Agrippina the Younger, also known as Julia Agrippina, was the daughter of Germanicus – an excellent Roman commander and Agrippina the Elder – an energetic and brave woman.
Agrippina the Younger was born in about 16 CE in the city of Oppidum Ubiorum (current Cologne). It was a city located on the Rhine, inhabited by Germanic tribes. There was the headquarters of her father’s Germanic army. The city of Ubii, in 50 CE was named COLONIA CLAUDIA ARA AGRIPPINENSIS. This husband’s official name was – on Agrippina’s initiative – her husband Emperor Claudius. This city exists to this day and is called Cologne.
Agrippina the Younger lived under the following emperors: Tiberius (her uncle), Caligula (her brother), Claudius (her husband) and Nero (her son). These were the years when the power struggle in the Roman Empire was brutal and always brought to the fore. Agrippina the Younger also participated in these fights from an early age, who, like others, was unscrupulous in her pursuit of her goal.
Agrippina the Younger spent all her childhood with her siblings alongside her mother and father, traveling all the time.
Her husband at the age of twelve was Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, who came from a great family of Domitius. He was fifteen years older than Agrippina the Younger and enjoyed a terrible reputation. According to Suetonius, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus was a man “whose whole life was condemnable in every respect. (…) For example, in a settlement on the Apian road unexpectedly he galloped with his team and without any scruples, consciously drove the boy. In Rome, in the middle of the forum, he forged a knight’s eye for arguing with him too freely”1. From this relationship, the later Roman emperor – Nero was born. After the birth of his son, when his friends congratulated him, he replied that “from a relationship like him and Agrippina, only something very wicked and fatal to the state could be born”2. Gneaus Domitius Ahenobarbus was accused at the end of the reign of Emperor Tiberius of insulting majesty and adultery with his sister Lepida. He avoided punishment by changing the ruler. “He died in Pyrgi because of water ascites”3.
From February 37 CE, when the emperor Caligula, her birth brother, Agrippina the Younger, and her younger sisters, Julia Liwilla and Julia Druzylla, took an honorable position in the state, and at the same time they were at the decadent court of Caligula. Accused of participating in a plot to kill her brother, then Emperor Caligula, she was sent to exile on the island of Pantea and her sisters.
After the death of Emperor Caligula, the brother of Agrippina the Younger, Claudius, Germanicus’ brother, became the new emperor of Rome. His coming to power was described in his work by Suetonius:
Having spent the greater part of his life under these and like circumstances, he became emperor in his fiftieth year by a remarkable freak of fortune. When the assassins of Gaius shut out the crowd under pretence that the emperor wished to be alone, Claudius was ousted with the rest and withdrew to an apartment called the Hermaeum; and a little later, in great terror at the news of the murder, he stole away to a balcony hard by and hid among the curtains which hung before the door. As he cowered there, a common soldier, who was prowling about at random, saw his feet, intending to ask who he was, pulled him out and recognized him; and when Claudius fell at his feet in terror, he hailed him as emperor.4
By assuming imperial power, Claudius sought to maintain the seriousness of his own family, “instituted his most holy and most common oath: in the name of Augusta”5. He gave his deceased father Nero Claudius Drusus, brother of Tiberius, and mother Antonia the Youger funeral ceremonies at the expense of the state, and each of them separately the annual circus games on their birthday. He awarded prizes to praetorians and canceled newly introduced taxes.
At the beginning of his reign, Emperor Claudius also announced an amnesty. He dismissed from exile, among others Caligula’s sisters, Liwilla and Agrippina the Younger. In addition, on the initiative of Claudius, the former owners were also confiscated, the slaves of the informers were punished. Placing trials for contempt of majesty was forbidden.
Despite the attempts to rehabilitate Claudius recently in science, the view is rather maintained that he was an infirm ruler, influenced by the environment, especially his notorious wife Messalina, later Agrippina6.
Agrippina the Younger, immediately after returning from exile to Rome, began to develop lively activity. In this way, she tried to compensate herself for two years in exile. Above all, however, she wanted to pave the way for her son Nero to take the throne.
Agrippina the Younger decided to get her husband quickly, thanks to whom she would be able to achieve her goal. Her first husband, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, died when Agrippina was in exile, as I mentioned earlier. Agrippina the Younger, Sulpicjusz Galba, seemed to be the best candidate for marriage at that time, who had an excellent reputation. It was him who tried to convince Agrippina the Younger to marry. This was during the lifetime of his first wife Lepida. “Until at one women’s meeting she was sharply insulted verbally and even actively by Lepida’s mother”7. After this incident, Agrippina the Younger gave up the capture of Galba. Soon her next batch hit her. He was Valerius Crispus, widowed after the death of Domitia, the sister of her late husband: a two-time consul, an excellent speaker, a great lover of trees, almost an ecologist at that time, a rich man8. After the wedding, Valerius Crispus made her and her son Nero his heirs because he had no children. He died, as was commonly believed, prematurely and precisely because of her.
Agrippina the Younger had to be very careful for many years after returning. At any moment she and her son were in danger of mortal danger from Messalina – the wife of Emperor Claudius. Valeria Messalina was the third wife of Emperor Claudius. According to Valeria Messalina, “as an empress, she showed up in public at night in a brothel with blond hair dyed and exposed breasts painted golden”9. It was Messalina who tried to remove little Nero, because she was afraid that with the help of her mother Agrippina the Younger, in the future he could become a rival to the power of her son Britannicus.
Agrippina waited patiently for the fall of Messalina, winning one of Claudius’ very influential freedmen, Pallas. Pallas was a slave to Antonia – the mother of Emperor Claudius, who liberated him. He was Messalina’s mortal enemy. Pallas was, according to A. Krawczuk, and rationibus – “from accounting”10.
The death of Messalina opened a new marriage perspective for Agrippina the Younger and a chance to implement a plan that was to bring her closer to power. Therefore, she decided to fight for a place alongside Emperor Claudius. She had two rivals: Lollia Paulina and Elia Petyna. Thanks to the skill of her friend Pallas, Agrippina the Younger won other candidates for marriage with the emperor Claudius. So “after Messalina, Claudius married his niece Agrippina the Younger, the patron of COLONIA AGRYPPINENSIS, the city of Cologne”11 as the fourth wife. According to Tacit, “Pallas mainly praised in Agrippina that she would bring with him a grandson of Germanicus; it would be by all means worthy of an imperial height to attach this noble branch to the descendants of the Julian and Claudian families”12. In addition, Agrippina the Younger was a beautiful woman, and Claudius, according to sources, had a weakness for women with a strong personality. The final decision of Cl