Ah they and welcome to Emperor's of Rome, a Roman history podcast from Latrobe University.

I'm your host Matt Smith and with me today is Dr. Emma Southen, a historian

and author, her most recent book being A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

This is episode CLV, Agrippina, wife of Claudius. In many ways Agrippina

can be associated with the worst qualities of Livia, scheming, deceiving and manipulating, but in her marriage to Claudius you can see a different side of her, an ambitious capable Empress who made Claudius look good in his job. So is she any of these? Here's Emma Southen.

Agrippina the Younger is generally remembered as being notable because of her relationship to four emperors.

She is the mother of Nero and is instrumental in his reign.

She is the wife and also the biological niece of the Emperor Claudius and is

instrumental in making his reign successful. She is the sister of Caligula, less instrumental in his reign, but he thinks she's very important for a while.

Then she is also the great niece of Tiberius and is briefly important in his reign and because she spans that quite important part of early Roman imperial history she gets remembered as a tyrannical wicked woman who murdered her way to power.

That's a really good way to describe how she links so closely to a lot of members of that dynasty because you you only kind of

of her sometimes as Nero's mother and having a lot to do with that end of the dynasty if

you want to think about it that way but she goes way back and you've got a lot of compressed time there.

Yeah and she you know her first marriage is quite an important one she's married to a cousin by Tiberius when she's a child because she is considered to be

still a reasonably important part of the dynasty. Well, her mother is alive anyway,

until look that goes pear shaped.

But she is still an important part of Tiberius's family,

as well as Nero's.

Yeah, she's got currency as an important highborn girl I suppose and can be used to make a politically

convenient marriage for alliance reasons so where exactly in the family does she sit? So this is the daughter of Germanicus?

Yeah, so she's a daughter of Germanicus who is descended from Octavia and Mark Anthony and she is the great-granddaughter of Augustus, so her mother.

Agrippina, the elder, is the daughter of Julia, who is the daughter of Julia who is the daughter of Augustus.

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