 64. He was deposed in 68 and committed suicide.
One of his victims, ironically, was Agrippina. After ascending to the throne at age sixteen, Nero was at first strongly influenced by his mother. But she disapproved of his relationship with Poppaea Sabina. Wishing to remove all obstacles to his marriage to Poppaea, Nero ordered Agrippina’s death in 59. She was forty-four.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- An opera, Agrippina, was written by the baroque composer George Handel (1685–1759) in 1709.
- Claudius’s third wife, Valeria Messalina (c. 20–48) was infamous in her own right. According to Pliny the Elder (c. 23–79), she once won a sex competition with a prostitute, “the commonest strumpet in all Rome,” by having relations with twenty-five men in twenty-four hours.
- Poppaea Sabina’s second husband, Marcus Salvius Otho (32–69), became emperor for three months in 69, during the so-called Year of the Four Emperors. He committed suicide after losing a battle against one of his opponents.
