Agrippina Sex, Power and Politics in the Early Empire

Agrippina the Younger attained a level of power in first-century Rome unprecedented for a woman. In this first biography of Agrippina in English, Anthony A. Barrett draws on the latest archaeological, numismatic, and historical evidence to create a startling new picture of this influential and misjudged woman.According to ancient sources, she achieved her success by plotting against her brother, the emperor Caligula, murdering her husband, the emperor Claudius, and controlling her son, the emperor Nero, by sleeping with him. Although she was ambitious, Barrett argues that she made her way through ability and determination rather than by sexual allure, and that her political contributions to her time seem to have been positive.

Significant events and figures; background; family; daughter; sister; niece; wife; mother; the end; sources appendices: the year of Agrippina the younger's birth; the husbands of Domitia and Lepida III; the date of Nero's birth; the family of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus; Agrippina's movements in late 39; the date of Seneca's tutorship; the decline in Agrippina's power; the patronage of Seneca and Burrus in 54-9; SC on gold and silver coins of Nero; the final days of Agrippina.

Anthony Barrett is Professor of Classics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He studied at the Universities of Oxford, Durham and Toronto and has written extensively in the field of classical antiquity.