Representing Agrippina

"Agrippina the Younger, wife of the emperor Claudius and mother of his successor Nero, wielded power and authority at the center of the Roman empire in ways unmatched by almost any other woman in Roman history. Such, at least, is the portrait of Agrippina delivered by our sources and perpetuated in modern scholarship. In this posthumous work, Judith Ginsburg provides a fresh look at both the literary and material representations of Agrippina. Her painstaking dissection of the rhetoric contained in portrayals by historians exposes their motivations. The objectives, as Ginsburg shows, went beyond the display of literary flourishes. The historians aimed to blur the boundaries between the domestic and the imperial realms, deploying the image of Agrippina as domineering wife and mother to suggest the flaws and instability of the regime, a dysfunctional family betraying an erratic and unpredictable system of governance. Distorted stereotypes of the "wicked stepmother," the domineering woman, and the sexual transgressor were applied to underscore the violations of status and disruption of gender relations that characterized the imperial administration. With as keen an eye for visual (mis)representations as for literary ones, Ginsburg also examines how depictions of Agrippina on coinage and statuary - as matron and priestess, emblematic of domestic rectitude and public piety, and a central figure in the continuity of the dynasty - provide a stark contrast with the written evidence. Unlike previous treatments, Ginsburg seeks neither to condemn nor to rehabilitate Agrippina. Nor does she endeavor to exhume the "real Agrippina." Ginsburg trains her focus on the representations themselves and by so doing forwards a new account of the diverse forces that shaped and disturbed the Julio-Claudian regime."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.