Julia Agrippina: Mother to Nero and Ambitious Broad

Julia Agrippina was a power-hungry Roman empress – power-hungry even by Roman standards – who is said to have poisoned her husband (who also happened to be her uncle) to ensure her only son's succession to the throne.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda Land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to Criminalia,
where we're exploring the intersection of history and true crime.
I'm Maria tru Marquis and I'm Holly Fry And this
season we're talking about lady poisoners. And this week's poisoner

(00:21):
was born into royalty. She became the wife of one
emperor and the mother of another. She has been described
by both ancient and modern sources as ambitious, but also
as ruthless, violent, and domineering. Not the kind of endorsements
you're typically looking for on your LinkedIn profiles. So what
I always search for when I'm looking for an employee domineering.

(00:45):
So we are talking about Julia Agrippina, the power hungry
Roman empress, and that's power hungry even by Roman standards.
So it's pretty great. Who said to have poisoned her husband,
who also happened to be her uncle, we'll talk about
that later, to ensure her only son's succession to the throne.

(01:14):
Julia Agrippina lived in the first century. She was born
in a small town called opdam Ubiorum, which is located
in what is modern day Germany. She was born sometime
between November and March fifteen of the Common Era, and
her parents were Germanica Caesar and Vipsania Agrippina. Julia was
often referred to as Agrippina the Younger in order to

(01:35):
distinguish her from her mother. Julia was actually born into
the Julio Claudian dynasty, which was the first Roman imperial
dynasty and was made up of the first five Roman emperors,
who were Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, names you
have probably heard before. Yes, Julia was the great granddaughter

(01:58):
of Augustus, that was the man who had turned the
Roman Republic into the Roman Empire and became its first emperor.
She was the great niece of Tiberius. She was the
sister of Caligula, the niece and the fourth wife of Claudius,
and ultimately the mother of Nero. Her story is one
of the ambition and scandal, and it sounds like something
that came out of a fiction writer's imagination. But the

(02:20):
idea of the female murderer, for whom poison is the
weapon of choice, is, as we mentioned, just a moment ago,
really prevalent. Throughout human history, but also throughout our mythologies
as well. So if you have studied any mythology, you
may remember that in Greek mythology, Searsly used magic herbs
to turn people into wolves, lions, and pigs, for instance,

(02:41):
which sounds kind of cool. Uh. Today you hear that.
Today you hear it described in more modern fiction in
George Martin's Game of Thrones as the preferred weapon of
the craven so eunuchs and also women. Julia was married
young in the year twenty eight, which would have made
her a thirteen year old bride. Her first husband, Nius

(03:04):
Domedius a Hino Barbus, was an aristocrat who was her
paternal first cousin once removed. He was also the biological
father of her only child, a son whom they named
Lucius Demedius Ahino Barbus. Lucius was the youngest descendant of
Augustus's royal blood and would eventually become the infamous Emperor Nero,
infamous for his debauchery and his extravagance, and in fact,

(03:26):
upon receiving congratulations of his son's birth, the brutish Demidius
is said to have remarked, or maybe prophecied that he
didn't think that anything produced by him and Julia could
possibly be good for the state or the people. Little
did he know what was to come. Eleven years later,
in thirty nine, Julia was exiled from Rome by her brother,

(03:47):
the Emperor Caligula. And at this point, Caligula was roughly
two years into his reign, and he'd reached this stage
of intense self importance and had actually declared that he
was a living God. But even God's apparently fear assassination. Yeah,
Caligula had accused his sister of taking part in a
plot to have him killed and to install Marcus Emilius

(04:08):
Lepidus as emperor in his place. I want to make
sure we're clear on this. This was not the Marcus
Emilius Lepidus, who had been a Roman general in an
ally of Caesar as well as a member of the
Second Triumvirate. He died in thirteen BC, so well before
the events that we're talking about. This Marcus was married
to caligula sister, Julia Drusilla, and there was a conspiracy

(04:30):
as well as a lot of romantic drama involving him
hooking up with both Julia Agrippina and yet another of
caligula sisters, Julia Levilla. But the plot to assassinate the
emperor failed, and it came to me known as the
plot of the Three daggers Um. He was executed for
his part in it, and like Julia Agrippina, Julia Lavilla
was also exiled. I always have to wonder when I'm

(04:54):
reading all these things about how one person was having
affairs with all these sisters, and like, did you have
like a wider dating pool to right, it's only only relatives.
Julia Agrippina was sent to the Pontine Islands, that's a
rocky archipelago in the Tyrannean Sea, and Caligula died two
years after that, and after he passed, Agrippina's uncle, the

(05:18):
new Emperor Claudius, allowed her to return to Rome, and
that allowed her to reunite with her young son. Julia's husband, Dimidius,
died in the year forty of adema, not of suspicious causes,
we promised. We're getting to the poison though, so while
she was still in her twenties, Julia was not only
a widow, but she was also the lone surviving member
of her family. Her sister, Julia Lavilla was executed by

(05:40):
starvation over a whole different matter, and circumstances were now
that Julia's son was the only male heir left carrying
the legacy of the royal family bloodline. Julia married again,
this time to the affluent ex consul Gaius Crispus Passienus,
and it was Emperor Claudius, her uncle, who actually asked

(06:01):
Christmas to divorce his then wife. He was already happily married,
presumably and the marriage children, yeah, and he asked her
to do this so that he could marry the recently
widow Julia Agrippina as a favor. Let's be very clear,
it wasn't like she was pining for him. This was
not a matter of Julia or Christmas being deeply in love.

(06:23):
This was strictly a financial transaction. Over the years, christmas
Is fortune was valued at two millions hysterity, which is
a form of Roman currency, persuaded during his marriage to
name his new wife and son, Julia and Lucius as
heirs to his state. When Christmas died eight years into
their marriage, his widow was suspected among the Romans to
have poisoned him to gain his wealth and in general

(06:46):
accused her of using her sexual allure to manipulate powerful man.
So for the record, we don't know for certain if
Julia poisoned Christmas, and we never will, because as you
get farther and farther away from a point in time
in history, your odds of unearthing and thing that will
give you that information get tiny and tiny and tinier.
But as far as the court of public opinion went

(07:06):
in her contemporary time, she was absolutely considered guilty, which
she might as well just be guilty. Welcome back to Criminalia.
So after the death of Christmas, Julia continued to manipulate

(07:26):
and money for herself into a position of unprecedented power
for a woman in the Empire at that time. So
enter Claudius, whose full name was Tiberius Claudius Nero, a
dice playing history buff who was Julia's uncle, which kind
of makes me love him. I loved coming across that
tidbit about him throw the Bones and History book. He

(07:50):
suffered from partial paralysis and a movement disorder, and he
spoke with a stammer, according to uh descriptions of him,
and also had a little bit of a propensity to
have like a drooling problem, and he allegedly walked with
a limp. He was also known to have uncontrolled emotional responses,
and he had no political experience until he ascended as

(08:12):
emperor in the year forty one, after Emperor Caligulo was
assassinated in the Praetorian Guard. These were the elite unit
of the imperial Roman army who served as the personal
bodyguards to the Roman emperors. They named him emperor after
discovering him in the palace after the death. It would
be another two days, though, before the Roman Senate would
accept him into the position, but they did. In forty nine,

(08:35):
Claudius and Julia were married. This was an incestuous partnership
and that was contrary to Roman law, but that's no problem.
Claudius was the emperor, so he just had the law changed. Uh.
This union may not have been the first time that
Julia was involved in an incestuous relationship either. Rumors had
swirled that she had had a sexual relationship with her

(08:57):
brother Caligulo when he served as emperor, and it was
swirl again around just exactly how she managed to control
her emperor's son in the future. I have so many
questions about that. Like, we know, the name Caligula automatically
comes with like an association of sexual debauchery. But I
also wonder how much of that is just like the

(09:17):
rumor mill trying to take people down, right, I know, tee,
because I mean he's always assistated with his sisters, But
I always got the impression sisters inside, like those parties
were way bigger than family. Yeah. Otherwise it's just like
a quiet game of pinuckle. In any case, women in

(09:40):
ancient Rome at this time worst citizens, but they did
not have the power to vote or to hold political office,
and Julia never content with her position pretty much. Ever,
just assumed the title of Augusta after marrying Claudius, and
that is the Roman imperial yet honorific title given to
empresses and honored women. Her behavior actually led one of

(10:02):
the Roman statesman and historian Cassius Dio to comment, no
one attempted in any way to check Agrippina. Indeed, she
had more power than Claudius himself. Yeah uh, sisters doing
it for themselves. Yeah uh. Some historians suggest that the
Roman Senate may have been behind the push for the
marriage between Julia and Emperor Claudius. As a political way

(10:25):
to end the feud between the Julian and Claudian branches
of the dynasty. But regardless of the Senate's intentions, Roman
society still considered this marriage incestuous and immoral and kind
of gross. So we have to rewind for just a
minute to talk about Claudius's background. Julia here was not

(10:47):
Claudius's first wife. She's actually his fourth wife. Um and
Claudius and his previous wife, Valeria Misslina, had had a daughter,
Octavia and a son too, named Britannicus. But upon his
marriage to Julia, and at her prompting in the year fifty,
which was a year after they got married, Claudius formally

(11:07):
adopted her son, Lucius Damidius Ahenobarbus, whose name was then
changed to Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus. This is an
interesting and significant power move, as Julia's son was three
years older than Claudius's biological son, Britannicus, and that made
him the now expected heir to the empire. Okay, the

(11:30):
next step to ascending her son to the position of
emperor would be to get rid of Claudius. Right, So
it's been jokingly concluded that Claudius ultimately died because of
dave una x or a nimia, which means one too
many wives. But he died on October thirte in the
year fifty four, and it was room in public opinion
that Julia was the one who poisoned him for the
Imperial Purple. To be clear, Claudius did die of poisoning.

(11:53):
He had actually ingested a poisonous mushroom, but the facts
of the story beyond that differ depends ding on who
told it. So, though he may have accidentally eaten a
highly toxic deathcap mushroom at a banquet, most historians agree
that in the year fifty four, Julia had sought the
help of a notorious poisons expert. It was a local

(12:15):
woman named Locusta, to supply her poison with which to
murder her husband, the Emperor Claudius. It was likely that
Locusta advised Julia to try a trope a bella donna
as a poison. And you might already know that as
deadly nightshade um, and this perennial plant has been used
for poisoning since antiquity. It's highly poisonous, and the plant

(12:37):
itself and its fruits contained something called tropain alkaloids, which
are plant toxins. And according to this version of the story,
it is said that Belladonna was sprinkled on a mushroom
and given to the emperor with his meal. Um. I
have read in some accounts that mushrooms were like his
favorite thing. Yeah. So Alternatively, other historical accounts suggest that

(12:59):
the mushroom may have just simply contained muscarine. That's a
toxin that's commonly found in mushrooms, and that toxin causes
some really nasty effects like vomiting, low blood pressure, difficulty breathing,
and neurological problems. There's even a third theory that the
poison mushroom didn't actually appear to work. So um. One
of the royal doctors, doctor Gaius Stratonius Xenophon, then murdered

(13:21):
the emperor with a poison tinted instrument, maybe a feather
inserted into his throat, as one story goes, to induce vomiting.
But the important takeaway here, no matter how any of
this actually played out, was that Claudius died from ingesting poison,
and because she had a great deal to gain from
his passing, everyone believed that Julia had somehow orchestrated it.

(13:44):
Being dead, in all, Claudius could not reinstate his biological
son Britannicus as his legitimate heir to the throne. So
naturally Julia declares her teenage son as emperor in his place,
and here we get Emperor Nero with are listening to
the throne as a teenager. His mother was effectively his region,
and that meant she had political power as a senior

(14:06):
partner in ruling over the Romans. Julia, we should point out,
is not the only member of the family who had
an association with poison. There was some cultural sort of
poison acceptance at this time. Just a year into his reign,
like mother, like son, Nero poisoned his stepbrother Claudius's son Britannicus,

(14:28):
and doing this knocked out any potential competition over the throne.
This seems like a good spot for a word from
our sponsor. It does. Indeed, let's talk about the guy

(14:52):
who Julia was willing to kill for her son, Nero. Nero,
as we mentioned at the top of the episode, was
Julia's own child, and in addition to his emperor gig
Nero considered himself primarily an artist, with interests including pantomime, dancing, poetry,
and even playing the liar. He also competed in the

(15:13):
Olympic Games in near sixty seven in order to improve
relations with Greece UM. But while he was there, he
raced and he was actually thrown from a ten horse chariot.
But he was still victorious because he was Nero. That's
like the ultimate participation trophy. Good JOBAI wins it. All
those other horses ran too far the tools. Nero's early

(15:37):
years on the throne were primarily seen as successful, and
in the first two years of his reign, Nero's coins
would depict his portraits side by side with that of
his mother. Overall, though, Nero is of course associated not
with chariot races or with art, but with cruelty. So
Nero ruled the Roman Empire from year fifty four until

(15:59):
his death by suicide, which was just fourteen years later. UM.
He was best known for his debaucheries and pulsiveness, political murders,
and his persecution of Christians, and for allegedly, although it's
not proven in any story, of infamously singing or playing
music during and maybe even starting the Great Fire of Rome.

(16:20):
We should point out that fiddles did not even exist
and wouldn't wouldn't exist for another fourteen hundred years. So uh,
he did not do that, even though it's quoted beautifully
in an Elvis Costello sock work of pure fiction. Maybe
he sang so astrologers prophesies that Nero would become emperor

(16:41):
and kill his mother. And though you may or may
not believe in astrology, and it could have just been
a pattern recognition based on his family's proclivities from murder
and intrigue. Either way, they were totally right on what
they predicted. I mean, if I were the Astrologergura'd just
be like a told you guys, check so upon Julia's

(17:04):
encouragement and so that he could secure his imperial position
while Claudius was still alive. Nero had married Claudius's daughter
from a previous marriage, so for clarity, he was marrying
his stepsister Octavia. But Claudius had a change of heart
regarding his marriage to Julia and his adoption of Nero
as the years passed in his marriage and he had

(17:25):
started to again favor his biological son Britannicus as heir
to the throne, but perhaps not surprising to those following closely,
shortly after Claudius's death, Britannicus suddenly died poison. Maybe no
one can prove that Julia and Nero killed Britannicus to
remove all of the remaining obstacles between Nero and the throne,
but their murderous reputations do precede them, right and Nero

(17:49):
is often credited with his stepbrother's swift end, And Julia
certainly seemed to have made very efficient work of clearing
out any obstacles to her growing power. But thing started
to go downhill for her after Nero began to assert
himself and play a more interested role in the throne.
And it would be, at least in part Nero's extramarital

(18:09):
affairs that would also decrease the amount of power and
influence his mother had over him. In fact, it would
be her insistent involvement and meddling that would eventually lead
to Nero's order of his mother's assassination just five years
into his reign. This family the assassination story plays out

(18:30):
like this. Nero actually tried to assassinate his mother more
than once because she opposed his political and sexual affairs, right,
just like if at first you don't succeed. But because
she opposed his political and sexual affairs, Nero first set
his mother to sail on a boat that he had

(18:50):
actually designed to sink. The idea was that she would
cross the Gulf of Naples, and she would sink halfway there.
Regardless of which outcome of the story, believe, whether she
was uh picked up by a small fishing boat or
she swammed to the shore, she actually survived the attempts
on her life, and he may have then tried to
poison her, yet unsuccessfully again. She finally enter demised, though

(19:15):
in the year fifty four, when Nero ordered her to
be stabbed to death in her country home. Despite his
generally poor leadership skills, as time war on, nero support
throughout Rome didn't really begin to crumble, though, until a
Roman governor named Gaius Julius Vindix declared his support for Galba,

(19:35):
then in Spain for Emperor. That effectively meant that he
was denouncing Nero and igniting a rebellion against the reigning
emperor's tax policies, of which he wanted no taxes. Learning
that he had been tried in Abstantia and condemned to
death as a public enemy of the state by the
Roman senate. Emperor Nero, who was just then thirty years old,
fled Rome, but before he left he called upon you

(19:59):
guessed it, local poison expert Lokista, as his mother had
to to murder Claudius to acquire poison for his own suicide,
although he ended up not using it in the end.
It is believed that Nero died by a self inflicted
knife wound to the throat to avoid capture, making him
the last emperor and putting a close to the Julio

(20:19):
Claudian dynasty. It is said that his last words were
what an artist dies in me. Curiously, though there was
a widespread belief surrounding nero suicide that he actually wasn't
dead and somehow he would return, he did not return.
Um in any way, This isn't a show about Nero,
but Julia had been suspected of more than having a

(20:40):
hand in poisoning a husband or two, and reportedly her
crimes ranged from murder which we've talked about, to witchcraft,
uh and even to forcing a man named Statilius Taurus
into suicide. Because she wanted his beautiful gardens all to herself.
I guess you really really loved flowers, right? He had

(21:00):
that one rose that she just couldn't find anywhere Listen.
After Claudius's death, Julia had risen so high in the
royal family that she became the first living woman whose
portrait bust appeared on the imperial coinage, along with that
of a reigning Emperor Nero. We mentioned that that those
first coins featured him and his mother together. Um Julie

(21:23):
was undoubtedly a woman who followed the family tradition when
it came to intrigue and power grabs. But was she,
as history paints her, a poison happy, murderous, and opportunistic seductress.
Funny thing that right. So, for one thing, uh, During
the time that Julia Agrippina was alive, the words for

(21:43):
adulteress and poisoner were used almost interchangeably, the idea being
that if a woman had sexual agency, she was not trustworthy,
and it was also assumed that she had a proclivity
for poisoning. Throw in the fact that there was also
some scientific confusion going on at that time when it
came to, for example, the causes of sickness. Certainly long

(22:07):
before germ theory, um, those kinds of things were often
attributed to poison instead of their actual, not often natural causes.
And when you put all these pieces together, you can
see how, even though it's completely unproven, a reputation like
Julius might have some roots in presumption instead of actual proof.
Oh and that species of mushroom that killed Claudia's people

(22:29):
today still die from it because it looks like a
totally safe and harmless mushroom that you want to eat,
So it may very well have just been a case
of somebody picking the wrong fungus. We should also say, right,
poison was very popular in Rome, not only among women. Uh.
Worth noting in all of this is that husbands often

(22:50):
poisoned their wives, just account after account of that, like
for various reasons. But there's never any kind of synonymous
associate Asian between the word adulterer or and poison only
adulter s. So we just want to introduce all of
this as food for Thought is totally poison free, we promise.

(23:13):
But that brings us to our final segment of the show.
Uh And now we are gonna do a little segment
that we're calling What's Your Poison, where every week we
will share some concoction related to the topic of the day. Uh.
And this week we have a little cocktail that I
have invented. We're gonna call it Death by Too Many Wives.

(23:37):
And it's one of those cocktails that I fully expect
to get mixed reactions to. I was not sure what
I would think, but it turned out delightful. So first,
what I did was I made a simple syrup, but
I used brown sugar instead of white sugar. Interesting if
you've never made simple syrup before, you just throw um
equal amounts of sugar and water, so like half a

(23:57):
cup of sugar, have a cup of water or whatever
measure you want to use, and let that boil. And
then when it finished boiling, I threw in some roasted
garlic and roasted mushrooms and I just lost, like I know,
I know, but I'm telling you come along with me. Um.

(24:19):
And then I let that simmer very low for like
literally just a couple of minutes, and then I steeped
that in the fridge with a cup of vodka to
make a liqueur, all in one container for a week,
and then you strain it out and you get this
very very um dark because of the brown sugar and
the roasted components syrupy liqueur, and I just poured that

(24:43):
into a glass and then I put an equal amount
of club soda in it, and I ended up with
this very interesting mushroomy garlic e cocktail. I don't even
know what I would call it. It's not really a martini,
it's not really a it's just a range little thing.
It's a death by too many wives. Uh. So you

(25:03):
just end up with this interesting like sense of savoriness.
And there's a little bit of a buttery taste to
it because it was those those vegetables were roasted. But
it's really quite bright, and like the first sip is
where you get the most sense of the flavor, and
then after that it just kind of feels like this weird, sparkling,
refreshing thing that has a buttery finish. Consider that liquor

(25:26):
for a bloody mary, That's what I'm saying. Consider what
kind of mushroom you're using that liqueur? Right, we don't
I don't want anybody to die from this sort of drink.
Don't be hunting down the toxic mushroom. Uh And I
hope this has given you, truly some some some information
to think about regarding how we view historical figures in

(25:48):
terms of just branding them as as murderers when maybe
they weren't. Maybe they were, We don't know. With that,
we thank you for listening to this first episode of Criminalia,
and we will to you next week. Criminalia is a
production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio.

(26:09):
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