Thread by @RealOlaudah

Empress Agrippina Part 1:

Roman Empress Agrippina was a master strategist. She paid the price for it.
Rome’s hardball politics were off-limits to women, yet this great-granddaughter of Augustus won power for herself and her son, Nero, who would later have her murdered.

Nobody could question Agrippina’s imperial credentials: great granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece of Tiberius (granddaughter of Drusus), sister to Caligula, wife of Claudius, and mother to Nero. Like her male relatives, she enjoyed great influence.

Honored with the title Augusta in A.D. 50, she wielded political power like a man—and paid the price for it.
Agrippina recorded her life in a series of memoirs, in which, according to first-century historian Tacitus, she “handed down to posterity the story of her life and of...

the misfortunes of her family.” Unfortunately, her writings—and her authentic perspective—have been lost. Most of what is known about her comes from secondhand sources written after her death.

Many contemporary historians condemned her for violating Rome’s patriarchal structure with her naked ambition. Many blamed her for the actions of her son, Nero. While describing her at times as irrational, perverted, and unscrupulous, some historians, however, bestowed a grudging

admiration for Agrippina, such as Tacitus when describing the moment she became empress of Rome:
From this moment, the country was transformed. Complete obedience was accorded to a woman—and not a woman . . . who toyed with national affairs to satisfy her appetites.

This was a rigorous, almost masculine despotism. In public, Agrippina was austere and often arrogant. Her private life was chaste—unless there was power to be gained. Her passion to acquire money was unbounded. She wanted it as a stepping-stone to supremacy.

Of course Agrippina is not the only powerful woman in history to have been treated unfairly by scholars, but this bias against her has motivated today’s historians to revisit her life and accomplishments to assess their effects on the Roman Empire.

Famous family:
Around A.D. 15, Agrippina was born in a military camp on the banks of the Rhine to an influential Roman power: Germanicus, nephew and adopted son of the emperor Tiberius and a candidate to succeed him, and Agrippina the Elder, Augustus’ favorite granddaughter.

When Agrippina was just four years old, Germanicus died of poisoning in Syria, a crime that her mother always attributed to Tiberius. Agrippina the Elder claimed that the emperor Tiberius feared Germanicus’s popularity with the army, believing that military support would...

eventually allow Germanicus to usurp the emperor and take his place. Whether or not Tiberius was responsible for poisoning Germanicus, he did deny his adopted son the honor of a public funeral.

Germanicus’s widow, the indomitable Agrippina the Elder, arrived in Rome with her husband’s ashes, in what became an open challenge to the emperor.

To be continued.

With the greatest dignity, she took the urn containing the ashes and, accompanied by her children and a huge crowd of mourning citizens, she led a silent procession through the streets of Rome to the mausoleum of Augustus, where she deposited it.

Tiberius was furious at his daughter-in-law’s defiance and never forgave her.
The younger Agrippina apparently received a solid education, and there is no doubt of her intelligence, nor of her determination and strength.

From an early age, she certainly understood the workings of the imperial court and how a woman could maneuver within it. Her great-grandmother Livia, grandmother Antonia, and her mother taught her the mechanisms and dangers of life at court.

Agrippina, in her role as Augusta, founded a Roman colony near her birthplace in what is today western Germany. Her father, Germanicus, had been stationed at a military outpost along the Rhine when Agrippina was born there in A.D. 15.

After Agrippina elevated it, the colony was named Colonia Claudia Augusta Ara Agrippinensium (Colony of Claudius Near the Altar of the Agrippinians) but referred to as Colonia.

The colony grew and became a major urban center, serving as the capital city of the Roman province Germania Inferior. Today it is known in English as Cologne, Germany’s fourth largest city.

Agrippina the Elder would pay dearly for taking on Tiberius. A few years later, the emperor had her two eldest sons murdered and banished her to one of the Pontine Islands where she died. These horrors, observed by Agrippina the Younger, while still a child, scarred her deeply...

and left an indelible mark on her thinking. It was here that she grew up and where early trauma forged her character. She decided not to challenge power head-on, at least at first, as her mother had done, but rather to protect herself through marriage to a cousin,...

Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus.
Agrippina began to make waves when her brother Caligula became emperor in A.D. 37. It is to this era that the earliest surviving image of her dates. A coin minted with Caligula’s effigy on the front features his three sisters on the back.

Depicted as Securitas, the security and strength of the empire, Agrippina leans on a column alongside her sisters Drusilla and Livilla, representing Concord and Fortune.

The new emperor Caligula showered his three sisters with honors, included them in official prayers, and even had consuls conclude their proposals to the Senate with the formula “Favor and good fortune attend Gaius Caesar and his sisters.”

Agrippina grew popular during this time. At age 22, she gave birth to her only biological child, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, who would become better known as Nero. From the very beginning, Agrippina was resolute in one aim: to see her son become emperor.

To be continued.