Hello! I have some news at last! Agrippina is finally real and on her way! She went to press last week and will be arriving in the Unbound officies on August 8th. That's less than a week! Do you want to see what she'll look like? 

 


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Isn't she gorgeous?!

The question, of course, now is: when will you get your books?? 

The vast majority of you will recieve the ebook on the 8th August and the unsigned books will start being posted that week. 

Those of you who have bought signed and inscribed editions will have to wait a tiny bit longer for your physical copy because I live in Belfast and have a job (ugh) and can't get to London until 17th August I am afraid. So I will be in the Unbound office on 17th to wear my writing hand out and your copies will start being posted that day. I am sorry that you will have to wait a little longer but I hope that you don't mind too much. 

In the meantime, those of you who have bought prints and postcards and the like, I will be getting on those and they will arrive possibly before your book. I am going to pick up the prints tomorrow and they are truly beautiful. And the 6 of you who wanted to go on a tour of the British Museum with me, watch your emails!

I am so excited that you will finally get to read Agrippina this month. I am so proud of what I have written and the response from people who've been allowed to see it has been overwhelming so far. I can't wait to hear what you think. That said, if you hate it or find a typo, absolutely do not tell me. It is vitally important that I never know either of those things. 

If you live in Belfast or London, I am going to be doing a couple of little launch events to which you are all invited, and I will let you know about them as soon as I have nailed down dates etc. 

Thank you for your patience, I know this has been a long wait. Literally three of my backers, including both my grandparents, died during the course of making this book. So I appreciate that you have all stuck by and waited to kindly and not died. 

Emma x

It's finally here!

Hello! It's been a little while so I thought I'd better update you all on where we are. I am waiting for the proofs right now as all the copy edits are done, but most excitingly I have picked a cover! There's some tweaking and fiddling before I can show it to you but hopefully it will be soon! I am terribly impatient and I am getting more impatient as I get more excited/nervous about the whole thing. 

So that's where we are and as it's basically "some stuff is happening over there and hopefully will be done soon but *shrug emoji*", I thought I'd give you a little thing to thank you all for your patience. 

For the cover design process, I was asked to send an extract of the book to the designer Mark Ecob so he could get a feel for the book. Obviously, this was like picking which of my baby's arms to send so I made my partner read the whole book  and pick a section and this is the bit he chose.

Until you can read the rest, you can tune into the podcast I do with Within The Wires's Janina Matthewson, <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/history-is-sexy/id1342659081?mt=2">History is Sexy</a> which my mum describes as "very funny!" And who can argue with my mum. 

For context, this is the beginning of Chapter Three. Agrippina has spent a year in exile on a tiny island, during which time her husband has died and her brother, sister in law and niece have been assassinated. Her weird uncle Claudius has taken the throne and has recalled Agrippina and her last remaining sibling from exile. She is returning to Rome. 

 


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"The fact of her return must have been a huge relief for Agrippina as there were several days of chaos following Caligula’s death and there were several ways that the situation could have ended in Agrippina being politely murdered on her island instead of being pardoned. This was what had happened to both her grandmother Julia the Elder and her great-uncle Agrippa Posthumous when Tiberius took the throne, so there was precedent. But luckily for her, the world fell in the right order and she was recalled to Rome with her property reinstated and everyone was terribly sorry that she got exiled because of that plot thing and, as it turned out, they all agreed that her brother was a right bastard.

***

When Agrippina stepped back on Roman soil, she was about 25 years old and Nero was four. He had been living with his paternal aunt for a year, since his father’s death, and hadn’t seen his mother in maybe two years. Obviously, no source says a thing about reunion, but I hope it was lovely. Agrippina should have come back to Rome cowed and vulnerable, ready for a quiet life and perhaps chastened by her experience, but instead she came swaggering back like Liam Gallagher. She got off the boat from Pontia ready to swing for anyone who came near her. Her first act, in collaboration with her sister Livilla, was a massive middle finger to the senate and to Claudius’s palace. She exhumed the half-cremated, half-buried remains of Gaius from the gardens where he had been left, and held a proper full cremation and funeral for him which ended with his interment in the imperial Mausoleum of Augustus. This seems, to a lot of historians, to be a totally baffling move, partly because Gaius had literally just been brutally murdered and replaced for being a nightmare, which would suggest that people probably didn’t want to think about him, and partly because Agrippina and Livilla had both been exiled by him. So why on earth were they making a big show of demonstrating their loyalty to an assassinated tyrant? Why were they antagonising Claudius like this? They could have just had a small, private funeral, or not done it at all. They could have interred Gaius in any other mausoleum or burial place that wasn’t a huge monument in the centre of Rome. But they went as big and swaggering and public as possible. There is a selection of possible reasons for the sisters to make this their first action. My personal favourite is the idea that they did it to stop Gaius’s ghost from haunting both the gardens where he was buried and the palace in which he was murdered.

This idea comes from a throwaway line in Suetonius, right at the end of his biography and in the same breath as the description of the murder of Gaius’s wife and infant daughter, that Gaius’s ghost haunted the gardens in which he was half buried until his sisters completed the interment, and that ‘something horrible appeared’ in the palace in which he was murdered until it eventually burned down.[1] This is a useful glimpse at how enormously superstitious the Romans were. Ghosts and spirits of the dead creep through an awful lot of their religious practices, and Gaius wasn’t even the only emperor ghost. Suetonius also has a good story about Augustus’s ghost haunting his childhood nursery and beating up anyone who entered it without first being properly purified.[2] Which, to me, says an awful lot about dead Augustus’s ego. But even at the more average level of society, there was a general cultural fear of evil spirits that needed to be pacified, and good spirits who should be commemorated in various religious festivals during the year. The idea of malevolent ghosts and spirits is not necessarily a left-field one for the Romans, and maybe the sisters were doing the Romans a favour by purging the angry spirit of Caligula.

There were also familial reasons why properly burying their murdered brother was a good move for Agrippina and Livilla: it was good pietas. Pietas was a uniquely Roman concept and is untranslatable into English. At its most base level, it meant duty to one’s family and one’s country. But this simple definition strips pietas of its depth and makes it sound a lot more optional than it was. Pietas also referred to various flavours of love, religious devotion, obligation, justice, gratitude, respect, compassion and friendship. Pietas also contained a strong sense of natural law and natural justice, as in concepts which were perceived to be entirely fundamental to human behaviour. To act in a manner which undermined pietas, therefore, meant to act unnaturally. In this context, as the only living members of the family, Agrippina and Livilla had a strong obligation in both a religious, civic and familial sense (so far as those things could be separated) to lay their brother to rest properly with the correct rites and rituals. Failure to do this demonstrated not just a lack of familial duty and compassion for their brother but also a personal duty to Rome. It’s quite possible that the idea of leaving their brother unburied was genuinely upsetting to Agrippina and Livilla, regardless of how they felt about his personality.

The other possibility, and the most likely one from a boringly rational perspective, is that it was good optics to bury Gaius because it’s pretty clear from a bunch of sources that even though the Praetorian Guard and senate absolutely loathed Gaius to his bones, the people and armies of Rome thought he was quite, quite wonderful. This is an underlying theme in almost all the surviving sources about Gaius’s reign. Even Suetonius allows 20 paragraphs of his biography to record the good things that Gaius did and how popular he was among the plebeians. There is a slightly earlier source which covers the assassination of Gaius in enormous detail and that’s Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities.[3] Josephus describes Gaius showering the Roman people with gold and silver coins. And Gaius walking happily and comfortably among the people of Rome. And he also lets slip this little gem when describing the assassination: ‘it was no small danger they had occurred by killing an emperor who was honoured and loved by the madness of the people, especially when the soldiers were likely to make a bloody enquiry after his murderers.’[4] His narrative goes on to describe a private bodyguard and a citizenry who were appalled and incensed by the behaviour of a small group of senators. Josephus literally writes these people off as women, children, slaves and Germans (the worst barbarians), who were too stupid to know what was good for them. And so, the people and the soldiers formed a lynch mob and started hunting down and murdering people they thought were involved the assassination. A lot of people died. It took two days to sort everything out. All this happened just a few months before Agrippina and Livilla arrived back in Rome, and there was no way they were unaware of their brother’s popularity with the army and people of Rome. Their decision to give Gaius a proper burial and inter him in the Mausoleum of Augustus alongside their glorious parents, their murdered brothers and their tragic sister can only be a reminder to Gaius’s remaining fans that his family lived on. It was a reminder to the Roman world that they were still the children of Agrippina and Germanicus, still the great-grandchildren of Augustus and still the sisters of an emperor. It was a clear reinstatement of their power as Julians."

 

 

[1]                  Suetonius, Caligula, 59.

[2]                  Suetonius, Augustus, 6.

[3]                  Josephus was a Jewish scholar who was captured by the emperors Vespasian and Trajan when they broke the siege of Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple of the Jews. He was born Joseph ben Matityahu, but, like all great colonialists, the Romans didn’t handle non-Latin names very well so they renamed him Titus Flavius Josephus. Now Josephus knew which side his bread was buttered and managed to save his own life when he was captured by telling Vespasian that the Messianic prophecies of the Torah (you know, the ones that predict the coming of a Messiah, the ones that form the fundamental foundation of Christianity) spoke of Vespasian himself coming from the east (Jerusalem) to conquer Rome and become emperor. Vespasian was apparently deeply susceptible to flattery and went for it, taking Josephus back to Rome with him. He became emperor and kept Josephus around forever. Josephus instituted himself as a semi-formal explainer of Judaism to the Romans and wrote a series of books about Jewish history for elite Roman readers. One of which was the Jewish Antiquities.

[4]                  Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, 19.115.

Hello, an update

So here's some new at last pals: I got the copy edits back, have gone through and felt really, really bad for the copy-editor (who found my jokes baffling and my insistence on deliberately splitting infinitives for fun painful), and the edited document has gone back to Unbound looking much nicer. The laser focus of people who can spot that you've spelt a word you made up differently 180 pages apart is ceaselessy amazing. 

Agrippina also is now formatted like a proper book, with copyright pages and the like which means we are inching, slowly slowly inching, towards actual publication and I'm pretty sure it's all production decisions like picking a cover and proofreading from here on in.

Not long now until you can read it, you delightful, kind patient people.

Copy edits!

Hello everyone! I have no real news here I'm afraid. Just waiting and gradually beginning to chip away at the very start of the next project. In the meantime though, just to keep you sated til the book is done, I thought you might like to know that I started a podcast with Janina Matthewson (who writes the brilliant <a href="http://www.nightvalepresents.com/withinthewires/">Within The Wires</a> which you should listen to also). It's called History is Sexy and we are going to answer history questions that you can't be bothered to research yourself. Episode one is obviously Romans and you can listen <a href="https://soundcloud.com/historyissexy/episode-1-what-have-the-romans-ever-done-for-us">here</a> or on your podcast app. We had to tick the explicit content button because I said the word "dick" so many times. Sorry about that.  

Also if you have a history question, then you can tweet us <a href="https://twitter.com/SexyHistoryPod">@sexyhistorypod.</a>

Until next time there is news! 

 

xxx

Not really news

Hello everyone! It's been a while. How are you? Did you have a nice end of year break? I ended my year with the news that Agrippina has gone off to the copy-editor, which is obviously terrifying because copy-editors tend to say things like "wow that's a long sentence it seems to take up half a page" and " you have managed to switch tense in the middle of the sentence" and "that's a lot of commas" to me. The good news for all of you is that the version you read will all be the one tense and the sentences will probably be shorter and with far fewer sub-clauses. Thank goodness for copy-editors. 

 

As the majority of the writing part is now done, I spent today somewhat sadly packing up all the Agrippina paraphenalia that has filled my desk for the past couple of years and putting it away so I can get started on something new. I no longer have a list of everyone Agrippina allegedly banged in my peripheral vision while I sit at my desk which is, on reflection, probably a good thing. 

 

As a new year tease, here's the (current) contents page for Agrippina. The headings probably count as spoilers so if you don't want to know how Agrippina's life ends, don't look!

 


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Emma x

Happy 2018

So, last week I missed Bromans because I was in Berlin having an actual holiday.It was an actual holiday with no writing because, last Wednesday, I sent my editor Scott the first draft of the book! So now I am in the terrified waiting period of hoping that it's ok and how much needs to be burnt. On the upside, I got 5 days with no writing to do. 

And now I'm back in Belfast and got to watch Bromans last night. And it's still bizarrely charming. 

Bromans has absolutely no right to be charming. It seems to be specifically designed to produce low key moralising outrage and tittilation in equal measure. That's why the majority of the talking head clips with the couples are them not knowing things. One girl, for example, asks the other how Romans cooked eggs without pans. Another responds that the Romans invented the pan. At another point in the show, Summer (19) and Glenn (22) attempt to work out who Maid Marion was. Some of this happens while the girls are making plaster casts of their boobs or butts, which their boyfriends will then try to identify. Thick girls with their tits out is basically pure Daily Mail bait. Add in the boys with regional accents whose main purpose is to be strong and you can hear Outraged of Tumbridge Wells composing their letters about the decline of Western Civilisation from here. 

What makes the show charming though is how cute the couples are. The vast majority of them look at each other with a pure love and joy that melts the heart. When the boys all correctly identified the plaster casts of their girlfriend's body parts, it was simultaneously quite weird and quite lovely how well they knew each other. And they all care about each other and about doing well in such a genuine way that I can't help but like them and root for them. Except Dino and Cherelle, who would definitely murder and eat all the others at the slightest provocation.

Anyway, Bromans now has its structure: First, the boys do some circuit training in the North African sun while David McIntosh in pants shouts at them and the girls sunbathe. At the end of the training, McIntosh decides which two put the most effort in and therefore won. Then the girls do a "cultural activity" - making casts of their boobs this week which exists purely to cause drama. Finally, the girls and boys do a challenge together. This week, the couples were tied to revolving platforms and the boys had to use slingshots to hit their opponents with projectiles while the girls span the platform to keep their boy out of the firing line. It was bizarre. The eimination process is excessively complicated. First, the mysterious emperor decides who will be up for elimination, based on advice from McIntosh and Dominus, then the nominated boys make a speech asking to be saved and finally the rest of the couples choose who gets to stay. Then, apparently, the emperor overrides their decision and no one leaves. Because absolute monarchy is capricious and inscrutable. 

This whole setup means that the boys and girls both get to do challenges, but only the boy's challenges count towards anything. The girls' challenges are time-fillers. The girls' most important role in the whole thing is to support and spur on their boyfriends. They give the boys something more than themselves to fight for, they demand that the boys strive to please them, to increase their standing among the other girls, to get them rewards. The boys have to report their progress - their successes and failures - to their girlfriends, who then shout at them to do better. It's absolutely the most Roman thing I've ever seen. Not gladiators, who were slaves who couldn't marry, but for free Roman citizens, this is oddly accurate.

There's two very Roman concepts on display here: The notion that the individual is working to build prestige and wealth for a family rather than for themselves, and that women couldn't technically impact the outcomes of the constant competition for power and wealth in public. Women (legally) had to rely on men doing well in politics and war (if they were of senatorial rank) and business (if they were freedmen or equestians) and could only offer advice and support. Obviously, in the real world, real Roman women had more access and agency than the Bromans girls do, but as a very broad framework it's disturbingly accurate. The men go out to work and fight and come home to their women, who tell them off or celebrate; the women's reactions fuel the men's drive to succeed; the women's prestige depends almost entirely on the men's success. Nothing could be more Roman.

The interesting thing in this is how it serves to highlight gender divisions and make them really, really stark. Obviously, the Bromans producers have deliberately chosen couples who embody extreme gender presentation: the men are hypermasculine with huge shiney muscles and enormous strength; the women are hyperfeminine with long hair extensions, plumped lips, massive eyelashes and several sets of fake boobs between them. The structure of the show emphasises this by forcing the women to be passive and supportive, while the men are forced to engage in feats of strength. Apart from the engaging in feats of strength (which Roman men of the higher classes would consider to be barbaric), this extreme division between masculinity and femininity, this bludgeoning unsubtlety, is something the Romans would approve of. 

Eventually, in episode three, no one got sent home for reasons that were entirely unclear but which entirely messed up a lot of couple alliances but there were two true winners in my heart.

The first was Jordan, who wrote a poem for his gf Jade (who likes poetry and music according to Jordan) and then read it to her. The poem was a set of rhyming couplets, each using a different synonym for penis, begging Jade to shag him on set. Writing a poem to a girl in a rigid form begging for a shag is SPECTACULARLY Roman. The only way it could be more Roman would be if the next poem was hendecasyllabic and about how much he hated Jade now. 

The second winner was Summer, for declaring, during a massage she got as a reward for Glenn winning the first challenge, that being a Roman wife was much more interesting than being a contract administrator. This is such a brilliantly obvious statement (because being a contract administrator sounds UNBEARABLE. I'm sorry if you're a contract administrator) that I love it. 

So that's Bromans! Here's some <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Catullus_37">Catullus</a> to see us out.

Bromans Episode 3

There are two reasons I never watch reality TV anymore. The first is that I am a massive sucker for reality TV editing and will get immediately sucked in. The second is that, about 10 years ago, contestants became self aware and worked out exactly how to play the editing game. About 30 seconds into Bromans, it became clear that both these things were still true when one of the Ladiators declared 

<blockquote>
"Back in the day, in ancient Roman times, they believed the Earth was flat and, yeah, I believe that."
</blockquote>

This kid immediately became my favourite. But let's go through this beat by beat.

From the first line of the press release a couple of months ago, we knew that Bromans was going to be a very, very silly show that took a very tongue-in-cheek attitude to the ideas of accuracy and authenticity:

<blockquote>
“The Romans gave us roads, viaducts and basic sanitation but ‘Bromans’ may prove to be their greatest legacy.”
</blockquote>

And our introduction to the Bros, and to the character that is going to guide them through the world of Ancient Rome, suggests that it's going to be very silly indeed. The show is using the sets of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plebs_(TV_series)">Plebs</a>, so they do look surprisingly authentic from the outside, and it has been populated with about 13 extras wearing sackcloth tunics and no shoes. The Bros enter in their half undone shirts and their salmon coloured shorts bellowing 

<blockquote>
"Ancient Rome is sick! Full of fit ladies and sick geezers."
</blockquote>

The Bros are 97% muscle and regional accents. All of them have an accent: Welsh. Yorkshire, Essex, Unexpected Eton Plummy. 

They are met by a guy in a kind of generic Roman outfit speaking with cut glass RP and introducing himself as "Dominus, the advisor the emperor." When I say generic Roman, he is wearing a long white t-shirt with a bit of red curtain draped over it and a gold diadem.


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Dominus then recites some Latin very quickly, but I'm 75% sure it was Horace's/Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori' (It is sweet and honourable to die for the fatherland), which is either a brilliant piece of ironic usage or, well I'm not sure. The first part of the set up is in place though: the Bros are oily dimwits, the Dominus (who is the voice of the viewer) is making fun of them.

And so he does, as he forces them all to strip naked and shackles them to the floor. We are maybe 4 minutes into the show and all the boys are nude.

Cut to the girls entering the set. The girls are mostly blonde hair extensions and excessive lip fillers. I'm a bit worried about the amount of filler in one of them. They are taken on a shopping trip where they all change out of their own bikinis and into matching gold lame bikinis and tiny white dresses and then are taken to see their nude boyfriends who are still shackled.


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It will rapidly become clear that Bromans was made for men who want to look at oiled muscles and the reassure themselves about their sexuality by looking at slo-mo jiggling lady bits for a long time. 

 The Bros and Girlfriends (because why bother to define a woman by anything other than her relationship to a man) are now together in the 'colosseum'. I thought maybe they'd call it at amphitheatre but I think we're going to have to learn to live with the fact that people don't know that the colosseum is just one specific amphitheatre, which, fyi, means double theatre as a normal theatre is just the semi-circle shaped ones. The colosseum is called the colosseum because it was built on the site of Nero's colossal statue of himself. Don't say you never learn anything from me. 

It's at this point that I get fully sucked into this show because one of the girls, I didn't catch which but it might have been Jade, instantly shouted "babe, you look fit!" at her bf, an act of support that I found unbearably charming. We then got a VT of Jade and her bf Jordan. Jordan is a bricklayer and is made of puppy levels of enthusiasm.Jade never stops gazing at Jordan. They're both adorable. 


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Back in the Colosseum, the girls have a task: they have to dig in the sand to find clothes for their Bros. But there are 8 Bros and only 6 sacks of clothes. The girls strip in slow-motion. 

The next section has maybe 3 minutes of actual footage, stretched to nearly 10 by most of it being in slow motion. There are a lot of slo-mo close ups of women's bottoms jiggling and they fight in the sand. I'm pretty sure I saw some labia. It is absolutely pornographic and more than a little uncomfortable to be honest. If you're going to watch this on ITV Player, skip it. You'll know who loses because they (Richard and Tian) get put in tiny tiny tiny jockstraps, while the other Bros get skirts. There's some cock closeups but not in slow-mo. If they'd put a slo-mo man butt jiggle here, I'd maybe have forgiven the previous bit. 

With everyone now having at least a small bit of cloth covering their genitals, we skip off the the villa in which the couples will be living. It is tiny. The pool is about the size of a double bed. They all have to sleep in the same room. It is very clear that the producers were not allowed to change much about the Plebs set, but they've done their best and the kids are thrilled. They all hug. They're cute as buttons.

They have a dinner of sausages, which the narrator emphasises is not authentic Roman cuisine. There's a strange balance between semi-authenticity and deliberate anachronism, which they actively call attention to, that I quite enjoy. There is absolutely no guile or pretence in Bromans. It is, as the wee posh Soft Boy Tom says

<blockquote>
 Bums and boobs and bants and sex!
</blockquote>

Admittedly, he says it in such a way that suggests he's incredibly uncomfortable with all those things, but he's alone in that. Everyone else, from the production crew to the extras, are here for sexy people in the sunshine with an inexplicable Roman theme. 

The best is yet to come though: There's a Roman nightclub. It's also called the Colosseum. In a moment of pure joy, Brandon, who is a professional Instagram influencer, declares with absolutely unmitigated delight "We don't even need to pay for the drinks! It's ALL INCLUSIVE!" 

Jordan is even happier. As his gf grinds on him, he sighs, "This is the best night of my life".

I'd worry about a boy who thinks the best night of his life is hanging out with 14 strangers in an otherwise empty pretend nightclub on a TV set but I suspect that Jordan thinks that every night is the best night of his life. Jordan is unapolagetically thrilled by existence itself. I want to be him. 

Next morning, the Bros are introduced to their Doctore, called Doctore, played by David McIntosh. David McIntosh is massive, is doing a weird accent on and off, appears to have taken a ton of speed judging by his face chewing, and is wearing eyeliner. He once drove a van full of dead badgers into a bus stop. This makes his criticisms of the Bros in the task very funny. 


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He's also got VERY 2017 cold shoulder armour. You'd find this in ASOS. 

The task is for the couples to work together to load a cart full of rocks, which the Bros will drag America's Strongest Man-style up an alley. The final load will be the Bros pulling their girlfriends. 

The task is carnage. The Welsh couple go first and Richard falls over. Within seconds, he;s bleeding and everyone is sobbing while his girlfriend Sophii holds him and the rest of the group commiserate. I am fully sucked in. I am feeling feelings. I want to hug everyone.

Next, posh Soft Boy Tom, who is a semi-professional rubgy player, does a series of horse noises and shouts "I AM A STALLION! I FANCY YOU!" at his musical theatre student Rhiannon in the plummiest voice you ever heard. I don't know whether I want to hug him or drown him. They both look like 14 year olds who have snuck into a nightclub. 

The rest are kinda skimmed over because we spent all that time on the slo-mo jiggling. All the couples are just adorably loving and supportive of each other though. By this point, 45 minutes in, my heart, which is squishy as hell at the best of times, had completely melted and I want them all to win. Even the one that was described by one of his rivals as "toddler Joey Essex". I've forgotten his real name. I'm only calling him that. 

At the end of the task, the two teams with the slowest times are put up for elimination. We get a kind of strange council scene where the Dominus, acting his little socks off, and Doctore, also acting but aware its not his forte, present their overview of the teams to a mysterious Emperor. We never see the Emperor. I assume we are saving that reveal for the final. This is entirely pointless. I love it. 

Finally, there is an elimination. The bottom two are Toddler Joey Essex and Welsh Richard. Each gives a short speech to the rest of the gang outlining why they think they should be allowed to stay. This is a waste of their time becuase the couples are immediately and ruthlessly tactical. They decide that Toddler Joey Essex, who consists of 75% hairspray, is less of a physical threat that Welsh Richard, who is massive and is 80% tattoos and choose to keep Toddler Joey Essex. 


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Welsh Richard and Sophii are removed from Rome. To symbolise this, Dominus sets fire to a banner with Richard's face on it. Richard was my favourite so I am very sad at this point and have now been forced to take against Toddler Joey Essex. 

And that's the end. 

As far as I can tell, the show was developed as a way to get the most use out of the Plebs sets and show flesh. It is willfully and deliberately refusing to engage with any notion of accuracy and gives only a wee wink to the idea of authenticity. This is its saving grace really: if it went po-faced and accurate, it would be tedious; it it didn't acknowedge that the Romans were a real people, it would be confusing. By giving sly winks to the audience in the narration, it allowed me to forgive it. 

It's other saving grace is that the couples are all charming and adorable. They are all very young, in their early 20s, but they all seem to love each other and have all entered this being supportive and kind to the other couples. In the girls's task, one girl got her hair caught in a bag and got dragged by it. Immediately afterwards, the other girls publically apologised. They hug, they cheer for each other. They know literally nothing about Ancient Rome, but hardly anyone does, and they're nice people. That niceness is what sucked me in in the end. 


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Bromans - Episode One.

Hi pals! How are you? I am editing away as hard as I can and occassionally wondering what I was thinking when I wrote some bits, and sometimes thinking that I am brilliant and I can't wait for you all to read this! So if you could all promise to enjoy the good bits and ignore the rest, I'd like that. 

But this isn't just a pointless check in. It's also a warning and a present. 

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 A Warning


Those of you who are on Twitter or like Love Island might already know that ITV2 has a new show starting Thursday 14th called Bromans about Bros becoming gladiators (please see trailer above or <a href="http://agrippinilla.com/2017/07/17/bromans-b-romans-romans-bros/">my reaction to the press release</a>). Basically, ITV has decided to take hot young couples with a lot of tribal tattoos and hair extensions and make them lift weights and wrestle in the North African sun sexily and given it an "authentic" Roman theme. Obviously I am extremely into it so I have decided to write wee recaps/reviews of each episode for subscribers. So each Friday for the next few weeks, there'll be a wee Bromans update which you will either love or loathe but I'll mark them clearly so you can make your own decision! 


 Some Stuff about Exile


As I am editing, I am cutting out lumps of stuff that I wrote when 90,000 words sounded like an impossible goal and I was worried that I wouldn't have enough stuff to write about so I spent ages worrying about details that don't matter. Now I have too many words and more important details to add, so I'm passing along some of the more interesting bits that will probably not end up in the book, though maybe some of this will be, with extra links. Enjoy!

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Agrippina’s exile was to be carried out on the island of Pontia, now called Ponza, in the Tyrrean Sea. Ponza is about 70 miles off the coast of Naples, and is where her brother Nero also served out his exile. The island is a tiny volcanic place, but Agrippina would not be expected to live a life of total deprivation. The punishment was her being confined away from society, it was not to make her live in a cave. The island is <a href="https://i.pinimg.com/564x/43/f8/58/43f858df0e59678d0e3fb3ce9f39eff6.jpg">beautiful</a>, and has an Italian climate. It's got cliffs that fall away into the sea and the <a href="http://www.goseekadventures.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/shutterstock_79951633-e1423187112646.jpg">kind of views</a> that <a href="https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/life/travel/2010/09/24/lovely_ponza_an_italian_island_gem/ponza_coastal_viewitaly.jpeg">make you</a> want to<a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ponza+views&amp;tbm=isch&amp;tbo=u&amp;source=univ&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiJtcOSk6LWAhVZOMAKHfdQDiwQsAQILg&amp;biw=1093&amp;bih=541#imgrc=9KiRfGwI9G78sM:"> weep</a>. Archaeologists have found two villas on Ponza, both quite lovely. The biggest is almost 10 acres in size, has a little theatre of its own (there's a hotel inside it now), a solarium, those glorious views and<a href="https://www.ecoarttravel.com/images/e0ee3a9b2a5e18a8470a8e7259b114c4/neutral"> little grottoes</a> carved into the rocks that are full of fish. She also had a significant staff of slaves and freed slaves to look after her: she couldn’t be expected to do her own hair even now. In short, she has the kind of life that many a quiet soul, billionaire or writer would long for. A private island off the coast of Italy. A luxurious home. Fish ponds. The sea to swim in and massive staff to wait on her and then bugger off when she was bored of them. Given that we know that Agrippina was a very strong swimmer (more on that later), I particularly like to imagine her taking a morning swim each day. Wading into the green-blue sea and swimming until her arms were tired and she could barely see the shore that was her prison anymore.

 

Which is, of course, what it was. Effortlessly comfortable Richard Branson fantasy though it was, a private island is only really fun when you choose to be there. When you can never leave, when your brother is occasionally sending you letters reminding you that he owns swords as well as islands, when you may never see your son ever again, and when you are an imperial Roman woman, being on a private island--no matter how beautiful--is a torment. We know very, very little about what Roman exile was like, other than painful. We have just three reasonably well documented exiles, in that they wrote while they were in exile and those writings survived. They are, obviously, all men: Cicero, Ovid and Seneca. Cicero experienced an older, less restrictive form of exile that allowed him to go wherever he wanted except Italy. He mostly hung out in Albania and Greece until he was allowed to come home, and did little but write letters to his friends and family in Rome. His letters are dripping in pain, especially those to his wife, which are so tormented that you’d never know that he abandoned her a few years later for a young girl in his guardianship because he wanted the girl's cash. In exile, he writes long emotive letters full of heartbreak like

 

<blockquote>
“though I am always wretched, yet when I write to you or read a letter from you, I am in such floods of tears that I cannot endure it ... if these miseries are to be permanent, I only wish, my dear, to see you as soon as possible and to die in your <a href="http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi/citequery3.pl?dbname=PerseusLatinTexts&amp;query=Cic.%20Fam.%2014.4.5&amp;getid=1">arms”</a>

 
</blockquote>

Cicero deeply mourns the loss of his wife and children, and also his house which was burnt down by his enemies. But on top of this, over and over, he also laments his humiliation. To be torn down from a position of power and strength, to be shown to be weak and to be thrown out of his own life. It is deeply, desperately humiliating. Even more than you can imagine because it is humiliation in a world where reputation is everything a man has. 

Ovid and Seneca experienced the much harsher punishment that Agrippina received and were confined to specific places. Like Cicero, Ovid wrote letters from exile, but unlike Cicero he managed to come across as a massive complainer. He bashed out 9 tedious books of poems to his friends that are almost entirely wingeing and asking for things, and a 650 line curse against his enemies. Like Cicero, Ovid claims that he’d rather be dead that suffering exile, several times, in verse form and slightly hysterically. At one particularly heightened moment, Ovid compares his exile to the experience of the Greek Brazen Bull, a form of torture in which a person is popped inside a bronze bull and then a fire is lit underneath the bull’s belly. The person inside is slowly cooked and their screams escape from a hole in the bull's mouth, sounding like its bellow.

Obviously this is an appalling way to die, and very little like living on an island. But not to Ovid’s mind. As an exile, he was separated from his beloved Rome. While Cicero is interested in his position, his wife and his house in that order, Ovid is primarily interested in the city of Rome. He laments: “Rome is in my thoughts, and home, and longed-for places, whatever of mine remains in the city I’ve <a href="http://www.intratext.com/IXT/ENG1359/_P3.HTM">lost.”</a> In a later letter, dedicated entirely to his patriotism, he wails “Where is better than Rome?” and  waxes lyrical about the places he misses most:

 

<blockquote>
“I revisit the sites of the lovely city from my home/and my mind surveys it all with its own inward eye./Now the fora, now the temples, now the marbled theatres,/now I think of each portico with its levelled grounds./Now the grassy Campus that faces the lovely gardens,/the ponds and the canals, and the Aqua Virgo./But I suppose, the pleasures of the city being snatched away/in my misery, that I should at least enjoy all this countryside!/It’s not so much that my heart desires the fields I lost,/the noble landscapes of the Paelignian country,/or those gardens sited on the pine-clad hills/that view the junction of Via Clodia and Via <a href="http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/OvidExPontoBkOne.htm#anchor_Toc34217522">Flaminia.”</a>
</blockquote>

 

            Ovid, in summary, misses the city of Rome more than anything else. He misses his wife, his friends, his daughter, but what he really misses is his country. He misses living in a beautiful city that makes him feel beautiful and special. He misses the glory and spectacle of Rome. He is also very clear and insistent that he misses being warm. Ovid was exiled to the Romanian coast, a town which is now a city called <a href="http://radioconstanta.ro/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2015/01/constanta-city-view.jpg">Constanța</a>, which is excessively beautiful. To Ovid’s mind, it is the edge of the world. He writes a poem almost every winter (for eight years) complaining about being cold, about barbarians who wear trousers and don’t even speak Latin. He loathes it. There’s a statue of Ovid in a square named after him in the centre of Constanța now, and I can’t imagine much that would make him angrier.

Ovid’s exile was literally eight years of writing misery laden letters that his friends (including Germanicus) must have dreaded receiving, full of begging and pure sycophancy for Augustus as he essentially begged to be allowed to return home. He died in exile. It is interesting though that Ovid prostrated himself so fully in his exile poetry. He died while he was halfway through writing an epic poem describing every festival in the Roman calender (the Fastii) that it’s generally thought was his last ditch attempt to get back in Augustus’s good books by contributing to his programme of moral and artistic reform. Who knows if it would have worked, but every ounce of Ovid’s energy to the end was dedicated to grovelling to power for release.

 

            Seneca on the other hand, being deeply Stoic, refuses to be sad about anything at all in writing, or indeed have any feelings that could be identified from a distance. Instead--in a move that is either extremely patronising or admirable depending on your point of view--he writes letters to his mum telling her to stop being sad because he’s fine. Of course, Seneca got to go to <a href="https://www.easyjet.com/en/holidays/shared/images/guides/corsica/corsica-south.jpg">Corsica</a>, so he probably was mostly fine, but it is an unusual response to tell other people to stop being sad about you. This is Seneca’s stoicism at play, stoicism being a philosophy that teaches that one cannot change what happens in one’s life, only one’s own response to it. A Stoic should accept the good and the bad in life with the same calmness and aspire to the four great virtues: courage, wisdom, justice and temperance. To quote perhaps the most famous Stoic, 2nd-century emperor Marcus Aurelius:

 

<blockquote>
 And let this truth be present to you in the excitement of anger, that to be moved by passion is not manly, but that mildness and gentleness, as they are more agreeable to human nature, so also are they more manly; and he who possesses these qualities possesses strength, nerves and courage, and not the man who is subject to fits of passion and <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.11.eleven.html">discontent</a>.
</blockquote>

 

Obviously this is both sexist as hell and boring, but it was Seneca's one true love and he really went for it in his writing. Seneca was good friends with Agrippina. Agrippina had rescued him from being exiled once before when she still had influence over her brother, and it was she who eventually recalled him from exile in 49AD. Plus, Seneca was actually exiled by Claudius for banging Agrippina’s sister Livilla (she was re-exiled too), which raises some doubt about how temperate and Stoic he was outside of his writings. Still, he did a good job of pretending.

 

            So how did Agrippina react to being exiled? To her humiliation and isolation? To her separation from her husband and son? Of course we don’t know. Undoubtedly she wrote letters. She probably wrote to Seneca given how friendly they were. Her husband Domitius was still around for a little while so she probably wrote to him but he died of his dropsy at some point in 40AD and their son was sent to live her husband’s sister Domitia Lepida, so probably she wrote to her. Death would prevent letters getting to Domitus, though presumably someone wrote and told Agrippina that she was now a widow. I sort of assume that Gaius did. It seems like it would please him to break bad news. But did she write like Cicero the broken-hearted family man, or Ovid the grovelling urbanite, or Seneca the Stoic? Of course, she wrote like none of them. She wrote like an Imperial woman of a royal bloodline. And we have no idea what that might sound like.

 

 

 
<script src="https://cdn.inspectlet.com/inspectifr/1497926764.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

A hello and a warning and some bits about Roman exile.

In an effort to get this book in your hands as soon as I can, I have been on another little writing retreat in Donegal where I managed to knock out 11,000 words in 2.5 days. And that's WITH a sofa nap every day. I don't know why I am still surprised that having no access to the internet or Twitter is astonishingly good for getting stuff written that is more interesting than memes but I am. Not that I am not fascinating on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter. 

 

So here's an update in pictures. I have now finished Claudius's reign, and if you know your Romans you'll know that this was a dramatic bit, but it means I've just got a few more years of Agrippina being alive before I have to write her extremely dramatic death scenes. If I'm feeling confident enough I might pop another WIP extract up soon!

 


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nice.

The current goal is to have a complete scrappy draft by the end of August and a slightly better draft with Scott for him to edit by the end of September so we're getting closer, I promise!

 

Ex

Writing Retreat Redux

Hello friends!

Just thought I'd let you know that I've got an article in the August issue of History Today about Agrippina's dad Germanicus! Or more specifically, about interpretations of Tacitus's version of Germanicus! 

Look! 


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You can get it in all good newsagents or on the <a href="http://www.historytoday.com/magazine">website </a>and it's worth getting because Germanicus's face in that bog picture there is so pissed off. Just a proper "please make these people go away." Also there's a good llama. 

Now back to the writing. We're almost in the home stretch now lovelies! 

 

E x

Germanicus in History Today

One of the only good things about finishing my PhD way back when was that it ended the 3.5 years of friends and family asking "How's the PhD going?" like there is any answer to that beyond "oh yeah, it's good. good", which actually means PLEASE HELP ME I CRY EVERY DAY AND I AM NOT GOOD ENOUGH WHY AM I DOING THIS AND WHY DO I LOVE IT SO. It's unfortunate for me that my life plans ended up being writing a book and then writing this book, because now every time I see anyone that I've not spoken to in a while I discover that they've just changed the word "PhD" to "book" and the question and answer are still the broadly the same (except for a period at the end of the first book when I answered everyone honestly with "I hate it. I hate it so much. It is a tumour on my soul" but that's passed now. It was a temporary condition).

 

It's nice then that at the moment I can give a really excited answer to this question for probably the first time ever and say that I feel like the book is going brilliantly! I have been sticking to a rigourous regime of having nothing in my life apart from working for money and writing this book, which has been going great and I have now passed the half-way mark for writing. That's 45,000 words I have forced out of my brain and three whole chapters. Agrippina is coming to life very quickly! 

 

The best bit is that those three chapters should be the hard ones. They cover the years of Agrippina's exile, the massive hole in the centre of the best source for the whole period, and her five year disappearance from all source material, and there has been a lot of cursing, swearing an impossible revenge upon long, long dead men and drawing endless variations of the Julio-Claudian family tree as I try to work out exactly how everyone is related to each other. They look like this and really highlight my lack of spatial awareness and laziness when making notes.


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<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/20170619_152505_1_fa5efb01-75ef-4d1e-8a6d-dd8161ab3b11.jpg?v=1690908319" width="281" height="500"> 

Thankfully, in Agrippina's timeline, almost everyone in those diagrams has now died quite horribly, and Agrippina is finally the empress she (thought she) deserved to be. The next few tens of thousands of words should be a breeze!

 

So that's how the book is going. I'll be giving copies of this post to all distant relatives and acquiantances who ask from now on. 

 

Emma x

How's the book going?

This is a sneaky bit of the introduction, a little bit of historical and cultural context before we leap into the main narrative with Agrippina's parents.  


 

Before we leap into the life of Julia Agrippina, we need some context. Agrippina lived in a culture that is quite alien to our own, and which valued its history and its religion very much. Romans in every stage of Roman history, from the second that Aeneas stepped onto the shores of Italy to the moment that Romulus Augustulus was deposed in the 5th Century AD, felt themselves to be the very modern point of a history that stretched back thousands of years. The tendrils of their history were real, living things that twined their way into their everyday lives, mostly through their family histories. Romans were a collective. Each individual existed primarily as part of a family and then as part of the Roman state, and those identities were considerably more important than any individuality. This is why about a third of the men and women in this book share the same couple of names and why daughters usually take a feminised version of their father’s name (Claudius/Claudia, Drusus/Drusilla, Agrippa/Agrippina, Octavian/Octavia and so on): their familial identity is the most important thing about them in a cultural sense. Without having a little bit of knowledge about Roman history, and the history of the Julian and Claudian families, virtually nothing about Roman culture in the first century makes sense. At the same time, a tiny bit of background about Roman history tells you an awful lot about how they saw women in a big picture sense, and what they thought the purpose and function of women was. So let’s have a whizz-bang tour of nearly a millennium of Roman history up until the birth of Agrippina’s parents.

Rome has two founders: Aeneas and Romulus. Aeneas was a child of Troy who escaped when it was sacked by the Greeks bearing a horse, carrying his father and household gods out of the ruined city. He travelled about a bit and eventually arrived in Italy and, long story short, becomes king of Alba Longa.  A few royal generations later and a princess is raped by the god Mars resulting in twins. The princess is also a Vestal Virgin, and has therefore taken a vow of chastity. Rape is considered to be a violation of that vow (this is a theme we will return to) and so her sons are condemned to death as punishment. She tries to feed the twins to a wolf, who raises them instead (just keep going with me here). As demi-gods, the boys decide to found a city of their own, have a fight about which hill will be the best hill and Romulus kills Remus over it. So Rome get called Rome and Romulus seems pretty happy with the Capitoline hill as the capital/best hill. Romulus now needs to populate his city, so he rounds up some random men which is all well and good until they realise they are a city of exclusively men and that is both horrible and won’t last long. They need women. To get some women, the new Romans led by Romulus pretend to throw a party for their nearest neighbours, the Sabines, and steal all their women while the Sabine men are distracted. This is the Rape of the Sabine Women. The Sabine men, surprisingly, aren’t enormously happy that all their wives and daughters have been kidnapped so they start a war. However, the women are soft-hearted and don’t want either their fathers or their new husbands to die (having taken to the Romans for some reason. Stockholm syndrome probably), so they fling themselves between the two armies and stop the war. As a result of this action, the Sabines and Romans become united as one people under the dual kingship of Romulus and the Sabine king Titus Tatius.

Immediately in the foundation myths you can see the crystallising of some of the most important parts of Roman culture: respect for one’s father, respect for one’s gods, and the role of women as conduits and connectors between families. Women here function as links that tie peoples together, who bring peace and continuity in opposition to death and war. Men on the other hand are mostly violent, sexually violent and also violent. Easy right? Good. Because there’s more and to be honest, it’s all as gruesome as this. 

So for the next few hundred years, the kings rule happily. There’s lots of good kings like Numa and everything is grand. Until the kings start to go bad, culminating in 509BC with the reign of Tarquinius Superbus (if you’re going to be an evil king, you may as well have an evil king name) Superbus’s son, Prince Sextus, develops a passion for a woman named Lucretia, a woman of high rank and higher morals who spends her evenings weaving woollen cloaks for her husband and being quiet. Sextus, being a depraved prince, is so aroused by Lucretia’s modesty and weaving skill that he rapes her, assuming she will keep quiet about the violation to her honour. However, Lucretia is also a woman of great moral strength and she immediately tells her father and husband and then kills herself to spare them the pain of having to do it (because, as we now know, rape counts as cheating). Her father and a sort of family friend who is invited for no real reason take her body, display it in the forum as evidence of the despotism of the king and thus incite a revolution, led by the family friend that overthrows the kings forever. That friend’s name? Lucius Junius Brutus. 

This story, while exceptionally grim, also tells us an awful lot about the place of the female body in Roman culture. It represents a private space, invaded by the king. We also learn that even though Lucretia is raped and has told everyone that she has been raped, and everyone believes that this wasn’t an act of hers, she still bears the shame of adultery and must die. Her suicide is an act of masculine moral strength because she knows that her honour as a woman can never be restored. This is important. Remember this for later. Finally, we learn that things that happen to women that are out of the ordinary can cause massive social and political upheaval. Women drive historical narratives, but ideally by dying. 

Back to the story. The kings are overthrown in 509BC and the republic is instituted by a collection of ancient aristocratic families known as the patricians. The republic is specifically set up to control both religion and politics, those things being inseparable. Two consuls take the place of the kings at the top of political ladder and take on the kingly duties between them. The rest of the political system is divided into offices, carefully set up to divide powers and stop anyone from gathering too much personal control over anything. Two consuls, for example, means that one could veto the other, preventing anyone from doing anything too terrible. The consuls were the head of the senate, made up of the patricians, who ruled as a consensus. Men obtained a political office through a very direct form of sort-of democracy that involves elections but is irrelevant here. You just need to know they exist. This setting up of the republic is the crowning glory of the Romans and the thing they are most proud of. 

These themes of republic, of shared power and of consensus and agreement are key to understanding the early emperors. Without knowing how violently Romans were repulsed by the idea of hereditary monarchy, and how absolutely core the notions of shared rule were to the image that Romans had of themselves, the actions of the early Roman emperors look bizarre and inexplicable. At the same time, take note of the idea of the patricians: these are ancient families who have granted themselves authority purely on the basis of their age and basically everyone has agreed that they are better because they are older. That’s important too. 

The republic ticks along alright for some centuries. There’s some fights between the patricians and the plebeians (i.e. people not in the senate) that are irrelevant by the time of Agrippina but which cause lots of waves of trouble that continue to simmer. Then the Romans start expanding their territory and the armies start to grow. At this point we are leaving the world of myth and are into reasonably well documented military and political history. Now Romans granted men who won great military victories a big parade called a triumph and an enormous amount of personal prestige and authority. This was fine when wars were fairly small and great victories were rare, but during the Punic Wars against Carthage in North Africa (modern Tunisia) and the destruction of that city in 146BC, massive victories became more common. The Punic Wars brought the Romans into contact with a lot of new people that they thought they might like to conquer, and so it brought some men a lot more personal glory and power than had previously been possible. The first two to emerge from this and cause trouble are Marius and Sulla. Marius gets so much personal power that he ends up being consul a terrifying seven times and Sulla is set up to bring him down a peg or two by replacing him as general in the east. Which is how the first civil war starts in 88BC. This bit is complicated and not very important but basically Marius dies, there’s a second civil war, Sulla becomes dictator for a few years then retires. Everyone expects that the republic will settle back to normal and recovery from the civil wars will be able to continue.

Apparently, however, no-one predicted that a lot of young men would see Marius and Sulla as idols to be imitated. Young men like Pompey, who came up through Sulla’s armies, and Julius Caesar, who was a supporter of Marius. Pompey is enormously successful in the East, defeating Mithradates in modern Turkey. Caesar, meanwhile, was conquering Gaul and writing books about it in the third person. In the middle was Crassus who was defeating Spartacus. Everyone was killing a lot of people and being praised a lot for it. You all know what happens here. There’s a civil war, Julius defeats everyone and becomes dictator like Sulla. Except unlike Sulla, who understood that dictator was a short term emergency position, Caesar decides to be dictator in perpetuity and makes his decision to be in charge of everything forever a bit too obvious. Mainly by telling everyone repeatedly that he was going to be dictator forever and letting Mark Anthony offer him a crown in front of people. So Brutus and chums give him 27 stab wounds and declare, once again, the monarch has been overthrown and the republic restored. 

Again, no-one accounted for the ambitions of younger men. so when 19 year old Octavian, Julius Caesar’s newly adopted son, appears from no-where and starts calling himself Caesar and threatening people with swords, everyone is quite surprised. When Octavian turns out to have a chum named Agrippa who is a military genius and starts defeating his elders in yet another civil war, everyone is even more surprised. And a bit upset. Octavian defeats Brutus and pals, and then allies with Anthony to unofficially rule the empire. Except that was never going to last, so Octavian goes to war against Antony, defeats him at Actium and becomes king of the world. But not in name. What Octavian, who was a very smart young man, learnt from his adoptive father is that if you make your power explicit, Romans get stabby. What he did instead was continually insist, until the day he died, that the republic was fine, that he wasn’t in charge, that everyone could do exactly what they wanted if they wanted do. It’s just that he happened to have the best ideas and everyone agreed and stop looking at that sword over there. It’s not there. 

Octavian defeated Antony in 31BC, after almost 200 years of continual war and almost 100 years of civil war. Rome was exhausted and now had an enormous amount of territory to rule, an effort that required a huge amount of paperwork. So the senate let him have his illusion of not being emperor because they were just happy that there were no more young and ambitious men left to threaten Octavian. So they gave him laurels and called him Augustus and pretended that he was just like them but the best of them. He was the Princeps: the first citizen. 

Which just about brings us to where we begin. Agrippina’s parents were born in about 14BC and 16BC respectively. Octavian was granted the name Augustus, which solidified his position, in 27BC. What you will have noticed (hopefully) is that the second we slipped into history rather than myth, all the women disappeared. That was about 1000 words of men doing war and politics. Awful stuff. That’s because Roman history as told by the Romans is all about men doing war and politics while women are quiet. There are a few women who appear in these stories for some dramatic purpose. Cornelia Africanus, the mother of the Gracchi, is a powerful character from the very beginning of the civil wars: a widow who raised her children right. Cleopatra is a figure who has resonated through the centuries as a beautiful decadent powerful queen, presented by Octavian as everything a Roman woman should not be so that Antony’s liaison with her was reason enough to destroy him. Fulvia was Antony’s second wife who raised an army for him and was abandoned by him as a result. Octavian’s sister Octavia stood as a modern Sabine woman between her brother and her husband Antony until she was also abandoned in favour of Cleopatra. A litany of near forgotten woman were married off to create alliances and divorced when they fell apart. Women are quiet, private and do as they are told by their brothers, fathers and husbands for the most part, so they are not worth mentioning unless they are exceptionally bad (Cleopatra and Fulvia) or exceptionally good (Octavia and Cornelia) and are therefore useful to mention.

This is our final lesson from this tour of Rome: it is perfectly possible to tell a history of Rome after Lucretia that does not mention women at all. War and politics only involve men on an official level. Only men wrote histories. So, if a woman is included in the narrative of the original sources, it is because the male author has made an explicit and definite decision to include her and has a reason for it. Women in the Roman world are never a neutral. They can never simply exist in the public eye. When they are held up to be looked at, they always mean something. So let us turn to Agrippina…


 [/first draft extract]

Sneaky extract: A Brief History of 750 years of Rome.

Last time I wrote, lovely readers, I was off on my writing retreat and it was absolute bliss. Honestly, I have not had such a good time since the first two years of my PhD. And I LOVED doing my PhD. My in-laws let me borrow their holiday home in Donegal. If you've never been to Donegal, you should get on a plane right now because there is nowhere more gorgeous. Thankfully, it rained the whole time I was there so I sent my partner off on day long bike rides to Sligo with my phone and I was left with a stack of books, a laptop, no wifi, a framed photo of Agrippina and a selection of notecards.

By the end of day two, the book looked like this:


 <img alt="" class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="/images/4597/preview/medium" width="281">


Colour co-ordinated writing planning. Overarching themes and the little dots are running themes. This is now all sellotaped together on my desk.

At the same time, the enormous writing lump of scar tissue that I developed on my finger when my pen rests in 2006 after doing 2 3-hour essay exams on the same day had swollen up to the size of a pea and gone all red. truly I am suffering for Agrippina. She'd better appreciate it.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/20170412_225835_992bd5f6-ae6c-46e0-aeca-10a55bf83e82.jpg?v=1690908335" width="281">


Obviously, it was time to put the pens away and start writing. 

Two days of solid typing ensued. I listened to a lot of Aphex Twin, but hopefully that won't show. It's such a terrible truism that the hardest part of writing is the sitting down to do it. But I had literally nothing else to do and no-one to talk to so I got a full 10,000 words completed, including condensing the entire history of Rome from 753BC to the point Augustus became Augustus in 27BC into 2000 words. Take that, Edward Gibbon. And because I like you, and you deserve something for sticking around, I'm going to let my supporters have a look at that bit later. 

Since getting back, the writing floodgates have opened and I've got down another 10,000 words while working my three jobs so I'm feeling terribly smug and terribly excited. I just hope I'm doing Agrippina justice. 

Ex

Writing Retreat

Hello lovely supporters and friends (as I have decided that if you've given me some of your money, you're basically a friend. That's how this works now. You're stuck with me),

So some of you gave me cash for this book a full year ago, which is crazy. Some of you gave lots of money and when I look at my wee fancy dashboard thing that Unbound have for authors I am genuinely staggered by the amount that I have raised to make this book real. It is an enormous amount of pounds! You must really like me as I did feel like I did very little!

The fact is, however, that hardback books are even more expensive than the many pounds I already raised - really expensive. Twice as expensive to be exact - and so until the other day the book being a real physical thing you got to hold still felt a long long way away. It takes several pledges to get that ticker to move 1% and frankly I am very bad at asking for pledges which all made it feel a bit unobtainable.

UNTIL, the very excellent Scott stepped in with a solution which I have decided to take him and Unbound up on: no more hardbacks. The hardbacks are the expensive bit and no one likes them anyway. Unless you do in which case, I'm sorry.

Here's what's going to happen. Agrippina is going to be published in a fancy schmancy paperback instead. It'll still have the gorgeous design that Unbound do so well, and all the same words, and you'll still get all the rewards you pledged for and your name in the back. Just in a more portable packaging. This means that the book is over 100% funded and I can get it done and in your hands much much faster. 

All that, to me, seems like good news and I very much hope that it does to you too!

The second bit of news is that I am off on a self-imposed writing retreat tomorrow to really really knock out a good chunk of the book so it can be yours as soon as I can drag all the words out of my brain (which is sort of the easy bit tbh). 

So that's that - we're moving forward and good things are happening! And you are all A++ people. I really can't tell you how much all your kind words and the fact that you want to read my book means to me. Give yourselves a treat from me. 

Emma x

Some news...

About 9 months ago I started a Roman tinyletter called <a href="http://www.tinyletter.com/agrippinilla">U Wot MVIII.</a> One of the things I decided to document every week was Roman religious festivals and observances, thinking that there’d be a few a year and it would be fun. I’ve never studied Roman religion in any depth beyond undergraduate survey courses. I’ve always been a historian rather than a classicist, and gods and myths have never interested me much.

 

What I learnt almost immediately was that Romans celebrated a major festival at least once a month, sometimes three or four. In between the big ones, which meant that no public business was allowed and street parties and the like, there would be little ones. One day celebrations and sacred days and weird little rituals. Essentially the whole of February is a series of different festivals. April is the same. It’s constant!

 

And those are just the ones I’m writing about in U Wot MVIII. I know there’s also household gods. Little statues of gods that were kept in tiny shrines in the house. I once knew an archaeologist at Pompeii whose PhD thesis argued that there were lots of shrines in roman houses because the inhabitants carried the statues around the house with them and made tiny sacrifices to them throughout the day.

 

It has become increasingly, tangibly obvious that what we in this modern, secular, western world, have absolutely the wrong idea about Roman religion. Jorg Rupke says that our Christianised notion of religion as something that we do or have fundamentally warps what we see when we look at the Romans. We see gods and temples and sacrifices and think we know what that means.

 

But Oh My God this stuff is constant. They are praying and sacrificing and celebrating and honouring and communicating with divine beings every. Single. Day. In AD22 the senate had a long, long debate about where the gods Apollo and Diana were born. All astronomical events were considered to be omens. Anything was considered to be an omen. At one point Suetonius claimed that lots of people dying in Rome was an omen. A 2 minute random flip through Suetonius finds the following:

 

<ul>
	<li>More lightning strikes than I can be bothered to count</li>
	<li>A funeral pyre being blown over by wind and dogs leaping in to eat the half burnt corpse (which does sound like a bad day in fairness)</li>
	<li>A dead fire in Tiberius’s dining room suddenly flaring up again</li>
	<li>A statue of Jupiter laughing</li>
	<li>Blood splashing Caligula as he sacrificed a flamingo (and WHERE are the flamingo sacrifices in tv shows about Rome?!)</li>
	<li>Caligula covering Vespasian’s toga with mud</li>
	<li>A stray dog picking up a human hand from the road and dropping it on Vespasian’s breakfast table (there is too damn much in this sentence to deal with).</li>
</ul>

 

Those are the weird ones. Wind. Losing a tooth. A tree falling over. Someone falling over. A dog barking. An unlucky noise at the wrong time. A bird flying in literally any direction. All omens. As far as the Romans were concerned literally any natural event could be an omen.

 

And then there’s astrology, which the Romans loved. Not like your mum loves to read Jonathan Cainer in the Daily Mail every day, or that person you met on OKCupid who told you they were such a typical cancer. More like when Ronald Reagan used an astrologer to decide how to deal with Russia during the Cold War. Except worse, because everyone was at it all the time.

 

Of course the ancient world was a dark place. Once the sun went down the only light pollution was the revolting stink of an animal fat candle that couldn’t light half a room. The stars loomed huge and heavy over ancient cities. You and I will probably never experience the heaving bustle of a city like Rome and the sight of bright constellations burning above us simultaneously.

 

But that was every day in Rome. The gods were in your pocket. In everything you touched and saw and felt. Everything was sacred or profane. Any bit of weather was an omen to be deciphered and the altars ran with animal blood nearly every damn day. The stars were huge and sparkled and were both close and unfathomably far away. Sometimes they grew hair and flew. Divinity was in everything. Every meal a little was given to the god in your home.

 
Religion as I have ever experienced or understood it feels so inadequate and thin a term to describe this world. Religion implies that everything that wasn’t sacrificing on an altar was superstition and therefore lesser, when really there is no distinction between the two in the Roman experience. Trying to separate the two is like trying to separate the salt from the sea.

I've been thinking about Roman Religion

I’m going to start with two quotes that have been bothering me lately. Because I have the kind of extremely verbal brain that only gets text-based earworms. The first comes from Stefan Zweig writing in 1931 about the poetry of History (capitalisation there is his, though he was writing in German so I guess the capitalisation is the translator’s):

 

<blockquote>
“Happily this respect for the facts, for the original historical material, is reborn and the era of the “historical novel”, the blatant falsification of our ancestors; lives, is now over…”
</blockquote>

Zweig, a brilliant man whom I adore, goes on to call historical novels “a caricature, a valueless hybrid form, and in the end a literary failure” because no-body can be right about everything.

 

The second comes from Laurent Binet’s brilliant historical novel HHhH. Binet is an avid fan of Barthes (which I empathise with), an academic and charmingly French and about a third of his novel is interpolations like this:

<blockquote>
 “Look, I’m doing the best I can to get at the historical truth, but I can’t keep these little rodents of novelistic artifice out of the structure: they are endemic to narrative.”
</blockquote>

 

Lines like this nibble at me because I technically disagree with them I have argued vocally and in public (most recently on a panel at Nine Worlds Sci-Fi convention) that the job of the novelist is not to be accurate or to worry about facts. The job of a novelist is to tell good stories. Make characters up. Blend 8 people into one. Do what you like. Change the facts if you want. Fiction is fundamentally a made up thing, knock yourself out.

 

And I truly believe that. Historians can worry about evidence and truth. Except I am a historian and I keep reading histories that read like fiction. And I am the kind of girl who gets giddy reading Derrida and don’t really believe in the concept of an objective historical Truth (capitals mine) but in fluid truths based on beliefs and perceptions and available evidence. And I am writing a history book.

                                 *********************************************************************************

Writing a history book is hard. It makes writing an academic monograph look reasonably easy, and that was really bloody hard (out April this year). When you write a history thesis or article or monograph, you read a load of sources, read a load of interpretation, make up your own mind and then stake out your argument and provide your evidence.

That takes years and you cry a lot, obviously, but that’s basically it. And the only concession you have to make to your reader - of which there will be approximately ten - is to pop in the occasional transition phrase so they know broadly what’s going on from paragraph to paragraph. If you’re a real dick (and plenty of academics are) you don’t even have to bother translating any of your evidence, leading to books that contain giant chunks in 2-5 languages.

If you’re nice you translate your evidence and try to put in some signalling but I can tell you from experience that supervisors and editors will remove all adjectives, adverbs, puns, jokes, colourful sentences, rhetoric and anything that amuses you while writing until you are conditioned to recoil from them.

And then you try and write something that is not an academic book. Which is trying to contain a whole historical person in a way that is entertaining and captures my idea of her as much as possible and brings her alive to the reader. To you. And I get to keep all of my bad jokes and puns that make limited sense and it’s great but also I am massively overthinking this.

                                ***************************************************************************************

 

I just read Red Plenty by Francis Spufford, which is his first novel if you live in the US and his fourth nonfiction book if you live in the UK (when checking that I discovered that there’s an Orwell Prize, for which Red Plenty was nominated, and an Orwell award for “distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language” which The Onion won in 2014. Isn’t that delightful).

Red Plenty is about the Soviet Union in the 1960s and Spufford wrote it knowing no Russian and about 50% of the people in it are completely made up. And for those that aren’t made up, Spufford invents words, thoughts, feelings. It’s structured and steals tropes from 50s scifi novels.

It’s wonderful. Gripping and charming and unique and I love it like I love Golden Hill, an actual historical novel. It confuses the hell out of reviewers and goodreads users and booksellers. It’s intimidatingly good really. Damn him. But it’s not history is it?

Maybe a better question would be, why is Red Plenty history, with its internal monologues and graphic first person description of a fictional woman in labour, but HHhH, with its agonised reflections on what colour car Heydrich drove and over whether it’s ok to invent dialogue, is fiction? Because apparently, evidence and facts and references and “truth” aren’t the difference and actual fictional characters aren't the deciding factor?

 

                              **************************************************************************************

 

I have, usually close to hand and covered in annotations, a copy of the only other non-fiction book about Agrippina the Younger. It’s by an academic called Anthony Barrett who is both very smart and comparatively very readable. Here’s a quote, the first sentence from a page I opened at random:

 

<blockquote>
“Drusilla had been married in 33 to the nonentity Lucius Cassius Longinus. The marriage did not last. They were divorced and she next married Marcus Aemilius Lepidus (Stemma 3). This man was to play an important role in the story of Agrippina and precise information on him would be most welcome.”
</blockquote>

 

No-one would call this bad writing but also it’s never going to make anyone drop and beg for more. And honestly, Agrippina deserves better than this bone dry prose that passed for readable and thrilling in my old life (and god I cannot tell you how delighted I was by Barrett as an undergraduate).

 

On that same page, Barrett describes a lovely moment. Lollia Paulina, a woman whose beauty was considered to be so spectacular that she married Caligula and almost married Claudius, arrived at a dinner party dripping in gold and emeralds and pearls. 40 million sesterces worth of jewels, in a world where bread cost half a sesterce, decorating a single gorgeous woman. And we know how much those jewels cost her because she carried the receipts and would show them to anyone who talked to her for long enough. Isn’t that marvellous. Such beauty and such enormous wealth and her pockets are full of receipts.

Barrett describes it like this:

<blockquote>
“The elder Pliny reports seeing her at a dinner party bedecked with emeralds and pearls, some 40 million HS worth. In case anyone had the poor taste to be unconvinced of their value, she carried the bills of sale on her person and readily produced them.”
</blockquote>

 

Is what I’m doing in my version “novelistic artifice” as Binet fears or is it imaginative history in the vein of Spufford? Does an adverb make me less of a historian and biographer? I am coming to the conclusion that it doesn’t. That this is what I love about history - the little moments and silly anecdotes and dirty jokes and knobs on everything (the Romans put dicks on everything) that cast a little light on the culture as it was lived in, experienced and created. That’s the fun and the thrill of studying and writing about these long dead people who are so very different to me.

 

So these are the rules I’ve set myself for this. I won’t do dialogue unless it’s in a source. I won’t make people up. I won’t give you a first person account of the birth of Nero or tell you how she felt because Agrippina would rise from her unmarked grave and haunt me forever if I dared. But I might tell you how I think she might have felt, in context, and what people thought she thought and felt and said and was. I will do my best to give you real people, in a real world, experiencing real things and it will be history, not fiction.

Fictional History and Historical Fiction

Hello everyone! my new year resolution for 2017 was mostly to write more and that includes here. So i thought I'd show you some exciting photos from my trip to Cologne last week. 

As you MIGHT know, the city of Cologne was founded as Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium in 50AD by our own Agrippina the Younger in order to celebrate her own birth. the city was founded at the location of an altar built by Augustus so that the Ubi Germans could join in emperor worship if they ever got properly conquered. When Agrippina's father was rampaging around Germany beating them up in the name of Rome, the altar was the central location for his army and so that's where Agrippina the Elder was when she gave birth to her first daughter: Agrippina the Younger. 

When Agrippina the Younger became empress and got access to all the good powers, she decided to flex a little muscle by founding her own city, and where better than in her birthplace. Here's Tacitus on the matter:

<blockquote>
Agrippina, on the other hand, in order to advertise her strength to the provinces also, arranged for the plantation of a colony of veterans in the Ubian town where she was born. The settlement received its title from her name; and, as chance would have it, it had been her grandfather Agrippa who extended Roman protection to the tribe on its migration across the Rhine.
</blockquote>

Obviously, I was keen to go and see how well my Agrippina is represented there. The answer is...badly. (this is also the bith where I warn you that photography is not my great strength and I am sorry!)

 


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/20170113_130848_8c8ecec8-3e47-465f-8016-f49759bbb2e3.jpg?v=1690908303" width="500" height="281">



 <img alt="" class="doksoft_image_img" src="/images/4046/preview/medium" width="500" height="281">


This is the original arch over the city gate, with the CCAA inscribed on it so you knew where you were. And three busts. Of Livia, Augustus and Agrippina the Elder. Genuinely baffling. So the CCAA is really the closest that the Roman-German museum got to acknowledging that Agrippina the Younger existed as far as I could tell.

Thankfully, it made up for this slight (a bit) by being absolutely full of incredible Roman glass, which I have a weakness for. Just look at these and swoon.


 <img alt="" class="doksoft_image_img" src="/images/4047/preview/medium" width="281" height="500">


<img alt="" class="doksoft_image_img" src="/images/4048/preview/medium" width="281" height="500"> These are one use perfume bottles. You break the tail off to open them and are for the very fancy indeed.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/20170113_132254_45a13a05-24bd-4b39-9af6-3aeb4bda7e43.jpg?v=1690908303" width="281" height="500">



 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/20170113_134913_98ff9c9a-4817-41cd-a19b-c1d6d2cc366d.jpg?v=1690908303" width="281" height="500">


I have at least 200 photos of glass things because I am eternally delighted by how beautiful and delicate it is. Cologne was a centre for glassmaking for the later empire so there is absolutely tonnes of it alongside the usual detritus of a Roman city. Like the governer's mansion


 <img alt="" class="doksoft_image_img" src="/images/4052/preview/medium" width="281" height="500">


and the sewers, which I couldnt get a good picture of so here's us being delighted to be in the ancient sewer instead.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/20170114_155450_1_a2e480ad-eeef-49dd-bf7b-7de277d346dc.jpg?v=1690908303" width="281" height="500">


So obviously I had a great time. But I was sad at the general lack of Agrippina the Younger. last year the museum held a <a href="https://www.thelocal.de/20151126/the-life-of-the-murderous-mother-of-cologne">special exhibition in honour</a> of her 2,000th birthday, and published a book about her legacy in Cologne, so I know that they like her. But that made her absence feel a little weirder and sadder to me. 

 

But then, if it were up to me, there'd be a whole museum for her!

I will be updating here more often, and in the meantime you can sign up for my weekly newsletter of Roman news and notes <a href="http://www.tinyletter.com/agrippinilla">U Wot MVIII.</a>

Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium

I have just recieved the postcards that will make up my new pledge level so I want to show them off because GOSH they're so pretty!

The front shows a frieze of Agrippina dressed as a sexy goddess crowning her son Nero as emperor. As a piece of iconography, this is staggering as she is quite literally saying that she has the power to grant the throne to whomever she wants. She herself is wearing a crown and carrying a cornucopia which represents fertility and contains ideas of the future. You can also see how terribly young Nero is - just a teenager. I chose this image as to me it really hammers home how exceptionally powerful Agrippina was.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/postcard_front_ee8c81d6-c701-4d47-becc-b65700ce59ef.jpg?v=1690908327" width="500" height="281">


On the back is a little quote from Tacitus explaining again how remarkable Agrippina was. Because I am me, there's a typo in it so I'll be correcting all of those :)

 


 <img alt="" class="doksoft_image_img" src="/images/3074/preview/medium" width="500" height="281">


 

And then each one will have a sticker and a little handwritten explanation or fact for the sticker. There may or may not be scribblings out. This one is mine, because I like Cleo's sad face. It looks like she's just really unhappy about holding a snake.

 


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/20160715_131859_c04c3e72-92c6-4e28-b25c-6f2b8b77eacb.jpg?v=1690908326" width="500" height="281">


 

I am super delighted by these and almost don't want to give them away,, but I am going to because people reading the book is more important than me owning a lot of the same thing :)

ELS x

New Postcards!

So I decided to start a TinyLetter. A collection of thoughts and anniversaries and interesting things that I come across as I research and go about my merry way, things that don't make it to twitter or the blog. I'll post most of the content here too, but if you want some extra Romans in your life, you can sign up at https://tinyletter.com/Agrippinilla

 
This Week in History

 
“Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.”  
This week, on 26th April 121AD, Marcus Aurelius was born. Marcus Aurelius is best remembered for being essentially Plato's idealised philosopher king because he left behind his nice collection of Stoic philosophical sayings, called the Meditations, and we like a bit of Stoicism. Also because of that bit in Gladiator where he claims he wants to restore the republic and it's hilarious. The things he's not remembered for are my favourite bits about him, in that they make him the most interesting to me. That he was the first joint emperor with Lucius Verus for the first 8 years of his reign is genuinely interesting. That he decided to build a column in imitation of Trajan and covered it in pictures of being being trampled and beheaded to celebrate his conquest of various lands is interesting. Finally, he ended the best bit of Roman history, the Five Good Emperors, but ending their tradition of adopting the new emperor and handing the job to his sons, one of which was Commodus who immediately killed his brother and went on a rampage. So happy birthday Marcus!  
 
We also got the birthday of Otho this week, who managed to rule in the year of the four emperors (69AD) for a total of three months before quitting and committing suicide. He also had his wife stolen and then murdered by Nero. His life was one of ups and downs to say the least.  
 
Cool Things 
 
My favourite thing of this week was the discovery of a massive 4th century coin hoard in Spain. I like coin hoards because I like to imagine the person who put all their money into pots and buried them. Were they scared? Did they expect to come back? What happened to them? This one is odd because the coins were never circulated, and there's 19 jars full of them, which means that whichever soldiers they were supposed to pay never were. And in that there's so many tiny stories within that.So many individual lives affected by this decision. What a wonderful thing.  
 
My second favourite cool thing is this depiction of some 2nd/3rd century Roman drinking glasses from Denmark. Firstly because they are truly beautiful and secondly because people forget that the Romans made it so far north and hung out there so long and its a nice reminder of the things we forget. http://en.natmus.dk/historical-knowledge/denmark/prehistoric-period-until-1050-ad/the-early-iron-age/a-princely-dynasty-at-stevns/ 
 
And finally, quite an old link which crossed my path: charming pictures of puppy paw prints in Roman tile from England. Much like the coin hoard, such an image drags the past into the present and makes it feel real, vivid and alive. And adorable. http://www.livescience.com/44914-photos-animal-prints-on-ancient-roman-tiles.html 
Though, as a cat person, these teeny tiny cat paw prints will always be my favourite. 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-33687439 
 
Thoughts 
 
While I'm writing, I have quote scrawled on pot-its and stuck to my windowsill and this week's addition has been from Tacitus, who is accidentally giving me a lot to think about w/r/t women and power and such: 
 
"Influence is rarely lasting. Such is its fate" Tacitus, Annals, 3.29. 
 
It is next to one I took from a sociology book: 
 
"The power of beauty is the power of the weak." 
 
These are the thoughts shaping my thinking this week, slowly and slowly as I work out more about Agrippina and how to write her.

"Influence is rarely lasting. Such is its fate"

Agrippina is well documented in the sources but there's no convenient ancient biography. Instead, finding out about her involves chasing references and allusions and half sentences across many ancient souces. Here's a bit of how it looks to to find her and keep track of her. <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/IMG_20160406_144157_96446e6b-bc49-4060-b7dc-e4537904127f.jpg?v=1690908295" width="500" height="375">


 <img alt="" class="doksoft_image_img" src="/images/2658/preview/medium" width="500" height="375">
 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/IMG_20160406_144134_b470b4d7-e5ce-4519-a300-cee25e008f1c.jpg?v=1690908295" width="375" height="500">

A peek into the process of research

This is me doing clickbait titles. And by using a slightly out of date reference that people will only just remember I’m maintaining the tradition that ancient historians are always a little behind everyone else when it comes to modern events.If David Cameron Fucked A Pig is too 2015 for you, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/25/the-definitive-debunking-ted-cruz-is-not-the-zodiac-killer/">Ted Cruz Is The Zodiac Killer</a> fits this too. Now most people won’t read past probably this bit (so my friends who know about how people read on the internet tell me) so maybe I should answer the question that I know you’re all asking now: what does David Cameron shagging a pig have to do with writing about Romans? Or maybe I should leave it to the end, so you keep reading. I’m not sure. I don’t know about these things. I just know about Romans.

 

The relationship between these two things - the Prime Minister of the UK putting his dick in the mouth of a dead pig and the entire civilisation of the Roman empire - is the importance of rumour and anecdote, and how they make life both really hard and really fun for historians like me.

 

Here’s the thing with the David Cameron Fucked a Pig story: we all know it’s not true. I was awake and on Twitter when the story broke in the middle of the night  and the hysteria flowed through and the left-leaning journos and artists I follow (all brilliant, marvellous, smart, nuanced people) all fell about joking, laughing, retweeting, spreading the story that was too funny, too perfect. It encapsulated everything that educated lefties like me hate about Cameron: it had the exclusive university dining club setting, a dining club where they had a pig’s head - like Henry the Eighth! - the image of the braying, drunk mob of red faced posh boys, the peer pressure, the notion that Cameron will do ANYTHING for power, a literal penis going into a dead pig, and the almost too perfect intertextuality of David Cameron both looking quite a lot like a ham, and that this exact thing was the basis of an episode of a TV show a few years back. David Cameron Fucking A Pig epitomised why a significant subset of people just really hate David Cameron. So we wrote about it, laughed about it, spread it. But we all know it didn’t technically happen.

 

People are smart, they know the story is at absolute best a wild exaggeration of a drunk boy putting a flaccid dick in a pig’s mouth. At best. Most likely it was a half truth woven by a man who we know actively hates Cameron for denying him a job and who sold the story to the highest paying, lowest common denominator tabloid to publicise the book he wrote about Cameron. We KNOW this. We don’t believe that David Cameron fucked a pig. But still, there’s a PigGate wikipedia page, it was in all the papers, it was in Time magazine, the prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was forced to publicly deny that he had ever fucked a pig. It’s part of Cameron’s reputation, his legacy, even though it’s just a silly story no one believes. In 1000 years, it’s just possible that this is a thing people know about him. Brexit, phone hacking, and the pig fucking.

 
 

Which brings me to writing history, and especially history concerning the Julio-Claudian family. Because so much of what we have about Julio-Claudian emperors is stories just like this - stories about sex, about private habits, about things happening on islands that no-one ever visited, behind closed doors and even - when you’re Suetonius - inside emperor’s heads. Take this classic line about Caligula for example, probably one of the best known “facts” about poor old Gaius:

 

“...it is also said that he planned to make Incitatus [his horse] consul.”

 

This is written by Suetonius, about 80 years after Caligula dies and he’s pretty clear that the level of chat we’re talking about is the level that David Cameron Fucked A Pig fits into: a rumour, a story, something no one really believes but everyone thinks is funny because it fits what they think about Caligula: he’s a deranged, uncontrolled lunatic who likes his horse way too much and has no respect for the institution of the senate. But another 50 years after that, 130 years after Caligula had a favourite horse, we get this from Cassius Dio:

 

“he swore by the animal's life and fortune and even promised to appoint him consul, a promise that he would certainly have carried out if he had lived longer.”

 

Certainly? Certainly would he? The rumour, the “it is said” has become fact. And by the time you get to now, it’s in Rotten Romans book with FACT! written next to it.

 

That’s an extreme example of course. But it’s indicative. So much of what’s known about Agrippina and her family, her world, everything that happened comes from rumour and is bracketed by “reliable sources say”, “it is said”, “historians report” or a personal favourite “the lecherous passion he felt for his mother was notorious.” But these stories are always GREAT. They’re always dramatic or sex filled or just plain WEIRD. They’re always the best ones to tell, which is how they survive. Except. Except there’s two levels of difficulty with that for a historian trying to write about these people: these are always the best, most entertaining stories, but what obligation do I have to any kind of truth?

 

This is a question that bothers me, and bothers lots of people. I’m a trained historian, trained not to make statements I can’t substantiate and to avoid using the past for my own ends. But is my job to peel back layers of rumour and story and lies and find out what’s underneath, only to see that there is nothing, or is it to pick through those rumours to find kernels that I can - for whatever reason of my own - decide are “The Truth”, or is it to report those rumours and leave you to make your own decisions? What criteria do I use to decide which stories are anecdotes and which stories are “true” and which are “rumour”? I mean some are seemingly obvious, like the Caligula horse one. Others are, in context, obviously bollocks too, like basically any accusation of incest because incest was a bizarrely common accusation in the 1stC and there are numerous examples of people making accusations in order to take out their enemies. So either the Romans were constantly fucking their siblings, or it’s a strange cultural quirk of the period to accuse your enemies of fucking their siblings. But others. Others are hard, and there are just so many of them. Just Suetonius’s Life of Claudius is 11,500 words of mainly weird anecdote, and Agrippina weaves through 5 emperor’s lives, always in the background, always obscured by layers of misogyny, genre tropes, narratives and different, unknown sources. Picking these layers apart, and then working out what is left, is a challenge. Because I don’t want to tell people that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer or David Cameron Fucked A Pig, I want to be able to tell you the reader these stories and what they mean.

 

One of my favourite books of recent years is Laurent Binet’s HHhH, a part fictional, part historical, part memoir account of the assassination of Heinrich Himmler. As much of the book is about Binet’s research, decision making, thought processes and worries when writing his novel. Several pages for example deal with the colour of Himmler’s car and its representation in a number of sources, a car that Binet has both seen and touched. HHhH is incredibly personal (and brilliant, you should read it) but the thing I like most about it is how honest Binet is with his readers about the fudges, the guesses, the assumptions that make up telling history. I’m not writing a novel, I don’t have access to the sources that Binet has (the absolute luxury modern historians have and still they complain), but I still have to make decisions about what to believe and what not to, about hows and whys and wheres. And make this entertaining and not an unbearably tedious academic book which picks apart anecdotes until they just shrivel to boring, boring dust. It’s a careful tightrope to walk, the line between credulous - or knowing - reporting of the ridiculous, and the dissection of it into something meaningless.

 

I guess the point of this is that all history is lies, based on lies told at the exact second events were happening. History is all interpretation and word choice, it’s the difference between “<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3242550/Cameron-pig-bemused-look-face-future-PM-took-outrageous-initiation-ceremony-joining-Oxford-dining-society.html">David Cameron Fucked A Pig”</a> and “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggate">a hostile source leaked a one sentence description of teenage David Cameron putting a private part of his anatomy into a dead pig’s mout</a>h” and <a href="http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/you-are-currently-imagining-david-cameron-having-sex-with-a-pig-414">“people would like to believe that David Cameron fucked a pig because it just fits</a>.” And some are lies which tell more truth, and tell it more entertainingly that an honest truth can. And isn’t that what makes history fun.

David Cameron ****** a Pig...and the Romans

I suppose I should write something in these wee boxes, and make it worth everyone’s while and ££ to be interested in this project. So I decided to write about something that has come up a couple of times: the decision to include the word ‘whore’ in the title.

 

Obviously, this is a somewhat contentious issue, and one that is exacerbated by the fact that Bettany Hughes's book on Helen of Troy and Stella Duffy’s book on Theodora both include the word too (“Goddess, Princess, Whore” and “Actress, Empress, Whore” respectively so at least I’ve broken out of the three adjectives trope. By adding another adjective. I am only moderately innovative). I can’t necessarily speak to why Bettany and Stella decided to use the term, but I can speak for myself. And I do want to be clear that I did not use the term lightly or without thought (and to be honest I rather thought that any publisher would make me change it until I noticed that it was on the Helen book), but that I did have my reasons.

 

The first is that Agrippina is remembered in both ancient and modern sources in this way. Not necessarily using this word exactly, but her sexual behaviour is widely questioned and she is regularly accused of unacceptable use of her sexualitiy. Now obviously, “unacceptable” is a culturally relative term. For the Romans, the fact that Agrippina openly had control of her sexuality, chose who she slept with and married seemingly made those decisions without worrying too much what people thought of her was all entirely unacceptable. These were a people whose most lauded woman was one who killed herself because she was raped and had thus brought shame on her husband and father. This was a people who legally allowed men to murder their wives if they were believed to have been adulterous. A woman's sexuality never belonged to her as an individual in Roman culture, and so Agrippina’s willful control of who and what she knobbed was not ok at all. And so Agrippina is accused of all kinds of things, which mostly boil down to “chose her own sexual partners, not all were her husband. Maybe.” Nonetheless, in the ancient sources she is certainly portrayed as unchaste, improper and unacceptable sexually.

 

In the modern sources, they’re about the same. Obviously the sexual behaviours tend to be switched up a bit, to fit the cultural context in which they’re produced. There’s no point accusing a woman in the 21st century of controlling her sex life as if that’s a bad thing because *massive shrug*. Instead she is regularly accused of using sex as a tool to gain power, of essentially selling her sexual favours for power. Thus, Graves has his Claudius say:“Sexually, as I have said, she was completely immoral; yet she was by no means prodigal of her favours. She only slept with men who could be useful to her politically.” Because what is worse that a woman who doesn’t take sex seriously. Or takes it too seriously. It’s a lose/lose really isn’t it.

 

But here’s the thing, and the second reason that I included the word whore, she DID use sex for power. Whether she “rewarded” Pallas or Vitellius with a go on her tits is beside the point really (and I think does a disservice to Agrippina and to the men involved). I don’t think anyone would argue that she married her gross old uncle Claudius, with his dribbling and being 30 years her senior, and being her dad’s brother and previous legal guardian, because she massively fancied him. She married him because he was emperor, because he was the quickest route to power and he was amenable to it and he benefitted from it. More than anything it is this single act that gets her the epithet whore, and one which is central to her story. Because it deserves examination: is this morally reprehensible behaviour or not? Is it admirable to use the only leverage she had (as a potential wife) to get to the top?  And an examination of how Agrippina used her sexuality, what men said about her, and what the implications of all this are IS core to my book about Agrippina. So it only seemed right to include that in the title.

 

The final reason, the pragmatic reason, is that it fit the rhythm of the sentence the best. Which is why murderer isn’t in there. Sorry.

Was Agrippina a Whore?

They said she was a tyrant, a murderer, and "the most wicked woman in history."

She kicked her way into the male spaces of politics and demanded to be recognised as an equal and an leader. For her audacity, she was murdered by her son and reviled by history. 

She was the sister, niece, wife and mother of emperors. She was an empress in her own right. And she was a nuanced, fearless trail-blazer in the Roman world.”

The story of Agrippina - the first empress of Rome – is the story of an empire at its bloody, extravagant, chaotic, ruthless height.

On approximately 6th November AD 15, Vipsania Agrippina gave birth to her fourth living child, her first daughter, in a Roman garrison on the banks of the
 Rhine, the very edges of the Roman empire. Her father Germanicus named her after her mother and grandmother: Julia Agrippina, immediately causing trouble
 for future historians trying to untangle the web that is the Julio-Claudian family tree. Her parents exemplified this web. Vipsania Agrippina, commonly
 called Agrippina the Elder, was the daughter of Agrippa - Augustus’s right hand man - and Julia - Augustus’s daughter. In AD 15 she was simultaneously the
 stepdaughter, niece and daughter-in-law of the reigning emperor Tiberius. Her husband was Tiberius’s biological nephew and adoptive son. Tiberius's full
 name was Tiberius Claudius Nero. His father was called Tiberius Claudius Nero. It is possible that both his biological nephews were named Tiberius Claudius
 Nero. We now call them Germanicus and the emperor Claudius. All of Agrippina and Germanicus’s daughters were named Julia. And so goes aristocratic Roman
 naming conventions and aristocratic Roman families: they all have the same names and they’re uncomfortably incestuous with their marriages. Which brings us
 back to Agrippina and Germanicus, who were married somewhere between 5-1BC, and who were (non-biological) cousins via a complex network of adoption and
 intermarriage.
 
 
 
 The marriage of Agrippina and Germanicus was contracted by their families to once again cement together the two halves of the Julio-Claudian dynasty that
 had been brought together by Livia and Augustus and which was vital to the maintenance of power in Rome at the beginning of Augustus’s reign. The Claudii
 were an ancient and enormously aristocratic family with massive cultural capital. Much like the Kennedys or the Rockefellers in America but much, much
 older. The antiquity and longevity and reputation of the Claudii added a considerable weight to the new, military backed power that Julius Caesar had
 bequeathed to Augustus. In an imperial system that still required the illusion of a functioning senate, alliance with an ancient and powerful family was
 useful. Bringing together these two families into one big tangle of a family via marriage gave all the members a huge web of influence and power, which
 could then be built upon with further marriages and alliances. It’s complex and frankly gives me a headache trying to work it all out. But on the ground,
 at a grass roots level, it means that Agrippina, daughter of Julia, was married to her stepfather’s adoptive son and this was considered to be broadly fine
 rather than staggeringly weird. The Romans have always had strange ideas about marriage though. One of their root foundation myths is the Rape of the
 Sabine Women, which sounds horrifying enough in name alone. In practice, it even odder. The story goes that the first Romans, led by Romulus, found that
 they had a distinct lack of ladies in their new city and the local tribesmen wouldn’t let them legally marry their women. So the Romans wandered next door
 to the Sabine peoples, abducted a load of their daughters and forcibly married them. Now, fairly obviously, the Sabines weren’t enormously keen on this as
 an act - they rather liked their daughters being around perhaps, or at least weren’t happy about them being straight up kidnapped by these new guys with
 their fancy new city - and so they declared war on the Romans. The war was bloody and nasty, and upset the fragile women who flung themselves between their
 new husbands and their fathers, took responsibility for the war and begged the men to stop the killing. Hearts touched, and maybe a little distracted, all
 the men agreed to be friends and the women agreed to stay in Rome and be wives to their abductors. And thus, women came to Rome and all was well, apart
from the abducting and the war and the fact that this enshrined into myth the idea that women’s major function is as a point of contact between men. <a href="#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title="">[i]</a>


 Another excellent story which really enshrines this idea into a slightly more modern (in Roman terms) context is that of Cato the Younger and his wife
 Marcia, who were contemporaneous with, but slightly older than, Julius Caesar. The story goes that a friend of Cato’s named Hortensius wanted to enter his
 family and so asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Unfortunately, Cato’s daughter was already married to someone else, and was 40 years younger than
 Hortensius, and so Cato refused. Undeterred, and suffering no lack of gall, Hortensius then requested that - as Marcia had already born heirs but
 Hortensius was childless - Cato divorce Marcia and let him marry her. After what one imagines was an awkward pause, Cato agreed. And thus, Marcia was
 divorced and married off to Hortensius until Hortensius died, when she returned to Cato. This story was told by biographers as proof of Cato’s excellence,
 honour and willing to rate men over women.<a href="#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title="">[ii]</a>


 So, the idea of marrying people off in ways that we would now see as worthy of a daytime TV talkshow where chairs get thrown were at least slightly normal
 amongst aristocratic Romans, where marriage was a contract between men more often than it was a union between two people who had any interest in one
 another. And for that reason it is genuinely nice to see that Agrippina and Germanicus appeared to have had a happy marriage. They had 9 children together
 (3 of whom did not survive past infancy), a number which is truly exceptional among the Roman elite who at the time Augustus was attempting to bribe into
 having children at all with new laws that rewarded individuals for having 3 children. Moreover, Agrippina accompanied Germanicus on all his military and
 non-military trips around the empire, including to the grim German army encampments. But then Agrippina and Germanicus are individually exceptional in a
 lot of ways. We’ll get Germanicus out of the way first, as this book is about women. And Agrippina manages to stay alive longer than her husband.


 Germanicus was the grandson of Mark Anthony, through his mother Antonia Minor. She is known as Antonia Minor because her older sister was also called
 Antonia. We’re going to have to deal with a lot of this. Antonia was a somewhat terrifying woman, who allegedly starved her own daughter - Germanicus’s
 sister - to death for committing adultery. We’ll talk about her more later. Germanicus was probably named Nero Claudius Drusus at birth, probably, no one
 is sure, but became known as Germanicus after his successful campaigns in Germany. And Germanicus was adored by the Romans, especially by those Romans who
 never met him like historians and biographers writing 80 years after his death, and the general population of Rome. The people who met him were, to be
 honest, rather more split on how much they liked him. But historians and the plebs worshipped him, and he is remembered in writing as essentially a
 demi-god. He gets compared to Alexander the Great by Tacitus, despite winning only the one small war. This limited actual success deters no Roman writer,
 who tend not to be limited to mere truths, and Tacitus tells us that Germanicus “outdid Alexander in the great in clemency, self-control and every other
 good quality” even though, again, he provides only evidence to the contrary. Suetonius meanwhile half dehydrates himself so furious is his adoration, and
 six chapters of Caligula’s biography are dedicated to spunking praise on his father. Germanicus is handsome, smart, funny, he kills men in hand to hand
 combat like Achilles but is so desperately modest you’d never know it, everyone falls in love with him where ever he goes, except those who are jealous of
 him like mean old Tiberius, and to them Germanicus is kind and tolerant. He has bandy legs, but he works every day after dinner to strengthen them by
 riding horses. Truly, according to our sources, he is a literally perfect man. According to both Tacitus and Suetonius, when Germanicus came to town,
 people would follow him around, and run twenty miles outside of Rome to meet him. Indeed, he was “in danger of being mobbed to death whenever her arrived
 at Rome.” Basically, Germanicus was The Beatles. And much like the Beatles, he insisted upon being a real life, quite disappointing, person rather than the
 cypher that teenage girls and grown historians want him to be. Germanicus’s version of being in Wings however was - in essence - everything that he did bar
 killing some Germans. And even in Germany, he managed to be quite unimpressive.


 Germanicus made his name and reputation in a war with various German tribes between the Rhine and the Elbe immediately following the death of Augustus in
 AD14. Germanicus arrived in Germany about 15 minutes before the news that Tiberius had decided not to decommission any soldiers who had been enlisted for
 less than 20 years. The length of service was supposed to be 16 years. Instantly, the troops mutinied. And quite reasonably. Many of them had been in
 service for almost two decades, and in service means marching about in Germany, a place that the Romans feared and loathed, in the cold and constant rain,
 with very limited rights. Soldiers weren’t allowed to marry for example. Their conditions were also horrendous. As Tacitus puts it, the mutineers shows
 “their lash-marks, their white hair, their tattered clothes.” Tacitus also points to some soldiers who had served for thirty or forty years. It’s not hard
 to empathise with them. Germanicus struggles to put down the mutinies, partly because his power to meet their demands to get paid for their service and be
 allowed to go home is non-existent, and partly because he’s bad in a crisis. His first approach to dealing with the mutiny begins with a long and tedious
 speech about loyalty, goes through some weeping and ends with him faking a suicide attempt in front of everyone so they’ll stop him. Except one soldier
 offers him a sharper sword, so he goes off in a huff. At this point, Germanicus has three kids, is in his late twenties, commands a huge army, is first in
 line for the throne if something happens to Tiberius, and he’s acting like the protagonist in a very low quality YA book. Despite this initial failure, he
 does stick around - with his heavily pregnant wife and 3 year old son - and does some more crying in a tent and bombastic speeches, until Agrippina takes
 things into her own hands and very conspicuously leaves telling the troops that they can’t be trusted around the granddaughter of Augustus. This triggers a
 shame mechanism in the highly loyal troops, who adore her and her son Caligula, and effectively the mutiny dies down. Germanicus takes all the credit,
 gives some more speeches and then makes the troops themselves kill the mutiny leaders to teach everyone a lesson. And then he cries about that too. The
 reason that Tacitus has Germanicus crying all the time is probably not because he was somewhat emotionally unstable - although his tendency to whip out a
 sword and threaten suicide at the sign of the slightest misfortune is disturbingly frequent - but because he was attempting to cast him in the classical
 model of hero in the style of Achilles. Weeping within the Greek archetype was seen as a perfectly masculine and virile manner of grieving and so many of
 the Greek heroes weep a lot. Think Achilles weeping over the body of Hector after he has killed him and then mutilated his corpse. This is what Tacitus is
 alluding to when he has Germanicus cry over the mutineers. Notably, a recent scholar called Germanicus “unstable” as a result of his crying, which is
 rather a modern judgement. It also is a take that is a little credulous. Tacitus’s heroic allusions in his construction of his Germanicus are so strong as
 to be unbelievable so we can take all the details above with a fistful of salt. What we do know is that he did put down the mutiny eventually, that
 Agrippina was a part of that success, and that in order to raise everyone’s morale after the punishments, he decided to attack a nearby German tribe and
 start a war.

<div>
 
 <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%">
 <div id="edn1">
 
 <a href="#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title="">[i]</a>
 See Livy Book 1.9-13 and Plutarch’s Life of Romulus for more detailed versions.
 
 </div>
 <div id="edn2">
 
 <a href="#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title="">[ii]</a>
 This all comes from Appian’s Histories, Lucan’s Pharsalia and Plutarch’s life of Cato Minor.
 
 </div>
</div>

Agrippina: Empress, Exile, Hustler, Whore

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