Messalina
Empress, Adulteress, Libertine: the Story of the Most Notorious Woman of the Roman World
1 of 1 copy available
The lubricious image of the Empress Messalina as a ruthless, predatory, and sexually insatiable schemer—derived from the work of male historians such as Tacitus and Suetonius—has taken deep root in the Western imagination.
Here, the classicist Honor Cargill-Martin puts this traditional narrative of Messalina to the test. She looks first at Messalina's life as it is recounted in the primary sources, before using material and circumstantial evidence to reconstruct each aspect of Messalina's character: politician, wife, adulteress, and prostitute. Finally, she explores how posterity has memorialized Messalina, whether as artist's muse, epitome of depraved pagan womanhood, or as libertine icon portrayed in literature and film.
Cargill-Martin sets out not to entirely rewrite Messalina's history, or to salvage her reputation, but to look at her life in the context of her time and to reclaim the humanity of a life story previously defined by currents of high politics and patriarchy.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 6, 2023 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781639363964
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781639363964
- File size: 68767 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from May 1, 2023
Classicist Cargill-Martin reexamines the life of a notorious Roman empress in this vibrant tome. History portrays Messalina, the wife of the emperor Claudius, as a sexually insatiable adulteress whose final brazen act of bigamy led to her downfall and execution, but Cargill-Martin looks beyond this salacious scandal recounted by sometimes biased historians to place Messalina in the context of the treacherous and often unstable Roman court in which she spent her life. Born in approximately 20 CE to patrician parents, Messalina grew up during the reign of Augustus' paranoid heir, Tiberius, and married Claudius, who was three decades her senior, soon after the ascension of the unstable emperor Caligula. After Caligula's assassination, Claudius had the support of the populace and military, if not the senate. He and Messalina worked together to eliminate his enemies (and a few of Messalina's rivals) to solidify his position. But Messalina's passionate affairs with a freedman, an actor, and others, culminating in her bigamous union to an aristocrat while Claudius was away from Rome, led to her ultimate undoing. Cargill-Martin does an excellent job of bringing the tumult, intrigue, and danger of the Julio-Claudian dynasty to life, mining original sources to get to the heart of who this complicated woman was in the world in which she lived.COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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