Dear Commons Community,
I have just finished reading Honor Cargill-Martin’s s Messalina: Empress, Adulteress, Libertine: The Story of the Most Notorious Woman of the Roman World. Cargill-Martin is studying for her doctorate focusing on political sex scandals in classical times at the University of Oxford. Messalina, the wife of the Emperor Claudius, had an enormous sexual appetite that is mentioned and described but not dwelt upon in this book. Cargill-Martin presents Messalina as a woman fighting to assert her position in the overwhelmingly male world of imperial Roman politics – and succeeding. As the wife of Claudius, she shows she can be intelligent, passionate, and ruthless. Cargill-Martin covers many of the same people as the novel I, Claudius by Robert Graves, that became an award winning television series in the late 1970s. As a matter of fact, reading this book has made go back and watch the TV series again.
In sum, I found Messalina a fine biography and ideal summer reading.
Below is a review that appeared in the New York Times Book Review.
Tony
The New York Times Review of Books
Reconsidering the Reputation of a Magnet for Roman Scandal
In “Messalina,” Honor Cargill-Martin looks at the limited evidence with empathy, arguing that a notorious empress was also a canny politician.
MESSALINA: Empress, Adulteress, Libertine: The Story of the Most Notorious Woman of the Roman World, by Honor Cargill-Martin
The past is as much a foreign language as a foreign country, full of words and names that have lost their force. Not that long ago, one of the worst insults for a woman was “Messalina,” after the third wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, who was damned by antiquity as a sex-crazed schemer.
French revolutionaries, Honor Cargill-Martin notes in “Messalina: Empress, Adulteress, Libertine: The Story of the Most Notorious Woman of the Roman World,” hurled her name at Marie Antoinette, rhyming “Messaline” with “guillotine.” In “Jane Eyre,” Mr. Rochester dismisses his first wife as an “Indian Messalina.” And even in the mid-20th century, doctors were diagnosing unruly women with a “Messalina-Complex.”
Messalina was infamous most of all for the supposed crime for which she was executed in A.D. 48: marrying one of her (many) lovers, with whom she was possibly planning a coup, in a bigamous mock ceremony while Claudius was out of town. It is a puzzling act, so reckless as to be either apocryphal or, as the ancient sources insist, insanely real.
Her bad reputation may have faded into no reputation, but Cargill-Martin aims to rehabilitate her nonetheless. Messalina, she writes, was not a “vacuous slut” but a canny actor “pioneering new ways of exerting power” — specifically female power — within a changing political system.
This is not a completely new argument. Scholars have been reconsidering Messalina since at least the 1970s, often through a feminist lens. But it is one that Cargill-Martin, a British writer trained in classics and art history, makes well.
Her principal foils are Tacitus, Rome’s greatest historian, and Juvenal, its most scabrous satirist. What we know with absolute certainty about Messalina, she writes, “can be summed up in a single paragraph,” and it doesn’t even include the exact year she was born (sometime around A.D. 20). Beyond the bare facts of her parents, children and marriage to Claudius, we have only a few accounts, written decades or centuries afterward.
Romans liked their history to have literary polish and clear moral examples, and the portrait of Messalina in Tacitus’ “Annals” is fittingly gripping and seamy. Driven by a love for luxury, he writes, she engineered the death of one senator in order to expropriate his estate, “gaping” with desire for its famously elaborate gardens. And it was the unhinged pursuit of incognitas libidines (“untried pleasures”) with her aristocratic lover Gaius Silius that led her to the extreme of sham marriage — an event whose veracity Tacitus, a careful sifter of sources, specifically vouches for.
Juvenal’s leering sketch is even worse. In his sixth satire, a misogynistic litany of women’s perfidy, he calls Messalina an insatiable “whore empress” and claims that she would sneak out once Claudius was asleep to work in a brothel under a fake name. The poem is a highly rhetorical performance — Facit indignatio versum, Juvenal boasts elsewhere, or “Anger makes my verse” — but the tarnish stuck.
These are the lurid images that Cargill-Martin is up against. Without much concrete evidence, let alone testimony from Messalina herself, to contradict them, she offers historical context and empathy for her subject, a teenage bride pulled into the bloody swirl of imperial politics.
She starts her narrative under Augustus, the ruler who transformed Rome from a republic into an autocracy. As power was consolidated into the hands of a single man, politics moved behind closed doors, from debate in the Forum and Senate to intrigues in the palace.
After Augustus’ successor, Tiberius, withdrew to a villa on Capri, “salacious imperial rumor” flourished in Rome as never before, Cargill-Martin writes. People whispered that dour, unloved Tiberius was off wallowing in depravity. Whether or not it was true, she argues, this was the climate in which Messalina grew up, and she bore its stamp, just as she was marked by the debauched cruelty of the next emperor, Caligula.
He enjoyed bullying Claudius, who was homely, cowardly and seemingly stupid (historians judge him more favorably than contemporaries did), and Cargill-Martin imagines Messalina, still a teenager, “feeling the breeze of the jesters’ whips” as the emperor’s attendants thrashed her droopy husband awake at a dinner party.
By the time Claudius bumbled onto the throne in A.D. 41, Roman court politics was personal in every sense: Influence was conferred by ancestry, connections and reputation. Messalina was well born, at least, related to Augustus through both her mother and father. But her position was still insecure, Cargill-Martin emphasizes, vulnerable to skeptical citizens and dynastic rivals. “Emperor’s wife” wasn’t a formal role but one she would have to assert for herself. Fortunately, rumor and charisma allowed her to wield a degree of power otherwise unavailable to a woman.
Within the court, Messalina began to “systematically, at times brutally, root out potential sources of opposition,” such as Julia Livilla, one of Caligula’s sisters. Though sources trivialize their dispute as a “catfight,” Cargill-Martin insists it was “undoubtedly a political one” (though this is the narrow “politics” of survival in power, not actual policy).
Julia Livilla was duly accused of adultery. It was a grave charge. “Good” Roman women were both chaste and invisible in public; female desire and female ambition were seen as almost inevitably intertwined. What’s more, adultery had been made illegal under Augustus, part of an effort to correct the moral deficiencies that had supposedly caused the civil strife that preceded his reign. All this made accusations of infidelity, true or not, a handy weapon — as well as an obstacle for historians such as Cargill-Martin who are trying to distinguish political maneuvering from personal character.
Driven into exile, Julia Livilla soon died. Before her own downfall seven years later, Messalina apparently arranged a half-dozen more deaths. They were driven by calculation more than derangement, Cargill-Martin concludes, and Messalina’s final, fatal liaison found her the victim, not the perpetrator, of a plot. Ultimately, the case can never be conclusive, relying as it must on conditional phrasing and a kind of historical connoisseurship — a feel for what in the sources doesn’t fit and what, by contrast, fits too neatly.
Still, “Messalina” is lively and sardonic, if marred by a few clichés (Messalina had to “think outside the box” and risked being seen as a “loose cannon”) and anachronisms (“trust fund baby,” “police brutality”). Best of all, though lust and power will always be with us, Cargill-Martin doesn’t try to draw parallels with politics today. The classics “are not vitally relevant,” she writes, “they are interesting (which is better).”
Timothy Farrington is a former editor at Harper’s Magazine and The Wall Street Journal.
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