October 17, 2023 • 57 mins
Two of Imperial Rome's most infamous women come together for this episode, as Pat and Ben discuss Locusta the Poisoner -- perhaps the most prolific and deadliest assassin of the Ancient World -- and the woman who gave her the majority of her most notorious missions: Julia Agrippina. Caligula's sister. Nero's mom. If you like political intrigues, murder mystery, amateur botany, cutthroat diplomacy, and the idea of two women who never met a problem that couldn't be solved with a syringe of cyanide and a bag of Death Cap Mushrooms, then you really can't afford to miss this one.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Sister wife, niece, great granddaughter, and now mother of various emperors,
Julia Agrippina Augusta herself draws a shabby cloak around her head.
An assistant furtifully shows her into the quote unquote kitchen.
(00:31):
A woman looks up from an array of herbs, mushrooms,
and ominous looking bottles, and also a dead rat.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Mistress Julia Locusta, I need to discreetly get rid of
certain persons who might be trying to get rid of me.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
In turn, Lo Cousta smiles.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Oh, let me check in the back. Hello, and welcome
back to Badass of the Week. My name is Ben
Thompson and I am here as always with my co host,
doctor Pat Larish. Pat, how are you doing? A school
(01:17):
year has started and we are kind of like you're
a couple of weeks into the quarter of the semester. Now,
how's things going with school?
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Yeah, yeah, things are going along. Students are great, high students. Yeah.
So we're about, as of this recording, about a month
in and I'm excited about some of the readings we're
going to be doing in my Latin two class. Our
textbook we use the textbook Suberani, which is a fairly
recently published one. Our textbook, Volume one takes place in
(01:53):
the year sixty four, which fans of Roman history might
now is the year of the Great Fire of Rome.
So that's what my Latin one students will be reading.
And the volume two, which my Latin two students are
going to be reading, takes place in the year sixty eight,
which is in the reign of Nero. And there's a
(02:14):
lot that could happen in the reign of Nero, right,
there's a.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Lot that does happen, I think only yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
There is. And the year sixty eight leads into a
very specific year, which is the year of four Emperors.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Which we've talked about when we talked about Vespasian earlier.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Yeah. Yeah, but before we get to the year of
four Emperors, there's a lot of you know, intrigue and
politicing that happens in Rome, and uh.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Yeah, this is kind of like the Golden Age for like,
you know, when you think about Roman Empire, especially the
Early Empire, you know that you were getting into all
of this, you know, Caligula and Nero and all of
those very fascinating, very exciting characters from history. I always
kind of think of Game of Thrones when I think
about early and everybody's kind of maneuvering each other and
(03:04):
backstabbing each other, and it's probably wasn't that fun to
live there, but it was pretty fun to read about it.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Yeah, yeah, And certainly it was probably high stress if
you were in the center circles of power, if you
were not that important, maybe you could just live your life.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Who knew, you know, it's possible. It's possible that it
was pretty hard to live your life, yes, yeah, yeah,
So you're going to be talking about Miro this year,
so that's kind of the Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Yeah, I guess this week we're going.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
To talk about Nero's mom.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Nero's mom, Akipina, and not just her, but also Lucusta.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Yeah, Lucusta the poisoner, and she's in your textbook, right.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
She has a weird character that shows up in our textbook,
and actually the way she's presented the first time we
meet her, there's a the story is illustrated, and there's
a picture of a woman sitting at a table and
she's got like a little recipe book open and she's
got some little like bowls and bottles and stuff, and
(04:12):
she's looking very intently and it looks like she's doing science,
you know, it looks like she's doing a lab experiment.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Women in stem.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
Well.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
See that's the thing.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
That's the thing, that's that's I love the way. I
love the way they present her because she's interesting and
cool and also deadly.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
So diabolical, yeah probably, yeah, Yeah, So this woman, Locusta
is presented as someone who's very dedicated to her craft,
which happens to be poison.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
It's it's very lucrative for her. As we're going to
get into, yeah, and so's we're going to talk about
really two diabolical and infamous women from Roman sixty eight AD. So, yeah,
this week we are going to talk Lacusta, the poisoner.
We're also going to talk about the woman who elevated
her to the position of prominence. She gave her a
(05:11):
tenure I guess as a poison instructor, made sure she
never ran out of materials, poultices, or targets. Yeah, Nero's mom,
Julia Agrippina Agrippina, the younger, she's sometimes referred to. She
was extremely ruthless and power hungry as well. And I've
written about her in the first Badass Book, and she's
one of my favorite characters of Roman history and possibly ever.
(05:36):
I think she's amazing and I love reading her stories
and kind of through her you can track the first
the beginnings of the Roman Empire. She's kind of juiced
in with everybody who's anybody up until you get to
the year for Emperors. And one of my favorite things
with Agrippina was, you know, at least according to Tacitus,
(05:57):
when she was young, an astrologer predicted that her son
would kill her, and she said, that's fine, as long
as he becomes emperor. We're going to talk about her
right after this break.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
So we're here talking about Julia Agrippina, known as Nero's mom.
And I mentioned that because well, that may very well
be her ambition in life, to be Nero's mom, because well,
she was a woman from an elite family in the
Roman Empire. And what does it mean to be a
(06:39):
woman from one of the elite families of Rome? How
do you gain power? How do you wield it? What
are your ambitions in life? I'm assuming that one wants
to wield power. You know, some women from elite families
might have just wanted to kind of stay behind the
scenes and may do a little bit of matchmaking and
also weave or maybe eat olives or whatever.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
You know, just be rich, Just be rich, Just be.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Rich, hang out with you know, eventually your grandchildren or whatever.
It just kind of, I don't know, live a good life,
you know, but no, our definition of a good life
is having as much power as possible. And this is
the Roman Empire, which I'll sometimes referred to as the
principate because there's a guy in charge, who's the emperor.
(07:25):
The Roman word is princeps, which is a little bit
of a euphemism because it means like first in the
sense of oh, yes, first among the citizens, and so
it sounds a little more egalitarian than it actually was,
because Rome was still kind of pretending to be a
republic kind of, you know.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Anyway, So how do you gain how do you gain power?
If you're Julia Rapina because this is a very male
dominated line here, you're the first guy in Rome rate
and yes, yeah, options are limited for women to be the.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Yes, so a woman is not going to become the
emperor or the print caps, But there are lots of
ways for women to wield influence and power behind the scenes.
Even this power behind the scenes isn't one hundred percent
behind the scenes, because we know that, say, Augustus's wife, Livia,
(08:23):
was pretty influential. You know, she got her image on coins.
The Senate granted her the title of Augusta, which was
a pretty big deal.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
And Lvia was was awesome from what I understand, Like
she kind of was able to pull a lot of
strings and make a lot of things happen.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
For the entire Yeah, and Julia Agrippina is you know,
growing up like a generation later, knowing the stories of
maybe she was even alive for part of Livia's life.
You know, she overlapped with Livia a bit. That's one
of her role models. She's like, oh huh, okay, if
you know Livia could do this, maybe that's a possible
(09:00):
for me too. I might not be able to become
actual emperor, actual prin camps, but maybe I could get
my son on the throne. I mean that's a classic
motive right throughout history. Yes, you know, women can we
hold a lot of power.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
To come back to sur Lanister again, I keep making
the Game of Thrones references here, but that's how I feel.
Even I think even in Game of Throne, Surcey had
some kind of prophecy about like her kid being emperor
or something.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Yeah, Livia was actually deified after her death, not immediately
after her death, but her grandson Claudius, who we'll hear
about later for other reasons, did get the Senate to
declare her a goddess. The deified Livia, which is cool, right.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Totally cool, that's pretty awesome.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Actually doesn't happen to many people in some ways. Maybe
Agrippina may have even outdone Livia When we consider her.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Whole career, Julia Agrippina is really tied in with the
elite and the prominent families of Rome. Her father was Germanicus,
who was a great war hero of Imperial Reme. Germanicus
was descended from Augustus and mark Antony, which means Agrippina's
bloodline was already pretty royal. As for Germanicus, he was
(10:20):
a famous Roman hero. He destroyed a bunch of rebelling
Germanic tribes and kicked their ass so hard that that's
why they call him Germanicus.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Well, Tiberius, the current emperor was growing a little jealous
worried about Germanicus and his rising popularity, so he had
him poisoned.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Which will be a theme in this episode, poisoning. So
Tiberius soon retires from being emperor, gets poisoned himself, and
everyone's like, well, crab, who should be emperor? Then we
all liked Germanicus, but he's gone, So what about his son? Yeah, yeah,
that should be fine. He'll be a good emperor, no doubt.
So they grabbed Germanicus's son and put him on the throne.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
And Germanicus's son was Guius, also known as Caligula.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
What could go wrong? Yes?
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Yes, So Caligula gets to the throne, which means that
our friend Julia Agrippina is now if you do the math,
the sister sister go ahead, Yeah, which sounds pretty cool,
pretty great. Caligula was very close to his sisters.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Pretty I mean, that's maybe a little too close, depending
on which anti Cooligula source of fake news you want
to believe.
Speaker 4 (11:31):
Yeah, yeah, whatever the details.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Agrippina apparently was very influential over Caligula and or Guias
if you prefer his more official name, and with Caligula
as emperor, well, if Agrippina is influential, he's going to
manage to get her image placed on the coins. She
lives in the Imperial Palace, She's awarded the and privileges
(12:01):
that are also awarded to the vestal virgins.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Which, knowing what we're going to know about Julia Agrippina,
seems ironic, right.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
Yes, in a certain sense.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Yes, so yeah, what are the privileges of the vestual virgins?
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Yeah, so if you're a vestal virgin, Okay, it is
true that there are a lot of constraints on your life.
You have to be from a patrician family, and yes,
you have to devote three decades of your life to
this particular religious practice. You're the guardians of this sacred
flame in this temple, and if the flame goes out,
(12:37):
Rome's gonna collapse. So no pressure you start becoming a
vestal virgin, or I should say, if you are chosen
by the Pontifex Maximus, the chief priest of the Roman
State religion, to become a vestal virgin. This happens under
the age of ten, so you're maybe not old enough
to really understand what you're getting yourself into, you know,
(13:00):
you know, so for three decades of your life. You
have to live this particular life not supposed to have sex,
and this is on pain of death, okay. And on
top of that, you also had to do your hair
in this really elaborate hairstyle with like twists and braids
and pins, and.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
I mean, what else are you going to do with
all of your menti energies? Yeah, you know, yeah, you know,
I have a feeling that Julia Grippina was probably like
spared some of the negative sides of this.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
So yeah, so Julia Agrippina was not herself a vestal virgin,
but what are the privileges?
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Oh, she was treated as a vestal virgin, but she
didn't have to do any of the actual work. Oh
my god.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
You know.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
You could own property, which was not a thing that
women were legally allowed to do. You could sign contracts.
Most women in Rome had to have a male relative
signed contracts for them. And if you were a vestal virgin,
you could bequeath property to women. You could also grant
(14:15):
pardons to condemned criminals.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
That's going to come up later. I think.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Also had the best seats at events, including events that
most most of the time upper class women weren't usually
allowed at so you could get ringside seats to gladiator
fights basically.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Oh man, so she got all the good stuff. So
this is a great deal for her, and she doesn't
have to do her hair like that. Yeah. So she
gets all these great perks and her brothers the Emperor Caligula.
But that probably is going well for a while. But
you know, Caligula is also declaring war on the ocean,
and you know, I don't know, there's movies about how
(14:54):
freaky he got or allegedly freaky, and anyway, this is
the freaky era, and what.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Is going on with Caligulas? Okay, things are getting a
little unexpected with Caligula.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
A little bit of a loose cannon.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Yeah yeah. I mean, on the other hand, I'm sure
many people over the centuries have wanted to declare war
in the ocean. I mean, I'm sure there are sailors
and ship captains and fishermen and you know who just
pressing her.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Yeah, he had he had his tribute chaise and archers
shoot into the water, and then he had his soldiers
go pick up seashells as tribute. I don't know, man, Okay,
allegedly Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
It's a great story. It's a great story.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Yeah, warhere's Agrippina during all of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Yeah, Julia Agrippina. So, Agrippina is scubbing out the situation,
and so she's thinking, hmmm, so she's got a lover,
this guy named Lepidus of her, so Agrippina, and it
(16:00):
is plot to kill Caligula and put Lepitus on the throne.
But wrinkle. Caligula finds out what's going on and has
Agrippina exiled, and he also confiscates all of her possessions,
sells them on eBay or yeah, you know, whatever the
Roman equivalent was, and ships Agripina herself off to an
(16:23):
island in the middle of nowhere. And that's how her
life was at that moment. Who knows. Maybe she was
practicing her skills at.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Swimming, which is going to come up later, Which is
going to come up later.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Do you think trifling things like exile and maybe not
so subtle death threats are going to take her out?
Speaker 1 (16:45):
That's all the time we have for today, guys, that story,
Julia Agrippina thinks, so much for listening to the podcast. Yeah,
she was a vestal virgin and then Collaguilar exiler. That's
the end of the story clearly.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
Yeah. Yeah, so Pekerpina wasn't the only one who wanted
Coligula out of the way. Lots of people in Rome
got sick of him.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Yes, And he is eventually taken out by the Praetorian Guard,
and this is going to be a theme throughout the
course of Imperial Rome, but he's the first one that's
taken out by the Praetorian Guard. The Praetorian Guard are
the bodyguards of the emperor there hand chosen from the
greatest soldiers of the legion. They get to wear gold armor.
(17:28):
They follow the emperor around everywhere he goes, and they're
responsible I think for killing like twelve to fourteen emperors
over the course of.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Their I thought they were supposed to be the bodyguards.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
No, yeah, they're really bad. They're worst bodyguards ever. Right. Anyway,
they kill Caligula and they were probably paid to do
it by somebody, or maybe they just really hated him.
But the Praetorian Guard wax Caligula. And then this is
when they find Claudius like hiding behind a curtain or something,
and they're like, cool, your emperor now and he's like, okay, great,
sounds good. Yeah, that's the story. At least that's the story.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
And it was Kaliah's uncle, right, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
So Claudius is emperor, and okay. One of the things
he does is he recalls Agrippina back to Rome, because remember,
she's been in exile doing whatever it is you do
in exile. And Agrippina knows how to make the most
of the situation.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
She plays the oh poor me, this poor vestial virgin,
my crazy brother.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Yeah, you know, and she garners some sympathy with that
among the Roman people. She marries a wealthy senator. That
doesn't work out well for him. It does work out
well for her because she poisons him to death and
inherits his.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Estate because she can inherit property because she's got all
the rights and privileges of a shore virgin, which is
great for her. And hey, speaking of poison, here's where
we meet from. Here's where we meet the second character
of our of our little story today. So, yes, we
are talking about the Roman Empire. We're talking about the
(19:17):
early empire, kind of the glory days that everybody thinks
about when they're thinking of the Roman Empire. You know
gold and emperors, and you know all of these. You
know Caligula drunkenly ordering political assassinations while laying on top
of piles of naked women. It's all very you know, Scorsese,
I guess. But if you were a powerful Roman, like
(19:40):
a Julia Agrippina perhaps, and you did need somebody, maybe
a husband, maybe hated arch nemesis. You needed somebody taken
out of the picture. You needed somebody in your sphere
of influence to have a heart attack and maybe fall
off a building in the process and land on a sword.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
You needed someone to not be where they currently were,
which is in your way right exactly.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
So one of your options was to call Locusta of Gaul.
So she was a all natural, free range, organic chemist assassin,
and she was very good at her job. She's kind
of this black widow of Imperial Rome. She is gonna
take people out if you need them taken out. She's
(20:28):
an expert. We don't know much about her before she
shows up in Rome, and that's kind of when she
starts rising to prominence. So she was inventive. She was intelligent.
We know this. We know she knew a lot about
herbal lore. We know she was making extracts from various
plants and fungi and kind of finding new and interesting
(20:48):
ways to take people out in ways that might not
come back to harm her employer. So she would test
her concoctions on animals to try to test their potency
and try to find these perfect toxins, perfect cocktails of
drugs that she could you could whatever pour into somebody's
(21:10):
drink and pour it into their wine and give them heart.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Attack, you know. And do you want something fast acting?
Do you want something slow acting? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Do you want to see them die? Or do you
want to be really far away when they die? Let's
find out. It's going to cost you a different it's
a different different yea, it's a different menu either way.
She is a good friend to have when you are
a Julia Agrippina.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
Yes, definitely.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
So.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Agrippina's goal wasn't wealth, or it wasn't wealth per se.
It was power, which wealth facilitates. She's gotten a sense
of what it's like to be close to the emperor.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
These senators aren't going to cut it. After having been
the sister of the emperor.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
Now her primary obstacle is Claudius's wife, Messalina. This is Messalina, who,
at least according to our sources, was famous because she
was a woman of loose.
Speaker 5 (22:08):
Morals, pretty famously right, yes, yeah, and some of that
may be exaggeration by our sources, which, as we've said,
are biased.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Whatever, it doesn't take much for Agrippina to.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Some of them might be propagandists from Agrippina. It might
have just been a smear champaign against you, bi Agrippina.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Uh uh yeah maybe yeah. So Agrippina manages to smear
her reputation in the public eye, undermine her just in general,
to the point where actually the Praetorian Guard forces her
to kill herself, which is a Roman way of getting
(22:54):
yourself out of a really awful situation with some measure
of dignity. Life left. The Emperor Claudius is now single.
And if you're Julia Agrippina, what do you do now?
Speaker 1 (23:09):
I don't know. Isn't she related to Claudius? Presumably?
Speaker 2 (23:14):
Yes, yes, so okay, but that's not going to stop her.
So step one, you have already been getting romantically involved
on the DL with this guy named Palace. Now who's Palace? Oh?
He happens to be a confidante of the Emperor Claudius.
He's a friend of Claudius. Step two, you get Palace
(23:38):
to chime in when Claudius is wondering what to do
with his personal life, like, oh my goodness, my wife died.
Oh no, like should I just go into goblin mode?
And kind of I don't know, watch Netflix, neat Dorito's.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
All day and they hadn't invented Netflix or Dorito, so
it was even worse option straight him. Oh no, Palace
of Gold, Yes, no Netflix.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Yeah, so Pallas the guy, Agrippina's boyfriend, not Palas, the
architectural structure. Palas says, hey Claudius, bro, dude, man, kind
of move on. Why don't you, you know, put yourself out there.
And hey, Claudius claw claw, I just happen to know someone,
and who is that someone?
Speaker 1 (24:23):
And it's Agrippina. He's set up. He set up his
girlfriend with the emperor. Or I guess she set him up.
She made him set her up with the emperor.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
That's what it looks like. That's what it looks like.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
So yeah, this is where things get awkward. Agrippina and
Claudius are actually.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
Niece and uncle fantastic.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
So yeah, okay, And is Agrippina herself squeaked out by this, well,
I don't know. She goes through with this plan. Agrippina
is now married to the emperor Bingo.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
She's the sister and now she's the wife. That's better, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Now, if you're a woman, can you become emperor?
Speaker 1 (25:07):
No?
Speaker 2 (25:09):
No, but your son can become emperor if you play
your cards right. So let's assume that that's her plan.
Agrippina is so committed. Okay, I guess if you want
to decide that her plan, her ambition all along, is
to get her son on the throne, because that's the
(25:29):
closest she can get to becoming emperor, then you can
look at everything she does in that light. You know,
she had taken out mess Alina. She also takes out
another woman called Lollia Paulina, who is a woman who
might have married Claudius had Hurricane Agrippina not swept in
and gotten her accused of sorcery, right as you do.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Yeah, she gets exiled and then she doesn't get poisoned,
but she does do the Messolina thing and is convinced
by the Praetorian guard to kill herself.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, they.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Can be pretty convincing.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
So yeah, and this is Agrippina.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
She wore a gold cloak.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
She traveled in these special carriages carpenta, usually reserved for
vestal versions and holy.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Artifacts, which she was probably both actually.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
We've met six of her boyfriends by now. But and
she's with her uncle, but she's still a yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
And you know, she worked the system for her own purposes,
which you might consider nefarious or you might consider rational
given the horizon of expectations available to a woman of
her status at the time. She took out people who
got in her way without being too obvious about it.
And you know, it's like, why use a chainsaw when
(26:57):
you could just get other people to use a scalpel
poison behind the scenes or poison, yes, yes, a chemical scalpel.
She allegedly took out her enemies in the government and
the imperial family in the palace, you know, the Pretorian guardian.
She took out everybody from powerful senators to her own
(27:17):
sister in law, and she established her place as Alpha Goo.
You know, she's at the top of the food chain,
in the political food chain or whatever whatever.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Metaphor you want to use here, you know, boss lady.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Boss lady, yes, totally boss.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Lady, total girl boss, yes.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Yeah, in a system that did not have official recognition
of a girl boss.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Yeah, only boy boss, you know.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Sometimes she managed to get people killed outright, sometimes just
removed in other ways, you know, exiled, sent there, discredited,
just you know, arrested, dem maybe forced to commit suside
maybe yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Maybe he committed suicide, but we don't know if they
were forced to or not.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so she is.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
So we prefaced her as being Nero's mom, and so
that has to happen soon, right, She's on top of
the game, she's on top of the world. She's running
running Rome. She wants to keep that rolling. But she's
got a little problem because Claudius and Messalina had a kid,
(28:38):
and in theory he's going to be the dude that
inherits the throne.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
Right, Yeah, the son named Britannicus. Yeah, and Britannicus he
was pretty popular.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Yeah, people liked him. And and and Agripina does have
a kid with Claudius, and that is Nero. And you know,
make whatever greating jokes you want to make here. But
and Nero is the second son of the emperor, and
Britannicus is the first. So she's got a problem. But
luckily she knows a guy, yes.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Or maybe she knows a gal.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
She knows a gal.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
So in the year fifty four, fifty four CE, Locusta
is she will She's in jail. She's on her third
prison stent for presumably killing people. And you remember that
thing about the vestial Virgins where they could exonerate a
condemned criminal. Well, Julia Gripina makes a little visit to
(29:43):
Rome County Penitentiary and says, all right, Locusta, you're with me,
We're getting out of here, and pulls her out of
jail and tasks her with a very high profile hit.
She wants allegedly, well, we don't have proof of this,
but but we're gonna tell the story. We're gonna tell
(30:04):
the story the way that it has been told for generations.
And the story goes that, uh, Lacusta was pulled out
to kill the Emperor Claudius, which is just awesome. Lacusa
doesn't bad nye and she set something up, presumably allegedly,
(30:24):
and on October thirteenth, fifty four a D, so as
of the time of this recording, it's almost exactly one
nine and sixty nine years ago. Lacusta puts her planeto motion,
so Claudius's bodyguard. So the night before the hit, Claudius's
most loyal bodyguard was poisoned just enough that he wasn't
(30:49):
feeling good. He was thrown up. He had to call
out sick from work that day. Then Lacousta bribes Claudius's
food taster to take the night off. Here's some money,
go go go buy yourself to nice, get a drink,
watch a movie. So that guy goes away, and now
there's not much in the way of her and Claudias.
So she makes this amazing or somebody she knows makes
(31:11):
this amazing stew that has actually happened to be spiced
up with some super poisonous death cap mushrooms that might
have fallen in there off of one of the other
shelves in the kitchen. Oh yeah, Claudius eats it. He
falls off of his throne. He starts clutching his neck.
A doctor comes running up to try to see what
(31:33):
he can do to save the emperor, which medicine and
fifty four ad is that the doctor literally sticks a
feather down your throat to make you barf and throw
up whatever it is that's making you sick. And there's
a certain logic behind that, sure, but the problem here
is a standard practice. Yes, maybe it would work, but
it's not gonna work today because Locusta has already soaked
(31:54):
that feather in strychnine. And he dies. And that's that's
the end of the Emperor Claudius. He die, He falls
off his throne and dies of death cat mushrooms, possibly
allegedly because of Locusta the poisoner and Julia Agropina.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Yeah yeah, And if it wasn't exactly the mushrooms, maybe
it was whatever was on that feather. Yeah yeah. And
when Nero took the throne, Niro has some good one liners.
Supposedly he said that art he makes the quip that
mushrooms must be the food of the gods, since Claudius
became a god by eating them.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Oh and so now we are into the reign of Nero.
And if you remember earlier, Nero is not the first
born son of the Emperor Claudius. He's second. When Claudius
was married to Messalina. They had a son named Britannicus,
who was very popular in Rome in fifty five AD.
(32:52):
Britannicus of fourteen Nero's I think like twelve or eleven.
But Agrippina had kind of we had talked a little
bit about Claudius. They're trying to kind of rehab his
they're trying to kind of rehab his image in the
last few decades of like maybe he was actually just
a mild mannered guy, a level headed emperor, the kind
(33:15):
of guy the empire needed at the time. But the
reputation for him has generally been that he's this kind
of like confused old guy who just kind of gets
dragged through life by all of the people that surround
him and through whatever ways. We know, Agrippina is extremely convincing,
and she was able to convince Claudius to name her
(33:37):
son Nero emperor over Britannicus as his successor, which people
didn't love that, but he did it, and then I'll
go figure he died like a couple of months later
before he could change his mind. Yeah, so now Nero's
in charge, but people are still kind of like, well,
we like Britannicus, so all right.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that guy, he's still around.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Yeah, yeah, And you know, you can't leave loose ends hanging,
So we gotta go, we gotta we gotta call acoustic.
What happens this time, Well, Lucusta's real only question is like,
do you want it to be extended pain or just
sudden death? And so it's kind of that's where we're
that's where we're at with this.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
She's a professional, she's that's her little menu, you know,
like you go to the deli, you order a sandwich,
like you take off provolon, you take off us. He
took off that, and she's like, oh, yeah, yeah, it's.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
A high end service we're offering here, and you've got
a lot of options.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
So anyway, Nero and Britannicus, they're having this big party
at the at the Imperial Palace, kind of celebrate Nero
in his first year of his reign, and everyone's having
this great time, and then Britannicus takes a sip of
his wine goblet and he kind of falls to the ground,
shaking and convulsing and foaming at the mouth.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
And yeah, and I love the way Tastis tells the
story because Nero's emperor. Right, And so we've got this
banquet and the guests at the banquet, they're there, they're
eating their you know, stuffed pheasant or their dormice or
whatever it is they're eating, and Britannicus has these fits,
these seizures, and it looks like, oh dear, he's stopped moving,
(35:18):
Oh dear. The way Tacitus tells it, everyone makes their
expression just blank because they don't know how to react,
like or they don't know what's the safe way to react.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Oh, because they don't know what neuro is going to do.
They don't know how to they have a figured to
Malle yet he's just become member. They don't have a
good sense of what's the deal, like should we are we?
Are we happy about this? Are we said about this?
I don't know? Or just let's just don't react. Nobody's
say anything. Let's see what he does.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
Wait, wait for r Q. And then Nero says, oh, yeah,
Britannicis gets these seizures all the time. Oh, And everyone's like, oh, yeah, okay,
that must be it. He must be having one of
these things. This is perfectly normal. Yes, let's go eat
some more olives.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Or whatever whatever, not what he had, but something else.
Yeah yeah, and then yeah, Britannicus dies because that's what happens,
because he was probably poisoned to death by probably by Lucusta,
probably at the request of Julia Agrippina. Yeah yeah, and
and and we're not saying these are good people. We're
(36:17):
saying that they're just that they're badass, and that doesn't
badass does not imply role model, and it does not
implay goodness or like moral honesty. I'm sure there are
some very very moral, very like good romans in these
days who were giving alms to the poor, and you know,
they fed their dog and they went to work every day, But.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Generally speaking, didn't poison people.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
Generally speaking, with their entire life without committing a single crime.
And that's great and that's the kind of life we
should all live. But that's not as good of a
story as no. I just knocked I just whacked the
emperor and his son.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Yep, yep, yep.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
All right, So now we've got Neuro in charge, and
Julia Grappina has been the the sister, the wife, and
the mother of emperors, and we're going to get into
the mother of emperors, right now after this break, Okay, okay,
(37:19):
welcome back.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
So, yeah, it seems like a pretty tense environment to
live in if we ask me.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Yes, I agree.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
So Nero is the uncontested emperor, and this is great
for the uncontested emperor's mom, I e.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Agrippina. So she's so he's I think, like he's young
when this happens. So she can rule for him as
regent because she's she's an adult and he's not, and
so she can kind of run the show for a while.
It's even more power than when she was the wife
or the sister. This is peak power for her.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
Yeah, this is peak Agrippina. Yeah, she is very sophisticated
about this. She manages to put in place other people
who can kind of keep a check on Nero. So
there's this guy Buris who can kind of keep an
eye on Nero. There's Seneca, the philosopher, the stoic philosopher,
(38:24):
the Seneca. Yeah he's Nero's tutor, but.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
He's an agent of Agrippina.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
He is.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
And here's the thing about Agrippina. She wants her son
to become emperor, but she also sees this particular son
with very clear eyes. She knows that Nero is he's
Nero and yeah, little rambunctious. Yeah, yes, that's one way
of putting it. And so she knows that if Nero
(38:53):
gets too rambunctious, things might go badly for him, and
then he won't be emperor anymore, because maybe he'll be dead.
And so for part of Nero's reign, his rambunctiousness is
moderated by Seneca and Buris, and this is Agrippina's doing.
So this is Agrippina as the emperor's mother, as regent.
And yeah, she even gets to sit in on senate meetings.
(39:17):
Somehow she's talked Nero and to letting her do that.
She's not visible, she's behind a curtain, because the whole
idea of having a woman in a senate.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
Meeting is just craziness.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
Yeah, And here's something that I think we should mention
is that, like, you know, we keep talking about how
much Agrippino wants to gain power and gain prestige and
influence and how she's sitting in on senate meetings and
running the show in Rome. But like one thing we
should talk about is that this is like the golden
(39:51):
age of Rome, and she is by all intents and purposes,
has been the empress of it for decade now, right, Like,
she's kind of you know, rome Is is doing really well.
They are they are the superpower in the West right now.
They are expanding, they are consolidating their building. There's a
(40:14):
lot of really exciting things happening in the Roman Empire
right now. It is up and coming, and she is
responsible for making a lot of these decisions, or at
least influential in these decisions being made. She's not just
like I want a bigger palace. She had a big palace.
She didn't need to be sitting in on senate meetings
for that. So she's sitting on.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Senate meetings because that's where things get.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Done right, right. And I think it's something that doesn't
get talked about that much with her, is that she
has done a very good job of you know, clearly
Claudius would do anything she asked her to do. With Nero,
she doesn't even ask, she just does it. And with
Caligula it was maybe a little harder, but she could
have if she really tried, right.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
She found her ways, yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
Right, And so you know, I think that a lot
of the works and conquests and all of the The
expansion of the Roman Empire in the first century is
kind of one of the glory. It's one of we
still have to learn it in elementary school today, right,
And I think that, you know, maybe she should get
a little bit of credit for some of the things
(41:18):
that happened in the empire around this time. Yeah, it
becomes very powerful, and it's a big, big jump from
Augustus to to where we're at now.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Yeah. Yeah, Now Agripinut is not actually the emperor slash Empress.
It's actually Nero, And you know, he's growing up, he's
becoming an adult, and maybe.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
He wants to be emperor for once and not have
to like do what his mama said.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Yeah, yeah, so she actually does try to have Hi assassinated.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
But this is Nero, and he alleged she alleged. Now
that sounds more like her though honestly.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
Now, Nero's mama didn't raise no fool. So Nero figured
out that maybe something's going on, Maybe it's my mom
trying to kill me. WHOA, that's counterintuitive, but also makes
sense in the circumstances.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
And it's also pretty paranoid. So it's possible that he
made entire thing up. But well, you know, we're saying
because he just really didn't want his mom telling him
what to do. I don't have to listen to your
any more, mom, and just told everybody that she tried
to assassinate me.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Yeah, and if any of my students are listening, don't
try this tacic. Not cool, not cool, No, not cool,
doctor Larris's students. Yes, yes, And uh, if you were
Nero and you thought that maybe your mom was trying
to take you out, you know the saying, just because
your paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you, Okay.
In Nero's at at any rate, Agrippina is perceived as
(42:52):
a threat. What do you think Nero's going to do?
Speaker 1 (42:54):
I think you got to you gotta take her out first.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Right, So this is player versus player, a.
Speaker 1 (43:01):
Student versus master.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Well, actually yeah, it might be.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
So what does he do? He goes to Lacusta, the poisoner,
because she's she's in She's in Julia Agropina's pocket. Right.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
Well, so yeah, so not only is Lacusta, at least
as far as we know, probably still in Agrippina's pocket
because Agrippina would not squander a relationship like that. But also, Agrippina,
probably with the help of Lacusta, had spent her entire
life building up resistances to most of the common poisons
(43:36):
on the market out there.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
I love that. I love that. Yeah, so Nero tries
to poison her to death, probably with more than one agent,
but she's kind of I don't know Wesley and the
Princess Bride Lake, but I love to think that, like
perhaps Locusta had created a little vitamin regimen for like,
all right, take two of these every morning. I'll adjust
(43:57):
the recipe as necessary, but like give it like six months,
and you'll be pretty resistant. You're not gonna feel great
for the first six months, but after that you're gonna
you can be able to like take lethal doses of
every poison I've used to kill your enemies.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
And Agrippina is no fool. She's probably done her homework,
or Lacusta's done her homework.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
And yeah, so she eats a bunch of poison and
doesn't doesn't not only doesn't die, but doesn't even get sick.
She's fine.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
Yeah, Yeah, poison is off the table.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
It's like Grasputine. I think grass Pudin had like thirteen
poison cupcakes and drank a bottle of poison wine and
he still didn't die. He didn't even get sick.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
Yeah, So if poison is off the table and you
were Nero, would you try next?
Speaker 1 (44:43):
I know the answer to this, but I want you
to sell the story because I love I love this.
This is one of my favorite Agrippina things. Is that, like, yeah,
the murdering and killing and running rome is great, but
like she is just famously impossible to kill. Yes, yeah,
he goes the Wyley Coyote route. Yes he does.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
Yes, Now he can't actually drop a literal grand piano
on her because that hasn't been invented yet. But he
tries to crush her to death by causing the roof
of a building to collapse on top of her, and
she survives.
Speaker 1 (45:19):
She crawls, falls on her head, and she crawls out
of the rubble and lives.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
Yeah. Yeah, Okay, So Agrippina, who is very much alive.
She's out on the lake. She wants to go out
on a lake. She has her usual boat, it's like
a pleasure yacht or whatever. And for whatever reason, h
by coincidence, that boat is not available. It's like infra
(45:47):
repairs or something like that, and she has to take
out another boat because obviously you have more than one yacht.
When she goes out on this boat onto the lake,
oh no, oh no, oh it sinks, it collapses. Oh no,
but your agrippina. The boat's going down. She escapes, she
(46:08):
jumps overboard, she swims to the shore, and.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
There's there's some speculation that this was a boat that
was like totally rigged to do this, or some kind
of contraption to like sink while Yeah, no, you're gonna
have to do better than the drown me in a
placid leg.
Speaker 2 (46:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
So he tried to poison her. He dropped the building
on her head, he tried to drown her. So what's next.
Speaker 2 (46:35):
So what's next? Well, okay, so TLDR. Eventually he just
has her stab to death by assassins with you know,
daggers and swords and whatever. Supposedly, the story is that
when these assassins come with their swords and their daggers,
she points to her torso to where her womb is
(46:59):
and says, okaya, stab me here, stab me in the
part of my body that produced Emperor Nero.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
That's baller, that is really that is a that is
a stone cold last words, stone cold. Yeah yeah, because
that's like not a that's a painful death too. And
she would know right, like that is not the gut
wound is like the worst one.
Speaker 2 (47:25):
Yeah yeah, if you remember what the astrologer foretold that,
oh yes, yeah, yeah, but he will be emperor, uh
huh yeah, And she's like, yeah, I'm cool with that,
Like it's okay if he kills me, as long as
he becomes emperor, because I guess that was her goal.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
So yeah, and he did. It's like the sith, right,
like the student has to kill the master something like that, like,
oh you got me all right, collapsing building thing didn't
work out. You just gotta you gotta send them, you
gotta send the army and like, but the thing with
that is it's hard to make that look like an accident.
So her being stabbed to death by the army was
(48:04):
actually it was pretty clear what happened here, and a
lot of people who maybe thought Nero was kind of
a fun dude to have at a party kind of
turned on him and were like, maybe this guy's actually
a psycho.
Speaker 2 (48:18):
Yeah. Yeah, and supposedly he did express guilt over having
killed his mother, and like, okay, but that's also coexisting
with the fact that he did actually kill his mother, So.
Speaker 1 (48:29):
Yeah, he still did it.
Speaker 2 (48:31):
He still did it. Yeah, And yes, that's Agrippina, And
so she's no longer on the scene and she was
complicated to say the very least, and very strong willed
I mean she yes, yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:47):
Yeah, I love Agropina. I think that story is so
great because when you talk about her, the story of
early Roman Empire can be told through her. You've got
her being the sister of Caligula, the wife of Claudius,
the mother of Nero. And then after after she's kind
of no longer a stabilizing force for him or at
least running the show on his behalf, and everybody kind
(49:08):
of turns on him a little bit or like, oh,
he killed his own mom, Like this pretty messed up
even for him, and you know, kind of that's when
we kind of get the stories of him playing the
playing the fiddle, wall room burns or whatever.
Speaker 2 (49:21):
Yeah, well the liar fiddles weren't invented yet, but yeah,
saying a liar, that's the story. Yeah, anyway, anyway, anyway,
So yeah, so Agrippina is no longer with us, but.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
But Locusta is still with us, and she's now out
a boss. So Nero goes to Locusta the poisoner, and
he says like, hey, you want to work here, and
she says, yes, of course I want to work here.
Speaker 2 (49:50):
Yeah. Girls got to pay rent.
Speaker 1 (49:52):
Yes, yes, I still have have a lifestyle to maintain here.
And so for the next fourteen years, which is a
long time. Oh wow. In the next fourteen years, Locusta
is the personal poisoner for the Emperor Nero, who is
kind of famously remembered as one of Rome's most ruthless emperors.
(50:15):
She even she gets to have her experiments. He makes
sure that she has everything she needs to do her thing.
She lives in this really huge villa. She actually like
opens a school for like a you know, alchemy school
or a botany school or whatever, but it's a she
trains other women to do what she's doing. So she
is training other women on how to you know, make
(50:38):
people bleed out of their eyes and nose at the
same time, I don't know, but or.
Speaker 2 (50:44):
Not bleed out of your nose and eyes and just suit,
you know, quietly stop leaving.
Speaker 1 (50:49):
Yeah, or maybe there's some medicine involved here. Maybe she
did some good things too. We don't remember any of
that stuff about her. Yeah, it's about how.
Speaker 2 (50:55):
She tell the stories that they choose to tell.
Speaker 1 (50:58):
Yes, yes, we know that she was a chemist and
a biologist and a botanist and she cultivated and grew
various plants and made all of these interesting pultices and potions,
and you know, and trained other women how to do this.
And she was kind of remembered as a Nero's neuro's assassin.
(51:20):
We don't have a number or in cad hazard to
guess on how many people she might have been responsible
for their deaths. And I always kind of find the
counting aspect of this grim just in general. But yeah,
so she was the poisoner for Nero for fourteen years,
which is the rest of his reign. It all kind
of came to an end in sixty nine CE, when
(51:43):
everybody had just kind of finally had enough a neuro
they were done with him. He gets deposed by the Senate,
he's briefly put under a dam na to memoria memoria,
and he is sentenced to death by being beaten with
iron rods until he stops moving, which sounds just awful.
Speaker 2 (52:01):
It sounds awful. It sounds very undignified for a member
of the Roman elite class to die.
Speaker 1 (52:08):
Yeah, the Julia Claudia, the Emperor, We're gonna beat him
up with iron rods until he dies and then throws
probably throw him down the steps of the senator or whatever. Well,
Nero doesn't like the idea of that either, And he
always kind of like a like a James Bond villain
or something. He always carried a special suicide poison pill
that Lacusta had given him, and he was just basically like, okay,
(52:31):
if the jigs up, like, eat this real quick, so
you know, get you know, humiliated or or imprisoned or
captured or anything else. But on the day the assassins
came to get him with the iron rods, uh, he
didn't have it on him for whatever reason. He had
forgot to stick it in his toga before he left
that morning. So but he did have a knife, so
(52:51):
he stabbed himself to death with a knife to avoid
being beaten up with rods. Anyway, Nero dies and Locus
now is kind of unemployed and Nero. When Nero dies,
we get into that year of four Emperors that ends
up with Vespasian, but the first of those four emperors. Yeah,
(53:12):
in order to get there, we got to get through
three other guys, and the first one is Emperor Galba,
who was a soldier who had kind of taken over
after Nero died or was or killed himself or was
incited to kill himself. So Galba takes over, and Galba
everybody was sick of Nero. Galba, he's sick of Lacusta
(53:35):
and he's kind of kind of tired of these two
decades of people being poisoned and dying, and maybe she's
stopped being quite so subtle about it. And anyway, one
of Galba's first acts as emperor and only acts as emperor,
because I think he's only emperor for like three months,
but he has her drag through the streets and chains
and publicly executed, and that's Lacusta's end. She should have
(53:57):
saved one of those poison pills for herself, I guess.
But yeah, well, but you know, those are two very
infamous women of of of Rome who who had their
had their reigns of terror that had a little bit
of overlap on the Venn diagram. They both kind of
died horribly, but they also both were able to kind
(54:22):
of find a degree of power and autonomy in a
society that really didn't have I wasn't really structured to
allow them to have that, which is pretty cool, right, Like, yeah,
I think that they're both really really interesting women. I
mean they're both pretty also pretty diabolical and evil, but.
Speaker 2 (54:43):
Yeah, yeah, but but diabolical and evil in context, like
you kind of you kind of wonder you kind of
understand why we don't endorse their choices, but we might
understand what led them to make these choices.
Speaker 1 (54:58):
Yeah, and you know, and pursue them. Yeah, And like
we talked about like the stories, this isn't like a
nice guy of the week. This is badass. And these women,
they they crushed everybody in their path. They destroyed anything
standing against them. They took out emperors, they took out senators,
they took out every they took out generals, they took
(55:20):
out any powerful person. Right, yes, for sure, they took
out any anything that was in their way in the
most violent manner possible. Like her own kid, she was like,
whatever this guy's guy's a problem, he's got to go right,
that's pretty badass. And then you know they both kind
of had these pretty serious ends, which is also kind
(55:43):
of badass as well, right, being meriting being dragged through
the streets of Roman chains and publicly executed. Is you
had to have? Like's been pretty scary.
Speaker 2 (55:55):
Aiety, Yeah, yes, yes, in for me, but but still
still badass.
Speaker 1 (56:02):
Yeah all right, Well, okay, Pat, that's a good primer
for your students for Latin two.
Speaker 2 (56:07):
It sounds like, okay, yeah, so I should say, don't
poison people.
Speaker 1 (56:13):
Don't poison people. Yeah, get a food taster, make your
own food lokially source all of your stuff, growed all
in your backyard. That way you'll know it's not poisoned
by anybody outside of your house.
Speaker 2 (56:23):
Okay, yeah, yeah, that narrows it down. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (56:27):
So if you are enjoying the podcast, please do subscribe,
Please share with your friends, like it, and leave a
comment that really really helps us out. Thank you guys
so much.
Speaker 2 (56:36):
We'll see you next time, and stay badass. Badass of
the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by High five Content.
Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, me Pat Larish and my
co host Ben Thompson. Writing is by me and Ben.
(56:57):
Story editing is by Ian Jacobs Brandon Fish. Mixing and
music and sound design is by Jude Brewer. Special thanks
to Noel Brown at iHeart Badass of the Week is
based on the website Badass of Theweek dot com, where
you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses.
If you want to reach out with questions ideas, you
(57:20):
can email us at Badass Podcast at badassoftheweek dot com.
If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen, and tell
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Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Sister wife, niece, great granddaughter, and now mother of various emperors,
Julia Agrippina Augusta herself draws a shabby cloak around her head.
An assistant furtifully shows her into the quote unquote kitchen.
(00:31):
A woman looks up from an array of herbs, mushrooms,
and ominous looking bottles, and also a dead rat.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Mistress Julia Locusta, I need to discreetly get rid of
certain persons who might be trying to get rid of me.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
In turn, Lo Cousta smiles.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Oh, let me check in the back. Hello, and welcome
back to Badass of the Week. My name is Ben
Thompson and I am here as always with my co host,
doctor Pat Larish. Pat, how are you doing? A school
(01:17):
year has started and we are kind of like you're
a couple of weeks into the quarter of the semester. Now,
how's things going with school?
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Yeah, yeah, things are going along. Students are great, high students. Yeah.
So we're about, as of this recording, about a month
in and I'm excited about some of the readings we're
going to be doing in my Latin two class. Our
textbook we use the textbook Suberani, which is a fairly
recently published one. Our textbook, Volume one takes place in
(01:53):
the year sixty four, which fans of Roman history might
now is the year of the Great Fire of Rome.
So that's what my Latin one students will be reading.
And the volume two, which my Latin two students are
going to be reading, takes place in the year sixty eight,
which is in the reign of Nero. And there's a
(02:14):
lot that could happen in the reign of Nero, right,
there's a.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Lot that does happen, I think only yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
There is. And the year sixty eight leads into a
very specific year, which is the year of four Emperors.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Which we've talked about when we talked about Vespasian earlier.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Yeah. Yeah, but before we get to the year of
four Emperors, there's a lot of you know, intrigue and
politicing that happens in Rome, and uh.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Yeah, this is kind of like the Golden Age for like,
you know, when you think about Roman Empire, especially the
Early Empire, you know that you were getting into all
of this, you know, Caligula and Nero and all of
those very fascinating, very exciting characters from history. I always
kind of think of Game of Thrones when I think
about early and everybody's kind of maneuvering each other and
(03:04):
backstabbing each other, and it's probably wasn't that fun to
live there, but it was pretty fun to read about it.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Yeah, yeah, And certainly it was probably high stress if
you were in the center circles of power, if you
were not that important, maybe you could just live your life.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Who knew, you know, it's possible. It's possible that it
was pretty hard to live your life, yes, yeah, yeah,
So you're going to be talking about Miro this year,
so that's kind of the Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Yeah, I guess this week we're going.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
To talk about Nero's mom.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Nero's mom, Akipina, and not just her, but also Lucusta.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Yeah, Lucusta the poisoner, and she's in your textbook, right.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
She has a weird character that shows up in our textbook,
and actually the way she's presented the first time we
meet her, there's a the story is illustrated, and there's
a picture of a woman sitting at a table and
she's got like a little recipe book open and she's
got some little like bowls and bottles and stuff, and
(04:12):
she's looking very intently and it looks like she's doing science,
you know, it looks like she's doing a lab experiment.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Women in stem.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
Well.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
See that's the thing.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
That's the thing, that's that's I love the way. I
love the way they present her because she's interesting and
cool and also deadly.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
So diabolical, yeah probably, yeah, Yeah, So this woman, Locusta
is presented as someone who's very dedicated to her craft,
which happens to be poison.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
It's it's very lucrative for her. As we're going to
get into, yeah, and so's we're going to talk about
really two diabolical and infamous women from Roman sixty eight AD. So, yeah,
this week we are going to talk Lacusta, the poisoner.
We're also going to talk about the woman who elevated
her to the position of prominence. She gave her a
(05:11):
tenure I guess as a poison instructor, made sure she
never ran out of materials, poultices, or targets. Yeah, Nero's mom,
Julia Agrippina Agrippina, the younger, she's sometimes referred to. She
was extremely ruthless and power hungry as well. And I've
written about her in the first Badass Book, and she's
one of my favorite characters of Roman history and possibly ever.
(05:36):
I think she's amazing and I love reading her stories
and kind of through her you can track the first
the beginnings of the Roman Empire. She's kind of juiced
in with everybody who's anybody up until you get to
the year for Emperors. And one of my favorite things
with Agrippina was, you know, at least according to Tacitus,
(05:57):
when she was young, an astrologer predicted that her son
would kill her, and she said, that's fine, as long
as he becomes emperor. We're going to talk about her
right after this break.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
So we're here talking about Julia Agrippina, known as Nero's mom.
And I mentioned that because well, that may very well
be her ambition in life, to be Nero's mom, because well,
she was a woman from an elite family in the
Roman Empire. And what does it mean to be a
(06:39):
woman from one of the elite families of Rome? How
do you gain power? How do you wield it? What
are your ambitions in life? I'm assuming that one wants
to wield power. You know, some women from elite families
might have just wanted to kind of stay behind the
scenes and may do a little bit of matchmaking and
also weave or maybe eat olives or whatever.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
You know, just be rich, Just be rich, Just be.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Rich, hang out with you know, eventually your grandchildren or whatever.
It just kind of, I don't know, live a good life,
you know, but no, our definition of a good life
is having as much power as possible. And this is
the Roman Empire, which I'll sometimes referred to as the
principate because there's a guy in charge, who's the emperor.
(07:25):
The Roman word is princeps, which is a little bit
of a euphemism because it means like first in the
sense of oh, yes, first among the citizens, and so
it sounds a little more egalitarian than it actually was,
because Rome was still kind of pretending to be a
republic kind of, you know.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Anyway, So how do you gain how do you gain power?
If you're Julia Rapina because this is a very male
dominated line here, you're the first guy in Rome rate
and yes, yeah, options are limited for women to be the.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Yes, so a woman is not going to become the
emperor or the print caps, But there are lots of
ways for women to wield influence and power behind the scenes.
Even this power behind the scenes isn't one hundred percent
behind the scenes, because we know that, say, Augustus's wife, Livia,
(08:23):
was pretty influential. You know, she got her image on coins.
The Senate granted her the title of Augusta, which was
a pretty big deal.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
And Lvia was was awesome from what I understand, Like
she kind of was able to pull a lot of
strings and make a lot of things happen.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
For the entire Yeah, and Julia Agrippina is you know,
growing up like a generation later, knowing the stories of
maybe she was even alive for part of Livia's life.
You know, she overlapped with Livia a bit. That's one
of her role models. She's like, oh huh, okay, if
you know Livia could do this, maybe that's a possible
(09:00):
for me too. I might not be able to become
actual emperor, actual prin camps, but maybe I could get
my son on the throne. I mean that's a classic
motive right throughout history. Yes, you know, women can we
hold a lot of power.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
To come back to sur Lanister again, I keep making
the Game of Thrones references here, but that's how I feel.
Even I think even in Game of Throne, Surcey had
some kind of prophecy about like her kid being emperor
or something.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Yeah, Livia was actually deified after her death, not immediately
after her death, but her grandson Claudius, who we'll hear
about later for other reasons, did get the Senate to
declare her a goddess. The deified Livia, which is cool, right.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Totally cool, that's pretty awesome.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Actually doesn't happen to many people in some ways. Maybe
Agrippina may have even outdone Livia When we consider her.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Whole career, Julia Agrippina is really tied in with the
elite and the prominent families of Rome. Her father was Germanicus,
who was a great war hero of Imperial Reme. Germanicus
was descended from Augustus and mark Antony, which means Agrippina's
bloodline was already pretty royal. As for Germanicus, he was
(10:20):
a famous Roman hero. He destroyed a bunch of rebelling
Germanic tribes and kicked their ass so hard that that's
why they call him Germanicus.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Well, Tiberius, the current emperor was growing a little jealous
worried about Germanicus and his rising popularity, so he had
him poisoned.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Which will be a theme in this episode, poisoning. So
Tiberius soon retires from being emperor, gets poisoned himself, and
everyone's like, well, crab, who should be emperor? Then we
all liked Germanicus, but he's gone, So what about his son? Yeah, yeah,
that should be fine. He'll be a good emperor, no doubt.
So they grabbed Germanicus's son and put him on the throne.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
And Germanicus's son was Guius, also known as Caligula.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
What could go wrong? Yes?
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Yes, So Caligula gets to the throne, which means that
our friend Julia Agrippina is now if you do the math,
the sister sister go ahead, Yeah, which sounds pretty cool,
pretty great. Caligula was very close to his sisters.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Pretty I mean, that's maybe a little too close, depending
on which anti Cooligula source of fake news you want
to believe.
Speaker 4 (11:31):
Yeah, yeah, whatever the details.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Agrippina apparently was very influential over Caligula and or Guias
if you prefer his more official name, and with Caligula
as emperor, well, if Agrippina is influential, he's going to
manage to get her image placed on the coins. She
lives in the Imperial Palace, She's awarded the and privileges
(12:01):
that are also awarded to the vestal virgins.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Which, knowing what we're going to know about Julia Agrippina,
seems ironic, right.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
Yes, in a certain sense.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Yes, so yeah, what are the privileges of the vestual virgins?
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Yeah, so if you're a vestal virgin, Okay, it is
true that there are a lot of constraints on your life.
You have to be from a patrician family, and yes,
you have to devote three decades of your life to
this particular religious practice. You're the guardians of this sacred
flame in this temple, and if the flame goes out,
(12:37):
Rome's gonna collapse. So no pressure you start becoming a
vestal virgin, or I should say, if you are chosen
by the Pontifex Maximus, the chief priest of the Roman
State religion, to become a vestal virgin. This happens under
the age of ten, so you're maybe not old enough
to really understand what you're getting yourself into, you know,
(13:00):
you know, so for three decades of your life. You
have to live this particular life not supposed to have sex,
and this is on pain of death, okay. And on
top of that, you also had to do your hair
in this really elaborate hairstyle with like twists and braids
and pins, and.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
I mean, what else are you going to do with
all of your menti energies? Yeah, you know, yeah, you know,
I have a feeling that Julia Grippina was probably like
spared some of the negative sides of this.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
So yeah, so Julia Agrippina was not herself a vestal virgin,
but what are the privileges?
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Oh, she was treated as a vestal virgin, but she
didn't have to do any of the actual work. Oh
my god.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
You know.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
You could own property, which was not a thing that
women were legally allowed to do. You could sign contracts.
Most women in Rome had to have a male relative
signed contracts for them. And if you were a vestal virgin,
you could bequeath property to women. You could also grant
(14:15):
pardons to condemned criminals.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
That's going to come up later. I think.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Also had the best seats at events, including events that
most most of the time upper class women weren't usually
allowed at so you could get ringside seats to gladiator
fights basically.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Oh man, so she got all the good stuff. So
this is a great deal for her, and she doesn't
have to do her hair like that. Yeah. So she
gets all these great perks and her brothers the Emperor Caligula.
But that probably is going well for a while. But
you know, Caligula is also declaring war on the ocean,
and you know, I don't know, there's movies about how
(14:54):
freaky he got or allegedly freaky, and anyway, this is
the freaky era, and what.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Is going on with Caligulas? Okay, things are getting a
little unexpected with Caligula.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
A little bit of a loose cannon.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Yeah yeah. I mean, on the other hand, I'm sure
many people over the centuries have wanted to declare war
in the ocean. I mean, I'm sure there are sailors
and ship captains and fishermen and you know who just
pressing her.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Yeah, he had he had his tribute chaise and archers
shoot into the water, and then he had his soldiers
go pick up seashells as tribute. I don't know, man, Okay,
allegedly Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
It's a great story. It's a great story.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Yeah, warhere's Agrippina during all of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Yeah, Julia Agrippina. So, Agrippina is scubbing out the situation,
and so she's thinking, hmmm, so she's got a lover,
this guy named Lepidus of her, so Agrippina, and it
(16:00):
is plot to kill Caligula and put Lepitus on the throne.
But wrinkle. Caligula finds out what's going on and has
Agrippina exiled, and he also confiscates all of her possessions,
sells them on eBay or yeah, you know, whatever the
Roman equivalent was, and ships Agripina herself off to an
(16:23):
island in the middle of nowhere. And that's how her
life was at that moment. Who knows. Maybe she was
practicing her skills at.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Swimming, which is going to come up later, Which is
going to come up later.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Do you think trifling things like exile and maybe not
so subtle death threats are going to take her out?
Speaker 1 (16:45):
That's all the time we have for today, guys, that story,
Julia Agrippina thinks, so much for listening to the podcast. Yeah,
she was a vestal virgin and then Collaguilar exiler. That's
the end of the story clearly.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
Yeah. Yeah, so Pekerpina wasn't the only one who wanted
Coligula out of the way. Lots of people in Rome
got sick of him.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Yes, And he is eventually taken out by the Praetorian Guard,
and this is going to be a theme throughout the
course of Imperial Rome, but he's the first one that's
taken out by the Praetorian Guard. The Praetorian Guard are
the bodyguards of the emperor there hand chosen from the
greatest soldiers of the legion. They get to wear gold armor.
(17:28):
They follow the emperor around everywhere he goes, and they're
responsible I think for killing like twelve to fourteen emperors
over the course of.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Their I thought they were supposed to be the bodyguards.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
No, yeah, they're really bad. They're worst bodyguards ever. Right. Anyway,
they kill Caligula and they were probably paid to do
it by somebody, or maybe they just really hated him.
But the Praetorian Guard wax Caligula. And then this is
when they find Claudius like hiding behind a curtain or something,
and they're like, cool, your emperor now and he's like, okay, great,
sounds good. Yeah, that's the story. At least that's the story.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
And it was Kaliah's uncle, right, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
So Claudius is emperor, and okay. One of the things
he does is he recalls Agrippina back to Rome, because remember,
she's been in exile doing whatever it is you do
in exile. And Agrippina knows how to make the most
of the situation.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
She plays the oh poor me, this poor vestial virgin,
my crazy brother.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Yeah, you know, and she garners some sympathy with that
among the Roman people. She marries a wealthy senator. That
doesn't work out well for him. It does work out
well for her because she poisons him to death and
inherits his.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Estate because she can inherit property because she's got all
the rights and privileges of a shore virgin, which is
great for her. And hey, speaking of poison, here's where
we meet from. Here's where we meet the second character
of our of our little story today. So, yes, we
are talking about the Roman Empire. We're talking about the
(19:17):
early empire, kind of the glory days that everybody thinks
about when they're thinking of the Roman Empire. You know
gold and emperors, and you know all of these. You
know Caligula drunkenly ordering political assassinations while laying on top
of piles of naked women. It's all very you know, Scorsese,
I guess. But if you were a powerful Roman, like
(19:40):
a Julia Agrippina perhaps, and you did need somebody, maybe
a husband, maybe hated arch nemesis. You needed somebody taken
out of the picture. You needed somebody in your sphere
of influence to have a heart attack and maybe fall
off a building in the process and land on a sword.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
You needed someone to not be where they currently were,
which is in your way right exactly.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
So one of your options was to call Locusta of Gaul.
So she was a all natural, free range, organic chemist assassin,
and she was very good at her job. She's kind
of this black widow of Imperial Rome. She is gonna
take people out if you need them taken out. She's
(20:28):
an expert. We don't know much about her before she
shows up in Rome, and that's kind of when she
starts rising to prominence. So she was inventive. She was intelligent.
We know this. We know she knew a lot about
herbal lore. We know she was making extracts from various
plants and fungi and kind of finding new and interesting
(20:48):
ways to take people out in ways that might not
come back to harm her employer. So she would test
her concoctions on animals to try to test their potency
and try to find these perfect toxins, perfect cocktails of
drugs that she could you could whatever pour into somebody's
(21:10):
drink and pour it into their wine and give them heart.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Attack, you know. And do you want something fast acting?
Do you want something slow acting? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Do you want to see them die? Or do you
want to be really far away when they die? Let's
find out. It's going to cost you a different it's
a different different yea, it's a different menu either way.
She is a good friend to have when you are
a Julia Agrippina.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
Yes, definitely.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
So.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Agrippina's goal wasn't wealth, or it wasn't wealth per se.
It was power, which wealth facilitates. She's gotten a sense
of what it's like to be close to the emperor.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
These senators aren't going to cut it. After having been
the sister of the emperor.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
Now her primary obstacle is Claudius's wife, Messalina. This is Messalina, who,
at least according to our sources, was famous because she
was a woman of loose.
Speaker 5 (22:08):
Morals, pretty famously right, yes, yeah, and some of that
may be exaggeration by our sources, which, as we've said,
are biased.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Whatever, it doesn't take much for Agrippina to.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Some of them might be propagandists from Agrippina. It might
have just been a smear champaign against you, bi Agrippina.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Uh uh yeah maybe yeah. So Agrippina manages to smear
her reputation in the public eye, undermine her just in general,
to the point where actually the Praetorian Guard forces her
to kill herself, which is a Roman way of getting
(22:54):
yourself out of a really awful situation with some measure
of dignity. Life left. The Emperor Claudius is now single.
And if you're Julia Agrippina, what do you do now?
Speaker 1 (23:09):
I don't know. Isn't she related to Claudius? Presumably?
Speaker 2 (23:14):
Yes, yes, so okay, but that's not going to stop her.
So step one, you have already been getting romantically involved
on the DL with this guy named Palace. Now who's Palace? Oh?
He happens to be a confidante of the Emperor Claudius.
He's a friend of Claudius. Step two, you get Palace
(23:38):
to chime in when Claudius is wondering what to do
with his personal life, like, oh my goodness, my wife died.
Oh no, like should I just go into goblin mode?
And kind of I don't know, watch Netflix, neat Dorito's.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
All day and they hadn't invented Netflix or Dorito, so
it was even worse option straight him. Oh no, Palace
of Gold, Yes, no Netflix.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Yeah, so Pallas the guy, Agrippina's boyfriend, not Palas, the
architectural structure. Palas says, hey Claudius, bro, dude, man, kind
of move on. Why don't you, you know, put yourself out there.
And hey, Claudius claw claw, I just happen to know someone,
and who is that someone?
Speaker 1 (24:23):
And it's Agrippina. He's set up. He set up his
girlfriend with the emperor. Or I guess she set him up.
She made him set her up with the emperor.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
That's what it looks like. That's what it looks like.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
So yeah, this is where things get awkward. Agrippina and
Claudius are actually.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
Niece and uncle fantastic.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
So yeah, okay, And is Agrippina herself squeaked out by this, well,
I don't know. She goes through with this plan. Agrippina
is now married to the emperor Bingo.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
She's the sister and now she's the wife. That's better, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Now, if you're a woman, can you become emperor?
Speaker 1 (25:07):
No?
Speaker 2 (25:09):
No, but your son can become emperor if you play
your cards right. So let's assume that that's her plan.
Agrippina is so committed. Okay, I guess if you want
to decide that her plan, her ambition all along, is
to get her son on the throne, because that's the
(25:29):
closest she can get to becoming emperor, then you can
look at everything she does in that light. You know,
she had taken out mess Alina. She also takes out
another woman called Lollia Paulina, who is a woman who
might have married Claudius had Hurricane Agrippina not swept in
and gotten her accused of sorcery, right as you do.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Yeah, she gets exiled and then she doesn't get poisoned,
but she does do the Messolina thing and is convinced
by the Praetorian guard to kill herself.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, they.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Can be pretty convincing.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
So yeah, and this is Agrippina.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
She wore a gold cloak.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
She traveled in these special carriages carpenta, usually reserved for
vestal versions and holy.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Artifacts, which she was probably both actually.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
We've met six of her boyfriends by now. But and
she's with her uncle, but she's still a yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
And you know, she worked the system for her own purposes,
which you might consider nefarious or you might consider rational
given the horizon of expectations available to a woman of
her status at the time. She took out people who
got in her way without being too obvious about it.
And you know, it's like, why use a chainsaw when
(26:57):
you could just get other people to use a scalpel
poison behind the scenes or poison, yes, yes, a chemical scalpel.
She allegedly took out her enemies in the government and
the imperial family in the palace, you know, the Pretorian guardian.
She took out everybody from powerful senators to her own
(27:17):
sister in law, and she established her place as Alpha Goo.
You know, she's at the top of the food chain,
in the political food chain or whatever whatever.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Metaphor you want to use here, you know, boss lady.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Boss lady, yes, totally boss.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Lady, total girl boss, yes.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Yeah, in a system that did not have official recognition
of a girl boss.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Yeah, only boy boss, you know.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Sometimes she managed to get people killed outright, sometimes just
removed in other ways, you know, exiled, sent there, discredited,
just you know, arrested, dem maybe forced to commit suside
maybe yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Maybe he committed suicide, but we don't know if they
were forced to or not.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so she is.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
So we prefaced her as being Nero's mom, and so
that has to happen soon, right, She's on top of
the game, she's on top of the world. She's running
running Rome. She wants to keep that rolling. But she's
got a little problem because Claudius and Messalina had a kid,
(28:38):
and in theory he's going to be the dude that
inherits the throne.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
Right, Yeah, the son named Britannicus. Yeah, and Britannicus he
was pretty popular.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Yeah, people liked him. And and and Agripina does have
a kid with Claudius, and that is Nero. And you know,
make whatever greating jokes you want to make here. But
and Nero is the second son of the emperor, and
Britannicus is the first. So she's got a problem. But
luckily she knows a guy, yes.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Or maybe she knows a gal.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
She knows a gal.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
So in the year fifty four, fifty four CE, Locusta
is she will She's in jail. She's on her third
prison stent for presumably killing people. And you remember that
thing about the vestial Virgins where they could exonerate a
condemned criminal. Well, Julia Gripina makes a little visit to
(29:43):
Rome County Penitentiary and says, all right, Locusta, you're with me,
We're getting out of here, and pulls her out of
jail and tasks her with a very high profile hit.
She wants allegedly, well, we don't have proof of this,
but but we're gonna tell the story. We're gonna tell
(30:04):
the story the way that it has been told for generations.
And the story goes that, uh, Lacusta was pulled out
to kill the Emperor Claudius, which is just awesome. Lacusa
doesn't bad nye and she set something up, presumably allegedly,
(30:24):
and on October thirteenth, fifty four a D, so as
of the time of this recording, it's almost exactly one
nine and sixty nine years ago. Lacusta puts her planeto motion,
so Claudius's bodyguard. So the night before the hit, Claudius's
most loyal bodyguard was poisoned just enough that he wasn't
(30:49):
feeling good. He was thrown up. He had to call
out sick from work that day. Then Lacousta bribes Claudius's
food taster to take the night off. Here's some money,
go go go buy yourself to nice, get a drink,
watch a movie. So that guy goes away, and now
there's not much in the way of her and Claudias.
So she makes this amazing or somebody she knows makes
(31:11):
this amazing stew that has actually happened to be spiced
up with some super poisonous death cap mushrooms that might
have fallen in there off of one of the other
shelves in the kitchen. Oh yeah, Claudius eats it. He
falls off of his throne. He starts clutching his neck.
A doctor comes running up to try to see what
(31:33):
he can do to save the emperor, which medicine and
fifty four ad is that the doctor literally sticks a
feather down your throat to make you barf and throw
up whatever it is that's making you sick. And there's
a certain logic behind that, sure, but the problem here
is a standard practice. Yes, maybe it would work, but
it's not gonna work today because Locusta has already soaked
(31:54):
that feather in strychnine. And he dies. And that's that's
the end of the Emperor Claudius. He die, He falls
off his throne and dies of death cat mushrooms, possibly
allegedly because of Locusta the poisoner and Julia Agropina.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Yeah yeah, And if it wasn't exactly the mushrooms, maybe
it was whatever was on that feather. Yeah yeah. And
when Nero took the throne, Niro has some good one liners.
Supposedly he said that art he makes the quip that
mushrooms must be the food of the gods, since Claudius
became a god by eating them.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Oh and so now we are into the reign of Nero.
And if you remember earlier, Nero is not the first
born son of the Emperor Claudius. He's second. When Claudius
was married to Messalina. They had a son named Britannicus,
who was very popular in Rome in fifty five AD.
(32:52):
Britannicus of fourteen Nero's I think like twelve or eleven.
But Agrippina had kind of we had talked a little
bit about Claudius. They're trying to kind of rehab his
they're trying to kind of rehab his image in the
last few decades of like maybe he was actually just
a mild mannered guy, a level headed emperor, the kind
(33:15):
of guy the empire needed at the time. But the
reputation for him has generally been that he's this kind
of like confused old guy who just kind of gets
dragged through life by all of the people that surround
him and through whatever ways. We know, Agrippina is extremely convincing,
and she was able to convince Claudius to name her
(33:37):
son Nero emperor over Britannicus as his successor, which people
didn't love that, but he did it, and then I'll
go figure he died like a couple of months later
before he could change his mind. Yeah, so now Nero's
in charge, but people are still kind of like, well,
we like Britannicus, so all right.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that guy, he's still around.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Yeah, yeah, And you know, you can't leave loose ends hanging,
So we gotta go, we gotta we gotta call acoustic.
What happens this time, Well, Lucusta's real only question is like,
do you want it to be extended pain or just
sudden death? And so it's kind of that's where we're
that's where we're at with this.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
She's a professional, she's that's her little menu, you know,
like you go to the deli, you order a sandwich,
like you take off provolon, you take off us. He
took off that, and she's like, oh, yeah, yeah, it's.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
A high end service we're offering here, and you've got
a lot of options.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
So anyway, Nero and Britannicus, they're having this big party
at the at the Imperial Palace, kind of celebrate Nero
in his first year of his reign, and everyone's having
this great time, and then Britannicus takes a sip of
his wine goblet and he kind of falls to the ground,
shaking and convulsing and foaming at the mouth.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
And yeah, and I love the way Tastis tells the
story because Nero's emperor. Right, And so we've got this
banquet and the guests at the banquet, they're there, they're
eating their you know, stuffed pheasant or their dormice or
whatever it is they're eating, and Britannicus has these fits,
these seizures, and it looks like, oh dear, he's stopped moving,
(35:18):
Oh dear. The way Tacitus tells it, everyone makes their
expression just blank because they don't know how to react,
like or they don't know what's the safe way to react.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Oh, because they don't know what neuro is going to do.
They don't know how to they have a figured to
Malle yet he's just become member. They don't have a
good sense of what's the deal, like should we are we?
Are we happy about this? Are we said about this?
I don't know? Or just let's just don't react. Nobody's
say anything. Let's see what he does.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
Wait, wait for r Q. And then Nero says, oh, yeah,
Britannicis gets these seizures all the time. Oh, And everyone's like, oh, yeah, okay,
that must be it. He must be having one of
these things. This is perfectly normal. Yes, let's go eat
some more olives.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Or whatever whatever, not what he had, but something else.
Yeah yeah, and then yeah, Britannicus dies because that's what happens,
because he was probably poisoned to death by probably by Lucusta,
probably at the request of Julia Agrippina. Yeah yeah, and
and and we're not saying these are good people. We're
(36:17):
saying that they're just that they're badass, and that doesn't
badass does not imply role model, and it does not
implay goodness or like moral honesty. I'm sure there are
some very very moral, very like good romans in these
days who were giving alms to the poor, and you know,
they fed their dog and they went to work every day, But.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Generally speaking, didn't poison people.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
Generally speaking, with their entire life without committing a single crime.
And that's great and that's the kind of life we
should all live. But that's not as good of a
story as no. I just knocked I just whacked the
emperor and his son.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Yep, yep, yep.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
All right, So now we've got Neuro in charge, and
Julia Grappina has been the the sister, the wife, and
the mother of emperors, and we're going to get into
the mother of emperors, right now after this break, Okay, okay,
(37:19):
welcome back.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
So, yeah, it seems like a pretty tense environment to
live in if we ask me.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Yes, I agree.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
So Nero is the uncontested emperor, and this is great
for the uncontested emperor's mom, I e.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Agrippina. So she's so he's I think, like he's young
when this happens. So she can rule for him as
regent because she's she's an adult and he's not, and
so she can kind of run the show for a while.
It's even more power than when she was the wife
or the sister. This is peak power for her.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
Yeah, this is peak Agrippina. Yeah, she is very sophisticated
about this. She manages to put in place other people
who can kind of keep a check on Nero. So
there's this guy Buris who can kind of keep an
eye on Nero. There's Seneca, the philosopher, the stoic philosopher,
(38:24):
the Seneca. Yeah he's Nero's tutor, but.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
He's an agent of Agrippina.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
He is.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
And here's the thing about Agrippina. She wants her son
to become emperor, but she also sees this particular son
with very clear eyes. She knows that Nero is he's
Nero and yeah, little rambunctious. Yeah, yes, that's one way
of putting it. And so she knows that if Nero
(38:53):
gets too rambunctious, things might go badly for him, and
then he won't be emperor anymore, because maybe he'll be dead.
And so for part of Nero's reign, his rambunctiousness is
moderated by Seneca and Buris, and this is Agrippina's doing.
So this is Agrippina as the emperor's mother, as regent.
And yeah, she even gets to sit in on senate meetings.
(39:17):
Somehow she's talked Nero and to letting her do that.
She's not visible, she's behind a curtain, because the whole
idea of having a woman in a senate.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
Meeting is just craziness.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
Yeah, And here's something that I think we should mention
is that, like, you know, we keep talking about how
much Agrippino wants to gain power and gain prestige and
influence and how she's sitting in on senate meetings and
running the show in Rome. But like one thing we
should talk about is that this is like the golden
(39:51):
age of Rome, and she is by all intents and purposes,
has been the empress of it for decade now, right, Like,
she's kind of you know, rome Is is doing really well.
They are they are the superpower in the West right now.
They are expanding, they are consolidating their building. There's a
(40:14):
lot of really exciting things happening in the Roman Empire
right now. It is up and coming, and she is
responsible for making a lot of these decisions, or at
least influential in these decisions being made. She's not just
like I want a bigger palace. She had a big palace.
She didn't need to be sitting in on senate meetings
for that. So she's sitting on.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Senate meetings because that's where things get.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Done right, right. And I think it's something that doesn't
get talked about that much with her, is that she
has done a very good job of you know, clearly
Claudius would do anything she asked her to do. With Nero,
she doesn't even ask, she just does it. And with
Caligula it was maybe a little harder, but she could
have if she really tried, right.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
She found her ways, yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
Right, And so you know, I think that a lot
of the works and conquests and all of the The
expansion of the Roman Empire in the first century is
kind of one of the glory. It's one of we
still have to learn it in elementary school today, right,
And I think that, you know, maybe she should get
a little bit of credit for some of the things
(41:18):
that happened in the empire around this time. Yeah, it
becomes very powerful, and it's a big, big jump from
Augustus to to where we're at now.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Yeah. Yeah, Now Agripinut is not actually the emperor slash Empress.
It's actually Nero, And you know, he's growing up, he's
becoming an adult, and maybe.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
He wants to be emperor for once and not have
to like do what his mama said.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Yeah, yeah, so she actually does try to have Hi assassinated.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
But this is Nero, and he alleged she alleged. Now
that sounds more like her though honestly.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
Now, Nero's mama didn't raise no fool. So Nero figured
out that maybe something's going on, Maybe it's my mom
trying to kill me. WHOA, that's counterintuitive, but also makes
sense in the circumstances.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
And it's also pretty paranoid. So it's possible that he
made entire thing up. But well, you know, we're saying
because he just really didn't want his mom telling him
what to do. I don't have to listen to your
any more, mom, and just told everybody that she tried
to assassinate me.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Yeah, and if any of my students are listening, don't
try this tacic. Not cool, not cool, No, not cool,
doctor Larris's students. Yes, yes, And uh, if you were
Nero and you thought that maybe your mom was trying
to take you out, you know the saying, just because
your paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you, Okay.
In Nero's at at any rate, Agrippina is perceived as
(42:52):
a threat. What do you think Nero's going to do?
Speaker 1 (42:54):
I think you got to you gotta take her out first.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Right, So this is player versus player, a.
Speaker 1 (43:01):
Student versus master.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Well, actually yeah, it might be.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
So what does he do? He goes to Lacusta, the poisoner,
because she's she's in She's in Julia Agropina's pocket. Right.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
Well, so yeah, so not only is Lacusta, at least
as far as we know, probably still in Agrippina's pocket
because Agrippina would not squander a relationship like that. But also, Agrippina,
probably with the help of Lacusta, had spent her entire
life building up resistances to most of the common poisons
(43:36):
on the market out there.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
I love that. I love that. Yeah, so Nero tries
to poison her to death, probably with more than one agent,
but she's kind of I don't know Wesley and the
Princess Bride Lake, but I love to think that, like
perhaps Locusta had created a little vitamin regimen for like,
all right, take two of these every morning. I'll adjust
(43:57):
the recipe as necessary, but like give it like six months,
and you'll be pretty resistant. You're not gonna feel great
for the first six months, but after that you're gonna
you can be able to like take lethal doses of
every poison I've used to kill your enemies.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
And Agrippina is no fool. She's probably done her homework,
or Lacusta's done her homework.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
And yeah, so she eats a bunch of poison and
doesn't doesn't not only doesn't die, but doesn't even get sick.
She's fine.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
Yeah, Yeah, poison is off the table.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
It's like Grasputine. I think grass Pudin had like thirteen
poison cupcakes and drank a bottle of poison wine and
he still didn't die. He didn't even get sick.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
Yeah, So if poison is off the table and you
were Nero, would you try next?
Speaker 1 (44:43):
I know the answer to this, but I want you
to sell the story because I love I love this.
This is one of my favorite Agrippina things. Is that, like, yeah,
the murdering and killing and running rome is great, but
like she is just famously impossible to kill. Yes, yeah,
he goes the Wyley Coyote route. Yes he does.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
Yes, Now he can't actually drop a literal grand piano
on her because that hasn't been invented yet. But he
tries to crush her to death by causing the roof
of a building to collapse on top of her, and
she survives.
Speaker 1 (45:19):
She crawls, falls on her head, and she crawls out
of the rubble and lives.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
Yeah. Yeah, Okay, So Agrippina, who is very much alive.
She's out on the lake. She wants to go out
on a lake. She has her usual boat, it's like
a pleasure yacht or whatever. And for whatever reason, h
by coincidence, that boat is not available. It's like infra
(45:47):
repairs or something like that, and she has to take
out another boat because obviously you have more than one yacht.
When she goes out on this boat onto the lake,
oh no, oh no, oh it sinks, it collapses. Oh no,
but your agrippina. The boat's going down. She escapes, she
(46:08):
jumps overboard, she swims to the shore, and.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
There's there's some speculation that this was a boat that
was like totally rigged to do this, or some kind
of contraption to like sink while Yeah, no, you're gonna
have to do better than the drown me in a
placid leg.
Speaker 2 (46:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
So he tried to poison her. He dropped the building
on her head, he tried to drown her. So what's next.
Speaker 2 (46:35):
So what's next? Well, okay, so TLDR. Eventually he just
has her stab to death by assassins with you know,
daggers and swords and whatever. Supposedly, the story is that
when these assassins come with their swords and their daggers,
she points to her torso to where her womb is
(46:59):
and says, okaya, stab me here, stab me in the
part of my body that produced Emperor Nero.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
That's baller, that is really that is a that is
a stone cold last words, stone cold. Yeah yeah, because
that's like not a that's a painful death too. And
she would know right, like that is not the gut
wound is like the worst one.
Speaker 2 (47:25):
Yeah yeah, if you remember what the astrologer foretold that,
oh yes, yeah, yeah, but he will be emperor, uh
huh yeah, And she's like, yeah, I'm cool with that,
Like it's okay if he kills me, as long as
he becomes emperor, because I guess that was her goal.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
So yeah, and he did. It's like the sith, right,
like the student has to kill the master something like that, like,
oh you got me all right, collapsing building thing didn't
work out. You just gotta you gotta send them, you
gotta send the army and like, but the thing with
that is it's hard to make that look like an accident.
So her being stabbed to death by the army was
(48:04):
actually it was pretty clear what happened here, and a
lot of people who maybe thought Nero was kind of
a fun dude to have at a party kind of
turned on him and were like, maybe this guy's actually
a psycho.
Speaker 2 (48:18):
Yeah. Yeah, and supposedly he did express guilt over having
killed his mother, and like, okay, but that's also coexisting
with the fact that he did actually kill his mother, So.
Speaker 1 (48:29):
Yeah, he still did it.
Speaker 2 (48:31):
He still did it. Yeah, And yes, that's Agrippina, And
so she's no longer on the scene and she was
complicated to say the very least, and very strong willed
I mean she yes, yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:47):
Yeah, I love Agropina. I think that story is so
great because when you talk about her, the story of
early Roman Empire can be told through her. You've got
her being the sister of Caligula, the wife of Claudius,
the mother of Nero. And then after after she's kind
of no longer a stabilizing force for him or at
least running the show on his behalf, and everybody kind
(49:08):
of turns on him a little bit or like, oh,
he killed his own mom, Like this pretty messed up
even for him, and you know, kind of that's when
we kind of get the stories of him playing the
playing the fiddle, wall room burns or whatever.
Speaker 2 (49:21):
Yeah, well the liar fiddles weren't invented yet, but yeah,
saying a liar, that's the story. Yeah, anyway, anyway, anyway,
So yeah, so Agrippina is no longer with us, but.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
But Locusta is still with us, and she's now out
a boss. So Nero goes to Locusta the poisoner, and
he says like, hey, you want to work here, and
she says, yes, of course I want to work here.
Speaker 2 (49:50):
Yeah. Girls got to pay rent.
Speaker 1 (49:52):
Yes, yes, I still have have a lifestyle to maintain here.
And so for the next fourteen years, which is a
long time. Oh wow. In the next fourteen years, Locusta
is the personal poisoner for the Emperor Nero, who is
kind of famously remembered as one of Rome's most ruthless emperors.
(50:15):
She even she gets to have her experiments. He makes
sure that she has everything she needs to do her thing.
She lives in this really huge villa. She actually like
opens a school for like a you know, alchemy school
or a botany school or whatever, but it's a she
trains other women to do what she's doing. So she
is training other women on how to you know, make
(50:38):
people bleed out of their eyes and nose at the
same time, I don't know, but or.
Speaker 2 (50:44):
Not bleed out of your nose and eyes and just suit,
you know, quietly stop leaving.
Speaker 1 (50:49):
Yeah, or maybe there's some medicine involved here. Maybe she
did some good things too. We don't remember any of
that stuff about her. Yeah, it's about how.
Speaker 2 (50:55):
She tell the stories that they choose to tell.
Speaker 1 (50:58):
Yes, yes, we know that she was a chemist and
a biologist and a botanist and she cultivated and grew
various plants and made all of these interesting pultices and potions,
and you know, and trained other women how to do this.
And she was kind of remembered as a Nero's neuro's assassin.
(51:20):
We don't have a number or in cad hazard to
guess on how many people she might have been responsible
for their deaths. And I always kind of find the
counting aspect of this grim just in general. But yeah,
so she was the poisoner for Nero for fourteen years,
which is the rest of his reign. It all kind
of came to an end in sixty nine CE, when
(51:43):
everybody had just kind of finally had enough a neuro
they were done with him. He gets deposed by the Senate,
he's briefly put under a dam na to memoria memoria,
and he is sentenced to death by being beaten with
iron rods until he stops moving, which sounds just awful.
Speaker 2 (52:01):
It sounds awful. It sounds very undignified for a member
of the Roman elite class to die.
Speaker 1 (52:08):
Yeah, the Julia Claudia, the Emperor, We're gonna beat him
up with iron rods until he dies and then throws
probably throw him down the steps of the senator or whatever. Well,
Nero doesn't like the idea of that either, And he
always kind of like a like a James Bond villain
or something. He always carried a special suicide poison pill
that Lacusta had given him, and he was just basically like, okay,
(52:31):
if the jigs up, like, eat this real quick, so
you know, get you know, humiliated or or imprisoned or
captured or anything else. But on the day the assassins
came to get him with the iron rods, uh, he
didn't have it on him for whatever reason. He had
forgot to stick it in his toga before he left
that morning. So but he did have a knife, so
(52:51):
he stabbed himself to death with a knife to avoid
being beaten up with rods. Anyway, Nero dies and Locus
now is kind of unemployed and Nero. When Nero dies,
we get into that year of four Emperors that ends
up with Vespasian, but the first of those four emperors. Yeah,
(53:12):
in order to get there, we got to get through
three other guys, and the first one is Emperor Galba,
who was a soldier who had kind of taken over
after Nero died or was or killed himself or was
incited to kill himself. So Galba takes over, and Galba
everybody was sick of Nero. Galba, he's sick of Lacusta
(53:35):
and he's kind of kind of tired of these two
decades of people being poisoned and dying, and maybe she's
stopped being quite so subtle about it. And anyway, one
of Galba's first acts as emperor and only acts as emperor,
because I think he's only emperor for like three months,
but he has her drag through the streets and chains
and publicly executed, and that's Lacusta's end. She should have
(53:57):
saved one of those poison pills for herself, I guess.
But yeah, well, but you know, those are two very
infamous women of of of Rome who who had their
had their reigns of terror that had a little bit
of overlap on the Venn diagram. They both kind of
died horribly, but they also both were able to kind
(54:22):
of find a degree of power and autonomy in a
society that really didn't have I wasn't really structured to
allow them to have that, which is pretty cool, right, Like, yeah,
I think that they're both really really interesting women. I
mean they're both pretty also pretty diabolical and evil, but.
Speaker 2 (54:43):
Yeah, yeah, but but diabolical and evil in context, like
you kind of you kind of wonder you kind of
understand why we don't endorse their choices, but we might
understand what led them to make these choices.
Speaker 1 (54:58):
Yeah, and you know, and pursue them. Yeah, And like
we talked about like the stories, this isn't like a
nice guy of the week. This is badass. And these women,
they they crushed everybody in their path. They destroyed anything
standing against them. They took out emperors, they took out senators,
they took out every they took out generals, they took
(55:20):
out any powerful person. Right, yes, for sure, they took
out any anything that was in their way in the
most violent manner possible. Like her own kid, she was like,
whatever this guy's guy's a problem, he's got to go right,
that's pretty badass. And then you know they both kind
of had these pretty serious ends, which is also kind
(55:43):
of badass as well, right, being meriting being dragged through
the streets of Roman chains and publicly executed. Is you
had to have? Like's been pretty scary.
Speaker 2 (55:55):
Aiety, Yeah, yes, yes, in for me, but but still
still badass.
Speaker 1 (56:02):
Yeah all right, Well, okay, Pat, that's a good primer
for your students for Latin two.
Speaker 2 (56:07):
It sounds like, okay, yeah, so I should say, don't
poison people.
Speaker 1 (56:13):
Don't poison people. Yeah, get a food taster, make your
own food lokially source all of your stuff, growed all
in your backyard. That way you'll know it's not poisoned
by anybody outside of your house.
Speaker 2 (56:23):
Okay, yeah, yeah, that narrows it down. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (56:27):
So if you are enjoying the podcast, please do subscribe,
Please share with your friends, like it, and leave a
comment that really really helps us out. Thank you guys
so much.
Speaker 2 (56:36):
We'll see you next time, and stay badass. Badass of
the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by High five Content.
Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, me Pat Larish and my
co host Ben Thompson. Writing is by me and Ben.
(56:57):
Story editing is by Ian Jacobs Brandon Fish. Mixing and
music and sound design is by Jude Brewer. Special thanks
to Noel Brown at iHeart Badass of the Week is
based on the website Badass of Theweek dot com, where
you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses.
If you want to reach out with questions ideas, you
(57:20):
can email us at Badass Podcast at badassoftheweek dot com.
If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen, and tell
your friends and your enemies if you want as. We'll
be back next week with another one. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
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