The Roman empress Messalina, wife of Claudius, has gone down in history for her excessive sensuality. Classical historians describe her as an irrational, impulsive and evil woman, unable to control her desires, who killed on a whim and collected lovers. Her name has become synonymous with femme fatale. How much is truth and how much is myth in this sinister image?
Although his enemies exaggerated his outrages, not all the rumors were false. The evidence indicates that she was a woman with few scruples, whether it was when it came to having a love affair or eliminating anyone who stood in her way. A common place in that Rome, on the other hand. Political and sexual scandals dotted the entire first stage of the Empire.
Messalina's marriage to Claudio was based on a large age difference: he was at least thirty years older than her. Specialists agree that the emperor was a cultured man of great intelligence, but he lacked attractiveness. Apparently he had a limp, stuttered and it is possible that he suffered from some form of mild cerebral palsy. His own family ignored him. Surely, these factors influenced the couple, as it soon became clear, not going at the same pace.
On the other hand, classical historians draw Claudius as a weak, indecisive, even paranoid man. According to these sources, Caesar would have been a very impressionable character, completely at the mercy of the whims of his wife. Messalina, on the other hand, is described as a perverse and insatiable woman.
It is currently considered that this portrait does not fit reality. The distortion of her image could come from the senatorial class's fear of an empress who seemed to have lost control. Suddenly, the strings of the Empire were not being pulled in the institutions, but in the palace bedrooms. Meanwhile, low-born people participated in decision-making.
Not only that: the sovereign's arbitrariness made the senators fear for their lives. A fear that, as they had the opportunity to verify, was based on good reasons.
It was not the first time that a woman held a top position in imperial Rome. Livia, Augustus's wife, played an important political role, but she had the cunning of always presenting herself as a woman dedicated to household chores who seemed harmless.
Messalina, on the other hand, did not know how or did not want to embody the virtues of the austere republican matron. Aware that her position at court was tenuous until she gave birth to an heir, she dedicated herself to weaving her own network of contacts in the upper echelons of politics, administration, and justice. Rather than a figure unable to control herself, she seems to have coldly calculated her moves to consolidate her power.
Not only does Messalina's true personality remain to be discovered. Many unknowns continue to arise about her. There is one that towers over the rest: how is it possible that she decided to marry another man while Claudio was alive and, therefore, committing bigamy?
The decision immediately meant death for both her and her partner, the consul Gaius Silius. Did she think, perhaps, that nothing was going to happen to her? In the podcast, different theories come to light regarding Messalina's inexplicable action.
Isabel Margarit, director of History and Life, and journalist Ana Echeverría Arístegui say goodbye to the episode with several recommendations. The first is a biography of Honor Cargill-Martin not yet translated into Spanish: Messalina: A Story of Empire, Slander and Adultery (Bloomsbury, 2023).
These days it is possible to visit the exhibition “Pompeii, the last gladiator” in Barcelona, which takes us to luxurious summer villas from times very close to those of Messalina with the help of virtual reality.
And, for lovers of the classics, there is Claudius, the god, and his wife Messalina, the novel by Robert Graves, on which the famous BBC series I, Claudius (1976) is partly based.
All of these works keep alive the memory of a woman who was, ironically, condemned to oblivion, the damnatio memoriae, after her execution.
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