Agrippina
In honor of Mother’s Day (this coming Sunday), today’s blog is about one of history’s most notorious mothers, Agrippina. She was the sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero.
It’s probably wise to take the accounts of Roman historians with a grain of sale. The Roman writers Suetonius and Tacitus were not kind to Agrippina the Younger, and also contradict one another regarding some of the events. Still, a few facts seem incontrovertible.
She gave birth to Nero in AD 37, and subsequently her husband died of mysterious causes. Then Claudius’s third wife, Valeria Messalina, was accused of conspiring against him, and was executed. Agrippina became the fourth wife of the Emperor Claudius, who was also her uncle. (Cue the music.) She persuaded him to adopt her son Nero, and then to permit his daughter, Octavia, to marry Nero. Claudius already had a son, Britannicus, heir to the throne. Still with me?
After that, the bodies began to pile up quickly. A number of people who stood in the way of Nero’s becoming emperor died under suspicious circumstances. First off, oopsa-daisy! Claudius’s son and Nero’s half brother, Britannicus, died of mysterious causes. Then, as soon as Claudius appointed Nero as his successor . . . oopsa-daisy! Claudius died, in AD 54. Natural causes? Or was he poisoned by a platter of mushrooms laced with arsenic trioxide and prepared by his wife? You do the math. The sixteen-year-old Nero was now Emperor.
Nero soon chafed at his mother’s Tiger-Momming/helicopter parenting. She saw herself as co-ruler and imperial mother, so he had her sent away, but not far enough, it seems. According to Suetonius, the last straw was that she embarrassed him in front of his mistress by kissing him with “indecent passion” in public. (Cue the film.) Whatever the reason, Nero seems to have decided that his mother had to die.
But he needed it to look like an accident. He appears to have tried three times to poison her, but it didn’t work. It seems she’d long feared being poisoned, and knew how to dose herself with antidotes. So he had to go to Plan B.
According to contemporary accounts, Nero had her lured onto a collapsible boat, designed to fall apart at sea. When it did fall apart, one of her handmaidens unwisely called for help and claimed to be the Empress. She was summarily bashed to death with an oar, while the real Empress swam to safety.
Then he arranged for a lead ceiling over her bed to fall on her. That malfunctioned.
Finally, in exasperation, Nero went to Plan D and had his mother bludgeoned and stabbed. Nice.
Some accounts assert that Nero was wracked with guilt over his treatment of his mother.
John William Waterhouse, 1878: The Remorse of the Emperor Nero after the Murder of his Mother